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Comment by thegrim000 | Hacker News Reader

This is a topic I really just don't understand. I've seen dozens and dozens of articles about it in the last couple of years. The only two possibilities I see are either

1) people actually care about this issue, an issue which I've never in my life given one picogram of thought about, it doesn't affect me in the slightest - twice a year we adjust the clocks by an hour, how does this actually bother a significant chunk of people enough to be upset over it?

or 2) the articles are some sort of long-running propaganda campaign pushing the idea for some reason, but I can't for the life of me figure out what they'd gain from it. Is there some sort of political/social power to be gained from getting rid of daylight saving time? Maybe just another "us vs them" divisive issue? I just can't understand it.

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If you work with people around the world it’s maddening for them that meetings shift around to times that no longer work for them. It’s actually a huge PITA and there’s no modern reason to do this. This especially impacts people in remote timezones where the 11pm meeting is now 12am, or worse, the 7am meeting is now 6am. People who work at global companies and are seated outside the US are massively inconvenienced by this absurdity.

I’m sure others here will cite the sleep disturbance it causes as well as depression and anxiety due to the sleep disruption. It’s like a tiny jet lag for no practical benefit.

The practical benefit is that, in the summer, you take an hour of sunlight that would normal be around 5-6am where almost no one is awake, and you append it to the evening where nearly everyone will happily appreciate it.

If that's what you appreciate, then feel free to adjust your schedule. Don't drag the rest of us into this. Messing with clocks and changing DST dates is absurd.

If schools, companies, etc want to shift their schedule, then that's on them too.

I'd hardly call a billion people getting to use an extra ~200-240 hours of sunlight a year absurd.

They can wake up earlier and go to bed earlier. Nothing prevents them from utilizing the sunlight due to a nominal time designation. But the time designation changes the structure of all activity unrelated to sunlight for no obvious reason other than “I don’t want to wake up an hour earlier to get that extra hour of sunlight.”

If that’s the case then why don’t we keep the DST permanent? Winter days are short no matter what. Either it’s dark when you leave home or when you wake up.

Being in the PNW I for one would rather the sun go down at 4 in the winter than 3. Losing an hour of sunlight at 10pm in the summer is ok for me. I have blackout shades specifically because the sun is up too late in the summer in the northern US.

I would say that the thing that's most annoying is that the US changed their DST dates to be 5 weeks different.

It didn't really alter anything materially for them, but I do have to be conscious for these couple of weeks twice a year that all my meeting are now offset by an hour.

I make a habit of getting some sort of world clock set up on any machine I use, so I don't have to think about it. Also try to keep anything international in UTC. Which isn't too hard, because my country is UTC+0 during the winter.

It’s a little silly to ask “why do people care so much about this?” I just think changing the time twice a year is worse than…simply not doing that.

But is it worse than shifting our daylight hours for the benefit of (almost) everyone? I don't think so.

There are numerous effects DST might have on people. Having to turn the clock is indeed the smallest of the concerns.

Parents of preschool or school children know the impact. Somehow for some of the kids the "biological clock" is stronger than for an adult. So twice a year you are fighting against that.

if you're trying to choose between the obvious scenario: people get annoyed at losing an hour of sleep randomly once a year. And the highly unlikely: a country-wide conspiracy to use DST as a wedge issue.

You may want to consider whether or not you believe in a flat earth and how that is affecting your other judgments.

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