Daylight Savings Time (2020)
theory.stanford.edu
theory.stanford.edu
I get that it's subjective, but my subjective view is that having sunlight after work is more important, and I stand by that.
First, the weather tends to be worse in the morning. It tends to be colder. Fog is more likely. Ice on the sidewalks and roads is more likely.
Second, people's schedules are generally more synced in the mornings. People tend to go to work or school over a narrower morning time span than the evening time span in which people come home.
Morning darkness then means you are putting the time when you have the most people traveling at the time you have the worst travel conditions of the day.
In the northern parts of the US, permanent DST wouldn't even give most people much usable after-work sunlight. Here in the vicinity of Seattle, for example, on the last day of DST this year sunset is 5:43 PM. If you are a 9 to 5 worker your commute likely uses up most or all of your evening sunlight.
Plenty of folks that study chronobiology do not think it is subjective. The Society for Research on Biological Rhythms:
> Local and national governments around the world are currently considering the elimination of the annual switch to and from Daylight Saving Time (DST). As an international organization of scientists dedicated to studying circadian and other biological rhythms, the Society for Research on Biological Rhythms (SRBR) engaged experts in the field to write a Position Paper on the consequences of choosing to live on DST or Standard Time (ST). The authors take the position that, based on comparisons of large populations living in DST or ST or on western versus eastern edges of time zones, the advantages of permanent ST outweigh switching to DST annually or permanently. Four peer reviewers provided expert critiques of the initial submission, and the SRBR Executive Board approved the revised manuscript as a Position Paper to help educate the public in their evaluation of current legislative actions to end DST.
* https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31170882/
* https://doi.org/10.1177/0748730419854197
World Federation of Societies for Chronobiology:
> In summary, the scientific literature strongly argues against the switching between DST and Standard Time and even more so against adopting DST permanently. […]
* https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2019.0094...
* https://doi.org/10.3389/fphys.2019.00944
Article that links to various other societies and such:
* https://herf.medium.com/why-standard-time-is-better-e586b500...
Some people like to wake up at 5 AM to work. Some people like to wake up at 5 AM to play. Some people like to play and go to bed at 5 AM.
The source of the issue is the fixed 9 to 5 work hour instead of which hour we call 9 AM. So use your tooth and nail for whoever tells to work from 9 to 5 instead of the divided opinion of when exactly is 9 AM.
I think that most people would want to switch to permanent daylight saving time.
This moves the sunset "later" in the day so that you get more sunlight after work.
This is good for restaurants and leisure activities.
Arguments against this typically come in a few flavors every time this subject comes up:
> But the sun should be overhead at noon.
> But kids will have to go to school in the dark.
> But employers could just start work earlier.
> But early risers prefer to enjoy time before work than after work.
It's still more correct than DST.
>And who wants to start work earlier?
You ARE starting work earlier with DST. That's the whole point. I sometimes wonder if there's some fundamental difference in understanding. To me the time in your watch is just a numeric value the _actual_ time of day is the location of the sun on the sky.
We're fine with getting rid of the time shift, but if we're going to do that, it makes more sense that the back half of the day have sunlight for longer. People need to do things and kids need to play. Most folks aren't going to work to plow fields anymore.
I think most people would agree on two things: (1) that having time after work to do things during daylight hours is ideal, and (2) that the work hours they already have are fine.
A shift in working hours might be fine for childless adults, but it doesn't work for most people. People have to be present to get their kids ready for school or daycare, and you're never going to get teacher's unions to agree that they should be in the doors of a school by 6am to receive students.
So... this fall, no shift. For now or ever. Boom, done. Yes, the days get a bit shorter, but you're still talking about a 6:45pm sunset in Texas, which gives people about 2 hours of active time in the evenings, which is preferable to the 45 minutes previously.
I live in Scandinavia some 500km South of the Arctic circle. Let me tell you that it's very obvious that the sun is one hour off at "midnight" in Summer. If we kept DST in Winter it would be even more noticeable. It would also mean that there'd be some 3 months per year where I need to go to and leave from work in complete darkness. At least right now I get to wake up to some sunlight in December.
Daytime is fundamentally an astronomic concept. Proponents of permanent DST could at least be intellectually honest and admit they want everyone to get up an hour earlier rather than force everyone to pretend that 11am is actually 12pm.
> Yes, the days get a bit shorter, but you're still talking about a 6:45pm sunset in Texas
That's cute. I just walked back home from work and the sun was already setting here at 5:30. And it's still Autumn.
To me it looks like it's mainly the Southernmost states and countries that are pushing for this. Which is especially strange since actual tropical countries don't seem to have issues with standard time.
It's much easier to change our clocks twice a year.
The logistics problem seems overstated, because countries that have different time zones manage fine.
Much as we’d all like to be special snowflakes who march to the beat of our own drum, the fact of the matter is that society moves as a unit, and our happiness is often dictated by where it is moving to.
It is not subjective according to the scientists.
The OP links to another site that says the science is in: "Wake up to the morning sun". Well, clearly, the answer is then to get rid of the stupid two shift shuffle each year (use standard time), get up to the sunrise, and go to fucking work.
But NO, business leaders of america will sob and whine... working hours are 9 to 5 ONLY! Natch, no cookie for politicians.
Assuming that we want everyone to know that we're waking up earlier in the summertime and closing up shop later, it would be preferable to coordinate this, right? We couldn't want all banks and shops and things closing at their own time. Or schools starting two minutes earlier every single day as we approach summer, to match up exactly with the sun, right?
So we could coordinate it all to happen in one big step. We'd say "Hey, from March 14th onward, all public schools are now going to be starting at 7:30 AM instead of 8:30 AM, and banks will open at 8:00 AM, and post offices will close at 4:00 PM.
And then we could so the same thing in the Fall, backwards.
But then, with nothing forcing private businesses and private schools from following this, wouldn't we get some horrible mismash? We'd have to call up every restaurant before making a reservation: hey, do you follow personal summertime hours? Banks would have their own closing hours, your older kid's public high school starts 1.5 hours before the private elementary school instead of a half hour, etc etc..
And your friends would have to have the same flexibility.
Also, you'll have to use your flexibility to go to bed before them to wake up and enjoy your evening sun.
Just move sunset later. It's a simple logistical option to apply uniformly that will maximize happiness.
Or you could wake up later in order to not screw up your circadian rhythm and in turn lower your risks of various ailments. It would be your own choice.
Yes, we are diurnal animals. Yes, sunlight matters to how we sleep. But why do we care whether the hands on the clock are pointing up when the sun is highest overhead? Everybody could do what they needed to do sleep wise regardless of where they were pointing.
The simplest solution is not only to do away with DST, but to adopt a single universal time. This would make keeping in synch easy. No longer would time zone conversions be necessary. No longer would we have to adjust our sleep schedules twice a year or worry about whether whomever we had to collaborate with in a different part of the world was doing the same.
But outside a handful of industries and technical fields, we seem unable to stomach the thought that the clock might read 17:00 as the sun rises. and 7:00 as it sets. That's just too weird. And why should Tavarua have to tolerate that when Greenwich gets to live with the historical norms?
Politics. Politics are the end reason for why we fight over what the clock says.
The 2015 article "So You Want to Abolish Time Zones" gets regularly discussed on HN:
How would having a single universal time solve knowing whether your collaborators were asleep or having dinner or whatever? You could have some kind of lookup table -- "Australians usually wake up around 18:00 UTC" -- but then what have you solved?
There's some possibility, in fact, that everybody living with their own local time makes it harder for people to learn how their local time works relative to others'. If we all used one universal time, we'd probably have developed an intuition for when people were sleeping in different parts of the world according to that universal time. As it is, we tend to rely on the lookup tables every time.
Would also make moving amusingly harder. You would be used to schools and business starting at time X, but you would be wrong.
The reality is that days get too damn short in the winter and any system of time zone switching is going to run into that limitation somewhere.
If I were dictator I would switch us to permanent standard time and normalize the concept of seasonal hours (which should be—but frustratingly often isn't—a lot less painful in the era of the internet).
You could even extend the concept of seasonal hours to making work days shorter in the winter and longer in the summer (not a new idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_clock).
They effectively did have DST. They just didn't implement at as a two segment step function like we do. They implemented it as a 365 segment step function (366 segments in leap years). I.e., they synchronized their activities to sunrise.
That's my main objection to permanent DST: it's really just shifting everyone one timezone to the east.
What I learned from this post is that one of the big reasons that permanent DST is appealing is that a lot of areas in the current timezones really ought to be one timezone to the east. For example (see https://observablehq.com/@awoodruff/daylight-saving-time-gri...) Nevada ought to be in the Mountain timezone and Alabama ought to be in the Eastern timezone. And a lot of the states that split into multiple timezones probably shouldn't (at least if you focus only on optimizing sunrise and sunset times).
You need to change the schedule if you don't like the hours. Changing the clock does nothing!
If the point is that business are closing too late so we lose too much daylight during winter, then we need to tell businesses to move their operating hours earlier.
My gut says that we decided school should operate 8-3 and work 9-5 for a reason. If we were to move the clock permanently by an hour, why wouldn't those times just shift as well?
Edit: I should say that my post is mostly inline with the updates to this article.
https://herf.medium.com/why-standard-time-is-better-e586b500...
The human body “needs” DST like diabetes needs cookies.
A comment of mine from a few months ago with links to various position papers, many of which are referenced in the story you linked to:
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26416574
The Society for Research on Biological Rhythms:
> Local and national governments around the world are currently considering the elimination of the annual switch to and from Daylight Saving Time (DST). As an international organization of scientists dedicated to studying circadian and other biological rhythms, the Society for Research on Biological Rhythms (SRBR) engaged experts in the field to write a Position Paper on the consequences of choosing to live on DST or Standard Time (ST). The authors take the position that, based on comparisons of large populations living in DST or ST or on western versus eastern edges of time zones, the advantages of permanent ST outweigh switching to DST annually or permanently. Four peer reviewers provided expert critiques of the initial submission, and the SRBR Executive Board approved the revised manuscript as a Position Paper to help educate the public in their evaluation of current legislative actions to end DST.
* https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31170882/
* https://doi.org/10.1177/0748730419854197
World Federation of Societies for Chronobiology:
> In summary, the scientific literature strongly argues against the switching between DST and Standard Time and even more so against adopting DST permanently. […]
* https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2019.0094...
* https://doi.org/10.3389/fphys.2019.00944
If anyone think that these are wrong, feel free to contact the original authors.
Also, it would be a shift to an 8-4 working day, right, if we were going to keep the clocks on standard time year round?
You'd have to re-negotiate every time you work with a new client. Are they on 9-5? Or 10-6? When can we schedule that weekly call? Businesses have no incentive to go through this headache, so they won't.
We already shift our working hours twice a year with practically no issues. Let's just not switch back once.
My experience is that these meeting coordinations still have to happen. Even within your own company, in the same office building.
Without DST, in my hometown, it will get dark at 6pm every day from Sept 23rd to March 4th. That's depressing for the 9-5ers with commutes.
I wouldn't see the sun past 7pm outside of May 1st -> August 16th.
If we're getting rid of DST, we need to switch the working day from 9-5 to 8-4 or 7-3.
If scientists say that getting rid of DST will lower diabetes/cardiovascular risks/etc. then I’m all for it.
Maybe your boss (if you have one) would let you do it.
To clarify, is your hometown in the southern hemisphere? DST generally occurs in the summer months.