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Comment by jp57 | Hacker News Reader

I've been reading the anti-DST (or more properly anti-clock-shift) posts that appear hear and elsewhere every spring and fall for years. I really think this is a case of "be careful what you wish for". I think many folks, especially in northern latitudes, will regret the early summer sunsets or sunrises if we were to stay on standard time year round.

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. :-)

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I always assumed we'd keep the summer hours year round. I don't even think about DST during the summer, it's during the fall where we suddenly lose an hour of evening sunlight that I complain. Unless I'm misreading, your comment is just pointing out that keeping the winter hours year-round is sub-optimal (I agree) but not arguing in favour of switching the clocks twice per year.

I would also much prefer we stay on DST (sun rises/sets later) year round. However, if DST were to end, it's not guaranteed that it would go that way. I think that unfortunately many people see the winter time (sun rises/sets earlier) as the default.

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.

> I think that unfortunately many people see the winter time (sun rises/sets earlier) as the default.

It is the default. That's why it is called Atlantic/Eastern/Central/Mountain/Pacific Standard Time in North America.

It’s also the time that most closely aligns solar noon to clock noon. People who advocate for “summer time all the time” basically just want to wake up earlier but want clocks to trick them into doing it.

(The more legitimate argument is for western regions to align to summer time to be closer in clock time to their eastern neighbors.)

Not quite. If your workday ends at 6pm then being on DST means you get usable daylight for more of the year after work. Even if you were prepared to get up and go to bed earlier many jobs have a fixed set of hours.

I mean, okay, let's change which hours they're fixed to! Let's not break the entire concept of noon because America sucks at collective action problems.

What you call "the entire concept of noon" is extremely minor concept in timekeeping for most humans. What's important, is when they work, when places are open, and when other humans are awake.

https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/emres/longhourstraining/light.html

> The light/dark cycle of the sun has a powerful effect on the circadian clock, sleep, and alertness. If you understand these effects, you can manipulate light exposure to help yourself sleep better at night and be more alert during the day. Keep in mind your circadian clock uses light and dark signals to predict what to do in the future: when to prepare you to be active and when to prepare you to sleep.

Noon corresponds to light. Traditional time keeping has been built around light forever for reasons that are still relevant even though we now have plenty of artificial light. There is no reason why we cannot adjust when we work, keep places open, and share waking hours around the sun, but we cannot adjust the sun.

> There is no reason why we cannot adjust when we work, keep places open, and share waking hours around the sun

This is the entire point of DST. To adjust when we work, keep places open, and share waking hours around the sun.

> but we cannot adjust the sun.

Of course, but we can adjust the angle of the hour hand on a clock. So we do that.

> This is the entire point of DST. To adjust when we work, keep places open, and share waking hours around the sun.

Perspective may vary here, but it seems to me it's to avoid having to adjust when we work by having the government enforce an artificial aberration on top of the normal social construct of time, a construct that at least hinges on the objective reality of Where The Sun Is. It's to avoid moving "a 9-to-5" to "an 8-to-4", to avoid it by pretending that noon isn't noon and making all of us mess with our clocks to keep up that pretense.

> It's to avoid moving "a 9-to-5" to "an 8-to-4", to avoid it by pretending that noon isn't noon and making all of us mess with our clocks to keep up that pretense.

Exactly. In our modern lives, noon itself is not very significant. Sunrise and sunset are much more so. So when the sun starts to set "too early", we fight back by pushing the clocks forward an hour. Some people don't like it because maybe they want the sun to rise earlier. Or maybe they hate the lost hour of sleep. Or they're a distributed database programmer :)

But there's no solution that pleases everyone, so we all get on these long threads about DST twice a year and yell at each other. My preferred timekeeping would have me join the "America/Phoenix" time zone (I'm in California). But 2nd-best is the current system.

Tradition is just peer pressure from dead people. We can do what we want.

Work hours adapt to human behavior. Some industries end "work" around 3pm. Some ends at noon. DST is basically a communism way to force everyone to adopt a standardized time that a leader there envision. What happens if the day turn darker at 3pm when dark storms last for 3+ hrs till night and repeatitively across days or weeks? Micro-DST for weather as well? Messing with times via DST +/-1hr won't get much other than confusions. Time is zero sum game however you rearrange it.

I want to wake up earlier and want the clocks to trick everyone else into also doing so, which is the only way I'll be able to get away with it.

Gotta coordinate things like this, otherwise it won't happen.

How is it the default when we are actually on daylight time most of the time now (mid March through early November)? Daylight is the norm, "standard" is actually the exception. What's the point of switching to "standard" time for 4 months?

> But I'm also really not a morning person.

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.

There's also the problem of lumping together cities at different latitudes. The summer time is aligned ideally with one region, at the cost of other regions following suit and having to wake up at night.

Ideally, each region would have their summer time adapted to their latitude, but that would be more chaotic than simply scrapping it.

Being a morning person or a night person isn’t only a personal preference; it’s also genetic.

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

That's not what happened in the two states that alleviated DST (Arizona and Hawaii). They are always on winter time.

I grew up in Indiana when they were on standard time year-round. It was light until well after 8:00pm in the summer, that's enough.

Is that due to being so far West in the Eastern Timezone?

Maybe? Yes? I'm not opposed to the idea of more, narrower time zones, though I think that in practice anything less than one-hour differences would be more complicated than it's worth.

Chicago has the opposite problem, where it's dark at 4:30pm in the winter.

you want the timezones to be 30 minutes apart? (i assume you aren't proposing 15) that sounds so much worse than the status quo

At the expense of standing at the school bus stop in complete darkness for most mornings of the school year.

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.

Or start school later?

I don't really remember waiting for the bus in the dark until I was in high school, when they started earlier and due to the need to use the same bus for later runs to elementary schools, we arrived at school 30 minutes before class started. I'm thinking my elementary school started at 8:30 or 9:00am? But I can't really remember.

>Federal law allows a state to exempt itself from observing daylight saving time, upon action by the state legislature, but does not allow the permanent observance of DST.

https://www.ncsl.org/research/transportation/daylight-saving...

In the case of Arizona, an early sunset actually makes sense because that means you get to enjoy the evenings outdoors at 30-ish ˚C (around 90 ˚F) instead of the >40˚C (>100˚F) you would have if the sun was still up.

Keeping DST year round just seems so crazy. If "midday" and "midnight" no longer approximate the middle of the day and night then what is even the point of time zones?

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.

Madrid's solar noon is around 1 PM during standard time and 2 PM during summer time, the rest of Spain is a bit off from this, and I noted when I lived there that the Spanish custom seems to be to keep later hours.

Spain should be on GMT. It was a political decision by Franco to align timezones with Germany during WWII.

Interestingly the UK also changed to GMT+1 during the war.

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.

If "midday" didn't get changing twice a year and always coincided with noon (i.e. the sun being highest), we could build a schedule based on working when there is light on the sky and still have some left after work.

> Time actually means something, don't mess with it.

That would be great advice for not changing the clock every six months.

To be clear, I am fully on board with abolishing daylight saving. We should standardize on the aptly named standard time.

There is a huge difference between keeping the same time all year versus keeping the same time over huge swaths of the globe. We only keep "regular" time just over four months a year now.

> we'd keep the summer hours year round

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.

Actually, winter time is zero-indexed, and summer time has an index of one. “Real hours” depends on whether you like C or SQL more.

Watchmakers took their stance, setting 12 at the zenith.

The entire concept of time is a "social agreement". Including when noon is. Solar noon is never at clock noon where I live or for that matter in most places, it's off by an amount dictated by political decisions and boundaries as well as by the fact that it literally drifts a bit over the course of the year.

In a way, but it is not "anarchic performance art": it tends to adhere to the actual objective time - it makes sense to create a system that applies reasonable compromises, but attached with a rubber band to the real thing. Approximate flexibly but do not lose the anchor.

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.

Having grown up somewhere northern that doesn't follow DST (Saskatchewan) I never really understood this argument. Winter months you get so little sunlight anyways I don't really see how it would make too much of a difference.

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.

Essentially DST is making everyone wake up an hour early everyday for 7-8 months. I’d rather just let the people who want the “extra” hour of sunlight in the evening get up early. Our bodies sync with the earth’s clock and not what we set. (Also 1-hr timezones are not sufficient. We need 30 minute time zones as well. People in the westernmost US, for example, have an early start. DST makes it much much earlier.)

It is not really practical to try to run one's life an hour ahead of the schedule of society, as set by things like business hours, transit schedules, and the times of public events and performances. This is why I personally would be sorry to lose DST where I live, even though it is an ugly hack.

Performances are held around the clock, you can't visit them all anyway.

I live in the middle part of alberta and I'm in the same boat, and during the recent referrendum on switching to DST I couldn't believe the amount of "But in the northern part of the province sunrise will be too late for kids going to school!" as if:

- ...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.

> 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.

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.

Preindustrial people haven’t been a part of global economy nearly to the same degree we are. They haven’t had to coordinate so much with other people in their daily tasks.

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.

Government and retail opening hours are already very grating. People do what they can online which is more convenient.

> Government offices and retail establishments have opening hours.

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.

> Online fixes like 99% of this.

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.

>No, online fixes some of it, not 99%. I can’t fix my car online.

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?

> But you can schedule the fix, pay for the fix, feedback the fix etc all online.

I can’t, however, fix my car online, which is the entire point.

> Now that much of the world is working remote, we drive a lot less

No, we drive only a little less. Miles driven fell only 13% in 2020 vs 2019, and people drive more in 2021 than they had in 2020.

> 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?

Yeah, soon we will be able to do everything online, and will not have to see and talk to another human being, ever.

> and will not have to see and talk to another human being, ever.

Except by choice, which imo is a good thing! I hope it will help people start to become cognizant, proactive, and invested in true community more than community by proximity and happenstance. Saying hi to the same cashier is nice and all, but there is a lot of depth of truer community that has been left by a gap of the church leaving the mainstream. (not suggesting it return as the replacement, just identifying a gap the change left).

Then we can begin to build community with people we choose to more than just because we live in the same zipcode or go to the same tax bracket targeted shops .

> Saying hi to the same cashier is nice and all, but there is a lot of depth of truer community that has been left by a gap of the church leaving the mainstream.

Indeed, but in fact, the increase in screen time (previously TV, now also internet/smartphones), has been a major contributor to the decline of community and civic society. Making more things doable online is likely to only make things worse, not better in this aspect.

I guess you're largely commenting on short term (ie < 50 yrs) actualized trends vs I'm looking at conceptual and longer term things like freeing people from certain mundanity (eg dishwashers and clothes washing machines) opens up unprecedented utility (like women entering the workforce when they previously handled domestic work).

yes, if we collectively just replace social interaction with asocial videogames or squid game, then yes we'll ultimately suffer. But if time saved by either 1) doing things online or 2) having your role eliminated entirely then we'll have additional and aggregated time for things like clubs around hobbies ... (aggregated part means 60x 1 minute saved could potentially be used to have a social interaction with a friend)

> But if time saved by either 1) doing things online or 2) having your role eliminated entirely then we'll have additional and aggregated time for things like clubs around hobbies ... (aggregated part means 60x 1 minute saved could potentially be used to have a social interaction with a friend)

Could, sure, but will it? Experience of last 50 years shows that it will more likely be spent on solo watching Netflix, while sipping wine and cuddling with a cat, or playing yet another video game.

The fact is, our ancestors had more meaningful social interaction with their friends and neighbors, despite all the modern efficiency improvements not being available to them. In my opinion, modern individual entertainment is so optimized that more old school activities cannot really compete in the immediate term, despite being much more fulfilling and socially beneficial in the long term. Optimizing out chores won’t solve this.

But, we strayed very far from the original topic.

Are you seriously suggesting that society could operate on system where people just work at any time of the day whenever they felt like it?

Not parent, but yes? And why not, work any time is a natural evolution after work anywhere. I'm sure virtual reality and AI can fill in for the human illusion of synchronous communication one day.

Good grief. It really is time for some of you people to step away from the computer, get out of the tech bubble for a while and have a look at what most people in society are doing for a living.

We really need to get over that tiresome and foolish self-flagellation complex of the "tech bubble" and the notion that our work isn't "real work".

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?

You are misunderstanding my point here. I'm not saying that IT work isn't real work.

We're discussing flexible working times for all of society, and what I'm reading is people who somehow assume that most of society is in a job with privileges like being able to work from home or on "async" schedules etc. Few jobs are like this.

So, apart from teachers and live television, what jobs can't operate on a flexible schedule? As others have said, many jobs that require attendance are already performed in shifts. Yes, a waiter cannot choose to work when the customers are not at their table, but that doesn't mean they have to be there at every time the restaurant is open. Same thing for bartending/stocking/cashiers/front office jobs, many of these are already part-time jobs so flexibility is readily implied.

Come to think of it, many of my high-school teachers worked part-time too. They didn't get to dictate their own hours, but they didn't work 7-15 every day either, some days they came in at 11 and other days they left at 12.

yes, for a good proportion of people this would work, and work could probably design around many of those who "cannot" via buffers, and for the remaining very small proportion where full coverage matter (like ER staff) -- well that's their profession so i guess not.

I think it's an interesting idea but it's a much larger problem than you're saying - your perspective is from the narrow position of knowledge work that pushes information around, and it doesn't really matter when the information gets pushed around. But out in the real world, where things need to physically come together for economic activity to occur, synchronization is a huge deal. If you want a store to be open from 9AM, someone has to be there at 9AM. People will rely on that store being open at the stated time. It's not just ER staff - almost any other profession you care to name will not function properly if people just turn up whenever. Bartender, hairdresser, trash collector, construction worker, police officer, firefighter...

Honestly, this reads like the narrow perspective. It sounds like western culture. And an urban one specifically.

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 think you underestimate the areas where full (or significant) staff is needed. What about manufacturing jobs, farming, transportation and logistics (especially transportation of ppl not goods), services (including public services).

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.

The economy is already distributed via intermediation mechanisms (trade, money), whereas in the stone age people had to meet all together to barter in a bazaar. You underestimate how much work structure is simply inertia, beginning with the eight-hour day.

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.

Outside of procedural manufacturing and public safety, very few industries are incompatible with the concept of flextime. The only thing preventing it from happening is archaic business management practices that were never based on actual research or metrics.

What's the gravity like on your planet? /s

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.

You seem to be under the mistaken impression that society was created only a few centuries ago, and that widespread deployment of clocks were a prerequisite for escape from base "eat your neighbors and older relatives to survive the winter" savagery.

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.

Quite the opposite, with flexible time workers are available at a wider time span and can do more coordination per day.

You claim "very few" jobs are compatible with flextime, yet nearly half of companies in the US already provide flextime options for most of their employees -- and this includes positions at every level. Your assertions are not representative of reality.

Is there really a white collar job that does not allow at least something like 7-15 schedule? Or one that couldn't be easily found. That is giving exactly the extra hour in evenings that people want.

I'm kind of amused at calling Seattle a "northern latitude". I live quite a bit north of that and I can tell you that as you go into actual northern latitudes if you wanted to have any of these useful effects you'd have to be changing the time a lot more often than just twice a year.

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.

From Finland I see that Seattle is around Switzerland. Which I consider central Europe or even being very much in south.

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.

To me it just means I get sad twice when I stop seeing the sun in the morning again. I've never found it worth it.

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.

I agree, and I'm glad we'll probably never end up getting rid of DST.

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 live on the eastern edge of ET. My in-laws live on the western edge of it (their solar noon is about 49 minutes later than mine).

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.

Same here, but on the eastern edge of central. If I was a little bit over in eastern time, I'd definitely have the opposite opinion.

I'd love to see a move by state governments to 1) end DST, and 2) formally adopt summer/winter hours, with encouraging businesses to follow their lead.

This creates a coordination problem. For example, your workplace adopts summer hours and now you have to get to work an hour earlier, but you kids' daycare hasn't. Or, the bakery wants to deliver pastries to the cafe an hour earlier, but the cafe workers haven't shown up yet.

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.

Forgive me, but this reads like "we're avoiding a giant coordination problem by implementing a giant coordination problem".

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.

I'd be fine with either DST or summer/winter hours but the latter is a significatnly harder coordination problem. Not all businesses would change you'd end up having to keep track of which things have shifted and which things have not and all the downstream implications of that. Compare that to the five minutes a year I spend setting the handful of non-internet-connected clocks in my house.

(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.)

Seasonal business hours can be posted as any time of day in UTC. DST can only adjust by exactly 1 hour.

Seasonal hours are indeed more expressive than DST. I love when times are indexed in terms of "sunrise" and/or "sunset" such as the parks near me.

But it doesn't mean that it is simpler for regular people to implement in their lives. If every shop, school, and office had seasonal hours that changed at different times of year (even if they were posted in UTC) then trying to coordinate errands would become a lot more complex. This week I have time to pick Timmy up from school and swing by the post office before it closes, next week school shifts later so I can't, but the week after that the post office implements their shift and I can again.

Many businesses already have differing winter/summer hours under the current regime. That is, they change their hours in winter and summer. And often those hours don’t change in any consistent way. They do just fine despite the coordination problem you bring up.

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.

I'd be fine with either DST or summer/winter hours -- they're just alternate implementations of the same thing.

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.

"I think more people would bemoan the lack of after-work daylight during spring and summer than currently bemoan the switch" I think this argument would also apply nicely in challenge of our concept of a modern work week. '9-5' got a harsh reality check with COVID for a lot of people, so why don't we challenge it and not just shifting DST. (I acknowledge that this currently only applies to people who could work remotely.)

We shouldn't get rid of DST, we should just stay on it year round. The change is worthless, causes accidents, disrupts everyone's sleep all for nothing.

I live in (a suburb of) Seattle. We're screwed by a 'lite' version of arctic winters no matter what.

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.

Yukon got rid of DST switch and stays on Pacific daylight time all year round:

https://yukon.ca/en/seasonal-time-change

There's just not much to be done in places that get eight or nine hours of daylight in the winter and fifteen or sixteen in the summer. Or worse, if you're even farther north than that.

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.

As you said, it depends whether you stay in "standard time" or DST. In BC we're planning on permanently staying on PDT. I agree with what you said about permanent standard time. I actually had to look it up to make sure we're actually gonna stay on PDT. Phew.

I think many folks, especially in northern latitudes, will regret the early summer sunsets or sunrises if we were to stay on standard time year round.

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.

This is exactly what DST is. Agreeing to all get up earlier.

> Agreeing to all get up earlier.

My biology and I do not agree.

If it's just you, why do you want all people do it? You can adjust your clock and get desirable digits there.

As someone who grew up in Europe at the same latitude as Montreal ... eh.

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.

I live about halfway down the US, and we have at least a month and a half in which the only sunlight an 8/8:30-5 worker (nobody actually works 9-5) is going to get is the sun blinding them while rising during their morning commute, and blinding them while setting during their evening commute. No amount of screwing around with the clock keeps the sun up longer. The only way to give people more free daylight hours in the winter, would be to have significantly shorter working hours.

I grew up in a northern latitude on the east coast and played golf as a fall sport. Without DST, the season would have to end much earlier since it would get dark too early to actually play a round after school.

Yeah, as another post here has said, what most people actually want is year-round DST. However, I believe this is a confusing way to express it to people not heavily involved in the DST “controversy” (it sounds like you’re supporting doing fine changes, or perhaps wanting even more time changes or something), so I think it’s often just short handed to “ending daylight savings time”, but yes, like everything, unnecessarily complicated and confusing. This clarification and conversation thus also takes place every year.

What is wrong with feeling the changes of season, depending on your geographical location? Personally that arbitrary shifting 2 times a year always disturbed me. And why TEE EFF should we all get up together? Ever heard of chronobiology and different chronotypes? 'Night Owls vs. Larks', so to speak?

The local time of sunrise and sunset depends not only on latitude but also on the difference between local solar time and the local time zone’s time.

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...)

As of now, with daylights saving, places like London don't have the sun come up until 8am.

It does wear on you mentally.

> with daylights saving, places like London don't have the sun come up until 8am.

I'd take that over an afternoon sunset.

> In Seattle

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.

Agree. I lived in Japan which doesn't change clocks. In the summer the sun rises at 4:30am but it's only light out until maybe just before 8pm.

Seattle is not far north. I live 12 degrees further north (Norway a little south of Oslo) and I would be quite happy to have permanent summer time. Lighter evenings are worth more to me than lighter mornings. Also the whole of the UK is further north than Seattle. From '68 to '71 we had permanent summer time in the UK and where I come from in the south it was popular.

We can make either time the permanent one and adjust accordingly, it’s the twice a year disruption that people hate. Especially difficult to explain to a child why their bedtime suddenly shifted despite established circadian rhythms.

It’s weirder to me that so many people care about which arbitrary number on the clock correlates to the position of the sun.

USA doesn't even properly have northern latitudes: Seattle is southern north, not far north. Also summer sunsets are late, not early: day expands into evening and morning equally and there's no reason to regret them.

Half a dozen of one... In December Seattle either has a late sunrise or an early sunset. Currently it is dark by 5pm in Dec.

God no. Because of DST Seattle is dark at 4pm in the winter. Going off DST would probably prevent some suicides.

Move it 30 minutes and call it a day.

Don't care. Want my morning time back.

I hate Morning Losing Time.

I hate 5:30 sunsets. A few hours from here are 4:49 sunsets which I'd super hate.

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