The future of daylight saving time is far from settled | Hacker News Reader

The future of daylight saving time is far from settled

nbcnews.com

14 pointsdanso11 comments

People probably “just want more daylight” which involves changing the earth’s tilt. We’ll ignore that option for now and look at Seattle. On Jan 1, google says Seattle gets 8.5 hours of daylight. If we want kids to go to school in light, say 7:00am, that means sunset occurs about 3:00pm which is probably before they go home. Conversely, if we want them coming home in twilight, they’re out there in the dark awaiting dawn at 7am. I’m not sure there’s a good answer which time to standardize on.

Is changing that bad? I’ve travelled to Europe and Japan from North America as well as bouncing around n America. These involve shifts (far) larger than one hour and it takes a few days to adapt. Given that most people get up later on the weekend than during the week, they’re doing the 1+/- hour shift every week…

Is this a mountain out of a molehill?

There's been research that studied the negative first order and second order effects of the twice yearly time change. I'm not an expert but if you search for something like "negative impact of daylight savings" you get various findings such as [1].

[1] https://evidencebasedliving.human.cornell.edu/2022/04/13/the...

The person you’re replying to indicates the choice is a tradeoff. The negative effects of daylight savings are just one part of that tradeoff. Kids going to school in daylight is another part. Most parents I know wants their kids to go to school in daylight in the morning, if only to help wake them up.

> they’re doing the 1+/- hour shift every week…

And this is why so many are knackered on Monday after two days off.

Rest (read: sleep) is important. The rule of thumb is to keep your bed time and wake time as consistent as possible. Deviation are counter to our evolution.

There is an obvious solution which never gets discussed: re-draw the boundaries between the time zones a half hour or so, and stay on "standard time" all year. Move them further east, and sunrise and sunset are earlier by the clock for people who have been changed from one time zone to another; move them further west, the opposite. Follow state lines if you must, but probably better not to.

This sounds like a technical nightmare

I'm planning to put my meetup on "permanent standard time" once we switch; so when the clocks "spring forward" in spring, I'll move the nominal meetup time forward an hour, so we continue to meet at the same time.

Standard time forever!

It cannot be eliminated soon enough.

Leap seconds, likewise. A pox on all petty time tyrants!

When I was a kid we had 2 clocks and they had to be changed manually. Now we have clocks everywhere and some change by themselves and some dont.

I think the whole world should be on one timezone all the time. The numbers are artificial anyway we may as well all use the same ones at the same time.

And why not change those numbers alltogether. I think we should use "degrees". 1 degree = 4 minutes.

> I think the whole world should be on one timezone all the time. The numbers are artificial anyway we may as well all use the same ones at the same time.

Disagree – there is a certain value to knowing that 12 am universally means midnight and 12 pm roughly is solar noon, and so on.

Abolishing timezones loses that property, while still not absolving you from the need to convert the meaning of time between people living at differing geographical longitudes. (Basically what is said here: https://qntm.org/abolish)

Plus for day-to-day life (and I posit that for the large majority of people, most of their interactions will still happen within the same timezones), the current arrangement also has the useful property that the calendar day changes at a time when most people are asleep or otherwise don't really care about the exact day. Having the calendar day change during the middle of the solar day (which with a single timezone would happen for everybody not living near wherever the meridian ends up) would be rather confusing, e.g. when are holidays (and weekends!) supposed to start and end, how do you write down dates, etc. etc.

You could write negative hours. E.g. if 0 is at the current 10am, a workday will start at -2.

There'd be two ways to name the same hour, but it wouldn't be confusing.

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