I would have preferred permanent standard time to permanent daylight time. But I accept I'm in the minority, and even permanent daylight time is far superior to changing clocks twice a year.
But also, all the opinion polling (business and individual) was like over 90% in favour of year-round daylight time, so here we are.
How is transitioning permanently to one easier than transitioning permanently to the other?
How to transition to permanent DST: wait until we are in DST and then stop switching.
How to transition to permanent Standard time: wait until we are in standard time and then stop switching.
It's a 4 month-hour difference over the year, instead of an 8 month-hour difference.
Personally, I'd prefer standard time, but having all days be 86400 seconds is a pretty great improvement over status quo. I find what most people really would like to change is the amount of time with sunlight in the winter, especially the more north they live... but changing the clock doesn't change the number of hours of sunlight; Vancouver, BC just doesn't have much sunlight in the winter.
The reason is that with standard time, solar noon coincides with local noon, so the day is approximately symmetric about noon, not regarding atmospheric refraction lengthening the day. It wasn't done on a whim.
The last time we went to year-round DST, we stopped almost immediately because people experienced what winter DST was actually like and went "wait, this sucks."
I always find it strange how particular people are about the numbers attached a purely astronomical phenomena(myself included, but I am pretty hard in the "let the sun figure it out camp"). If they want more "daylight" hours then get up at a time to enjoy them. But people would rather bend over backwards fiddling with the numbers as if that is going to change how long a day is.
Does it become Friday at dawn, at sunset, at noon, or at midnight?
This is all convention and not something that can be decided objectively.
I do not care if the sun is up as I shuffle groggily into the building. I don't think I'm alone.
I think fundamentally it comes down to energy for me. I have very little energy in the morning so I am not going to harness the pre-work daylight hours to do something outside like taking my dog to the park, biking, or running. For me I don’t actually start feeling energized until maybe 9-10AM.
After work however, I have much more energy to do things outside with the daylight.
After college I moved from the far western edge of one timezone to the far eastern edge of another zone. I grew up with 5-5:30pm sunsets in winter, and now I live with 4-4:30pm sunsets. I moved here 25 years ago, and every single year when November/December come around and I get those early sunsets I hate it. It's one of the reasons I'd like to move away from here.
I know it's just one person's opinion, but to me those extremely early sunsets in the middle of winter are a huge quality of life reduction.
I believe part of the problem is that if you're in the middle or western edge of your zone, the winter sunsets aren't so bad. I suspect a lot of people who would prefer DST year round live on the eastern edge.
On the other hand, I used to live in Boston (eastern edge of US Eastern time) and those 4:15 sunsets were pretty depressing. Permanent DST sounds reasonable there.
And yes, we could have all the schools and everything else open later in the winter than the rest of the year, but it turns out it's easier to change the clocks.
Why? because they decided to be on the same timezone as our eastern neighbors in Europe. The eastern part of Polonia is on the same timezone and probably have probably the opposite with much much earlier lunch and dinner than we do.
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https://vividmaps.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/time-zones-...
The old borders aligned with the sun a lot more, so we can blame that on WW2 as well.
Farmers have to wake up early because their animals wake up at sunrise and some tasks are best performed at that time. So they wake up before sunrise regardless of the clock time.
Human, like farm animals, are better off if they wake up at sunrise and go to sleep in full dark. At the equator that's easy, wake at 6, bed at 10PM. And standard work hours are 7-3 or 8-4.
I think this would make way more sense, when they say the Olympic Opening Ceremony start at 18:00, its 18:00 for everyone around the world. No one as to work out which TZ Italy is in or scheduling meetings with Tech Support in far flung locales does not require knowing IST is how far ahead or behind.
> He promoted worldwide standard time zones, a prime meridian, and use of the 24-hour clock as key elements to communicating the accurate time, all of which influenced the creation of Coordinated Universal Time.
The one bit where this would be problematic would be "what day is it?" When does today become tomorrow?
There are a lot of systems that we've built that depend on that distinction. Things like business days and running end of day so that everything that happens on March 2nd is logged as March 2nd. I've encountered fun with Black Friday sales where the store is open over the midnight boundary and the backend system really wants today to be today rather than yesterday (sometimes this has involved unplugging a register from the network so that it doesn't run end of day, running EOD on the store systems, and then plugging the register back in after it completes and then running a reconciliation.).
Other than that particular mess of banks and businesses... yea, running everything on UTC would be something nice in today's world.
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This is also kind of what happens in China (with a complicated history). https://github.com/eggert/tz/blob/main/asia#L272
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_China UTC+08:00 is observed throughout the country even though it spans about 60° of longitude.
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Aside on the "changing clocks" and realizing my flexible schedule privilege at a company I worked at I switched my schedule from 8-4 to 9-5 with the change in daylight savings so that I maintained a consistent "this is the hour I wake up".
When people propose switching to UTC what they are actually proposing is that everyone nominally switches to UTC but still uses local time informally in everyday life, which is a worse system than time zones. At least with time zones there is a way to know what time it is in any given place. With informal time you lose that.
Eastern parts of China gets up at 05:00 AM and westtern part gets up at 10:00 AM.
People get used to it.
Yes.
> and that we should all just use UTC and ...
No. that does not follow. Abstraction is useful. Having commonly understood terms (in this case hours of the day) that share certain traits regardless of where you happen to be in the world facilitates communication.
And we rethought it yet again, should we go on the time standard (DST) that we're already on for ~65% of the year, or the one we're on for ~35% the year.
It should be pretty obvious why DST is the new winner, it's the current standard.
Alas, I don't see my preferred method of changing the clock by 10 minutes every month taking hold. Basically ever. :D
I also don't think this is nearly as important for places that are not further away from the equator. If you are on the equator, you are almost certainly fine with no change throughout the year.
I accept that it was too many changes back when we didn't have smart phones/clocks controlling the vast majority of time pieces. Even most cars, nowadays, set themselves off of a GPS signal.
Nowadays, though? A surprising number of people flat out don't notice that the time even changed until people tell them about it.
As the other response said, though; if you look at when people were on solar time, the length of an hour just flat out wasn't constant. Such that most animals are already used to wake times changing throughout the year. It was specifically our move to a mechanical method that was constant that is causing this.
To that end, shifting to a change every month would, in many ways, be a step back towards how sundials worked with constant changes. As you say, we could go even more continuous someday. That feels like it would have slightly more complications. But by the time everything is controlled by a central computer like thing, most of them would be completely obviated.
Now, standard business hours (9-5 or whatever) were probably chosen for working well in the circumstances where they became standard, and it might be interesting to watch for whether tweaking the clocks leads to tweaking the nominal time of things...
Absolutely not. It was a compromise tempered by practical and political considerations.
If you want to go with what was settled long ago, that would probably be a return to each town observing its own time based on local solar noon, which would be pretty annoying.
I want to be able to say I sleep from 0 to 3 hours or 30 percent of the day.
Standardized time zones are a recent invention (late 1800s through early 1900s). Working hours in that period were determined by what factory owners could get away with, and later shortened by pressure from labor movements.
Some time-related practices, like high school in most of the USA starting especially early in the morning are at odds with what research suggests would work best (teenagers on average perform best later in the day than adults or younger children).
It's wise to consider the reasons behind existing standards before changing them, but unwise to assume they're what works best without examining whether that's reality.
This paper implies that for health, permanent standard time would be best, and permanent DST would be the worst. And even keeping the current clock-shifting would be better than permanent DST.
"The combination of DST and winter would therefore make the differences between body clocks and the social clock even worse and would negatively affect our health even more."
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/07487304198541...
Do you have children?
In past HN threads, the preference largely comes down to whether you have children (and want more early morning light for safer trips to school) or not.
Selfishly, I just want as much daylight as possible, which has very little to do with how a government selects a time range for legal reasons. The rotation of the globe has not been yet controlled, as far as I'm tracking.
Most of the time people conflate longer summer days with DLS.
The situation with dark mornings is winter not standard time.
My children are already waking to school in daylight this time of year prior to the switch to DLS.
As others have said. I would rather permanent standard time but I’ll take permanent DLS. Moving the clocks twice a year is insanity.
That's the perfect way to say it.
The other piece that a lot of people are missing is the whole larks (early risers) vs owls (late risers) divide. I think the best illustration of that is to ask, if you got your pick, which shift you'd take, based solely on your own body and habits: 8-4, 9-5, or 10-6 (or perhaps even further in one direction)? My guess is that the answer to that question predicts your desire for Standard or Daylight time pretty well.
My guess is that owls will say they prefer permanent daylight time and larks will say they prefer permanent standard time.
But their revealed preference is the opposite -- owls wake up well after sunrise and go to bed well after sunset. Yet permanent daylight time will shift it so they'll be waking up closer to sunrise and going to bed closer to sunset.
Larks revealed preference is more like permanent daylight time yet I think they're more likely to say they want permanent standard time.
It amazes me that we actually argue about this based on vibes. We know that people are better off the closer the time between waking up and sunrise.
(i.e. the time 12:00PM should be when the sun is overhead)
I'm not a "capitalism gives you brain worms" kind of person, but the idea that it is somehow better to literally change the location of the sun in the sky because the holy hours of 9-5 are sacrosanct is so strange to me.
The song is about a secretary who didn't get a lunch hour, so started an hour later than her boss.
Tech workers generally start at 9, but that started decades after the song came out.
With people acknowledging heatwaves and energy issues, I find it interesting how that's seldom part of the conversation.
But why? Because it's not even in standard time, except for around 1/60th of a time zone at best, if you're rounding to the minute.
If solar noon jumps from being at 11:35 in standard time, to at 12:35 under DST, at your coordinates, what does that matter?
Noon was at noon before the railroads. But ever since time zones were invented, that's no longer been the case.
Digits on a clock are just a number. If you care about when solar noon is, just memorize it.
Then it was a complete non-issue for our kids. I had this conversation with several parent friends and they couldn't figure it out either.
At most we've had a day or two where the kids wake up 10-20 minutes later than the target time, but it's not a big deal. Honestly it takes me longer to adapt than my kids.
I can believe that some kids are hyper sensitive to clock changes, but the more I talk to fellow parents I think it's a minority case. Traveling a couple states away is a bigger swing than DST.
I think this is a talking point that came up on the internet at one point and then got amplified because so many liked the direction it was going, but never stopped to think about how accurate the claim was.
(There was one year where the time change in March did actually have a noticeable effect on my kid... and a few days later, just when she had gotten back to "normal", everything shut down for COVID.)
God bless you for keeping that top of mind. So many people miss the forest for the trees here.