Hacker News Reader

Why should the clock be set to those arbitrary points? If you want sun in the morning, wake up later, it you want sun in the evening, wake up earlier.

If your issue is when work is scheduled, well businesses set their own hours, not the government.

Businesses don’t care how much sun you get

The government doesn't set the opening hours of businesses though either.

They do with DST.

That doesn't set the opening hours.

The bar near me has different opening hours to the library, and that has nothing to do with DST.

The government? Or your government?

Because there are countries where national or state governments do.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shopping_hours#Germany

Working hours will not change.

I will fight tooth and nail against attempts to take one hour of daylight from me in the evenings for half of the year.

"Working hours will not change". Except they have in most countries where they have got rid of DST...

They have? Which countries are those?

If you are looking for an example I did some contract work for a company in Turkey that implemented winter hours and summer hours for their office after abolishing DST in 2016. As far as I understand it, it's fairly standard across the country.

Then we should have timezones based not just on longitude, but also latitude. So northerly locales can get some sleep in the spring/summer/fall.

> If your issue is when work is scheduled, well businesses set their own hours, not the government.

Ah, someone who doesn't have kids in school/camp/some random activity yet.

We know how this goes in China (one time zone, no daylight savings time). Coming home from the bar in Beijing with the sun showing up at 4 AM was quaint back then, but I'm definitely glad we have DST in the states.

How many school kids are coming back from the bars at 4 AM in Beijing?

That was before I had kids, my point is that I’m familiar with life without DST even at a lower latitude can get weird.

Beijing is a bad example, because all of China actually has Beijing time. It gets confusing in Xinjang, which is 2 hours in the "wrong" timezone. But that doesn't mean that people start work at 8:00 in complete darkness, they just start at 10:00 wall time.

I think the talk of daylight savings time is a distraction, in the end it is arbitrary what the clock says. As a society we need to negotiate when (in celestial time) we want to do certain activities. For example, there are a lot of studies that school starts to early (relative to sunrise and the average bed time of teenagers). But the school starting time has to be decided politically. And reduced working hours or later start times have to be negotiated by trade unions, politics etc.. That's a lot more messy than just shifting wall time.

Urumuqi actually delays store openings/closings (department stores open at 11AM, for example), so it isn't that bad. Beijing time in Beijing should be accurate, but without DST, the sun rises way too early in the morning. But even then the schedules are still fixed, just the Chinese enjoy their night life, so the sun setting at 6-7PM in the summer isn't really a big deal.

Our school schedules are set by weird rules involving when school bus capacity is available. But in general, 9AM is about when school starts (for my son's K-8, its 8AM here for K-5s), or summer camp session starts, or whatever. My schedule is so influenced by my kid these days, it happens to correspond to rush hour, which sucks, because everyone else's schedules are intertwined (so traffic).

I WFH and can definitely set my own work hours. Which is why its 12:30 AM and I still haven't gone to bed yet.

> Then we should have timezones based not just on longitude, but also latitude

Of course. In Australia the southern states do summer time, and the northern states don't.

> businesses set their own hours, not the government

In plenty of countries the government decides the opening hours of shops, restaurants and sometimes even offices. Labour laws and nighttime pay are coupled to the hours on the clock. Hours you can make noise is decided by government. Germany has the mid-day resting hour (Mittagsruhe).

The government sets the hours of the schools, which in turn drives the schedules of a fair chunk of society.

Even that isn't very hard and fast, states can set their own school hours, but in nearly every case there is only an earliest time and an overall yearly hours of instruction. They can start at different times or change it everyday if they wanted, that is controlled by either the school or possibly the local government.

Schools choose to use similar times because they think that is what parents want.

I agree with everything you say, except the first. It’s still the government setting the hours for public schools (in the US meaning of public school).

Yeah, as someone who lives in Vermont, you could talk me into permanent DST. That would move the winter sunset from, say, 4:21pm to 5:21pm, which would mean I'd get enough twilight for a short walk after work. And Maine is even further east and north in the same time zone, so they have an even earlier sunset. On the other hand, Vermont's standard time sunrise around 7:20 is reasonable enough.

Parts of Vermont have traditionally coped with this by having an 8-4 workday instead of 9-5.

But the reality is that Vermont gets only about an hour of daylight outside working hours, depending on local customs. People have extremely strong preferences about how that hour gets split up.

Permanent DST is just a synonym for "let's all agree to wake up an hour earlier." The same change could be affected by e.g. schools and businesses agreeing to open at 8am instead of 9am. (Of course that would be wildly unpopular so permanent DST is just way to trick people into swallowing the pill.)

But would behavior change in the long run? Countries like Spain where solar noon differs wildly from clock noon just end up aligning their rituals accordingly (e.g. eating dinner at 9pm).

> The same change could be affected by e.g. schools and businesses agreeing to open at 8am instead of 9am.

School starts at 8am everywhere that I know of in northern New England and always has? Does school start at 9am where you live?

And as noted, an 8am start to the working day is long established in certain parts of Vermont and New Hampshire. It has not been "widely unpopular." It's nice to get a few minutes of sunlight and twilight after work in winter.

People may adjust their eating times or leisure activities, but work is 9 to 5. It's amazing to have almost 5 hours of sunlight after work

This just seems like a backwards justification. There is nothing wrong with a 9am sunrise or a 4:11am sunrise. People in Anchorage deal with both just fine.

> I am not awake at 4am, I have no use for sunlight at 4am

Most people aren’t awake at 5am either. Your use for the sun when there is an excess of it that goes well past your bedtime if you get up at 5am is irrelevant.

4am sunrise seems ludicrously early to me, but then again, even a 5am sunrise is awfully early.

Ever lived at high latitude? It's normal.

I live at a higher latitude than Seattle and the earliest sunrise is 5:45 or so.

My work starts at 9am, therefore I wake up around 7am. My work start time does not adjust based on the seasons. Any sun before 7am is wasted for me.

Under DST, at summer solstice, the sun rises around 5am, giving me 2 hours of wasted sunlight.

Without DST, at summer solstice, the sun rises around 4am, giving me 3 hours of wasted sunlight.

I enjoy having additional hours of sunlight when I am awake, so for me I actually prefer having DST vs without it.

Similarly, in the wintertime, under permanent DST, sunrise is around 9am, and I don't want to drive to work in the dark.

You can still wake up earlier and enjoy your sunrise even if your working hours are fixed.

Are you seriously suggesting I wake naturally at sunrise (4 AM), then start work 5 hours(!) later? I can't change my work start time.

That's an unproductive use of my time.

I still don't understand why you don't just wake up earlier.

It's not like without DST you have to work so late that you don't have enough hours for sleep, right?

Get out of bed earlier then and go to bed earlier. You’re inventing a fake problem.

Everything you said is me, me, me.

In the meanwhile I know enough people who wake up super early to walk their dogs, or to work out, or you know, to go to their work which opens at 6:30. Do they not count?

I can see the DST argument for people where the shift kinda sorta works out, but many places (like Anchorage!) it's completely unnecessary. I live in Sweden and it's just the twice annually "ah shit the clock moved overnight."

Yeah, it’s insane. Along with that, any permanent gains in the morning will be lost as soon as it becomes normal. Businesses will just open that much earlier. And this study assumed bedtimes of 10pm, which is not the average anywhere on the planet from what I remember the last time I looked into this. The average is like past midnight.

More tyranny inflicted upon the rest of us by morning people

> The average is like past midnight

Jesus, for what age group?

I'm an outlier because I have to be at work at 6:30 AM daily (so I get up around 5:15), so staying up past 10 PM is a rarity and I see midnight maybe two or three times a year. I don't think I've slept past 8 AM in the past decade, even on vacation. But I haven't even frequently stayed up past midnight since my mid-twenties, and even then didn't do so every night. I'd have been too sleep-deprived.

Hol up, don't fix time, there's a few guys in Seattle without curtains. Sorry everyone.

Curtains would make the sun set later in summer and rise earlier in winter?

You realize that you can change your own sleep patterns seasonally if you want to? Heck, you could do that even gradually instead of those abrupt 1 hour changes. That is your choice, we don't need to fiddle with clocks for the whole society for that.

> Do the anti-DST people understand what they're advocating for?

They do, which is why only 45 countries observe DST.

25 observe it partially.

And the rest, roughly ~125 countries do not.

Historically, ~140 countries did.

To put this into perspective, only about 1.2B people out of 8.3B observe it today. Which puts you into a very small <15% minority.

Appealing to population is a stupid argument. DST as a policy is designed for places at higher latitudes, and the the majority of the planet do not live at higher latitudes. DST exists to maintain a more consistent time of sunrise across seasons.

DST is moronic in any part of the world close to the equator. There is not enough seasonal adjustment in the time of sunrise to justify adjusting the clocks. And in places of the world such as the middle east, they have an active policy of avoiding the sun and a policy of DST (which maximizes sunlight while awake) is antithetical to how society functions.

You can have your own household clock.