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Comment by damnesian | Hacker News Reader

Studies have been conducted about the safety of sticking to one time. The ones who are the most vulnerable are kids waiting for buses in the dark. We can't move to dynamic school times because we are still working the same paradigm as the industrial revolution- same schedule every day, year in year out. And society is simply too divided and fractured, and the motives too hidden and craven, to decide to move en masse to a dynamic schedule.

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School start times should be pushed back an hour anyways. Students learn better, especially middle school + highschool age. The only reason we don't is because it conflicts with parents working schedules.

Studies also show that permanent standard time is better than permanent daylight time. But for some reason, the US wants to go against the rest of the world on this.

You are aware that at least much of Europe uses a similar system to what the US uses today?

Europe is less than 8% of the world's population. The vast majority of the world uses standard time. It works. No one there pines for permanent daylight time.

Europe is wrong 50% of the time. The US[1] will be wrong 100% of the time. It can mostly get away with this because it spans the continent. But still, you're going to deal with the stupidity that crossing the Mexican border you will always have to correct your watch.

[1] And Alberta + BC. But really - all of Canada is just a rounding error anyway!

Meanwhile, China has one timezone so I sort of doubt that DST registers given that.

> The vast majority of the world uses standard time. It works. No one there pines for permanent daylight time.

Timezones are political, there are many cities and countries that are an hour or more west of the timezone implied by their longitude, which is equivalent to permanent daylight time, even if they don't call it permanent daylight time.

See Spain.

> The vast majority of the world uses standard time.

This doesn't make any sense, "standard" is just an arbitrary choice.

See India for example, single time zone.

Ultimately the dumbest thing is to change the clocks back and forth. Just pick one, stick with it.

For what reasons is it better? I’d rather have the evening light than the first 20 minutes when I get up.

It matches our circadian rhythms better. That leads to absolutely massive better health outcomes, society-wide.

People wanting to drive home with a bit of light doesn’t really offset everyone’s sleep getting screwed up, especially those with later natural circadian rhythms.

> For what reasons is it better?

To start:

> Later sunrises and sunsets, as seen with pDST, are associated with multiple long-term health outcomes including increases in stroke, heart attacks, diabetes, obesity, and cancer.[8–10]

> The increase in obesity and other cardiovascular health problems show that even if DST were to encourage exercise in some individuals it is not enough to outweigh the effects of sleep and circadian disruption on food choices, metabolism, hunger hormones, and glucose control and other cardiovascular risk factors.[11,12]

* https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10476036/

To the degree kids are standing around outside, they're already in the dark in northern US states (to say nothing about Canada and areas of Europe) for part of the year even with standard time.

And, yes, dynamic school schedules don't work because they need to be synced at some level with work schedules. A one-time shift might work though.

I mostly don't have a dog in this hunt. I pretty much set my own schedule absent the odd morning appointment.

In the northern states, sure. But now you’re expanding it to southern states and places on the edge of the transition zones.

Also, 2 hour late starts for cold are a fairly common thing to happen due to cold in northern states. Now you’re talking about 3 hour late starts.

> To the degree kids are standing around outside, they're already in the dark in northern US states

It's a continuum, not a discrete state. Even in the northern states, they're out in the dark for perhaps 4-6 weeks. Now that will get extended to, say, 10+ weeks.

Every division of society should just use its own schedule, then the number of divisions doesn't matter.

"Standards are great. Everybody should have one!"

    Charles Moore, author of the Forth programming language

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