Daylight saving time and early school start times cost billions | Hacker News Reader

Daylight saving time and early school start times cost billions

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30 pointspseudolus11 comments

I lived in a state that doesn’t do the daylight saving time change and it was wonderful. No messed up sleep and no changing clocks. Really the only problem is that I would forget that my family and friends in other states were now suddenly off by an hour from what I was expecting.

Is 1 hour of delay on the sleep pattern really that problematic for some people? I can barely notice the time shift during DST day, specially when most clocks around us are synchronized automatically. Or maybe it’s because my most comfortable sleep time is between 6-7 hours?

> Our internal clocks are most stable when morning light exposure occurs early in the day,

This argues for continually adjusting our clocks throughout the year, so that sunrise happens at a stable time of day, doesn’t it?

I would imagine the subtle daily increase or decrease in daylight, even in extreme latitudes, is more natural and healthier than an immediate one hour shift in either direction.

Hmm, instead of an hour shift, a 30-day shift of 2 minutes per day would be an interesting experiment. Hey why do I see so many raised pitchforks all of a sudden?

Getting anything figured out would be a mess, obviously, if everything were synced up (from the clock on your grandma's kitchen wall up to the clock on say Air Force One) it'd be easier (hmm, I see even more pitchforks). Someone's daily meeting with overseas colleagues would be e.g. 9:56 today and 9:42 in a week's time.

Another alternative would be 4x15 minutes jumps, every Sunday in a month.

Apparently you're not alone: https://gregcochard.com/daylight-savings-time-smearing/

Couldn't you hypothetically just do this for your own purposes? Write an app that moves your alarm time by two minutes a day and tells you when to go to bed?

You would have to choose a wakeup time that was conducive to your work schedule, even when you're getting up an hour "late" (right before the time change), but maybe it would still be worth it?

If we simply adjust the clock back half an hour every month we can eliminate leap years.

There are a couple of issues that get confused in this discussion that end up reinforcing the status quo.

1 - The only problem with DST is the change in timing. There is a spike in all sorts of issues including accidents, heart attacks, etc in these days. The change itself is a problem.

2 - We have constantly underestimated the need for sleep and its association with the circadian rhythm and as a result, we face a lot of problems. DST/Standard time changes were an effort to solve the problem for 1 group of people, Midwestern farmers, and imposed it on everyone else.

What we really need is to eliminate the DST/Standard Time confusion and then individual systems need to set their own times for doing things.

Those times will depend on the kind of work, the people jnvolved, and then depending on the time and the needs it may even have to change through the year.

But the onus should lie on my company and me, or my kid’s school and him to track what time they should be meeting through the year.

> DST/Standard time changes were an effort to solve the problem for 1 group of people, Midwestern farmers, and imposed it on everyone else.

This is not true, DST has a long history and was first implemented in the US during WWI to conserve energy.

Suppose that, since next March 20th, the government adopts a standard time and school schedule that are perfectly synchronized with the local astronomical time, i.e. kids wake up at dawn, go to bed when it's dark, etc. On March 21st the sun will rise a little earlier and set a little later, so the once-perfect synchronization will be a bit off, and more the following day, an so on until the summer solstice. Then the trend will be inverted and the skew between the two times will slowly decrease until reaching zero on September 22nd. But the very next day the synchronization will go off again, this time in the opposite sense, until March 2026, and so on forever.

Just like a broken clock that shows the right time twice per day, the ideal ruling suggested in the article will result in two perfect days every year.

At least the current scheme theoretically allows for 4 perfecy days per year! Note that I'm not saying that it is what really happens, though. It depends on school schedule and the dates of the switch. About the latter, I do think that the switch should happen as close as possible to the equinox, so towards the end of March, like in Europe.

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