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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

The opposing case is stronger: you can't just change the school schedule, because school is part of the fabric of child care; change its schedule, and you change the schedules of parents, which means now you have a coordination problem. That problem ripples, so that by the time you've really addressed it, you've essentially recapitulated daylight savings time.

Accidents aside, there's a lot to be said for not having the first 45 minutes of the school day take place in the dark in places like western Michigan, or for having sunrise occur 3-4 hours before people normally wake up in the summer.

Josh Barro is fond of pointing out that this --- eliminating DST --- was tried in the early 1970s, and the 2-year experiment was so universally reviled in practice that it was repealed almost unanimously in Congress just 9 months later.

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It's not like we have a national school schedule. There are already 1-2 hour differences in school start times, sometimes just a few miles away.

The issue isn't universality but consistency. It doesn't matter to person A how person B gets their kids to school, what matters is that person A doesn't need a different system for half the year.

So everyone in the world changing their clocks is easier than having a summer schedule at a business where they open one hour earlier?

Many businesses have different schedules on the weekend, I think people could cope with summer hours. Especially since they already do - even with the time change many businesses are open longer.

For something so unpopular, how do places that don't do the time change get by? Why isn't Saskatchewan in a permanent rage-fueled civil war?

So everyone in the world changing their clocks is easier than having a summer schedule at a business where they open one hour earlier?

Yes.

No. My local swimming pool disagrees. Saskatchewan disagrees.

Hawaii and Arizona have done without the time change for over 50 years.

Where do most people in AZ live relative to their time zone? I wonder how apparent these issues are to people in DC; they're very apparent in places like Michigan, on the edge of their time zone; you drive for an hour outside of Chicago and it's weird how long the sun is suddenly up.

The state pretty much spans the width of mountain time. It's pretty large geographically, almost 350 miles across.

AZ and Hawaii experience ranges of [10-14 hours] and [11-13.5 hours] of daylight across the whole year, respectively. More southern latitudes can get away with not shifting their clocks because the daylight variance is much smaller. In AZ, sunrise varies from 5:15AM to 7:25AM. In Seattle, without DST, it would range from 4:11AM to 7:57AM. If we use "civil twilight" (bright enough for outdoor activities), Seattle would start experiencing daylight at 3:30AM in mid-summer.

Here is a reference point for Europeans: Seattle is at the same latitude as the southern border of Germany.

Having 16 hours of sunlight in the summer means the sun is going to be up too early. Both 3:30 am and 4:30 am are way too early for the sun, but such is life. Either way, the sun is up well into the evening, so it's not as if much changed with an hour moved. Except the sleep disturbance; for some, it's no big deal; for others it takes weeks to recover.

> there's a lot to be said for not having the first 45 minutes of the school day take place in the dark

Is there?

There's something to be said for the walk to school, for those that actually walk.

And there's also something to be said for having sunlight while waking up, with the huge caveat that the current DST system does not accomplish this.

But once they're at school? Why does it matter if it's dark outside during first period?

Let the children start later. Let the parents start later and have a shorter work day. Problem solved.

A huge fraction of the US workforce, spread throughout every industry, consists of parents. It sounds easy to say "let the parents start later", but it's a massive coordination problem. It makes more sense if you assume the whole workforce works the way it does for most of us on HN, but in most jobs, you actually have to show up on time; if you can't, someone else has to be scheduled to account for your missing hour.

The only way I think you can make DST abolition make sense is if you say "well, I guess kids are going to be at school in the dark at 9AM in a bunch of places around the country". That's a coherent argument! But "parents and workplaces will just figure it out" is, I think, not.

> Let the children start later. Let the parents start later and have a shorter work day. Problem solved.

What would actually happened would that that women and some guys would be penalized in the workplace and ... that would be it.

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