Hacker News Reader

Comment by jlokier | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised at the number of commenters who think permanent DST is favourable to night owls and bad for morning people.

I think it's night owls and delayed-cycle teenagers attending school who will suffer most under permanent DST.

In the Winter, permanent DST means everyone has to get up an hour earlier for work or school's clock time, relative to the sun which regulates their body rhythm.

Someone pointed out virtually nobody sets when they wake by the sun. Fair enough. But the sun does affect how well and how long they sleep, how restored they are, how they feel when they wake, and energy and concentration through the rest of the day.

Night people already struggle with getting up early enough for clock-time social expectations. As it's a struggle already, getting up an hour earlier is going to be harder for them. (If the sun makes no difference, why is it already hard?)

Research (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30691158) suggests that overall, health will suffer, sleep will be shorter, and educational attainment in teenage years will reduce. Even brain development may be adversely affected.

But there will be more shopping (economic activity), so that's ok.

View on HN

These problems are best solved by addressing the issue itself - that teenagers need more sleep than our maniacal obsession with starting school early in the morning.

That’s a change that can, and should, be made independently.

So the problem with that is school also serves as a safe daycare for children/teenagers while parents work. Everyone wants to blame the puritanical "if you aren't present 8 hours, it's not real work/school" attitude, but it's not that.

It's economics. People can't work if they have to stay home with their kids.

Right, wrong, or indifferent, that's 99% of the reason for the standard school day/hours. To fix the school problem, we have to fix our out-of-date 8-5 mindset toward work, first.

Which brings us back to why we should adopt permanent standard time instead of DST!

Timezones are an illusion. All you're actually changing when you change the clocks are people's cultural expectations, namely around when it's appropriate to arrive at work and school. Ergo, we should adopt the standard that has people start work and school later, not even earlier than they already do!

This was really highlighted by COVID. Families having to suddenly deal with childcare threw a big wrench in corporate America.

It has nothing to do about the children. Its 100% because public school has become glorified daycare and kids need to go in early for their parents to work.

It's not that simple. Alot of highschool aged kids need to work to save for college or just to feed their families.

Starting school later sound good if you live a very privileged life, but makes life impossible if you need to leave a 3 to work.

Make the last class optional to attend. It’s not like people learn anything of worth in classes.

If a high school class was optional to attend, that class would not be attended. Your solution instantly becomes "cancel the last class of the day."

Say you're a parent working for Walmart or Amazon. You have to get to work at 8.30AM so the store can open at 9AM. Your kid starts school at 9AM. How are you going to get your kid to school?

Given the context was explicitly "teenagers", getting to school is generally something kids can be expected to handle on their own. Admittedly having to arrive to early sucks for the few that truly rely on their parents to get there, but at least it only sucks for a few. (My school did start first at 8.30 (I think) and then 9, this is completely normal in many countries)

Of course teenagers can get themselves to school. The problem is with younger kids. They will basically have to go to daycare before school, making their day even longer.

I love that in this scenario, school is literally daycare and we're completely limiting our entire children's growth around the imagined concerns of billion dollar mega corporations. Instead of forcing them to give leeway to the humans they employee, we just legit ruin kids carcadian rhythm

School being daycare or not has nothing to do with this issue. If your child needs to be somewhere at time T, you as a parent typically need to take them there at time T, so you can only arrive at work at some time T + delta.

Now, while companies often have absurd requirements of their employees' time, I specifically chose the Wal-Mart example to illustrate a non-absurd requirement: a site needs its store clerks present at opening time to be able to open at opening time.

> a site needs its store clerks present at opening time to be able to open at opening time.

Surely not every employee has to do school drop-off in the morning though?

> How are you going to get your kid to school?

They walk there, use a bus, etc.

So if we change the school times to be better adjusted to sleep schedules blah blah blah.

Why can't we also adjust work hours?

And if we can adjust those as well, why can't we just be on Standard Time?

The problem isn't the clock. It never was the clock.

Norway would be the counter argument to everything you've said.

Highly educated, longest living, least depressed.

And the sun is out at midnight 76 days per year there.

Humans are adaptable. A -permanent- hour change would surely be less harmful than changing said hours twice a year.

Only the far north of Norway has a long polar night, down south the days are short but not much different to many other places. In the north, the winter causes more sleep problems and some low mood/energy. (sources below)

But this is false equivalence as it's studying a different thing. Also it is very difficult to compare mental health studies across countries and attribute differences to single causes as there are so many confounding factors. In Norway there is a good standard of living, a social safety net, cheap healthcare and many other factors that are proven to be beneficial to mental health.

Humans are adaptable but sometime I think it's more accurate to say that humans tolerate different environments. We often don't adapt to them, we cope with them.

[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/psychological-medici... [2] https://bmcpsychiatry.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/147...

> A -permanent- hour change would surely be less harmful than changing said hours twice a year.

If you ask actual scientists who research this topic, you get a different answer:

"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"

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/07487304198541...

So, permanent standard time is better than switching, but switching is better than permanent summer time.

I don't think this article has made that case at all. They are correct that there are negative health effects for people being on the western edge of time zones because their social clocks are earlier than their biological clocks. But this is because people synchronize their social clocks with people in their time zones. But if an entire timezone shifts by an hour, they will naturally adjust their social clocks. As a thought experiment, imagine shifting the time zone by 12 hours, so midnight was called noon and noon was called midnight. People would simply shift their social clocks by 12 hours to adjust.

An actual example of this is Spain, which since WWII has been on the central European time zone, even though it is in Western Europe. According to this article, people in Spain should have more health problems and shorter lifespans, because their social clock is so much earlier than their body clocks. However as everyone who has ever been to Spain knows, the social clock in Spain does not have the same relationship to the wall clock as it does in other countries. In fact, relative to say the US, the social clock in Spain seems to be shifted a good two hours, for example with dinner at 9pm or 10pm. That seems like a very late hour for dinner, but relative to the sun that's more like 8pm.

Isn't it also common in Spain to take a nap in the early afternoon?

So maybe moving to different timezone would make more sense? Start using the zone that is closest to where majority of population reside. Or even use more than one zone?

That article mentions the downsides of switching from ST to DST, but doesn't mention the downsides of switching back. It's as biased as it gets.

If you already know what outcome you want it's easy to assemble evidence that supports that position, but it's not science, and this article is one of the best examples of that I've ever seen.

It's a position paper. It posits an expert option, based on the research that is listed in the references.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Position_paper

If the paper is not about deciding what the best option is, why did you link it?

The author of the paper has examined the body of research and come to an informed conclusion, which they are sharing alongside their reasoning. Should the author instead present a case they think is wrong?

> If the paper is not about deciding what the best option is

The paper is about the best option: "the advantages of permanent ST outweigh switching to DST annually or permanently".

I can think of a thing or 50 that Norway does different tk the US that might explain their higher levels of educational achievement and better mental health.

Of course.

My point was that daylight isn't guaranteed to send a country into disarray as OP seems to imply.

Norway is one of the richest countries in the world – because they have so much oil – and they share the wealth with the people through social security and (mostly) free education and health care. I think that has much more influence on those factors than light.

The meaning is that permanent standard time is preferable to permanent DST, because it's more important during winter: during summer you get plenty of sunlight no matter what you have on the clock. That is, if we optimize for health instead of shopping.

I disagree on summer time, summer time makes they day on which it's possible to do outdoor activities in the evening come about three weeks earlier than without it. And sunlight around 5am when virtually everyone is asleep is much more useless than having it late in the evening.

> Highly educated, longest living, least depressed.

That's just an argument for a good social security system and says nothing about DST

A couple things:

1. Comparing the US (or any other country) to Norway is not valid because there are so many confounding variables. For one, Norway sinks in oil money and uses that money extensively to fund great social welfare programs.

2. What matters is relative within a country, not between country. The US had the choice between two time zones, and that's the question at stake here (not how the US compares to other countries, or how other countries deal with short day light periods).

Norway has explicitly barred any oil income to leak into the economy. All oil income is directed to the special fund that is not tapped (yet).

(I'm a citizen of Norway)

False, it was tapped in 2016. I also think it was tapped in 2020 but am unable to confirm, they atleast plan to withdraw again in 2022.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-norway-swf/norway-says-ma...

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/norway-raises-2022-spen...

False, 3% of the fund is tapped each year.

As a seattlite, darkness in the winter definitely effects me. This is why I’d rather have the extra hours of daylight when I’m awake, since it increases the chance of hitting a few hours of light without rain/overcast skies.

Wake up an hour early? You don't need to move the clock to be able to adjust when you wake up or go to sleep.

If I lived in a society where I got to set my own times, that would work perfectly. Get my kid up at six, force daycare to open and close an hour earlier, and have my meeting schedule displaced an hour earlier (hey, works well for those VCs to Stockholm, but those people are always in the dark in the winter).

Individuals have limited control over their own schedule, because of work hours, school hours etc.

They said wake up an hour early, not late, which has absolutely no impact on externally-imposed schedules. You have an extra hour to do X, whether that be exercise, getting baked out of your mind, scrolling instagram, etc.

You can't tell me that a society that burns, on average, five and a half hours daily on useless, mindless activities like television, sportsball, and social media is going to be even mildly perturbed by this. There's plenty of slack in the average person's schedule to move things around.

> least depressed

Compared to what? Anytime I speak to any Norwegian/Swede, they tell me how depression during winter is so widespread basically everybody suffers in one way or another. People in Norway, Sweden, Finland etc go into household lightning overdrive to help this a bit, but real sun is real sun.

Single most important reason why I never moved there, even above short summer.

> least depressed.

Source please?

On the contrary, Norway, as most Scandinavians, are above the EU average on chronic depression.

But Portugal, a sun-rich country which sits East of its timezone, gets the top spot. So, go figure.

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/e...

Yes and the sun never rises completely for a similar length of time. Perhaps it's the darkness that's the key to utopia?

After 35 I've more and more noticed how the long darkness affects my mental health. I'm not in northern Norway, so the sun rises all year, but during winter it comes up after I go to work and sets before I go home. So it's basically dark all the time. Supplementing vitamin D seems to help somewhat at least.

I strongly doubt this.

If this was true, seasonal affective disorder would occur in the summer and not the winter, don't you think?

And our ancient ancestors didn't evolve where it is dark. Nor did we evolve where the length of day changes much at all.

The fact that short days and darkness cause so many people problems in the winter tells me that amount of sunlight really matters to us.

And generally speaking, more is better, to an extent.

> The fact that short days and darkness cause so many people problems in the winter tells me that amount of sunlight really matters to us.

For the greatest part of our history we've spent our time outside, not sitting in artificial caves with artificial lights, hiding from the sun. If you want something that tells you why the sun is so important, take this instead.

If that doesn't work for you, remember that having enough exposure to the sun is vital for your body to function properly, both mentally and physically. We'd not be producing "Vitamin D" by being exposed for some time, if the sun wasn't an important factor in our existence.

This. The idea that fucking up everyone's rhythm twice per year isn't as bad as not doing it, is ridiculous.

Also some of the highest rates of suicide...

If lockdown WFH has taught me anything, it's that the times that we've set for doing activities day-to-day is totally arbitrary. I work with people across all timezones now, and it's clear that the way that I set the clock is just a pacing metric for the way that my job and the businesses around me give me the freedom to do what I need to do.

If what you're saying is true, schools should start at 10a. We need to have those conversations.

I'm on one coast, my coworkers are on another, we gotta figure out how to sync our meetings. Same goes with when the supermarkets are open.

Most of us are not farming anymore. It's just about having a consistent meter stick to which to adjust our standards.

Sorry, the "farming" myth is one of my ocd triggers. DST is for golf courses and has never had anything to do with farming. Businesses want more daylight hours after office people get out of work to get those people to spend more money. This is the original trigger that caused the golf lobby to push congress to enact daylight savings.

The problem is the "consistent yardstick" actually. People are accustomed to start work at "8am", and react badly to being told to start work at "7am". So we change the clock so that their yardstick "8am" occurs at solar 7am and people get out of work earlier. And people now are like "lets keep summer time" which is the exact equivalent of "lets always go to work at solar 7am".

> People are accustomed to start work at "8am", and react badly to being told to start work at "7am".

Retail workers and shift workers of all kinds constitute an existence disproof.

"Next week you start at 5:30am, open at 6, finish at noon -- on Tuesday through Thursday, then you come in for 6pm to midnight on Friday. Welcome to Starbucks."

Indeed its hard to generalize across all people. But I doubt many of those you list react favorably to the early times. Either way, they are likely not the ones wishing for permanent DST, because for some of them (like the ones waking up at clock 4:30am) it means they will go to sleep when the sun is still up (at solar 7pm) instead of after sunset.

When I did shift work I loved earlier start times because it meant I had more free time during other stores' business hours to run errands/do chores/etc. Also in my store, earlier times of day were less busy with customers so I could catch up on work. Of course I can't speak for everyone, and not every store is the same (I think early AM is a coffee shop's busy time)

Assuming some location in murrica, you should actually be getting into work at some clock time between 23:00 and 04:00. There is only one time, and it's UTC.

> DST is for golf courses

Source? I have seen dozens of explanations for DST. None of them well supported by evidence.

Wikipedia has a very thorough write-up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time with 171 sources. What degree of certainty are you looking for? It mentions many examples of business (with emphasis on golf and golfers) who pushed to restore DST for the modern era even after the original energy-saving reasons had become obsolete.

Not to go off topic, but everyone seems to just ignore everyone not working 9-5.

I mean if you work night-shift, morning shift, evening shift, you already have weird circadian rhythms, and out-of-sync school schedules.

And yet, somehow, they seem to function as humans. So maybe that 1 hour difference for 4 months a year won't actually result in the zombie apocalypse.

People will adapt just fine.

It is kind of weird to me that people are coming out of the woodwork arguing about stability and all sorts of stuff as if a single time setting is somehow worse than changing it twice a year.

Winter in the northeastern U.S. is damn depressing because the sun sets at basically 3:30-4:30pm. If you sleep in on a weekend, you get max 4-5 hours of sunlight (feels like less because the sun is so low and thus long twilights). Kids coming home from school have zero after school time with sunlight.

This is what I particularly dislike about the English winter, and part of why I'm determined to never set foot in an office as part of my daily work again. There's something completely soul-destroying about your work plus commute eating all the daylight hours and more for a big chunk of the year.

Agreed. On daylight time or off - just stop changing the clocks twice a year please.

There is so, so much research showing that night-shift and living out of sync with one's circadian rhythm literally shortens your life. It weakens your immune system, increases your chance of cardiovascular issues, gives you gastrointestinal issues, etc.

> And yet, somehow, they seem to function as humans

I know various people who work in shifts. It's really bad for your rhythm. It takes months before people find a way to deal with the effects. It's worth it due to the additional money they earn, that's it.

Oh jeez! Have you ever spoken to anyone whose shifts change every week?

Clearly not. I shared a house with a guy that worked rotating shifts. It was hell, and made me really glad I did not do that.

But I worked blue collar job the first ten years of working, so 7 to 5, and for a while 5AM to 6PM (six days a week). I don't think many people on this thread understand what it means to wake up between 5:30 and 6:00 AM every day (depending on your commute) to get to work.

> but everyone seems to just ignore everyone not working 9-5

They also seem to ignore Arizona. 7.5 million people all happily living their lives without dropping like flies from seasonal-affective disorder.

It’s a statistic. There is a certain (tiny) percentage of people affected. So that’s what is hyped up by the media, and then people think that is almost everybody.

Then the question remains: why not Standard Time?

This isn’t a DST issue. Start school later.

I agree. Changing times on everyone was always silly. If a group of people want to change the time they go to school or work, they should just do that.

I don't like it when the sun comes up early. Unless you have really dark curtains, then you don't get to choose when to wake up. You wake up when the sun comes up. So if you stayed up late, fuck you, here's some bright sun at 6am.

Oh, and you're coming home for the day at 5 or 6p? Fuck you, here's some darkness. I can't understand how anyone would be against DST.

When it is dark at 5pm is utterly depressing in the winter. This change is huge and I really never thought I would see it in my lifetime and am overjoyed.

I'm against DST because I think if people are going to wake up at solar 6am and go to work at solar 7am they ought to call it 6am and 7am instead of calling it 7am and 8am.

"Work is defined to start at 8am so lets have everyone call solar 7am '8am' so we can get everyone to go to work an hour earlier."

Now "high noon" will occur at 1pm and the middle of the night will be 1am. In Ohio (or west edge of any time zone) the middle of the day will be 2pm and middle of the night 2am. Sunburn zone in ohio? 12pm-4pm.

You can also buy a nice eyecover for 2 dollars.

School should be made later.

I suffered even with switching because no matter what part of the year we were in school was scheduled to wake me up in the dark.

Changing the clocks is basically a form of hibernation. It makes it OK for people to wake up later in winter by forcing everyone to do the same thing.

I guess any form of coordination is going to be more convenient for some parties than for others. The question is whether we really need to coordinate our entire days to such an extent. Many companies already practise a "core hours" schedule which allows individuals to be flexible about when they start work. This seems like the right approach.

I'm not looking forward to having to make normie appointments on Summer time during the winter, though. Making my way to the doctors at 5am in winter isn't going to be fun.

But the sun does affect how well and how long they sleep

Yes, the sun coming up an hour later means less light peeking into the room and more sleep cycle time. Big collective win for night owls.

As it's a struggle already, getting up an hour earlier is going to be harder for them

Times are changing, literally. Nice thing about all this remote work is you can be a night owl on the East Coast while everyone else is a morning lark on the West Coast. For me waking up is never an issue, I just get moving. But the night owl schedule is where everything naturally settles.

I really don't get what you're saying. Move the clock 4 hours forward and you favor some people; Move it backwards and you favor others. You literally cannot make everyone live in their "perfect sleep cycle." If you feel sleepy "at 2am" this changes nothing for you.

In Norway in December people wake up "in the middle of the night" because sunrise is at 10am: Humans can adjust easily to this stuff, it's just that we like to sleep "late" (as defined by the clock)

I didn't argue for any particular movement or direction, and I agree that any change favours some and is worse for others.

I argued that commenters who say permanent DST specifically favours night owls are incorrect about who it favours, because they (most of them) haven't considered the effect of the sun on sleep quality and daytime cycles.

My view is that most solar-affected night owls will have slightly worse sleep and daytime energy and metabolism, because clock-time social requirements will not change (that's the point of changing the clocks after all). Sunshine after will work will make people happier after work, which is reflected in economic activity, but I think the insiduous effects on health are being ignored. There is some scientific research to back up this point of view.

There are early risers here who don't like permanent DST saying "we're not all night owls like you", believing the change is designed to favour night owls.

There are night owls here who say permanent DST will be great for them because there will be less sun in the mornings to ruin their sleep. That implies they have a choice about when to wake, or they are thinking of Summer. They are in the minority even for night owls, because the change applies only to Winter, when most people are already forced by social requirements to get up when it's dark. There is no light streaming in that early in Winter. Permanent DST will only mean that it's dark for longer after they get up.

I mean, as a true night owl, my real problem isn't happening when I wake up: it is that when I go to bed in the morning it is extremely bad for me if dawn has already happened, so I would prefer the sun stay down for as long as possible to give me more leeway.

Don't you have shades/curtains to make your room dark even when the sun is out?

Breaking out the "THINK OF THE CHILDREN" for daylight savings time?

I think this is a very dramatic hypothesis you've presented here. If an individual or family is inconvenienced by this, adapt!

Places that already do not change for DST are doing just fine. e.g. Arizona

Finally, someone that gets it.

It’s like taking something that was set up to do A, and saying that we shouldn’t deprecate it because it’s going to do B

What if you sleep with blindfolds on already? I’ve been messing with my body this whole time?

Yes, unless you have some programmed lights to help you wake up. Sleep normally ends as the sun starts shining. If you don't get that "signal", your body will have a harder time waking up, and be more confused about the right rhythm.

I have lived my whole adult life with black out shades and curtains. I grew up very rural and was used to a pitch black bedroom. As an adult I moved to the most densely populated state in the country, and immediately discovered black out shades.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com