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Comment by User23 | Hacker News Reader

This actually happened in the ‘70s and it sucked so hard it got repealed in less than a year[1].

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/us-tried-year-round-daylight...

That article was funny. Business owners complaining they have to open up in the predawn? How does SBUX do it? The one down the street opens at 5 am. Construction men working in the dark for an hour? What do they want bankers hours? And schools having to open 30 minutes later, Imagine we give the kids 30 more minutes of sleep in the am. These days they are like factory workers waking up at 6 am to ride the bus and get to school for 8 am. Crazy.....

Changing the clock back and forth is unhealthy for everyone. We need to standardize on one time for our sanity and health. I use to prefer Standard time but now prefer DST, I don't know it just agrees with me more now that I am older. Lets try it again and see if anyone complains....

I never had to deal with any of this because I was homeschooled but every time I hear about the way public schooled kids are treated it sounds like abuse.

> Construction men working in the dark for an hour? What do they want, bankers hours?

Presumably, they want their schedule moved around so they can see what they're doing. There's no reason that the clock itself needs to change for that, though. Just unions forcing employers into a "9-5 in summer, 10-6 in winter" schedule would work fine.

I agree in principle - but assuming that school ends at 5, that means it'd be problematic picking up/being home in time for your kids in winter becomes an issue.

That could be solved by summer/winter schedule being recommended across industries - but then you might end up back with an effective DST anyway - forcing new sleeping patterns in the shift...

Due to lack of school buildings in a lot of places in my country we have school in two shifts. These rotate, one week from 8 to 13:30 and the next 14-19:30. As a kid I had to walk around 30min to and from school, carrying a small torch when it was dark. Just to give you some perspective.

I'm more thinking about parents here. Kids can do whatever we demand from them ;)

I assume your parents were home when you got home at eight - but how about the early shift - were you alone from 1330 until 1700?

Pretty much, me and my brother watching tv, doing homework or playing in the yard. They were also teachers, so sometimes we were left alone the whole morning or afternoon. And this was a time before cellphones. Although, it's a safe small town and we weren't trouble makers.

Whether you call it 9 am year round, and in winter you only start working at 10, or you change the name of the hour in winter to 9, doesn't really make a difference. People will have to adjust to the fact that in winter light start one hour later.

And with people flighing across time zones all the time, and it's not stopping them from taking holidays in a different time zone, i feel people are making an issue out of nothing.

It does make a difference: only some professions are harmed from the lack of light, and only those professions would need to change their schedules to follow the sun.

When you change the clock, it affects everybody. But people can change their own (business's) schedule without affecting anyone else.

But it is easier to accomodate to if everyone is affected, everything is connected: you may not be affected, but the school of your kids is, and the opening of daycare, the opening times of the stores, your sports facilities, etc.

If everyone changes, you can keep all the dependencies the same, otherwise you have to reconsider all dependencies.

> it is easier to accommodate to if everyone is affected

This is theoretically true about a lot of things, but we don’t try to actually do it for almost any other case. For example, it would be easier to accommodate wheelchairs if we just outlawed stairs and made it so every grade-separation must only be bridged by a incline. But we don’t do that. We build the incline, but we also continue to build stairs.

I just went through house construction. Pretty much all contractors insisted on coming in super early. Like 7:00 early. Apparently these days fancy lightning is cheaper than sitting in traffic. On top of that, I was able to come over to make arrangements before my work hours.

7:00 is not super early, not by traditional standards. And yes, having to sit additional hour in traffic wastes additional hour of your life. Of course they want to avoid that - that does not mean they would be super happy about having to push start toward even more dark hours in the morning.

Maybe depends from culture to culture, from country to country. Here 7:00 is considered rather early.

We've short days in winter so one less dark hour in the morning is one dark hour more in the evening. Around Christmas it gets dark at 15:30. While sun raises at 10:00.

7:00 is absolutely early for a business meeting.

But not for start of work for blue collar professions, including various services.

Lights exist, though. I'm in Norway: Winter days are short where I*m at. As in, sun up around 10 and down before 3pm. (The sun sets for a few hours in the summer, but I can read outside at night in June).

They do construction in the winter here.

And honestly, construction companies in Indiana used to close during the darkest months - I knew many that would get unemployment for that time period.

> Lights exist, though.

And pretty powerful ones, too. I remember the time when we had a very light winter and construction work didn't stop for that season. A building some 100 meters from my grandparents was being finished, a lot of roof work was happening. They had a light on that roof - when they turned it on in the middle of the night, my grandfather's room was lit as if it was just an overcast afternoon. I can only imagine that for the workers there, it felt like high noon on a cloudless summer day.

Not sure about other countries, but in Australia powerful construction lights are referred to as ‘day makers’ (and for good reason!).

The only bad thing about time changes is adapting to different sleeping hours.

Since the change between standard time and DST does not come as a surprise, I do that slowly over the course of a month. When the change actually happens, I drop the hour of extra time I gained in the morning and be done with it.

This might not apply to people with kids or living in confined living conditions with others who would be disturbed by someone waking earlier. Beside that, it is just a matter of foresight and preparedness.

I felt like shite while I was still treating the time change like a flight between timezones (that is as happening suddenly). This is also why I take arguments about time changes from people who fly frequently not serious. It's not different from the jetlag that they subject themselves to willfully.

> The only bad thing about time changes is adapting to different sleeping hours.

Cross time zone collaboration is made harder.

Mostly, I am aware of the DST shenanigans in my local jurisdiction, but keeping track of other people's DST is an extra hassle.

Just not mucking with the clocks is easier.

> It's not different from the jetlag that they subject themselves to willfully.

Just because you are willing to indulge in some pain to achieve some end, doesn't make the pain go away.

Wouldn't cross TZ collaboration be even harder of each individual business was possibly changing their operating hours though, especially if they ended up choosing different start/end dates

Maybe.

What I've seen in practice, is that when working in Australia we had recurring meetings set in California local time. So those moved around 2h during the year.

When people change their hours, they usually tell you. When they change to DST, they just assume you know.

Many businesses already have winter and summer hours.. I remain unconvinced that changing the definition of time for all of society is worth it because some people benefit.

For every edge case, the better solution seems to be that they adjust their schedule seasonally.

There are probably better articles available than this self-consciously smug one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time_in_the_Un...

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