UK sleep experts say it's time to kill daylight saving for good | Hacker News Reader

UK sleep experts say it's time to kill daylight saving for good

theregister.com

28 pointsDamonHD28 comments

This repeatedly comes up every year and yet politicians do absolutely nothing about it. The EU had a resolution it never enacted, and as a result I spend half the year off-kilter (waking up, having lunch and going to bed an hour off what feels “natural”).

Worse, some local governments (like Portugal) opposed the resolution on the grounds that it would impact tourism, which just goes to show you how much they value their people’s health…

As a child, time changes were my first "peak behind the curtain" where I began to clue in to the artificiality of clocks, and later many other social constructs.

To me, the absurdity of time changes is a reminder of how much of our life is governed by strange conventions and practices from a bygone era.

I would like it if we stopped doing time changes, but until then, at some level I still enjoy observing this strange tradition.

This was almost happening in the EU, with real momentum, but then came COVID and Russian invasion and it was buried under more pressing matters :/

They wanted to go with permanent DST though, which would have sucked.

The EU said it would be up to each country to decide how to set their clocks, and it got to the point where the council of ministers (ie, the governments of each country) had to make a decision when it all stalled.

At least it was a decision.

Sticking with GMT specifically throughout the year would have economic benefits as well by making it identical to UTC, which is in use well outside of the little European corner of the world.

In Europe daylight saving started, depending on country I suppose, during WWI and then again after the 1973 oil crisis. This was to save energy and it has been saving a lot of energy although apparently changes in technology and habits mean that savings are decreasing.

It's that time year so plenty of articles on the topic. For example, read one saying that official stats in France show that daylight saving saved 440GWh in 2009.

So certainly not absurd.

With the climate crisis, net zero, EVs, etc it seems like a bad time to abolish it if it indeed does save significant amounts of energy.

In Turkey, they killed the daylight savings and people are hating it because it means waking up in the dark in the winter.

However It's an active political topic, creates 1 hour difference with the European neighbors and the secular Turks believe that the government is doing it to separate them from Europe and bring them closer with the Arab neighbors(Which is somewhat plausible, the country's population and economic activities are concentrated in the western part), which might be influencing the opinions on the matter.

Did they go with summer time year round? Standard (winter) time makes it brighter in the morning at the same nominal hour. Summer (adjusted) time makes it darker.

One of the reasons I hate that the US extended summer time a couple decades ago. I’d kill to have year round standard time!

They went with the summer time

Gross.

This was the last year we had to change the clock... And was the last one for about 5 years.

Not joking: I'm surprised this isn't a campaign issue (in the USA). It would be an easy way to get attention, support, etc. And it wouldn't be a fluff issue. There are real tangible benefits to getting rid of daylight savings.

That said we're talking about an organization that can't balance its own budget; that there's a dedt ceiling crisis every few months. Why address something that's easy to fix and the people want?

If politicians had any desire or awareness to actually represent the needs of their constituents, the USA would look like a wildly different place. Instead we just have a single wedge issue every four years that's sufficient to drive enough people to the polls to keep politicians in power.

Unfortunately, it’s been picked up by figures like Senator Rubio.

They want to retain daylight saving all year.

As long as we pick one and don't switch im fine. It's the switching that's the problem for me.

I think our lame ass congress wants to get rid of it by eliminating standard time. Completely useless group of humans.

That still counts. It would technically be eliminating DST shifting, and then redefining the standard time zones as minus one hour. It would just be the new standard and no more switching.

We should eliminate (user-facing) standard time. Now that virtually everybody has time-telling computers instead of just mechanical clocks, we have a real opportunity to go back to True Solar Time. Noon can be set to precisely when the sun is highest in the sky at your precise location. This is enabled by smartphones knowing the astronomical date and your precise position on the geoid. Your noon and the noon of people a few miles away would be slightly different, but computers can automatically handle all the calculations required to coordinate with these time differences.

As a species, we didn't stop using solar time until sometime around the industrial revolution, when getting workers into factories at a precise predictable time became important to the people with money. (Some, such as people in monasteries, lived their lives according to clocks before this for superstitious reasons, but that wasn't the norm for the general population.)

We now have the technology to free ourselves from this clock tyranny and restore balance between our lives and daylight, if only we are willing to once again break from tradition.

but then you'd be back to the problem of coordinating times again. if you want to meet a buddy for lunch at noon but your two noons are different, now you need to communicate your offsets to each other constantly. every time check would require precise location data, that seems bad for privacy.

Daylight savings is awesome. It massively helps people wake up at a time more in sync with the sun.

Today (fairly near Greenwich) we are back on sensible time, with solar noon at clock noon near enough.

As it should be. If people want more light in certain time of day, let's do it by moving schedules. It is not actually that big of an deal.

You are describing daylight saving time.

I think it is nice to put an extra hour of sun in the evening. Most people don't get up at like 5am to get the first hour of sunlight.

As the day gets shorter you'd be better off putting it in the middle of the day to keep the morning lit up.

Honestly, I have never particularly enjoyed that it gets light here at 4AM in the summer, with the false damn beginning nearly ann hour earlier, even with DST: we certainly don’t need it getting light any earlier.

During the summer it has already been light for hours before I actually need to rise even with DST. To me this decades of scientific investigation seems to have come up with a conclusion that may well only make sense within a narrower range of latitudes rather than being some sort of universal truth.

Also, it’s in the winter that it’s dark when I rise and leave the house, which apparently is a problem I should worry about in summer according to this piece.

It reads pretty nonsensically to me.

Isn't this, in effect, what daylight saving time is? Moving all schedules 1h forward/backward 2x per year?

Except that sunset/sunrise shift by four hours in the UK, so the 1h messing around makes virtually no difference anyway, for the trouble that it causes,

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