Permanent daylight saving time? Where efforts to ‘lock the clocks’ stand
thehill.com
thehill.com
Meh. Just pick something, I guess. But this isn't an engineering problem and there's no correct solution.
It was an engineering problem, very literally an engineer problem. Standardized time zones were needed to keep trains, the big heavy things driven by engineers, from smacking into each other at speed. Coordinating all the train station clocks wasn't done for social reasons but for safety and efficiency. Imagine trying to run a modern air transport network if every airport changed its clock a few minutes every day. Total chaos.
Conversely, why should it? Clocks are artificial devices that serve human needs, there's no physical law that says you can't have the top of the clock be sunrise every day, or any other system you could imagine.
Wait a second...that's only because you are using noon as a reference.
The intervals from noons to consecutive noons decrease for half the year and increase for half the year, averaging 24 hours, with the swing being about a minute.
Similar for the intervals from sunrises to consecutive sunrises, except the swing can reach around 4 or 5 minutes.
Either of those is stable enough to use its average as a reference.
Your days will be longer than 24hrs from winter to summer solstice, and shorter from summer to winter.
You cannot have the same time system across an entire line if longitude.
Which sunrise do you pick? The equitorial one? 45 north? This may be more fraught than you were considering.
We could move from measuring time with a 24 hour clock to one based on solar angle.
We could also measure geographic distance in relative change of solar angle, combining our time and distance systems.
Some think it overly complex, but the increased geometry proficiency would save many lives.
I am far enough north that at some point as summer rolls around, I transition to sunset based structure, setting my morning alarm for 9 or 10 hours after sunset.
In practise, whether the sun is 15 degrees to the left or right at exactly noon doesn't have much practical effect on people in the way that it getting dark before they even can see the sky in the evenings does.
Anyway people should do this daylight saving forever experiment and contemplate these issues in the dead of winter. We can come back to this in a few decades.
All those standard start times are based on a world centered on solar noon. Maybe the semi ancients were onto something.
Eventually the noon reference became fixed upon, but it's only noon because it was easier to measure the shadow in that way. Other than a vague but unfounded sense of aesthetic need and the obsolete practically of synchronization with a sundial, solar noon isn't special.
Not to mention geography also plays a huge part in this. 4pm in the Netherlands vs 4pm in Egypt could look very different outside depending on the local weather. If you live in a part of the world with constant cloud cover, it will seem darker outside than in the desert, but you both share the same clock.
The upside to the way method we use now, is that it only happens twice a year and at most, you might miss something by 1 day. If that happened once a quarter, maybe we could get everyone on board, but again it's highly dependent on where you live. Some places can add 3-5 minutes of extra sunlight per day in the Spring! Over a week or two, that's a substantial amount of extra light/darkness.
While I agree that the current situation is not ideal, there are a lot of scenarios I can imagine being much worse for very little gain.
I'm not putting forward insane counterfactuals. I'm just saying that we can set things up so that noon is very approximately local noon, with no changes at random parts of the year, and we will be fine. As in, the state of things before we started trying to "save" daylight. Why daylight savings time should be the new normal is beyond me, and it doesn't seem that anyone can explain why except that it's some kind of funny political phenomenon.
Actually we can't, the coordination problem is so massive as to basically be impossible.
For various reasons, it's actually far, far, far easier to change clocks.
And to put your question back at you -- why should the sun be highest at noon? Because that's actually a very arbitrary thing (number 12 = highest) and it's not even perfectly true except for one special longitude in a time zone.
The purpose of time zones is really just so we can have a common vocabulary for when the daily rhythms of events happen. If anything, aligning 12:00 pm with lunchtime is probably the biggest cultural anchor. Not the sun.
12 is totally arbitrary. We could use a decimal clock. That's all historical. But because noon is when the sun is highest, most people can look at the light quality outside and know immediately what time of day it is.
Many cultures eat lunch at different times than noon. Some modern cultures even like to completely skip lunch.
And I agree. The coordination problem is impossibly large and annoying. So just skip it. Don't shift clocks around to try to coordinate. Give businesses and schools more ability to set and change their hours.
Why on earth and sun should we use this arbitrary artifact of a failed attempt to drive social coordination (daylight savings) as the new normal?
Most people really can't. Not only do most people simply not pay enough attention, but it varies dramatically by month the further you get from the equator. The light at 3 pm in August is totally different from 3 pm light in November.
> Give businesses and schools more ability to set and change their hours.
You're missing the fact that they effectively can't. Business hours are set around school hours, because employees have children. School hours are set around business hours, because of parents' jobs. Not to mention train schedules, airlines schedules, and everything. The only way we can change it is all at once, and the only way to ensure everyone follows is to change the clock itself. Not to mention changing every clock is so much easier than changing every single calendar event everywhere, because we already have systems for the former, but not for the latter.
Timekeeping is just a tool designed to benefit humans, it's not divine. We can use it as a tool to implement coordination changes that result in a net societal benefit around when we experience daylight. Why wouldn't we use it for that?
The fact that solar noon is then at 12:37 pm instead of 11:37 am for somebody somewhere is nearly irrelevant compared to that.
Most things work in lock-step with other things, so even though business already have limitless ability to set their own hours, they tend to set very, very similar hours because there's no point in being closed when people expect you to be open, and not much point in being open when people expect you to be closed.
"But because noon is when the sun is highest, most people can look at the light quality outside and know immediately what time of day it is."
Where, exactly, is noon when the sun is highest? Chicago, Illinois, and Regina, Saskatchewan, are in the same time zone. When the clock ticks noon, is that the apex for both of them? Or to avoid crossing international borders, is the sun at the highest for both Indianapolis, Indiana, and Bangor, Maine?
Bangor today had a sunrise at 05:55, and expects sunset at at 17:35. Indianapolis, on the other hand, had sunrise at 07:02, and expects sunset at 18:47. They are in the same time zone, and yet solar events are more than an hour different. Today, "solar noon" is 11:45 in Bangor, but 12:54 in Indianapolis. Adjusting Indianapolis back an hour to bring noon closer to solar noon would put it at 10:45 in Bangor!
"The sun is highest in the sky in the middle of the day" is approximately true, but can be off by more than the one-hour adjustment for Daylight Saving Time, so it is clearly not precisely true, whether we shift by an hour or not.
The continental USA is 2800 miles wide, and even splitting it into four time zones doesn't make things make good sense for every location. But hey, it could be worse: China is more than 3100 miles wide, and uses a single time zone!
* This isn't aimed at you, but I always check this when comparing two cities, because it's fun: Indianapolis gets between 9:21 and 14:59 hours of daylight, December to June, while Bangor gets from 8:48 to 15:35 hours of daylight.
But that is exactly what we're doing when we all agree to switch our clocks. Whoever ends up in the minority that really feels strongly one way or the other can still adjust their schedules if it's convenient for them.
Why don't sunset and sunrise count?
In the bay area daylight hours will vary, going as low as 10 hours in winter and as high as 14 hours in summer.
Standard time in December has 5pm occur after sunset.
Assume a standard 8 hour workday of 9 to 5. That's 8 of the 10 daylight hours dedicated to "work" with none left over for after work leisure time.
Numbers above are rough estimates, don't come at me with exact sunset time of some arbitrary day.
I propose that a very large percentage of workers do not do a type of work that is dependent on sunlight. The vast majority of people work indoors in a building with electric lights. Leisure time on the other hand is often spent outdoors. Or would be if we were to arrange our clocks so that there was more daylight after work.
Let's go wildly overboard with this thought experiment: Create a time zone overlay called "Fun in the Sun Time". FitST has 12 noon occur around the time when the sun rises. Everyone will have woken up while it's still dark out using some electric lights at home, then gone to work (where the lights are on 100% of the work hours regardless of what timezone, real or imagined). Lunch break takes place during sunlight hours, and after work there are still at least 5 hours to go hiking/biking/sun bathing/BBQing/whatever.
This is a bit extreme, obviously, but a somewhat less extreme version of this would be to have the bay area run on Eastern Standard Time (or equivalent) year round. This 3 hour shift would synchronize businesses here with the east coast.
Or we could do the easiest, least intrusive thing, shift to PDT now in March and never switch back.
And both sides of the debate have found science that backs up their opinion, and cherry picked public comments, so the deadlock continues. Even though the doing nothing is far worse than picking the wrong shed color.
And there are plenty of studies already; I highly recommend perusing them. I won't insult your intelligence by offering a lmgtfy link.
Which makes sense because how on earth could getting 1 hour less sleep on a random Saturday once a year lead to untold numbers of deaths?
It's absurd. Change your clocks and if it bothers you drink an extra glass of wine at dinner and nod off a little sooner. People that get emotional about daylight savings are an odd bunch to say the least.
See it in our healthcare system too.
I prefer standard time since in winter using DST would mean dark skies until 9 am. But most people here seem to enjoy how in summer the sun doesn't set until 10 pm. So, whoever touches this topic will end up getting burned by either side and no one dares to change it or suggest it (for now). So the terrible status quo continues.
[0] https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2022/10/28/when-will-the-...
Doesn't the EU (and various other countries) still switch back and forth between standard and daylight savings time?
In the meantime, all EU countries observe a summer time that starts and ends on the same day across the EU.
Something that does seem unusually American (although I’m sure not uniquely) is: We all agree this thing is bad, and something should be done. But the primary way to make big changes is to have one side push it and make concessions to the other side, to get it done. Nobody is willing to make concessions for something we all agree is good, so the good thing will never get done.
And also, we all agree it is bad, but our solutions are different, maybe even just in name, so we can’t let it be solved because that would give the other team a W.
Or Imperial measurement when everyone else is on metric
Or middle endian date when...
While true, and while I think most will agree that there are issues with US partisan politics, here's the thing...
Many people actually like DST. I personally do.
I don't think this is quite as clear cut as some things. It depends upon where you live (the farther north, it seems (to me) there is more support). It also depends upon whether you want light in morning or night.
So to restate, I think this issue is more "people just have opinions for legit reasons", rather than typical US partisan politics.
Here’s one example article that discusses this.
https://www.businessinsider.com/daylight-saving-time-is-dead...
Stopping this is more important than picking the right offset to stop it at.
People would still have to deal with the change either way.
Much better to change schedules as often and by as much as suitable in each case.
Where it matters, changing schedules can make an actual difference and it’s what people already do anyway.
It's also been "proven" that not time shifting is bad, too. SAD is worse without it, up North, and SAD results in an increase in suicides in the winter. And there are other "it helps" claims from pro-DST advocates, too.
As per the referenced study, it even states it is not actually validated. I'm all for the additional research, however, there is a problem here. What if this is only delaying or spiking heart attacks at these choke-holds?
EG, how do we know that without DST, said attacks wouldn't be 2 week delayed? A month?
And while I certainly think a month of life is worth living, does that actually offset the SAD improvements, and the (unproven, but hypothesized reduction in suicides)?
This bit of the study, I don't get:
Results There was no difference in the total weekly number of PCIs performed for AMI for either the fall or spring time changes in the time period analysed. After adjustment for trend and seasonal effects, the Monday following spring time changes was associated with a 24% increase in daily AMI counts (p=0.011), and the Tuesday following fall changes was conversely associated with a 21% reduction (p=0.044). No other weekdays in the weeks following DST changes demonstrated significant associations.
So there were no differences at all, until they applied a model? They applied 'trend and seasonal effects', and suddenly, it shows people dying and not dying?
I feel there should be more focus on what this model was.
Do you mean "it's proven that not changing the time twice a year is bad", or "it's proven that having winter on a particular time is bad"?
Studies (in both the US and Europe) have shown that DST improves road safety for both cars and pedestrians at dawn/dusk times.
Or, to put it another way, switching isn’t making this specific issue better.
There are lots of things that serve no unique functional purpose that we still love and that still increase death rates (e.g. marathons, hamburgers, skiing).
Having risk doesn't mean that we automatically shouldn't do something.
https://aasm.org/sleep-experts-want-to-stop-springing-forwar...
https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(19)...
And having risk also doesn't automatically mean that we should sit on our thumbs and go "there's nothing we can do, not enough people are dying from it yet!"
I also suspect that more people will die from the additional hour of morning dark in the winters. If you want to save lives, Permanent Standard Time would make more sense
And as for myself, I couldn’t care less which time offset is picked, I just want them to pick one and stop changing the offset twice a year.
Will there be long term problems from picking one over the other? Doubtful; there’s enough states/countries/etc which are stopped at various offsets to solar noon that we’d know if there was a significant advantage or disadvantage to being offset from solar noon.
That data seems speculative at best right now, telling me there advantages and disadvantages to each. Which reinforces my “just fucking pick one” opinion.
Maybe countries and states should choose based on how far north or south they are because that seems to be a key factor for how useful DST is?
But beyond that I don't fully understand all the complaints specifically about changing. It's an hour shift twice a year? Maybe I get slightly worse sleep for a day or two but then I am fine. It's no different than changing one time zone while traveling. People travel all the time cross country or over the Atlantic or Pacific and that's a much bigger shift in time yet they're all able to cope? I don't see articles regularly decrying the health disaster of jetlag, so what is it about changing the clocks that really gets people worked up?
The best answer is to do nothing at all. The current system that begin [sic] in 2007 of starting Daylight Saving Time in March and ending it in November, is the product of decades of study and compromise.
[0] https://www.wgbh.org/news/national-news/2022/03/19/the-u-s-t...
https://www.thensf.org/national-sleep-foundation-reiterates-...
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/03/11/1162345... (linked for reporting on AASM and AMA's positions which I don't want to go find independent links for)
17 seconds later, Mars declares itself UTC+1.
We'd still have to have time zones (except maybe it be more sensible to call them something else), and we'd still have to deal with the amount of daylight exhibiting significant seasonal variations at places that aren't close to the equator.
The fact that we live on an approximately spherical world whose rotation is not tidal locked to the star it orbits, that world rotates on an axis that is not perpendicular to its orbital plane around said star, we have a biology that uses local sunrise to synchronize its internal clocks to the planet's rotation, and we have spread to occupy regions of the world that are not near its equator imposes a lower limit on the complexity of our timekeeping.
On the other side, the time shift is quite bothersome to many and introduces a lot of efforts which translate into costs. So there are good arguments to abolish it.
What I cannot get are the requests for permanent "summer time". It is an illusion, long term. Because our day-rhythm is tied to the motion of the sun. Yes, we have to get up to be at work or in school at the set time, but that time does depend on the motion of the sun. Any short time advantage from "detuning" will be compensated. As you can see in all the places where the time deviates a lot from the astronomical time at that place.
While I agree that our bodies are tied to the rising and setting of the sun, we have a system in place that combats this. The need to get up for work, alarm clocks, the want of the people to have more time in the evening (i.e. get up & go to work).
This has the overall effect that our day is already shifted wrt solar noon.
In that case having an additional hour of sunlight in the evening in the dark summer months is more interesting than having it in the morning where most people are on auto-pilot anyway to get to their day-job.
Sounds like a good idea anyway: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Start_school_later_movement
It's not number on the clock. It's the switching.
People would still have to deal with the change either way.
In northern latitudes there aren’t enough daylight hours for a full working day to be between sunrise and sunset. That’s the immutable constraint - everything else is to deal with that.
Also, we see frequent posts here on HN about how schools ought to start later overall, for all students, so it seems reasonable to think that school could be made to start well after sunrise for everyone all year long.
Making school start Larter in general is a hard problem because there is only one real option and nobody likes it
https://www.washingtonian.com/2022/03/15/the-us-tried-perman...
https://www.npr.org/2022/03/19/1087280464/the-u-s-tried-perm...
It takes about a generation for people to forget about how bad the DST approach is. If it is to be locked into a time, standard time is better... but not as good for states further south where sunset is later.
Winter solstice:
Where Sunrise Sunset
Minneapolis 7:48 AM 4:34 PM
Houston 7:15 AM 5:27 PM
There is no additional hour of "after work, enjoy the still light evening".
The change to permanent daylight savings time has much more support in southern latitudes where the more light after 5pm and tourism has a larger impact on the local economies.
(another article about the "it didn't go as we planned") https://www.nytimes.com/1974/10/01/archives/senate-votes-ret...
That leaves the question of winter time - do the benefits of moving the daylight period for winter outweigh the disadvantages of clock switching twice a year?