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Comment by mmmlinux | Hacker News Reader

My understanding is that most people want to stop switching, but its split on which side to stay on.

I'd rather have it switch than do permanent DST. It's not good to wake up in total darkness if you can avoid it. Best would just be permanent standard time.

I'd rather have it switch than do permanent standard time. It's not good to end your workday in total darkness if you can avoid it. It's nice to wake up in early darkness and see the sun rise. Best would be permanent daylight time.

It’s always this argument with people, all totaled up against people’s overall health - as pretty much every sleep scientist agrees, kids actually being able to get to school because it’s not too cold (not to mention safety as far as light goes), and making night owl’s lives hell.

But yeah, you definitely need to drive home in the light instead of the dark for those two months out of the year or whatever. Definitely worth it.

I'm a night owl and daylight time does not make my life hell, kids don't walk to school in the US anymore, and yes, experiencing the daylight for 2 more months of the year is worth it.

Ok, well, I'm a night owl and it makes things significantly harder for me, and pretty much every single teenager in the US to boot. Kids don't walk to school, but they do wait for school buses. Late starts are already common in northern states due to cold, and some kids do in fact still walk to school in the morning, and that's way more dangerous in the dark.

Yeah, being awoken by an alarm in pure darkness is grim which, longitude 15 solar noon minutes west of where our timezone is set and at our latitude is very possible in winter.

With pure standard time we would never have sunset before 5 pm but daylight savings puts half the year's 7 am before the sun has risen, and if you are an early riser as I have become, before the dawn breaks.

It also gives us four months where it's very hard to get children to sleep after 8 pm and for me it's even hard to start winding down.

I think summer time is really non-optimal for most purposes, changing the clocks sucks, and most individuals that work do so for too many hours a day. It's a local maximum in terms of how we socially manage time and people mistake optimising our society towards it to be optimising towards a global maximum.

Imagine if there was no DST and someone said "let's change every clock...", I would think it's a classic XY problem.

It sucks when it's dark outside at 4:30 pm. That means many people don't even see much of the sun during the work week.

I have lived at high latitudes and agree; funnily enough around that time of year fog and cloud cover often meant no sun even if you were out during the day, records of 62 days with no sight of the sun. Crushing stuff.

But the situation you describe is literally not physically possible where I currently live due to proximity to the equator and being west of the line of longitude our clock runs on during standard time, but DST demands we wake up in darkness.

How the workday in the modern economy is fundamentally unjust. You shouldn't have to sign away your ability to see the sun for a job (unless at extremely high latitudes or extreme weather conditions).

Ignoring, of course, the fact you're already waking up in total darkness in Standard time.

At least with perma-DST you at least get daylight once you leave work; with perma-Standard you don't get that either.

The problem time is winter, when daylight is scarce. So whatever is best for winter should prevail. Summer doesn’t matter except for weirdos who want others to wake up earlier.

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