I don’t get this at all. Why would people want the sun to go down in the afternoon? In my time zone it sets at 4:30 part of the year! That’s awful, and sunrise is at around 7:00am. We have way more sun in the morning.
Linkdump:
https://www.econ.pitt.edu/sites/default/files/WP%2017-009.up...
http://cebp.aacrjournals.org/content/cebp/26/8/1306.full.pdf
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21231877
https://jcsm.aasm.org/doi/10.5664/jcsm.8780
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29636342
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/276058441_The_incid...
When I lived in Beijing, they are on standard time year round , and it was really horrible having the sun rise at 4AM in the morning during summer. Like really? How can that be healthy?
According to the research results, public health and economy would care.
> We therefore strongly support removing DST changes or removing permanent DST and having governing organizations choose permanent Standard Time for the health and safety of their citizens.
* https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/07487304198541...
Cows also don't care about property lines :)
I start work at an office starting around 8:30-9:00 and I wake up at 6AM. Not quite sure what that time has to do with farmers.
My (late) grandparent were farmers: they only cared about the time on Sundays to make sure they weren't late for Church services. Otherwise the the cows needed milking when they needed milking (which I helped with when I visited them).
But I worked blue collar after that, my job 7:30 to 5:00, or 7:30 to 8:00 on long days.
Even in my current white collar job, that habit has stuck, and I have been working 7:30 AM to 4:30 AM for the last thirty five years, mostly to avoid the bulk of the commute.
So yes, there are millions of jobs across this country where people arrive at work, and punch in on a clock, at 7:00 AM every morning.
Well, good thing we've never let that stand in the way of a decision. /s
Personally I'd prefer more light later in the day so that I don't feel like the day is over as soon as I get off work but that's just me.
> we find that an extra hour of natural light in the evening reduces sleep duration by an average of 19 minutes and increases the likelihood of reporting insufficient sleep.
The health benefits of people staying out longer and spending more money (?) are disputed I believe. The reduced sleep of day starting before sun-up are pretty universally recognized as bad for public health (particularly among teenagers).
Also note that if staying out longer was a goal to strive for, there are number of alternatives to encourage that. Including shorter worker ours, more public spaces, public events, etc. Conversely getting people to sleep longer is much harder with the clock set 1+ hour after the sun clock.
This are fantastic points I don't see in discussions around the topic. Goes to show that the solution space for a problem is often constrained by our perceptions of both the problem and what our expectations of a reasonable solution are.
But what I gathered is that what matters most for healthy sleep is not going to bed early, but rather to sleep longer in the morning and wake up with the sun. So if we move to permanent DST this behavior of staying up late might become more of a problem because of the early rising.
Permanent DST is the one where the sun rises later, which would mean easier to get more sleep rather than being woken up because the sun is rising too early.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_China
Permanent standard / solar time proponent here: I'm reminded of that quote about people believing you could get a longer blanket if you were to cut a foot off top and sew it onto the bottom.
perhaps lawmakers can try voting to change the tilt of the earth, lol.
Good for you that you're still sleeping at 6AM. But some of us wake up at 6AM (or earlier) and would like to have it be brighter to help kick start our circadian rhythm.
Any change whatsoever to a status quo will delight some and upset others on an individual basis. I assume your point isn't that we should all adopt your preferences. So if not, what is it?
But one hour less in the night has been shown to give a higher death rate that week every year so it's been discussed to get rid of it here too.
I like to joke that I never fully recover until they give me back the hour come November.
I'd rather they just pick one and be done with it.
* https://srbr.org/advocacy/daylight-saving-time-presskit/
* https://old.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/dq2nv3/
* http://www.chronobiology.ch/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/JBR-D...
* https://www.chronobiology.com/impact-daylight-saving-time-ci...
* https://esrs.eu/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/To_the_EU_Commiss...
> 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. […] The choice of DST is political and therefore can be changed. If we want to improve human health, we should not fight against our body clock, and therefore, we should abandon DST and return to Standard Time (which is when the sun clock time most closely matches the social clock time) throughout the year. This solution would fix both the acute and the chronic problems of DST. We therefore strongly support removing DST changes or removing permanent DST and having governing organizations choose permanent Standard Time for the health and safety of their citizens.
* https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/07487304198541...
So they picked the wrong one.
I live in Alberta, Canada, and enough people want to get rid of the time zone switching that it came to a vote last fall. I couldn't believe the question on the ballot was do you want to go to permanent DST, instead of asking if we wanted to go to permanent standard time. It was snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
The people voted against the change, but I really think they would've voted for permanent standard time if it had been an option.
Just look at all the other threads in this discussion: "I want it brighter when I leave the office".
It's like the lightbulb was never invented or something. We haven't had "dark" for decades:
Never mind light pollution doesn't apply if you're trying to get into outdoor activities after work.
Money. [1]
On the upside, local or state governments might be able to alter their time zone to essentially observe permanent Standard Time.
>Seasonal observation of DST was first enacted in the US during World Wars I and II, as an attempt to conserve fuel. The practice was unpopular and promptly repealed after each war; however, lobbyists from the petroleum industry lobbied to restore DST, as they had noticed it actually increased fuel consumption. Petroleum lobbyists joined with lobbyists from golf and candy corporations in the 1980s to form the National Daylight Saving Time Coalition, and they have twice since succeeded in extending the length of DST's observation from six months to seven in 1986, and again to eight months in 2005. The observation of DST has also been found to increase residential energy costs and pollution costs by several million dollars per year.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanent_time_observation_in_...
The delta is only which number shows on the clock each hour. Whether we choose to start school/work/whatever commitment at 7am, 8am, 9am, etc. shouldn't be coupled to ST or DST.
That is, if we want to start work when the sun rises (on average), there's nothing stopping us from doing that, particularly if it's proven to be more healthy.
That alone makes me question, a bit, the validity of these studies.
But again, maybe there's more context that I'm missing -- which is why I'm posting here, in case there's context that would explain this.
It's observational, empirical research. The results are valid whether you understand them or not.
You're not wrong, but (e.g.) this paper has several dozen references, stating at the end:
> In summary, the scientific literature strongly argues against the switching between DST and Standard Time and even more so against adopting DST permanently. The latter would exaggerate all the effects described above beyond the simple extension of DST from approximately 8 months/year to 12 months/year (depending on country) since body clocks are generally even later during winter than during the long photoperiods of summer (with DST) (Kantermann et al., 2007; Hadlow et al., 2014, 2018; Hashizaki et al., 2018). Perennial DST increases SJL prevalence even more, as described above.
* https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2019.0094...
If you want to fact check the folks who have this as their careers, you're welcome to pick up studying circadian rhythms as a hobby. But most of us ain't got time for that, so I'm willing to trust the experts and move on with my life.
We just spent two years having to put up with folks being arm chair epidemiologist with COVID, do we have to do it all over again with chronobiologists?
If COVID taught me anything, it's to question the experts. Only in the past half a year or so have the "experts" come around to what the layperson had been saying in 2020.
At any rate, I also strongly suspect it doesn't matter which one is picked but only as long as everything else is adjusted around it.
> If we want to improve human health, we should not fight against our body clock
You know what is really fighting against the body's clock? Suddenly shifting your normal wakeup time in any direction by an hour. No matter what your baseline sleep quality is, no matter if your body prefers getting up when it's light or dark, shifting that wakeup time by an hour with no prep will negatively affect your sleep quality.
The effort to abandon DST and move to ST (as positive as it may be) should be separated from the effort to abandon DST/ST switching. If this bill gets rejected in the House because people are so caught up in the DST/ST debate that they ignore the almost unanimous research conclusion that sudden sleep-schedule shifts are bad for most people -- that would just be a complete failure of policy.
This is like arguing over whether jogging or biking is better for your joints when the status quo is sitting on a couch. For most people, regardless of whether ST is better than DST for them, forcibly breaking their sleep schedule is the worst outcome.
If so, that's a solved problem these days. There's hundreds of ways to have lights that turn on in the morning. Having some kind of wakeup-light (simply two bright Philips Hue bulbs in the bedroom ceiling lamps these days) and taking vitamin D has solved the issues I've had with living far north, where it's dark most hours in the morning in mid-winter.
Only one of these papers (the researchgate one) actually asserts a hypothesis for the root cause of the correlation observed that might (but see below) make this true--later time of sunrise. The others all assert the hypothesis that being further out of sync with the rest of your time zone (which determines what one paper calls "social time") is the root cause. The way to fix that is not permanent winter time but narrower time zones--for example, a good chunk of what is now the Eastern time zone in the US is closer to the Central time zone meridian and should really be in that time zone. But that fix is orthogonal to the permanent summer time question.
Unfortunately for your argument, the one remaining paper (the researchgate one) is looking at variation with latitude, not variation with longitude. Latitude variation is going to be there regardless of what we do with daylight savings time. The fix for anyone bothered by the researchgate paper's findings is to move further south.
I wonder how much of the population in US (and worldwide) lives in Eastern/Western part of timezones and whether people's preference is correlated with what part of the timezone they live in. I'd also like to see research if moving an extra hour or two would continue to see gains (not sure how one would do that, perhaps recruiting people with different life schedules).
Eg. I prefer having DST on all the time, but I am at the almost Eastern end of the timezone, so perhaps my preference is affected by my experience too: eg. I already get 1h of earlier sunrise than Western-most parts of the TZ for the same wall clock time, but it's already dark outside at 4pm in winter months so way before work is done, which is what makes me unhappy.
If it turns out majority of the population would prefer DST only because majority of the population lives in Eastern parts of the timezones, that'd be pretty unfair to those living in Western parts of the timezones, which is why I wonder what's the population distribution across timezones.
They don't. They want it to come up in the morning. In many places there isn't enough sunlight in the middle of winter to have it up both in the morning and the afternoon, so they need to pick one.
From a safety point of view, probably sunlight in the morning in more useful because sunlight drives temperature. That means mornings tend to be colder than afternoons, and so are more likely to have hazards such as ice on the roads.
When you go with dark mornings, you are combining the worst road conditions with the worst visibility. When you choose light mornings over light afternoons, then morning is combining the best visibility with the worst road conditions and afternoon is combining the best road conditions with the worst visibility.
Another factor is that commutes tend to fall into a narrower time range in the mornings. The commutes back home after work tend to be more spread out. This tends to make the morning commute more dangerous, which further argues against placing the morning commute in darkness.
You're still passing the buck to commutes during dark evenings. Driving at night is always more dangerous:
https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/overview/crashes-b...
Well, yeah. That's the key to their whole argument: the buck HAS to be passed somewhere.
If we then have to add darkness to one of those, adding it to evening will probably be less damaging because evening has a larger safety margin due to better road conditions.
Adding darkness to morning is taking what is already the hardest case and making it even worse.
https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/overview/crashes-b...
Getting darker earlier at night, there are two advantages for schoolkids. One is that school tends to get out before the sun goes down even on the shortest days for most areas. So, many kids who'd have to wait in the dark in the morning don't have to deal with the dark at all in the afternoon. The other is that even when it's getting dark by the time the kid gets home, they don't have to wait next to the road for an indeterminate amount of time until the bus gets there.
The simple answer is that while lots of people "want" the sun in the evening, there is a sizable group of people that "need" the sun in the morning.
Keep kids away from traffic during darkness and let them have a little more darkness in the evening when they're inside and safe.
"These results should help establish the importance of circadian (morning or evening) time of light exposure in the treatment of winter depression. We recommend that bright-light exposure be scheduled immediately on awakening in the treatment of most patients with seasonal affective disorder."
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/...
It really doesn't matter whether we're on daylight time or standard time, schedules will adjust to whatever makes sense for that particular locale. Just stop changing the damn clocks back and forth.
What I can't get past is that we are literally changing the numbers on our clocks. That can't be a less invasive or easier to coordinate solution than a schedule shift for a business would be. If we can pass a law mandating daylight savings time, is that less invasive than passing a law saying that some businesses should shift their hours in the winter?
Even without a law -- businesses can voluntarily have summer hours and winter hours, because they already do, we just change the clocks to pretend that's not what we're doing. Businesses can already ignore or set their own hours voluntarily regardless of DST, and the majority have completely voluntarily decided that in the winter they'll shift their opening and closing times by an hour.
I just feel like -- couldn't they do literally the exact same thing they're doing right now, except without us all having to pretend that time itself has changed? Is it a mental thing, are we just relying on CEOs not understanding how DST works, so we have to trick them into having seasonal hours?
It seems like a solution where retail businesses were required to shift hours in the winter would still be preferable to what we have. Because what we have is kind of that already, except also it makes a lot of date math harder and affects non-retail workers too.
If the problem is that we need businesses to shift hours, we can do that through either regulation or social behavior or through other incentives -- we don't have to on top of that also change clocks, do we? Even just shifting public school hours and public transportation schedules alone would probably be a large incentive for many businesses to follow along.
that's how it works, though. We have a calendar with 365 days, turns out that's not quite how reality works. We could reallocate our calendar to fit reality, but it's easier to make reality fit our calendar.
Our measurement of time is fuzzy, you're right, and we have fuzzy systems to deal with it. But not all fuzzy logic and corrections are equally severe; adding an extra day every 4 years is a much smaller intervention than making a day last 23/25 hours twice a year, and that twice-a-year intervention comes with much larger effects than an extra day in February.
Our calendar/hour system for days/time is a map, and the map is not the territory. However, some maps are still more accurate than other maps.
It's also worth asking whether these interventions are making time easier or harder to reason about: 24 hours a day, 365 days a year is a nice set of numbers to work with, and it's a system that is standardized across most of the entire world if not the entire world at this point. The alternative would be very difficult to reason about or to do math with (if we were even capable of changing it at all), so we introduce some fuzzy corrections so that most of the time the math is easier, and that comes with almost no cost to society.
In contrast, DST/standard shifts make calendar math in the US harder, not easier, and they aren't standardized across the majority of the world, which makes it even harder to coordinate with people in other countries. And the intervention not only doesn't make the math easier, it also comes with large costs to society in the form of sleep-deprived people killing themselves and others every single March.
- We could pass regulations at at a federal level, state level, or even at a municipal level. Lower down would be my preference, federal changes to the clock are both too much of an intervention and also too clumsy of a brush, not every state needs this. But, whatever floats your boat.
- States/municipalities could regulate businesses directly, or they could regulate time shifts for public services, since a lot of businesses already set their hours based on those public services like schools/transportation/etc. Shifting local public school times in the winter/spring would probably cause a shift in local business hours for some segments of the market.
- Or, maybe you don't even need regulation at all, after all many private businesses today could choose not to respect DST/standard time in regards to worker hours. You could already have a business that says that when DST happens we're all going to come in 10-6 instead of 9-5. Most businesses either don't do that or they have flexible hours, which indicates that local pressures and worker preference might be enough to influence business hours even without government intervention. Businesses in this regard tend to make group decisions; I am doubtful that if office businesses all shifted their hours to accommodate worker availability with schools/transportation that retail shops would not shift their hours as well to accommodate shopper availability.
----
The trick here is to realize that federally mandated time shifts are effectively a regulation on business hours; they affect public services, they affect any local regulations that already exist around business hours. If you're opposed to federal regulations on business hours or incentives for seasonal business hours, you are opposed to DST/standard time, even if you don't realize it yet. If you're not opposed to federal regulations on business hours, then there's no real issue with regulating this stuff directly rather than indirectly.
We have a system right now where the federal government shifts clocks by an hour twice a year. That has a profound impact on business hours and on people's schedules. If you're OK with the government having that power, then we can get rid of DST/standard switching and just have the government exercise that power directly. If you're not OK with the government having that power, then you probably shouldn't be OK with it changing everyone's clocks twice a year.
Personally, I think that to the degree that we should be regulating something like this, it probably makes more sense on a local level than on a federal level. I also kind of think we probably shouldn't be shifting hours so much in the first place. However, regardless of whether or not we keep shifting hours, and regardless of whether it gets regulated federally, or locally, or not at all, we don't need to change clocks. If we're OK with the government shifting public services and hour regulations by an hour twice a year, then they can keep doing that. But we don't need to all collectively pretend that they're not doing that and that actually time changed.
This seems like a laughable reason given that traditional business hours are literally the exact same as traditional work hours, so by this argument all the supposed customers are at work anyway and thus not at your store.
Aren't they effectively exactly the same thing, especially if they're coordinated? And if they're not coordinated, isn't it a bigger mess in terms of knowing when things are supposed to change?
Yes. I don't personally advise that we do shift working hours, I think that breaking people's internal clocks and wakeup time is harmful. But, if for some reason people really want to do that, we don't need daylight/standard time changes to do it.
> Aren't they effectively exactly the same thing, especially if they're coordinated?
Yes, and that's actually a really good summation of my point. We aren't doing anything magical with time shifts, we are just coordinating business/school times. But we are doing it in a way that is a lot more complicated than it needs to be, and that is in some ways a lot less granular and useful than it could be.
Not every part of the US needs time shifts in order to make sure it's bright in the evenings/mornings. There could be some municipalities/states where having seasonal work times might make sense (again, I don't think that's the case, but I can see the argument for it). Other parts of the US might not need that at all. The time shifts are a really clumsy system for handling winter sunrise times given just how large the US is and how much daytime variety there is across the country.
> And if they're not coordinated, isn't it a bigger mess in terms of knowing when things are supposed to change?
Personally, I don't think we need that much coordination and I don't think the current system really requires that much coordination or that it's desirable for everything to be synced up that way. I don't think anything would fall apart if we all stuck with DST permanently but in one state there was a local regulation that made retail shops open an hour later in the winter, or where school hours were different in the winter than in a few Northern states. I think that would probably be fine? I already have to check local store hours if I get up early and I'm visiting an unfamiliar neighborhood.
To go a step further, I also kind of feel like even that would be a mistake for many businesses (at least non-retail ones), I think forcing people to suddenly get up an hour earlier probably does more damage than seasonal depression for most people, and I would rather buy the remaining people with really bad seasonal depression sun lamps.
However, my point is -- the system is just obfuscating what we're really doing, which is shifting business/school hours. Even if you disagree with me about everything in the previous two paragraphs, even if you think this does need to be perfectly coordinated, and we do need to keep shifting business hours -- even in that scenario, we don't need DST/standard shifts to do that.
The time shift is just an illusion, what's really happening is the government is saying everyone should get up an hour earlier/later. Well, if we're OK with the government saying that, and if (for some reason) we want the government to say that -- then the government can just say that, it doesn't have to also force everyone to pretend that clocks are different. I don't necessarily think we should shift business hours at all, I'm just saying that we don't need to pretend that we have altered the timestream if we do want to shift business hours.
A split between organizations changing their winter and summer hours and ones choosing an hour earlier or later permanently is not necessarily harmful because it ends up spreading the traffic across more time. Everyone moving in sync causes a very precise traffic jam.
"Hey boss, sickfigure over on HN says I can get up later so I'll be coming in at 10. k thx"
7:00 AM to 4:00 PM.
https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/2000/...
Except only for people at latitudes where it's worth doing. Those people are precisely where they started, and everyone else has a much simpler year-round standard time.
I mean, coats exist. We could make sure everyone has winter wear appropriate for the weather, and then it just won't be an issue. Kids here are out in it and are from a young age here (Norway).
Sure they can't all stand at the bus stop wearing some status symbol of a jacket but they do just fine.
Yes abductions are low, but in many many areas crime as a whole is high, and children are often involved or impacted, and likely more so when they are stuck standing around in the dark.
https://www.ojjdp.gov/ojstatbb/offenders/qa03301.asp
https://www.policechiefmagazine.org/after-school-the-prime-t...
Most places in the US are pretty safe, by the way, though folks will swear they aren't.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Start_school_later_movement
For example, in California, starting this Fall, high school can't start before 8:30 AM.
Is this because of the widespread school transport and the need to stagger the bus usage? In the UK it's quite rare to have school transport, with most kids at high school taking public transport, and at primary school either walking or being driven
I got the feeling from German textbooks at school that early starts were common in Europe too.
Even those of us who prefer DST in general don't like the change in general. (OK, I remember in college extending the party by one hour was pretty cool but the other end wasn't so great.)
The magic really goes away when you hit bar-going age and realize that even though the time-change lines up with last-call perfectly, they don't stay open an extra hour.
Tons of people already work 7-3 so they already deal with the downside in the morning. Not like night is gonna get any darker.