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Comment by seanmcdirmid | Hacker News Reader

Permanent winter time would suck here, I like taking my kid to the playground after school, I can't do that in the winter because it is long dark by the time I pick him up. Who cares if the sun is up and bright at 6AM in the morning while I'm still sleeping.

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?

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China has one time zone for the whole country if I'm not mistaken. the country spans 5 geographic time zones:

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.

While true, it doesn't really disprove what the poster above is saying, since they lived in Beijing, the place that China's timezone is roughly centered on.

That's definitely true for Urumuqi where stores open later (11AM instead of 9:30 or 10AM in the rest of the country). But Beijing is pretty far east where the time zone is mainly meant for.

Try Kashgar. It's dark until 10 or later every day in the winter.

the variability of solar time depends a great deal on latitude, if I'm not mistaken.

perhaps lawmakers can try voting to change the tilt of the earth, lol.

Kashgar would be the worst possible situation in China, I've only ever been as far west as Urumuqi.

> Who cares if the sun is up and bright at 6AM in the morning while I'm still sleeping.

According to the research results, public health and economy would care.

Public health also cares about not switching up schedules.

They care even more about Year-round Standard Time:

> 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...

Because we are still farmers who need to wake up at 6AM in the morning?

Farmers don't care about the clock, neither do the cows. Work traditionally started when the sun came up, and cows got fed then too... since cows still can't read the clock, they still get up and want food at sunrise, DST or not.

Haha! I worked on a dairy farm in my youth. Cows also don't care about what days off your government says you should have. Kids have a recital in the afternoon? Better have someone there to milk the cows. Woke up with a tooth ache? better have someone there to milk the cows.

Cows also don't care about property lines :)

> Because we are still farmers who need to wake up at 6AM in the morning?

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.

Sounds like you work in an all indoor environment where the sun matters not to your livelihood, unlike farmers.

Do you think farmers will orient their working hours around a clock or the sun?

Not in the modern era, no:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30691457

> Sounds like you work in an all indoor environment where the sun matters not to your livelihood, unlike 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).

Almost all 'blue collar' work starts at 7:00 AM. It isn't about farmers. I was a farmer once, my day started at 4:30 AM.

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.

I worked a blue color job where I was at work at 5:30 AM, sometimes 4:30 AM. The fact that it was never light out when I went to work, even when standard time was in effect, didn't bother me much.

> According to the research results, public health and economy would care.

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.

That's what the research supports. People go out more and spend money more when the sun is up after the working day. Kids play more. People exercise more.

Ahh, I think I read the comment I was replying to backwards (which is par for the course when it comes to TZ/DST-type things with me, "is it an hour earlier? or later").

No, you read it correctly the first time around. E.g. from the first link in the dump above:

> 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.

> 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.

My kid doesn't go to sleep earlier just because the sun sets at 5PM. In fact, he has gotten used to spending most of his evenings in darkness, not being able to go to the park after school to let off some energy makes him go to bed later rather than earlier.

Then might I suggest you ask your local government to invest in better lighting at you local park so your kid can still play at it even when it stars getting dark. Or if natural lighting is a must, you can ask your school district to have shorter school hours during the 2 weeks around winter solstice. If that is impossible you can ask for more outdoors school activities during mid-winter.

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.

I don't think you understand where we live at all. Since nights get cold quickly here, even in the summer, people are not out at night playing as much as they are in more temperate climates.

> 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.

I don’t think that is what people doing research on the subject are observing.

It's an interesting situation. Research shows one thing, but a lot of people seem to have a gut feeling that says the opposite thing.

This is literally what permanent DST accomplishes.

I know, I mistakenly thought the comment I was referring to was saying that the research says that "Standard Time" is better for us than DST.

You two are in violent agreement. Permanent DST gives you an extra hour of sunlight in the afternoon.

grandparent is advocating permanent standard time/winter time, not permanent DST.

You're correct, my apologies.

> Who cares if the sun is up and bright at 6AM in the morning while I'm still sleeping.

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.

And people who work night shifts would be delighted if every locale instantly adopted a +12 hour time offset.

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?

Why can't you take your kid to the playground after dark? In December we get sunrise at 8 but it's not light until 9 or so. Sunset is at 15 but it's quite dark at 14 already. Kids are happily playing with their parents in the snow no matter how dark it is, you can't stay indoors just because you have 5-6 hours of daylight. You just get a flashlight for your head and can play or go skiing in the forest.

Mostly it is just that there are no other kids to play with: yes, we might do it, but if we are the only ones it isn't great for him. But the real big problem is that sunshine in a Seattle winter is a precious commodity: 7/10 even with daylight we wouldn't get to the park because of rain, or its just not pleasant out. The problem with standard time is that 7/10 turns into not going 10/10, it wastes the precious sunlight we do have.

For us that hour does no difference at all, it's still dark when going to school/work and it's dark again when coming home. We have 4 hours and 20 minutes of daylight on the worst days, Seattle seems to have about 8 hours so there the DST hour actually does a difference I guess.

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.

What makes you think the school wouldn't start an hour later after the switch to permanent DST?

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