Daylight saving time is 'not helpful' and has 'no upsides,' experts say
usatoday.com
usatoday.com
In Seattle, for example, I think the sun would rise before 5 am as late as early August. On the other hand, if Seattle stayed on DST (+7) year-round then the sun would rise after 8AM from early November to late February, and as late as 9AM in December.
Seattle is an extreme case, because it is so far north, but New York City is not that different, and I think more people would bemoan the lack of after-work daylight during spring and summer than currently bemoan the switch, and would be unhappy about it for a longer period each year.
Of course, if we got rid of DST, we could all just agree to get up earlier in the summer. Maybe we could even standardize that by agreeing to all start getting up earlier on the same day each spring. :-)
IMO, having the sun set later is better because it means I get to enjoy a bit more sunlight in the evening, after the work day. But I'm also really not a morning person.
It is the default. That's why it is called Atlantic/Eastern/Central/Mountain/Pacific Standard Time in North America.
(The more legitimate argument is for western regions to align to summer time to be closer in clock time to their eastern neighbors.)
Gotta coordinate things like this, otherwise it won't happen.
I think this is really the crux of it, it's just a matter of personal preference and there's no one right answer. When I was younger I used to wake up later and I thought permanent DST was a no-brainer for the extra hour of light in the evenings. Now in my 30's for whatever reason my body clock has shifted a lot and I pretty much always wake up by 6:30 am. The last few weeks with the sun not rising until 7:30 in northern CA have been kind of depressing and I can't wait for DST to end, I'd now rather have that extra hour of light in the morning than the evening.
Ideally, each region would have their summer time adapted to their latitude, but that would be more chaotic than simply scrapping it.
I’ve learned a huge amount of sleep lately and every cell in our bodies is regulated by our circadian rhythms.
A great place to start: https://pca.st/episode/f062bb8c-6609-4dca-8666-177a17678117
The reason we don't all use UTC is because it is useful to be able to figure out roughly what time of day it is somewhere else on the planet. If we collectively agree that is no longer necessary then we are giving up a fundamental part of timekeeping.
If you want an example of how crazy this is, just look to China, which only has a single time zone. It is so large that in some parts of the country the sun doesn't set until "midnight".
Time actually means something, don't mess with it.
And during the Spanish Civil war Republicans had already moved to GMT+1 in 1938, a change that was undone after the war before switching again to GMT+1 in 1940.
> Time actually means something, don't mess with it.
That would be great advice for not changing the clock every six months.
Not clear. Those you call «winter hours» are supposed to be the actual, real hours: noon equals zenith, midnight equals nadir. You can have some reasonable exception, but to call "midnight" all year what is not midnight makes no sense. It amounts to "falsehood", where it would be just social agreement to just wake, work, dine sooner or later.
People in Paris know they have a pretty severe offset, ~50m (those in Vigo even ~95m). If you added a sticky +1h, the offset against solar time would increase to ~110m and ~155m.
https://www.ncsl.org/research/transportation/daylight-saving...
13 years of rising hours before dawn and walking and waiting in darkness is enough.
I would suggest that the government of any state or nation not be allowed to ever say what [civil] time it is, and require that they take technical timekeeping information--for TAI, UTC, UT1, and the like--from non-political scientific bodies.
Mind you this could be because of where I grew up, but moving to somewhere that follows DST I always saw it more as an inconvenience than anything else.
- ...Sunrise wasn't already too late for kids going to school anyways, since Because Capitalism school has to start before work does,
- ..."Sunrise" is a fixed point when you get any further north from me in the winter. It's more like a couple hours of varying degrees of "glowing horizon" centered around "sunrise" to begin with.
Your comment points out the real absurdity which is why are so stuck on the machinations of numbers on a clock, and ~24 granular timezones rather than just having humans be human and 1) get the sleep they need and 2) be productive when it makes sense to, regardless of the digits.
I doubt pre-industrial people thought to hard about if they chopped wood at exactly 9am, or if it might have been 8:37 or even 11am.
Think about a factory working in shifts: it cannot work effectively if every worker comes whenever it suits him, works for 8 hours and leaves. You need coordination to achieve efficiency.
Same is true for most other places of employment. Government offices and retail establishments have opening hours. Schools have schedules. Sure, in some jobs, there is a lot of flexibility, but not all of them can provide that, so as a society, we will be stuck with schedules and tyranny of the clock for the foreseeable future.
Online fixes like 99% of this.
> Schools have schedules and yet khan academy does not
> Think about a factory working in shifts
yes, but there's no reason these shifts have to be fixed in time across the year, people are so hung up on 9-5, or 8-5 or some other hour bound fixed pattern.
Why not come in at 8am on June 21, and 1 minute later per day until Dec 21, then 1 minute earlier per day till june 21?
See the point here? The majority of cases can be entirely eliminated / designed out of existence. Many can become flexible to the reality of the sunrise/set and circadian rhythms . A few will have to still provide 24 hour coverage for emergency or utility backup type things.
No, online fixes some of it, not 99%. I can’t fix my car online.
> Why not come in at 8am on June 21, and 1 minute later per day until Dec 21, then 1 minute earlier per day till june 21?
The absurdity of this proposition is illustrative of the challenges the reality pushes upon you. No, having to figure out whether your shift starts at 8:36 AM or 8:42 AM today is not an improvement over status quo.
But you can schedule the fix, pay for the fix, feedback the fix etc all online. Now that much of the world is working remote, we drive a lot less, and mechanics are needed less. See how this keeps feeding back into itself when we accept a new way of approaching life that isn't "butts in seats" and "in before the boss, leave after the boss" management?
If an office worker walked into a construction site and declared they were doing everything wrong from the lack of paperwork documenting completion of every shovel of dirt they would be called a clueless, arrogant ass. Why would it be any different if the subject was a construction worker in an office building declaring it unproductive for a lack of tonnage of paper relocated?
There are cultures where you just close up shop when you've had enough income for the day. Not to mention rural communities all around the world that are more flexible about timekeeping in general.
I'd say all the services which require face to face interaction will become way more costly if such buffers will be needed to cover off hours. For example: there is a notion of skeleton crew and the service might not be operational without that crew so the choice is actually to spread the cost of off hours low load to the high load hours or close the business for low load hours.
If there is a will, a structure for all work can surely be created where even more intermediation happens and productive artifacts are exchanged rather than physical presence. This applies much more broadly than so-called "knowledge work", it just happened first for knowledge work because it's most obvious and low-cost there.
Very few jobs in society are compatible with flexible time where people can work when it suits them. Any job which requires some kind of real time coordination with others will conflict, which is most jobs. That is not even counting parents with school age children.
Most tasks with real person in time coordination also have fixed locations, and optimal environmental work times. Roofers work early in the morning so they don't need to literally risk their necks to darkness while also avoiding scorching heat.
Lighting was also expensive and very inadequate compared to sunlight. This lead to convergence. Notice all of the old proverbs and parables speak in terms of light and not time on clocks?
In addition to the manual craftmanship, before standardized parts creation was done to fit by one person - something where you would prefer to do all of the relevant tasks with one person when possible. And manufactured goods were expensive precisely because most spent time on raw material related tasks.
Actual coordinated work has music associated with the proper rhythm. Sea shanties, and rowing drums for instance.
The bonuses of DST up here last maybe a few weeks before it really doesn't matter anymore, and likewise for the standard time shift, except probably even shorter time being useful.
Yet we still have to do it, even though it causes demonstrable harm to shift clocks twice a year.
Noticed that standard time was actually useful this time of year. Where there was no light before it, but now there is at least some for while. And I see it much more important for morning than evening.
I'm somewhere between finland and seattle, latitude-wise. A quirk of the structure of European vs. North American landmass is that northern europe is a lot more 'habitable' than northern America, so I am literally in the farthest north >1m person city in the americas and it feels about the same as, say, Stockholm except without direct ocean warmth.
If we got rid of DST then I'd lose an extra hour of daylight on summer evenings which would be disappointing. And in exchange I'd have to invest in blackout curtains because on the summer solstice the sun would shine through my East-facing window at ~4:07am.
If we made DST permanent then the sun wouldn't rise until ~8:10am on the winter solstice which means a lot of kids in my neighborhood biking and walking to school in the dark in the winter.
I'd be fine scrapping DST if schools and offices agreed to use "summer hours" and "winter hours" but coordinating such a switch twice a year seems like DST by another name.
I prefer the DST shifted time, which is partly because I’m on the edge of the timezone that benefits most from that.
I wonder how many people who have strong feelings one way or the other have them in part because of their longitudinal position in the timezone.
DST perfectly solves this problem -- everyone switches on the same day. This makes life easier for the entire population, and causes slight headaches for computer programmers.
It would be just as easy to remind everyone that winter hours start on X date as to remind them to change their clocks on X date.
(And of course if you legally mandated that everyone had to shift their hours twice a year at the exact same time then you just invented DST with extra steps.)
Business hours and human hours change all the time anyway. You have to check in instead of assume. The times that things happen are not and have never been static.
But coordinating a mass switch between summer and winter hours twice a year seems like it would end up being more effort for regular people than just shifting the clocks in their house, especially now that so many of the clocks we use are internet-connected and switch automatically.
Compare and contrast different cities (intentionally sorted)
https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/prudhoe-bay
https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/anchorage
https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/seattle
https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/los-angeles
https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/honolulu
Nothing except blackout curtains and artificial light solve the issues. DST just makes scheduling stuff stupid.
In December and January, you go to work in the dark, you come home from work in the dark, and you barely see the sun for a couple months.
This is, for me, the only argument that matters. I live in the Netherlands, which has significant seasonal changes in daily sunlight.
So, in the summer there is extra light. Do you want this sunlight between 5.45 and 6.45 or between 21.00 and 22.00?
I choose the latter, as the light in the (very) early morning is simply of no use to me at all.
Of course, if we got rid of DST, we could all just agree to get up earlier in the summer. Maybe we could even standardize that by agreeing to all start getting up earlier on the same day each spring. :-)
This is exactly what DST is. Agreeing to all get up earlier.
My biology and I do not agree.
During winter you get daylight at 7:45am and it lasts until 4:27pm. Despite daylight savings. It's basically irrelevant.
And we're not even that far north for Europe. Ljubljana is basically right next to Venice. Imagine how bad this gets in the UK. London is a full 5 degrees further north.
edit: turns out Ljubljana is 1 degree more South than Seattle. My point that it can't make much of a difference for a place like Seattle stands. Winters are dark, there isn't a lot of daylight hours to go around no matter how you slice it.
According to http://blog.poormansmath.net/how-much-is-time-wrong-around-t..., that difference can exceed 90 minutes in Spain and even over 3 hours in western China. That’s the price they pay for China having a single time zone (that apparently was introduced by Mao Zedong, to show the country was unified)
And yes, not everybody likes that (https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/17/world/asia/china-single-t...)
It does wear on you mentally.
I'd take that over an afternoon sunset.
Well that was a dumb thing to say.
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/its-daylight-savin...
If I remember right this change has something like 71% approval amongst the population up here. It's overwhelmingly supported and popular. We can't get rid of DST fast enough.
It’s weirder to me that so many people care about which arbitrary number on the clock correlates to the position of the sun.
I hate Morning Losing Time.
So the offset between us changes twice a year.
I doubt you'll get the world to agree on no DST, though.
https://newrepublic.com/article/79023/roll-back-the-bush-cha...
I am fairly skeptical of the assertion that most Americans favor Standard time over DST.
My skepticism extends to the 2019 poll[1] that asked Americans if they "Supported Ending Daylight Savings Time", a Q that bundles Standard Time with ending clock shifts.
The Q to ask is "For year round time, would you prefer Standard Time or DST?" This would better allow us to consider what people at different latitudes want.
[1] https://today.yougov.com/topics/lifestyle/articles-reports/2...
You may know them all then.
Over a longish life intersecting about every class there is, I found ~0 people expressing a preference for Standard time. The preference for DST has been fairly universal.
I have not lived at high latitudes however. Some comments here indicate opinions there may reasonably differ.
Probably the vast majority of people with sleep disorders would do better with it as well.
I'm not convinced that we're universally a sunrise-to-sunset species, just some of us are.
I'm fairly skeptical of that as well. What I've seen among support groups is losing free-time to darkness increases SAD, which leads to sleep issues. I could ask around tho.
I despite the changing clock. Frankly, I don't care whether we're on daylight or standard time - I fully expect my schedule would just change in order to accommodate having roughly the same amount of sunlight (which can be a precious commodity here in the Pacific Northwest in the winter).
Oddly for this DST shill, I envy you that. I despise unfiltered sunlight. I just don't want it replaced with darkness.
(page 12: https://apnorc.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Impeach_DSL-To... )
In the winter, I want the extra sunlight in the morning. That hour of sunlight is important to burn off fog and defrost things a bit. For the morning commute, I want that to get started as early as possible. Yeah, it sucks that the sun goes down at 4:30pm, but at least that darkness is warmer - the slush on the road is still warm enough that it often won't refreeze til after the evening commute is over with.
None of the cited upsides require clock shifts. They aren't upsides of DST, but of being in the right timezone during winter, which DST does for parts of poorly drawn timezones in ways which are more simply addressed by drawing the timezones properly.
That no one is pointing out problems solved that don't trace back to “without DST, we are in the wrong time zone in winter” is a strong clue that the real problem is wrong timezone and that that problem is just more acutely felt in winter.
Changing the definition of time is an absurd way to fix the issue. Why not have "winter miles per hour", where because more car accidents happen in winter, everyone has to adjust their car's speedometer to read 10MPH more, so that you then drive slower on the road - Roads with a 70 limit become 60, etc.
I would train people to run off of UTC time most of the time when they need to synchronize a specific time.
Then train them to run off of sunrise/sunset offsets for situations where daylight matters. Most of the parks in my neighborhood are open sunrise to sunset, that's perfect. With modern digital clocks, this would be trivial to setup.
When should work hours be? Either some UTC time if we're remote, or if all local, something like 10 hours before sunset to 2 hours before sunset.
[0]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%21wa%20is%20it%20daytime%20in%20m...
Also anytime anyone says “experts” my first instinct to to believe they’re wrong.
And that's kind of the upside of daylight saving time: in winter, when days are short, you really want to get the daylight in the morning not in the evening; but in summer, when days are long, you want to move the extra morning daylight to the evening. So DST is kind of a compromise where we suffer the negative results of the changeover to get the positive results of morning light in winter and the positive results of extra evening light in summer.
Why stay on summer time? Because this routes more available daylight to the evening, which most often (for the bulk of people) is used as personal time, family time, everything other than work and school.
We already give up so much to those institutions, I could not possibly support sacrificing another hour of daylight to them.
My 2 cents worth...
We want to do things on the sun. We don't want to have to carry torch. We want to get what little vitamin D we can get from more then just pills.
It is cool to see outside without having to go where floodlights are. Taking walk and see around, for example.
The bigger question is why? Now that we have electric lights, why do you want equal daytime before and after noon?
On the eastern edges of current time zones. There's a 45-minute to 55-minute difference to cities on the western borders and many of them daylight time would be closer to "natural noon" than standard time.
I could also try and get my coworkers to move our meetings earlier in summer so I can leave work by 3, but for some reason changing a "clock" seems to be more effective than getting people to buy into summer hours and winter hours.
* There's some evidence that light is useful for the biological process of waking up and keeping people wakeful in the morning. Anecdotally, if it's a particularly cloudy day when I wake up, I am far slower to get going in the morning versus if it's a very sunny day.
* If you live in a region that is afflicted by snow and ice in winter, you want the sunlight to help with warming up pavement and melting snow and ice [in conjunction with road salt]. This use in particular isn't solved with artificial light.
Well why do you want it in the evening instead? There's only so much daylight. I'd rather get up and start the day with some sunshine.
That is your opinion which many do not share. As long as it is light out by 9am I don’t care.
[1] https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/CFR-2003-title49-vol1/CF...
The can of worms every time we change the clocks forwards and backwards and despite what the "experts" say, there is clearly no obvious advantage, otherwise we would just get rid of it.
There are also differences between places of different latitude so I cannot speak to those on the equator or the extreme poles so no point assuming there is a single answer that everyone likes.
When it comes to (possible) advantages, it depends on the context.
AFAICT, the positions of most chronobiology and sleep societies is that we should stick with Standard ("winter" / non-summer) Time year-round. Of course this may not be advantageous culturally or socially ("daylight after work FTW!!!1").
When the European Union conducted a poll 3 years ago, 4,6 million people answered. That is less than one percent (!) of the population, which is evidence that the overwhelming majority of people just don't care.
I'm sorry what? Unless 100% percent of the population was surveyed and 99% told pollsters they "don't care", that isn't evidence of anything.
I care about lots of issues and I respond to almost no polls.
Rigorous, reliable statistical analysis is possible without polling 100% of the population.
Clearly if less than 1% of the population would participate in a presidential election that would be evidence that the population just did not care about the outcome?
I care quite a bit about certain policy decisions, but I don't answer any political polls since I think all of them are bunk or intentionally picking stats with poorly written questions.
No, it isn't. It is only evidence that 99% of Europeans did not vote in this poll. It says nothing about why they didn't vote. Or did you personally interview the remaining 455 million people and tallied their responses about why they didn't vote?
Otherwise, loosing one hour of sleep during spring is not a problem at all. Gaining one in autumn feels like a net benefit.
Skimming this thread, there can be said something about vocal minorities.
Bikeshedding?
I have strong opinions about DST. And even more fringe-y, I have opinions about time zones too.
Note that the EU parliament actually did pass a law to abolish changing the clocks, but I think it didn't pass the other branches of EU government, so probably got lost. Hopefully it can be revived in future.
The accuracy of a sample, as long as it's representative, doesn't depend that much on the population size, just on the size of the sample. Once you get past a few thousand samples you are accurate to a couple of percent no matter how big the population is.
The question here is was the poll representative? That depends on how those 4.6 million people were selected.
Many, many millions do.
>In the last four years, 19 states have enacted legislation or passed resolutions to provide for year-round daylight saving time, if Congress were to allow such a change, and in some cases, if surrounding states enact the same legislation. Because federal law does not currently allow full-time DST, Congress would have to act before states could adopt changes. The 19 states are:
>Alabama, Georgia, Minnesota, Mississippi and Montana (2021).
>Idaho, Louisiana, Ohio (resolution), South Carolina, Utah and Wyoming (2020).
>Arkansas, Delaware, Maine, Oregon, Tennessee and Washington (2019).
>Florida (2018; California voters also authorized such a change that year, but legislative action is pending).
https://www.ncsl.org/research/transportation/daylight-saving...
Daylight time is the same as standard time of the time zone to the east, so I don't know why these states haven asked the transportation sec to reassign their timezones.
I chose my wording carefully. I don't think I can persuade you and I don't seek to persuade you. In my opinion, intentionally choosing a timezone deliberately offset from the historic and natural meaning of 12pm ~= noon, which requires significant support which I have never seen.
Personally, I have great control over my time, so I just let my automated systems adjust their clocks and if I want "an extra hour of sleep", I just take it. If I want to go biking in the sun, I do it then. And so on and so forth.
The important thing is that we devolve power adequately. So the federal government should drop DST/no-DST decisions completely to the states. Currently US Gov only lets states adhere to the non-DST time, or adopt DST. My state wants to go full DST and can't.
If we eliminated day light savings time you would still have post work sunlight in the winter.
Western edges of timezones often favor/prefer year-round "daylight time" because that's closer to their natural noon as US timezones especially heavily favor natural noon on the eastern border.
So...fix the problem at the source by changing the boundaries so solar noon is clock noon at (approximately) the center of the zone instead of the eastern boundary.
And if they have an after school activity, they have to come home in the dark anyway.
It's a red herring.
Then we move school start times to what's biologically optimal for kids instead of what optimizes budgets.
By doing it this way, we keep things in synch, like business hours matching school hours matching transit timetables and so on. If every one of them changed their hours separately, we'd have a much greater mess than the less-bad current approach to daylight time.
Whether we want the functionality at all (to adjust human activities based on sunlight hours) is a separate question. Given that we do, DST is a useful abstraction compared to going without it.
You should be able to do things regardless of what number the clock says. Don't rely on the numbers on the clock to dictate everything you are doing all the time. If you want to go outside when it is not dark, then that is what you can do. If you want to eat dinner when it is not dark, then that is what you can do. If you want to sleep when it is dark, then that is what you can do. This can be done regardless of what number is on the clock. If you want to work or schedule something for some time you can do based on whatever criteria would be appropriate, regardless of what number is on the clock; regardless of what criteria are being used, the numbers on the clock will still tell you the intervals of time, and how long it takes. For example, opening hours need not be fixed, and holidays need not be fixed, etc. But, maybe you will not need to schedule something for a specific time anyways, in all circumstances. Also, if you want to wake up earlier, then you can set your alarm clock for an earlier time; you don't need daylight saving time for this to work.
I've yet to meet anyone who celebrates those days!
I assume someone must think it's still a good idea for some reason?
"Experts say" vaccines help (a) reduce your chances of getting COVID, and (b) not suffering as badly from it should you contract it.
Perhaps some of the "experts" who study how daylight effects us should at least be consulted before changes be made. 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://doi.org/10.3389/fphys.2019.00944
* https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2019.0094...
We can still ignore the experts after they have their say of course.
Alternatively, if we did DST all year round, the sun would rise at 8:30 in the winter. That also seems unpleasant.
Working a midnight shift on a Saturday evening and having to work an hour extra isn't.
The 'extra' hour feels nice this time of year. When the days are getting shorter and it's getting colder. And you know colder and darker days are ahead. While in the Spring you have Spring to look forwards too.
They often talk about the increase in accidents in the spring. But this time of year road conditions typically get worse. In terms of lack of daylight, more active wildlife and other small issues(first frost, wet roads, slippery leaves, Summer tires still on, etc).
If they clocks were GMT year round in Inverness, sunrise at 0730 today, 0830 come December, 0900 on shortest day.
But under GMT year round sunset in July would be before 2100, which seems a waste when culture has people getting up about 0700 (and if you did shift culture to get up an hour earlier, you'd be up for hours before sunrise in winter).
With Daylight Saving sunrise at 10am not great.
America is (aside from Alaska) quite far south, so the effect isn't as pronounced
Nobody does. But ask a group of people what the solution should be and someone will start screaming bloody murder about how the correct time is standard or daylight. As a result, politically, forcing a move will get you (a) lots of people with meh level support for you and (b) a small, pissed off group. Which is, electorally, worse than useless.
We usually get our own selection in Time Zone menus, so that is kinda cool.
Also the fact that without time zones, for everybody who isn't lucky enough to live near wherever the meridian ends up the calendar date will now change somewhere during waking hours, which seems a rather confusing prospect.
Schools and shops would open around 01:00 or maybe 02:00 sunrise time. Typical office workers head home around 10:00. Where I am the sun would set around 09:00 in the winter and 15:30 in the summer.
And of course anything on the internet or that requires cross-region coordination would be scheduled in UTC, perhaps with a user's local sunrise time displayed as a parenthetical. To decide when to call my Uncle Steve in Melbourne I'd look up his local time as I do today, but if we scheduled a call ahead of time we'd schedule it in UTC.
I'm someone who is wholly dependent on a wristwatch for nearly every aspect of my life. When I would forget to preemptively set my watch backward or forwards, I would be late for everything for a day, and it would lead to most of aspects of my life being worse.
Now that my watch is automatically set for me by the phone towers, and my alarms are also automatically updated, DST has shifted from "ruining my day" to "mild annoyance".
"Sleep is also necessary for the body to heal and repair heart and blood vessels. Lack of sleep has been linked to an increased risk heart disease, kidney disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, obesity and stroke, experts say."
I don't think that's a particularly controversial statement, but is it germane to a discussion of a twice yearly switch in sleep schedules? The general consensus for travelers is that it takes 1-2 days per hour of time difference to get past jet lag. There's a decent argument to be made based on accident avoidance, but the rest of the "health impacts" seem harder to justify.
(Potentially bad) back of envelope calculations follow: 1. The entire US population of 330 million is impacted by a 1 hour shift twice per year (of which one shift is probably more impactful than the other to sleep health). 2. On a typical year, there are about 1 billion airline passengers in the US alone (domestic plus inbound/outbound international). This counts everyone on a flight as one passenger. Let's assume that people take on average 2 legs in one day (probably a slightly high estimate). That's 500 million people, but we should halve that again since people have outbound and inbound trips. So we're down to 250 million people being impacted by travel. 3. Some of the travel is in the same time zone, but other travel spans many time zones (inbound international flights or transcontinental flights). We can call that a wash, though we could probably get to actual data if I weren't being lazy. I'd also argue that the travel is going to be much more disruptive to sleep schedules since in addition to the actual time zone shifts, travelers have to deal with early departures and late arrivals. 4. Many of the people who travel are being counted multiple times here, so we don't have a true collection of 250 million people impacted, but it's not clear that 1 person experiencing jet lag 10 times should only be counted once, since this is a recurring 1-2 day issue. 5. We're not orders of magnitude off here in terms of people-days impacted by normal travel vs the great DST debate.
It's far easier to change the local office hours for workplaces and schools during winter time as needed. For extreme northern areas, they could even move it by more than one hour. It can be their choice! Let the work hours be decided locally rather than a blanket rule for the poles and equator. Match our behavior to the daylight rather than the other way round - you know, like every other species on Earth
Utah has passed a law that makes DST permanent as soon as the federal law is removed.
Edit: On further review, this seems to have died in committee.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/6331...
Time zones themselves mean that "solar noon" is rounded anyway, but they at least try to roughly go along with it.
Even if there aren't external factors and there is theoretically flexibility around working hours cultural norms can make it difficult. My workgroup/division seems to have a strong norm about not scheduling meetings before 930a, but scheduling from 4-5p is normal.
Not even for the endless studies that show benefits from matching school start times to what's best for kids.
ref: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=study+school+start+times+sleep
[0] https://www.dw.com/en/eu-parliament-votes-to-end-daylight-sa...
I hope we don't change it as it's actually a great system and I think people would hate if we just stayed on a single time. Of course, people that live on certain latitudes probably care less about these optimizations and see it more as an annoyance.
We don't like DST in the winter because for many people this requires waking up in the dark if the time they have to get to work/school remains the same.
Which is why the next step is to shift school schedules to align with kids' natural sleep schedules.
Tracking time zones all over the world is hard, and a lot of code that does it was written decades ago. I wouldn't eagerly sign up to review it all.
I'd much rather stick with DST than send some poor devs down that path.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Policy_Act_of_2005#Chan...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time_in_the_Un...
Much patching / updating of tzdata and rebooting. I think that effort led to a bunch of changes that make for easier updates going forward.
Until that point there wasn't really that much churn in things over the past few decades, so people became a little more bit complacent when it came to TZ code.
My guess is that most people in the USA are _not_ early risers at this point and would prefer daylight savings time year-round, but would be interested to see data on this.
There are a number of bills on a federal level that would allow states to do this, but each of these bills have seemingly been lost in the torpid world of inaction.
In order to stay in DST, the region would have to completely change which timezone they observe. Pacific Time would observe Mountain Time, Mountain -> Central, Central -> Eastern, and Eastern would have to observe whatever GMT-4 is.
And bam! COVID came and froze all activities and our useless European bureaucrats now officially started that the topic is not on any radar screen
If small kids have to be outside near traffic at any point, better than they get as much light as possible. Having little Johnny mushed by an suv tends to upset folks.
And thinking about Cop26, perhaps we should minimize external lighting when possible to save energy and lessen impact on nature. Both of these, unfortunately, lean towards dst.
Edit: forgot. I assume most people change when they get up on the weekend vs, the work week. If this assumption is correct, they might have more extreme time shifts every weekend than the once a year problem being discussed…
Let's not fool ourselves anymore. DST is de facto standard time.
It's Winter Time (Daylight Wasting Time) that needs to go.
subtle but crucial difference
Maybe we need more common sense and less help from "experts."