I've been reading the anti-DST (or more properly anti-clock-shift) posts that appear hear and elsewhere every spring and fall for years. I really think this is a case of "be careful what you wish for". I think many folks, especially in northern latitudes, will regret the early summer sunsets or sunrises if we were to stay on standard time year round.
In Seattle, for example, I think the sun would rise before 5 am as late as early August. On the other hand, if Seattle stayed on DST (+7) year-round then the sun would rise after 8AM from early November to late February, and as late as 9AM in December.
Seattle is an extreme case, because it is so far north, but New York City is not that different, and I think more people would bemoan the lack of after-work daylight during spring and summer than currently bemoan the switch, and would be unhappy about it for a longer period each year.
Of course, if we got rid of DST, we could all just agree to get up earlier in the summer. Maybe we could even standardize that by agreeing to all start getting up earlier on the same day each spring. :-)
I always assumed we'd keep the summer hours year round. I don't even think about DST during the summer, it's during the fall where we suddenly lose an hour of evening sunlight that I complain. Unless I'm misreading, your comment is just pointing out that keeping the winter hours year-round is sub-optimal (I agree) but not arguing in favour of switching the clocks twice per year.
I would also much prefer we stay on DST (sun rises/sets later) year round. However, if DST were to end, it's not guaranteed that it would go that way. I think that unfortunately many people see the winter time (sun rises/sets earlier) as the default.
IMO, having the sun set later is better because it means I get to enjoy a bit more sunlight in the evening, after the work day. But I'm also really not a morning person.
It’s also the time that most closely aligns solar noon to clock noon. People who advocate for “summer time all the time” basically just want to wake up earlier but want clocks to trick them into doing it.
(The more legitimate argument is for western regions to align to summer time to be closer in clock time to their eastern neighbors.)
Not quite. If your workday ends at 6pm then being on DST means you get usable daylight for more of the year after work. Even if you were prepared to get up and go to bed earlier many jobs have a fixed set of hours.
I mean, okay, let's change which hours they're fixed to! Let's not break the entire concept of noon because America sucks at collective action problems.
What you call "the entire concept of noon" is extremely minor concept in timekeeping for most humans. What's important, is when they work, when places are open, and when other humans are awake.
> The light/dark cycle of the sun has a powerful effect on the circadian clock, sleep, and alertness. If you understand these effects, you can manipulate light exposure to help yourself sleep better at night and be more alert during the day. Keep in mind your circadian clock uses light and dark signals to predict what to do in the future: when to prepare you to be active and when to prepare you to sleep.
Noon corresponds to light. Traditional time keeping has been built around light forever for reasons that are still relevant even though we now have plenty of artificial light. There is no reason why we cannot adjust when we work, keep places open, and share waking hours around the sun, but we cannot adjust the sun.
> This is the entire point of DST. To adjust when we work, keep places open, and share waking hours around the sun.
Perspective may vary here, but it seems to me it's to avoid having to adjust when we work by having the government enforce an artificial aberration on top of the normal social construct of time, a construct that at least hinges on the objective reality of Where The Sun Is. It's to avoid moving "a 9-to-5" to "an 8-to-4", to avoid it by pretending that noon isn't noon and making all of us mess with our clocks to keep up that pretense.
> It's to avoid moving "a 9-to-5" to "an 8-to-4", to avoid it by pretending that noon isn't noon and making all of us mess with our clocks to keep up that pretense.
Exactly. In our modern lives, noon itself is not very significant. Sunrise and sunset are much more so. So when the sun starts to set "too early", we fight back by pushing the clocks forward an hour. Some people don't like it because maybe they want the sun to rise earlier. Or maybe they hate the lost hour of sleep. Or they're a distributed database programmer :)
But there's no solution that pleases everyone, so we all get on these long threads about DST twice a year and yell at each other. My preferred timekeeping would have me join the "America/Phoenix" time zone (I'm in California). But 2nd-best is the current system.
Work hours adapt to human behavior. Some industries end "work" around 3pm. Some ends at noon. DST is basically a communism way to force everyone to adopt a standardized time that a leader there envision. What happens if the day turn darker at 3pm when dark storms last for 3+ hrs till night and repeatitively across days or weeks? Micro-DST for weather as well? Messing with times via DST +/-1hr won't get much other than confusions. Time is zero sum game however you rearrange it.
How is it the default when we are actually on daylight time most of the time now (mid March through early November)? Daylight is the norm, "standard" is actually the exception. What's the point of switching to "standard" time for 4 months?
I think this is really the crux of it, it's just a matter of personal preference and there's no one right answer. When I was younger I used to wake up later and I thought permanent DST was a no-brainer for the extra hour of light in the evenings. Now in my 30's for whatever reason my body clock has shifted a lot and I pretty much always wake up by 6:30 am. The last few weeks with the sun not rising until 7:30 in northern CA have been kind of depressing and I can't wait for DST to end, I'd now rather have that extra hour of light in the morning than the evening.
There's also the problem of lumping together cities at different latitudes. The summer time is aligned ideally with one region, at the cost of other regions following suit and having to wake up at night.
Ideally, each region would have their summer time adapted to their latitude, but that would be more chaotic than simply scrapping it.
Keeping DST year round just seems so crazy. If "midday" and "midnight" no longer approximate the middle of the day and night then what is even the point of time zones?
The reason we don't all use UTC is because it is useful to be able to figure out roughly what time of day it is somewhere else on the planet. If we collectively agree that is no longer necessary then we are giving up a fundamental part of timekeeping.
If you want an example of how crazy this is, just look to China, which only has a single time zone. It is so large that in some parts of the country the sun doesn't set until "midnight".
Time actually means something, don't mess with it.
Madrid's solar noon is around 1 PM during standard time and 2 PM during summer time, the rest of Spain is a bit off from this, and I noted when I lived there that the Spanish custom seems to be to keep later hours.
Interestingly the UK also changed to GMT+1 during the war.
And during the Spanish Civil war Republicans had already moved to GMT+1 in 1938, a change that was undone after the war before switching again to GMT+1 in 1940.
If "midday" didn't get changing twice a year and always coincided with noon (i.e. the sun being highest), we could build a schedule based on working when there is light on the sky and still have some left after work.
> Time actually means something, don't mess with it.
That would be great advice for not changing the clock every six months.
There is a huge difference between keeping the same time all year versus keeping the same time over huge swaths of the globe.
We only keep "regular" time just over four months a year now.
Not clear. Those you call «winter hours» are supposed to be the actual, real hours: noon equals zenith, midnight equals nadir. You can have some reasonable exception, but to call "midnight" all year what is not midnight makes no sense. It amounts to "falsehood", where it would be just social agreement to just wake, work, dine sooner or later.
The entire concept of time is a "social agreement". Including when noon is. Solar noon is never at clock noon where I live or for that matter in most places, it's off by an amount dictated by political decisions and boundaries as well as by the fact that it literally drifts a bit over the course of the year.
In a way, but it is not "anarchic performance art": it tends to adhere to the actual objective time - it makes sense to create a system that applies reasonable compromises, but attached with a rubber band to the real thing. Approximate flexibly but do not lose the anchor.
People in Paris know they have a pretty severe offset, ~50m (those in Vigo even ~95m). If you added a sticky +1h, the offset against solar time would increase to ~110m and ~155m.
>Federal law allows a state to exempt itself from observing daylight saving time, upon action by the state legislature, but does not allow the permanent observance of DST.
Maybe? Yes? I'm not opposed to the idea of more, narrower time zones, though I think that in practice anything less than one-hour differences would be more complicated than it's worth.
Chicago has the opposite problem, where it's dark at 4:30pm in the winter.
At the expense of standing at the school bus stop in complete darkness for most mornings of the school year.
13 years of rising hours before dawn and walking and waiting in darkness is enough.
I would suggest that the government of any state or nation not be allowed to ever say what [civil] time it is, and require that they take technical timekeeping information--for TAI, UTC, UT1, and the like--from non-political scientific bodies.
I don't really remember waiting for the bus in the dark until I was in high school, when they started earlier and due to the need to use the same bus for later runs to elementary schools, we arrived at school 30 minutes before class started. I'm thinking my elementary school started at 8:30 or 9:00am? But I can't really remember.
In the case of Arizona, an early sunset actually makes sense because that means you get to enjoy the evenings outdoors at 30-ish ˚C (around 90 ˚F) instead of the >40˚C (>100˚F) you would have if the sun was still up.
Having grown up somewhere northern that doesn't follow DST (Saskatchewan) I never really understood this argument. Winter months you get so little sunlight anyways I don't really see how it would make too much of a difference.
Mind you this could be because of where I grew up, but moving to somewhere that follows DST I always saw it more as an inconvenience than anything else.
Essentially DST is making everyone wake up an hour early everyday for 7-8 months. I’d rather just let the people who want the “extra” hour of sunlight in the evening get up early. Our bodies sync with the earth’s clock and not what we set. (Also 1-hr timezones are not sufficient. We need 30 minute time zones as well. People in the westernmost US, for example, have an early start. DST makes it much much earlier.)
It is not really practical to try to run one's life an hour ahead of the schedule of society, as set by things like business hours, transit schedules, and the times of public events and performances. This is why I personally would be sorry to lose DST where I live, even though it is an ugly hack.
I live in the middle part of alberta and I'm in the same boat, and during the recent referrendum on switching to DST I couldn't believe the amount of "But in the northern part of the province sunrise will be too late for kids going to school!" as if:
- ...Sunrise wasn't already too late for kids going to school anyways, since Because Capitalism school has to start before work does,
- ..."Sunrise" is a fixed point when you get any further north from me in the winter. It's more like a couple hours of varying degrees of "glowing horizon" centered around "sunrise" to begin with.
> In Seattle, for example, I think the sun would rise before 5 am as late as early August. On the other hand, if Seattle stayed on DST (+7) year-round then the sun would rise after 8AM from early November to late February, and as late as 9AM in December.
Your comment points out the real absurdity which is why are so stuck on the machinations of numbers on a clock, and ~24 granular timezones rather than just having humans be human and 1) get the sleep they need and 2) be productive when it makes sense to, regardless of the digits.
I doubt pre-industrial people thought to hard about if they chopped wood at exactly 9am, or if it might have been 8:37 or even 11am.
Preindustrial people haven’t been a part of global economy nearly to the same degree we are. They haven’t had to coordinate so much with other people in their daily tasks.
Think about a factory working in shifts: it cannot work effectively if every worker comes whenever it suits him, works for 8 hours and leaves. You need coordination to achieve efficiency.
Same is true for most other places of employment. Government offices and retail establishments have opening hours. Schools have schedules. Sure, in some jobs, there is a lot of flexibility, but not all of them can provide that, so as a society, we will be stuck with schedules and tyranny of the clock for the foreseeable future.
> Government offices and retail establishments have opening hours.
Online fixes like 99% of this.
> Schools have schedules
and yet khan academy does not
> Think about a factory working in shifts
yes, but there's no reason these shifts have to be fixed in time across the year, people are so hung up on 9-5, or 8-5 or some other hour bound fixed pattern.
Why not come in at 8am on June 21, and 1 minute later per day until Dec 21, then 1 minute earlier per day till june 21?
See the point here? The majority of cases can be entirely eliminated / designed out of existence. Many can become flexible to the reality of the sunrise/set and circadian rhythms . A few will have to still provide 24 hour coverage for emergency or utility backup type things.
No, online fixes some of it, not 99%. I can’t fix my car online.
> Why not come in at 8am on June 21, and 1 minute later per day until Dec 21, then 1 minute earlier per day till june 21?
The absurdity of this proposition is illustrative of the challenges the reality pushes upon you. No, having to figure out whether your shift starts at 8:36 AM or 8:42 AM today is not an improvement over status quo.
>No, online fixes some of it, not 99%. I can’t fix my car online.
But you can schedule the fix, pay for the fix, feedback the fix etc all online. Now that much of the world is working remote, we drive a lot less, and mechanics are needed less. See how this keeps feeding back into itself when we accept a new way of approaching life that isn't "butts in seats" and "in before the boss, leave after the boss" management?
> But you can schedule the fix, pay for the fix, feedback the fix etc all online.
I can’t, however, fix my car online, which is the entire point.
> Now that much of the world is working remote, we drive a lot less
No, we drive only a little less. Miles driven fell only 13% in 2020 vs 2019, and people drive more in 2021 than they had in 2020.
> See how this keeps feeding back into itself when we accept a new way of approaching life that isn't "butts in seats" and "in before the boss, leave after the boss" management?
Yeah, soon we will be able to do everything online, and will not have to see and talk to another human being, ever.
> and will not have to see and talk to another human being, ever.
Except by choice, which imo is a good thing! I hope it will help people start to become cognizant, proactive, and invested in true community more than community by proximity and happenstance. Saying hi to the same cashier is nice and all, but there is a lot of depth of truer community that has been left by a gap of the church leaving the mainstream. (not suggesting it return as the replacement, just identifying a gap the change left).
Then we can begin to build community with people we choose to more than just because we live in the same zipcode or go to the same tax bracket targeted shops .
> Saying hi to the same cashier is nice and all, but there is a lot of depth of truer community that has been left by a gap of the church leaving the mainstream.
Indeed, but in fact, the increase in screen time (previously TV, now also internet/smartphones), has been a major contributor to the decline of community and civic society. Making more things doable online is likely to only make things worse, not better in this aspect.
I guess you're largely commenting on short term (ie < 50 yrs) actualized trends vs I'm looking at conceptual and longer term things like freeing people from certain mundanity (eg dishwashers and clothes washing machines) opens up unprecedented utility (like women entering the workforce when they previously handled domestic work).
yes, if we collectively just replace social interaction with asocial videogames or squid game, then yes we'll ultimately suffer. But if time saved by either 1) doing things online or 2) having your role eliminated entirely then we'll have additional and aggregated time for things like clubs around hobbies ... (aggregated part means 60x 1 minute saved could potentially be used to have a social interaction with a friend)
> But if time saved by either 1) doing things online or 2) having your role eliminated entirely then we'll have additional and aggregated time for things like clubs around hobbies ... (aggregated part means 60x 1 minute saved could potentially be used to have a social interaction with a friend)
Could, sure, but will it? Experience of last 50 years shows that it will more likely be spent on solo watching Netflix, while sipping wine and cuddling with a cat, or playing yet another video game.
The fact is, our ancestors had more meaningful social interaction with their friends and neighbors, despite all the modern efficiency improvements not being available to them. In my opinion, modern individual entertainment is so optimized that more old school activities cannot really compete in the immediate term, despite being much more fulfilling and socially beneficial in the long term. Optimizing out chores won’t solve this.
Not parent, but yes? And why not, work any time is a natural evolution after work anywhere. I'm sure virtual reality and AI can fill in for the human illusion of synchronous communication one day.
Good grief. It really is time for some of you people to step away from the computer, get out of the tech bubble for a while and have a look at what most people in society are doing for a living.
We really need to get over that tiresome and foolish self-flagellation complex of the "tech bubble" and the notion that our work isn't "real work".
If an office worker walked into a construction site and declared they were doing everything wrong from the lack of paperwork documenting completion of every shovel of dirt they would be called a clueless, arrogant ass. Why would it be any different if the subject was a construction worker in an office building declaring it unproductive for a lack of tonnage of paper relocated?
You are misunderstanding my point here. I'm not saying that IT work isn't real work.
We're discussing flexible working times for all of society, and what I'm reading is people who somehow assume that most of society is in a job with privileges like being able to work from home or on "async" schedules etc. Few jobs are like this.
So, apart from teachers and live television, what jobs can't operate on a flexible schedule? As others have said, many jobs that require attendance are already performed in shifts. Yes, a waiter cannot choose to work when the customers are not at their table, but that doesn't mean they have to be there at every time the restaurant is open. Same thing for bartending/stocking/cashiers/front office jobs, many of these are already part-time jobs so flexibility is readily implied.
Come to think of it, many of my high-school teachers worked part-time too. They didn't get to dictate their own hours, but they didn't work 7-15 every day either, some days they came in at 11 and other days they left at 12.
yes, for a good proportion of people this would work, and work could probably design around many of those who "cannot" via buffers, and for the remaining very small proportion where full coverage matter (like ER staff) -- well that's their profession so i guess not.
I think it's an interesting idea but it's a much larger problem than you're saying - your perspective is from the narrow position of knowledge work that pushes information around, and it doesn't really matter when the information gets pushed around. But out in the real world, where things need to physically come together for economic activity to occur, synchronization is a huge deal. If you want a store to be open from 9AM, someone has to be there at 9AM. People will rely on that store being open at the stated time. It's not just ER staff - almost any other profession you care to name will not function properly if people just turn up whenever. Bartender, hairdresser, trash collector, construction worker, police officer, firefighter...
Honestly, this reads like the narrow perspective. It sounds like western culture. And an urban one specifically.
There are cultures where you just close up shop when you've had enough income for the day. Not to mention rural communities all around the world that are more flexible about timekeeping in general.
I think you underestimate the areas where full (or significant) staff is needed. What about manufacturing jobs, farming, transportation and logistics (especially transportation of ppl not goods), services (including public services).
I'd say all the services which require face to face interaction will become way more costly if such buffers will be needed to cover off hours. For example: there is a notion of skeleton crew and the service might not be operational without that crew so the choice is actually to spread the cost of off hours low load to the high load hours or close the business for low load hours.
The economy is already distributed via intermediation mechanisms (trade, money), whereas in the stone age people had to meet all together to barter in a bazaar. You underestimate how much work structure is simply inertia, beginning with the eight-hour day.
If there is a will, a structure for all work can surely be created where even more intermediation happens and productive artifacts are exchanged rather than physical presence. This applies much more broadly than so-called "knowledge work", it just happened first for knowledge work because it's most obvious and low-cost there.
Outside of procedural manufacturing and public safety, very few industries are incompatible with the concept of flextime. The only thing preventing it from happening is archaic business management practices that were never based on actual research or metrics.
Very few jobs in society are compatible with flexible time where people can work when it suits them. Any job which requires some kind of real time coordination with others will conflict, which is most jobs. That is not even counting parents with school age children.
You seem to be under the mistaken impression that society was created only a few centuries ago, and that widespread deployment of clocks were a prerequisite for escape from base "eat your neighbors and older relatives to survive the winter" savagery.
Most tasks with real person in time coordination also have fixed locations, and optimal environmental work times. Roofers work early in the morning so they don't need to literally risk their necks to darkness while also avoiding scorching heat.
Lighting was also expensive and very inadequate compared to sunlight. This lead to convergence. Notice all of the old proverbs and parables speak in terms of light and not time on clocks?
In addition to the manual craftmanship, before standardized parts creation was done to fit by one person - something where you would prefer to do all of the relevant tasks with one person when possible. And manufactured goods were expensive precisely because most spent time on raw material related tasks.
Actual coordinated work has music associated with the proper rhythm. Sea shanties, and rowing drums for instance.
You claim "very few" jobs are compatible with flextime, yet nearly half of companies in the US already provide flextime options for most of their employees -- and this includes positions at every level. Your assertions are not representative of reality.
Is there really a white collar job that does not allow at least something like 7-15 schedule? Or one that couldn't be easily found. That is giving exactly the extra hour in evenings that people want.
I'm kind of amused at calling Seattle a "northern latitude". I live quite a bit north of that and I can tell you that as you go into actual northern latitudes if you wanted to have any of these useful effects you'd have to be changing the time a lot more often than just twice a year.
The bonuses of DST up here last maybe a few weeks before it really doesn't matter anymore, and likewise for the standard time shift, except probably even shorter time being useful.
Yet we still have to do it, even though it causes demonstrable harm to shift clocks twice a year.
From Finland I see that Seattle is around Switzerland. Which I consider central Europe or even being very much in south.
Noticed that standard time was actually useful this time of year. Where there was no light before it, but now there is at least some for while. And I see it much more important for morning than evening.
To me it just means I get sad twice when I stop seeing the sun in the morning again. I've never found it worth it.
I'm somewhere between finland and seattle, latitude-wise. A quirk of the structure of European vs. North American landmass is that northern europe is a lot more 'habitable' than northern America, so I am literally in the farthest north >1m person city in the americas and it feels about the same as, say, Stockholm except without direct ocean warmth.
I agree, and I'm glad we'll probably never end up getting rid of DST.
If we got rid of DST then I'd lose an extra hour of daylight on summer evenings which would be disappointing. And in exchange I'd have to invest in blackout curtains because on the summer solstice the sun would shine through my East-facing window at ~4:07am.
If we made DST permanent then the sun wouldn't rise until ~8:10am on the winter solstice which means a lot of kids in my neighborhood biking and walking to school in the dark in the winter.
I'd be fine scrapping DST if schools and offices agreed to use "summer hours" and "winter hours" but coordinating such a switch twice a year seems like DST by another name.
I'd love to see a move by state governments to 1) end DST, and 2) formally adopt summer/winter hours, with encouraging businesses to follow their lead.
This creates a coordination problem. For example, your workplace adopts summer hours and now you have to get to work an hour earlier, but you kids' daycare hasn't. Or, the bakery wants to deliver pastries to the cafe an hour earlier, but the cafe workers haven't shown up yet.
DST perfectly solves this problem -- everyone switches on the same day. This makes life easier for the entire population, and causes slight headaches for computer programmers.
I'd be fine with either DST or summer/winter hours but the latter is a significatnly harder coordination problem. Not all businesses would change you'd end up having to keep track of which things have shifted and which things have not and all the downstream implications of that. Compare that to the five minutes a year I spend setting the handful of non-internet-connected clocks in my house.
(And of course if you legally mandated that everyone had to shift their hours twice a year at the exact same time then you just invented DST with extra steps.)
Seasonal hours are indeed more expressive than DST. I love when times are indexed in terms of "sunrise" and/or "sunset" such as the parks near me.
But it doesn't mean that it is simpler for regular people to implement in their lives. If every shop, school, and office had seasonal hours that changed at different times of year (even if they were posted in UTC) then trying to coordinate errands would become a lot more complex. This week I have time to pick Timmy up from school and swing by the post office before it closes, next week school shifts later so I can't, but the week after that the post office implements their shift and I can again.
Many businesses already have differing winter/summer hours under the current regime. That is, they change their hours in winter and summer. And often those hours don’t change in any consistent way. They do just fine despite the coordination problem you bring up.
Business hours and human hours change all the time anyway. You have to check in instead of assume. The times that things happen are not and have never been static.
I'd be fine with either DST or summer/winter hours -- they're just alternate implementations of the same thing.
But coordinating a mass switch between summer and winter hours twice a year seems like it would end up being more effort for regular people than just shifting the clocks in their house, especially now that so many of the clocks we use are internet-connected and switch automatically.
"I think more people would bemoan the lack of after-work daylight during spring and summer than currently bemoan the switch" I think this argument would also apply nicely in challenge of our concept of a modern work week. '9-5' got a harsh reality check with COVID for a lot of people, so why don't we challenge it and not just shifting DST. (I acknowledge that this currently only applies to people who could work remotely.)
We shouldn't get rid of DST, we should just stay on it year round. The change is worthless, causes accidents, disrupts everyone's sleep all for nothing.
There's just not much to be done in places that get eight or nine hours of daylight in the winter and fifteen or sixteen in the summer. Or worse, if you're even farther north than that.
In December and January, you go to work in the dark, you come home from work in the dark, and you barely see the sun for a couple months.
As you said, it depends whether you stay in "standard time" or DST. In BC we're planning on permanently staying on PDT. I agree with what you said about permanent standard time. I actually had to look it up to make sure we're actually gonna stay on PDT. Phew.
I think many folks, especially in northern latitudes, will regret the early summer sunsets or sunrises if we were to stay on standard time year round.
This is, for me, the only argument that matters. I live in the Netherlands, which has significant seasonal changes in daily sunlight.
So, in the summer there is extra light. Do you want this sunlight between 5.45 and 6.45 or between 21.00 and 22.00?
I choose the latter, as the light in the (very) early morning is simply of no use to me at all.
Of course, if we got rid of DST, we could all just agree to get up earlier in the summer. Maybe we could even standardize that by agreeing to all start getting up earlier on the same day each spring. :-)
This is exactly what DST is. Agreeing to all get up earlier.
As someone who grew up in Europe at the same latitude as Montreal ... eh.
During winter you get daylight at 7:45am and it lasts until 4:27pm. Despite daylight savings. It's basically irrelevant.
And we're not even that far north for Europe. Ljubljana is basically right next to Venice. Imagine how bad this gets in the UK. London is a full 5 degrees further north.
edit: turns out Ljubljana is 1 degree more South than Seattle. My point that it can't make much of a difference for a place like Seattle stands. Winters are dark, there isn't a lot of daylight hours to go around no matter how you slice it.
I live about halfway down the US, and we have at least a month and a half in which the only sunlight an 8/8:30-5 worker (nobody actually works 9-5) is going to get is the sun blinding them while rising during their morning commute, and blinding them while setting during their evening commute. No amount of screwing around with the clock keeps the sun up longer. The only way to give people more free daylight hours in the winter, would be to have significantly shorter working hours.
I grew up in a northern latitude on the east coast and played golf as a fall sport. Without DST, the season would have to end much earlier since it would get dark too early to actually play a round after school.
Yeah, as another post here has said, what most people actually want is year-round DST. However, I believe this is a confusing way to express it to people not heavily involved in the DST “controversy” (it sounds like you’re supporting doing fine changes, or perhaps wanting even more time changes or something), so I think it’s often just short handed to “ending daylight savings time”, but yes, like everything, unnecessarily complicated and confusing. This clarification and conversation thus also takes place every year.
What is wrong with feeling the changes of season, depending on your geographical location? Personally that arbitrary shifting 2 times a year always disturbed me. And why TEE EFF should we all get up together? Ever heard of chronobiology and different chronotypes? 'Night Owls vs. Larks', so to speak?
The local time of sunrise and sunset depends not only on latitude but also on the difference between local solar time and the local time zone’s time.
According to http://blog.poormansmath.net/how-much-is-time-wrong-around-t..., that difference can exceed 90 minutes in Spain and even over 3 hours in western China. That’s the price they pay for China having a single time zone (that apparently was introduced by Mao Zedong, to show the country was unified)
If I remember right this change has something like 71% approval amongst the population up here. It's overwhelmingly supported and popular. We can't get rid of DST fast enough.
Seattle is not far north. I live 12 degrees further north (Norway a little south of Oslo) and I would be quite happy to have permanent summer time. Lighter evenings are worth more to me than lighter mornings. Also the whole of the UK is further north than Seattle. From '68 to '71 we had permanent summer time in the UK and where I come from in the south it was popular.
We can make either time the permanent one and adjust accordingly, it’s the twice a year disruption that people hate. Especially difficult to explain to a child why their bedtime suddenly shifted despite established circadian rhythms.
It’s weirder to me that so many people care about which arbitrary number on the clock correlates to the position of the sun.
USA doesn't even properly have northern latitudes: Seattle is southern north, not far north. Also summer sunsets are late, not early: day expands into evening and morning equally and there's no reason to regret them.
Adding to the pile of annoyances with DST - I’m now working at a fully remote company with employees spread across the US and the EU. The switch to DST is not synced between Europe and North America, which cause all types of scheduling havoc. Some meeting times switch, some do not. A totally avoidable mess.
I had this exact thing with Portugal... the time changed something like two weeks apart, and we ended up spending half a day on each end just getting meeting times fixed.
Fuckups? I often say that this is the one good thing Bush the Younger got done lol. The less standard time the better as far as I'm concerned (I live in NY where 4pm sunsets in the winter are a huge bummer).
"To the relief of many Americans, the period of daylight saving time is finally coming to a close."
I am fairly skeptical of the assertion that most Americans favor Standard time over DST.
My skepticism extends to the 2019 poll[1] that asked Americans if they "Supported Ending Daylight Savings Time", a Q that bundles Standard Time with ending clock shifts.
The Q to ask is "For year round time, would you prefer Standard Time or DST?" This would better allow us to consider what people at different latitudes want.
I think if you ask that question in a poll, you also have to explain the question that DST means "sun rises and sets later". The average person might not even know which is which.
Just about everyone I know despises DST. There is some disagreement about what would become "standard time", but almost everyone wants it to end. The worst part of DST is the assumption that you can just reschedule a kid's body clock. A baby gets really upset with the time change, and older kids aren't that much better.
Over a longish life intersecting about every class there is, I found ~0 people expressing a preference for Standard time. The preference for DST has been fairly universal.
I have not lived at high latitudes however. Some comments here indicate opinions there may reasonably differ.
> I would prefer doing away with DST. Probably the vast majority of people with sleep disorders would do better with it as well.
I'm fairly skeptical of that as well. What I've seen among support groups is losing free-time to darkness increases SAD, which leads to sleep issues. I could ask around tho.
Would those people do equally well or better if they didn't have jobs that confined them indoors with little natural light and were able to get out around noon for an hour long walk or run, instead of having to desperately try to catch that hour of sunlight after they get home?
> I am fairly skeptical of the assertion that most Americans favor Standard time over DST.
I despite the changing clock. Frankly, I don't care whether we're on daylight or standard time - I fully expect my schedule would just change in order to accommodate having roughly the same amount of sunlight (which can be a precious commodity here in the Pacific Northwest in the winter).
As someone who lives in a colder climate, I want to keep daylight saving. In the summer, I want the extra daylight in the evening - sunrise in June is 5am, without daylight saving it'd be 4am and the sun would go down at 8pm instead of 9pm.
In the winter, I want the extra sunlight in the morning. That hour of sunlight is important to burn off fog and defrost things a bit. For the morning commute, I want that to get started as early as possible. Yeah, it sucks that the sun goes down at 4:30pm, but at least that darkness is warmer - the slush on the road is still warm enough that it often won't refreeze til after the evening commute is over with.
It’s strange to say “no upsides” when there are a couple of obvious upsides (mentioned by other comments). Do the experts think it makes their case stronger when they make immediately disprovable claims? Isn’t it stronger to say “the upsides are massively outweighed by the downsides” or something like that?
> It’s strange to say “no upsides” when there are a couple of obvious upsides (mentioned by other comments)
None of the cited upsides require clock shifts. They aren't upsides of DST, but of being in the right timezone during winter, which DST does for parts of poorly drawn timezones in ways which are more simply addressed by drawing the timezones properly.
That no one is pointing out problems solved that don't trace back to “without DST, we are in the wrong time zone in winter” is a strong clue that the real problem is wrong timezone and that that problem is just more acutely felt in winter.
I like DST. It prompts me notice the season and reflect on where I've been and where I'm going. That's an upside for me, and for everyone else who likes it for similar reasons. I think this upside is a small one, probably outweighed by downsides, but it's still an upside.
What if instead of redefining time, "Daylight saving" was the part of the year when most businesses, schools etc. started work at 8am instead of 9am? The government could mandate that schools and many other institutions change their start times, businesses could be encouraged to mostly follow (although some may choose not to if they want).
Changing the definition of time is an absurd way to fix the issue. Why not have "winter miles per hour", where because more car accidents happen in winter, everyone has to adjust their car's speedometer to read 10MPH more, so that you then drive slower on the road - Roads with a 70 limit become 60, etc.
Get rid of them. Timezones are a leaky abstraction over daylight. They are to broad, so run into these failure modes.
I would train people to run off of UTC time most of the time when they need to synchronize a specific time.
Then train them to run off of sunrise/sunset offsets for situations where daylight matters. Most of the parks in my neighborhood are open sunrise to sunset, that's perfect. With modern digital clocks, this would be trivial to setup.
When should work hours be? Either some UTC time if we're remote, or if all local, something like 10 hours before sunset to 2 hours before sunset.
I think what they are saying is timezones mostly follow along north south. When if they took into account the tilt of the earth it would not be as big of an issue the further north or south you go from the equator.
I don’t even notice daylight saving time days. At all. I’m sure it’s an annoyance to some people but it’s so low on my priorities. A glass of water is more important to me. Or the dirt in my backyard.
Also anytime anyone says “experts” my first instinct to to believe they’re wrong.
Probably the biggest barrier to ending daylight saving time is... do you go to year-round winter time or summer time?
And that's kind of the upside of daylight saving time: in winter, when days are short, you really want to get the daylight in the morning not in the evening; but in summer, when days are long, you want to move the extra morning daylight to the evening. So DST is kind of a compromise where we suffer the negative results of the changeover to get the positive results of morning light in winter and the positive results of extra evening light in summer.
Why stay on summer time? Because this routes more available daylight to the evening, which most often (for the bulk of people) is used as personal time, family time, everything other than work and school.
We already give up so much to those institutions, I could not possibly support sacrificing another hour of daylight to them.
I have advocated getting to root of the problem. That is having days in first place... Just get rid off the planet and so many problems are solved. We could make sensible second based calendar as we don't need to care about days, months or years anymore. Win, win, win I say...
Um, pretty much every outdoor activity? Hiking, yard work, sports, and even just socializing outdoors are pretty dramatically affected by the sun going down.
Most outdoors activities are safer and more pleasant when there is some sunlight (think: walking through a forest, hiking, swimming in a lake, sports, having a picnic, etc).
I guess I don't get what activities people are doing that need the sun. Sports pitches for example have floodlights. When I run in the evening I carry a torch. Where I live a bit further north it's going to be dark unless you shift the day by like three hours. We manage to do things after work just fine.
Some sports aren't played in areas with big flood lights, and many people don't live near that kind of infrastructure at all. It's totally fine if you aren't interested in those activites, but it's a little weird to me that you seem unaware that they even exist and millions of people like to do them.
Noon is generally not midday for most people. Far more stores are open at 7 PM than are open at 5 AM. Far more people are still up at 9 PM than are waking up at 3 AM. And the "9 to 5" song would center the day at 1 PM. It seems that in general society has decided hours after 12 PM are more useful than hours before 12 PM. It's far easier to just change the clocks to have 1 PM be midday, keeping DST year round, than to change society.
Well, that is the very definition of noon. Which is handy, as the noon point doesn't move around much (a few minutes) over the year, while in northern latitudes the time of sunrise and set can move by several hours across the year. Noon has no special meaning beyond marking the middle of the daylight. All times are expressed relative to that and of course there is full freedom how to set up common time points like star of office hours, start of school etc.
Well, sure, as we have time zones, it is not precisely aligned. But all time zones are aligned so that the noon point is somewhere inside them, not outside of the time zone.
> But standard time would be closer more often than daylight time.
On the eastern edges of current time zones. There's a 45-minute to 55-minute difference to cities on the western borders and many of them daylight time would be closer to "natural noon" than standard time.
I'd prefer one that fixes the clock to sunrise and lets noon and sunset drift rather than fixing noon and letting sunrise and sunset drift.
I could also try and get my coworkers to move our meetings earlier in summer so I can leave work by 3, but for some reason changing a "clock" seems to be more effective than getting people to buy into summer hours and winter hours.
Why do you want daylight in the morning in winter? Now that we have electric lights, we have pretty good control over our indoor lighting situation, and even our outdoor lighting.
* There's some evidence that light is useful for the biological process of waking up and keeping people wakeful in the morning. Anecdotally, if it's a particularly cloudy day when I wake up, I am far slower to get going in the morning versus if it's a very sunny day.
* If you live in a region that is afflicted by snow and ice in winter, you want the sunlight to help with warming up pavement and melting snow and ice [in conjunction with road salt]. This use in particular isn't solved with artificial light.
I don't care - I'll adjust my life to what works. This past year I've had phone calls with people in India, Australia, and Germany (I'm in the US) There is no possible reasonable timezone for all of us, but I made each one work.
California voters actually passed a referendum to move to year round DST, but federal law only allows year round standard time. I think most people prefer the idea of year round DST.
The can of worms every time we change the clocks forwards and backwards and despite what the "experts" say, there is clearly no obvious advantage, otherwise we would just get rid of it.
There are also differences between places of different latitude so I cannot speak to those on the equator or the extreme poles so no point assuming there is a single answer that everyone likes.
> [...] espite what the "experts" say, there is clearly no obvious advantage, otherwise we would just get rid of it.
When it comes to (possible) advantages, it depends on the context.
AFAICT, the positions of most chronobiology and sleep societies is that we should stick with Standard ("winter" / non-summer) Time year-round. Of course this may not be advantageous culturally or socially ("daylight after work FTW!!!1").
Definitely agree. If people actually cared, these topics would be discussed months before and after the switch. It seems to JUST come up in the spring and fall near the change.
I am regularly surprised people have such a strong opinion on this topic. I personally enjoy that the sun only sets around 21:30 in the summer, and I like the cozy early sunset in winter. I never had any problems with the one hour less sleep once a year, especially since it is easy to allow for a transition phase of around a week. I have 1 clock in the house which doesn't adjust automatically, so this can hardly be called a nuisance. More than once I didn't even notice the change until the evening - I just got up when my alarm went off.
When the European Union conducted a poll 3 years ago, 4,6 million people answered. That is less than one percent (!) of the population, which is evidence that the overwhelming majority of people just don't care.
> When the European Union conducted a poll 3 years ago, 4,6 million people answered. That is less than one percent (!) of the European population, which is evidence that the overwhelming majority of people just don't care.
I'm sorry what? Unless 100% percent of the population was surveyed and 99% told pollsters they "don't care", that isn't evidence of anything.
I care about lots of issues and I respond to almost no polls.
This was a poll with extensive media coverage, and it was clear that the EU would use it to base a decision on. Polls were open for over 1 month.
Clearly if less than 1% of the population would participate in a presidential election that would be evidence that the population just did not care about the outcome?
Or they think the outcome of the poll is irrelevant. Not answering a poll is not equivalent to not caring about what a poll is about.
I care quite a bit about certain policy decisions, but I don't answer any political polls since I think all of them are bunk or intentionally picking stats with poorly written questions.
No, it isn't. It is only evidence that 99% of Europeans did not vote in this poll. It says nothing about why they didn't vote. Or did you personally interview the remaining 455 million people and tallied their responses about why they didn't vote?
It was slightly annoying in the past, when you had to change all clocks in the house manually. But nowadays... for me it's one I have to change manually.
Otherwise, loosing one hour of sleep during spring is not a problem at all. Gaining one in autumn feels like a net benefit.
Skimming this thread, there can be said something about vocal minorities.
Cozy winter feelings, not having to deal with international scheduling, laying in bed enjoying your extra hour of sleep in the autumn, not worrying about your employees calling in sick with cluster migraines or seasonal depression. Sounds really good where do I sign up?
I belong to an exclusive group that has needed to write software that calculates the time span between two (local) instants in time. And now, we can't just use GMT. The inputs we get are local time, by specification.
I have strong opinions about DST. And even more fringe-y, I have opinions about time zones too.
4.6 million people in a poll? That's a HUGE number.
Note that the EU parliament actually did pass a law to abolish changing the clocks, but I think it didn't pass the other branches of EU government, so probably got lost. Hopefully it can be revived in future.
The accuracy of a sample, as long as it's representative, doesn't depend that much on the population size, just on the size of the sample. Once you get past a few thousand samples you are accurate to a couple of percent no matter how big the population is.
The question here is was the poll representative? That depends on how those 4.6 million people were selected.
Participation varied significantly by country – if I remember correctly, something like 2/3 of the responses came from Germany, even though pre-Brexit Germany only accounted for approximatively 1/6 of the EU population.
The poll doesn't matter. In 2019, the European Parliament voted to end daylight saving time by 2021. This is democracy in action, people expressed themselves through their elected representatives.
The most amusing part was the crybabies whining about how their pet issue didn’t get any attention this year because it coincides with an uptick of corona.
>In the last four years, 19 states have enacted legislation or passed resolutions to provide for year-round daylight saving time, if Congress were to allow such a change, and in some cases, if surrounding states enact the same legislation. Because federal law does not currently allow full-time DST, Congress would have to act before states could adopt changes. The 19 states are:
>Alabama, Georgia, Minnesota, Mississippi and Montana (2021).
>Idaho, Louisiana, Ohio (resolution), South Carolina, Utah and Wyoming (2020).
>Arkansas, Delaware, Maine, Oregon, Tennessee and Washington (2019).
>Florida (2018; California voters also authorized such a change that year, but legislative action is pending).
I think most of these laws have been written as wanting to use daylight time year round, which isn't allowed by federal law. Federally states can use standard time or switch between standard and daylight but they cannot always follow daylight time.
Daylight time is the same as standard time of the time zone to the east, so I don't know why these states haven asked the transportation sec to reassign their timezones.
I remain steadfast in my position that people who support year-round DST are utterly clueless and have not done the evaluation of what that means to kids going to school in the morning in winter.
Care to share your evaluation, and how it compares to implications for crime and traffic accidents in the evening hours? Or did you already accomplish your goal of calling a large number of people you've never met "utterly clueless"?
Right now in California sunrise in winter is around 7-7:30am. Many schools start as early as 7:15am, and most start by 8:15. Moving to year round DST would mean changing from some kids starting school right at sunrise to most kids walking to school in the dark.
I chose my wording carefully. I don't think I can persuade you and I don't seek to persuade you. In my opinion, intentionally choosing a timezone deliberately offset from the historic and natural meaning of 12pm ~= noon, which requires significant support which I have never seen.
DST is for people who have low control over their time, i.e. they are subject to control from others. This could be as simple as not being able to set when they work, which is fairly common. Or being subject to when daycare opens or whatever.
Personally, I have great control over my time, so I just let my automated systems adjust their clocks and if I want "an extra hour of sleep", I just take it. If I want to go biking in the sun, I do it then. And so on and so forth.
The important thing is that we devolve power adequately. So the federal government should drop DST/no-DST decisions completely to the states. Currently US Gov only lets states adhere to the non-DST time, or adopt DST. My state wants to go full DST and can't.
I personally disagree. I live on the extreme west end of a time zone, and I greatly enjoy having an more daylight during my after-work leisure time. Without DST, I would have almost no post-work sunlight outside of the actual summer months.
Day light savings time is the process of switch clocks forward 1 hour in the spring. This transfers 1 hour of sunlight from the morning to the night, hence increasing the hours of daylight. Then in the fall day light savings time ends and we give that hour back to the morning.
If we eliminated day light savings time you would still have post work sunlight in the winter.
In the far west end of many timezones you never have post-work sunlight in the winter and the DST fight is over keep some post-work sunlight in the spring/fall and even parts of the summer.
Western edges of timezones often favor/prefer year-round "daylight time" because that's closer to their natural noon as US timezones especially heavily favor natural noon on the eastern border.
> In the far west end of many timezones you never have post-work sunlight in the winter
So...fix the problem at the source by changing the boundaries so solar noon is clock noon at (approximately) the center of the zone instead of the eastern boundary.
I think a lot of US timezones at least would split roughly in half if we entirely got rid of DST with eastern cities picking standard time and western cities picking daylight time. I think that's a big part of why we continue to debate getting rid of DST and never actually do it because no one wants to redraw the timezone boundaries.
It's certainly an interesting notion in theory, though I believe in practice it isn't all that likely either.
Before the railways every city and/or county just about was its own time zone and a lot of the historical records are in major computer timezone databases if you feel like exploring them. It's fascinating. (Including sometimes minute and second offsets from UTC; things that programmers sometimes wrongly assume aren't possible with UTC offsets.) I think it also should also be somewhat obvious pretty quickly that it is a communication nightmare for any company with a presence in multiple cities or any person travelling between cities.
I also think "Swatch beats" made it seem pretty obvious to me that no one actually wants to standardize only on a single timezone with no offsets either.
At risk of going way off topic, this reminds of the weird debates I've had with people about post-COVID calendars and how all the days kind of seem the same and all the months just weird. I've got friends that got deep into the "What day in March 2020 is this again?" "fandom" (https://whatdayofmarch2020.com/)
My own ridiculous reaction was trying to use the French Revolutionary Calendar with the English month names (either the joke ones or the more serious proposal depending on my mood): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_calendar
It's really hard to use a different calendar, even as a joke. Obviously this effort was not helped that though there is plenty of software calendars that can convert to/from the French Revolutionary Calendar quite obviously none of them were English localized (in either the witty or the serious names), and it isn't really worth the time to do that, especially just as a joke. (Today is 21 Sneezy or 21 Fogarious, if you were curious.)
Some people with children don't like that because "[their] children will have to go to school in the dark" during the winter. That's what killed legislation to make DST permanent where I live.
It wouldn't change a thing. The deeper cause of the day rythm is the daylight cycle. We adjust all our times, like start of work day or school start relative to that - mostly so that you get up after or not too long before sunrise and have most of the daylight during work time. If you change the time zone setting, day times are going to adjust accordingly.
Why can't the time someone wakes up or works change with the season, but using the same timezone? What is the point to call it 7a when it's actually 6a?
It's the advantage of centralization. Instead of every entity changing their operational hours, they peg it to a common standard, and simply change the standard. It's a layer of indirection.
By doing it this way, we keep things in synch, like business hours matching school hours matching transit timetables and so on. If every one of them changed their hours separately, we'd have a much greater mess than the less-bad current approach to daylight time.
Whether we want the functionality at all (to adjust human activities based on sunlight hours) is a separate question. Given that we do, DST is a useful abstraction compared to going without it.
Just curious, why not just just start and end your job an hour earlier all year round, 7-4 instead of 8-5? Then you gain an extra hour of evening sun all year, instead of just during DST?
This doesn't make sense to me. If you're on the extreme western end of a time zone, the clock time of sunset is later compared to points further east in the same time zone. So you're in better shape for post-work sunlight than anyone else in your time zone. The people who have it worst for post-work sunlight are the ones at the extreme eastern end of a time zone.
Getting rid of DST doesn't have to mean to stay on standard time permanently. BC for instance chooses to stay on DST. Some day. Hopefully. At least the legislation is already there.
I dislike daylight saving time, and want the time zone offset to be the same all the time. I would rather have 12:00 solar noon (it make much more sense to me than the other way), but would also accept the other way; either way is better than switching for daylight saving time. If there is enough sun light then you can also see the time by the sun dial too. Also, the fact that the clock is switch back can confuse the time wrongly, since the clock will say the same number twice making it ambiguous and also you cannot simply to subtract the numbers to measure the intervals of time.
You should be able to do things regardless of what number the clock says. Don't rely on the numbers on the clock to dictate everything you are doing all the time. If you want to go outside when it is not dark, then that is what you can do. If you want to eat dinner when it is not dark, then that is what you can do. If you want to sleep when it is dark, then that is what you can do. This can be done regardless of what number is on the clock. If you want to work or schedule something for some time you can do based on whatever criteria would be appropriate, regardless of what number is on the clock; regardless of what criteria are being used, the numbers on the clock will still tell you the intervals of time, and how long it takes. For example, opening hours need not be fixed, and holidays need not be fixed, etc. But, maybe you will not need to schedule something for a specific time anyways, in all circumstances. Also, if you want to wake up earlier, then you can set your alarm clock for an earlier time; you don't need daylight saving time for this to work.
Sometimes I see an "Experts Say" headline and wonder why we need an expert to say something that is so obvious to everyone. If there's one thing that unites all Americans, maybe every person on earth, it's damn Daylight Saving Time.
I've yet to meet anyone who celebrates those days!
I assume someone must think it's still a good idea for some reason?
"Experts say" is a call to authority. It's a rhetorical trope of the lowest quality journalist. It's meant to shut down all debate and frame the headline as a foregone conclusion.
"Experts say" vaccines help (a) reduce your chances of getting COVID, and (b) not suffering as badly from it should you contract it.
Perhaps some of the "experts" who study how daylight effects us should at least be consulted before changes be made. The Society for Research on Biological Rhythms:
> Local and national governments around the world are currently considering the elimination of the annual switch to and from Daylight Saving Time (DST). As an international organization of scientists dedicated to studying circadian and other biological rhythms, the Society for Research on Biological Rhythms (SRBR) engaged experts in the field to write a Position Paper on the consequences of choosing to live on DST or Standard Time (ST). The authors take the position that, based on comparisons of large populations living in DST or ST or on western versus eastern edges of time zones, the advantages of permanent ST outweigh switching to DST annually or permanently. Four peer reviewers provided expert critiques of the initial submission, and the SRBR Executive Board approved the revised manuscript as a Position Paper to help educate the public in their evaluation of current legislative actions to end DST.
> In summary, the scientific literature strongly argues against the switching between DST and Standard Time and even more so against adopting DST permanently. […]
If we didn't have daylight savings, the sun would rise at 4:30 in the summer. This seems quite unpleasant to me. I would rather have an extra hour of evening light.
Alternatively, if we did DST all year round, the sun would rise at 8:30 in the winter. That also seems unpleasant.
Working a midnight shift on a Saturday evening and going home an hour 'early' is quite pleasant.
Working a midnight shift on a Saturday evening and having to work an hour extra isn't.
The 'extra' hour feels nice this time of year. When the days are getting shorter and it's getting colder. And you know colder and darker days are ahead. While in the Spring you have Spring to look forwards too.
They often talk about the increase in accidents in the spring. But this time of year road conditions typically get worse. In terms of lack of daylight, more active wildlife and other small issues(first frost, wet roads, slippery leaves, Summer tires still on, etc).
In the Navy, when you're sailing west and setting the clock back, it happens after noon so that the work day is an hour longer. When you're sailing east and setting the clock forward, it happens after midnight so that you're losing an hour of sleep.
At least where I live (NE USA), February thru April is when we get our winter weather season. January is usually the coldest month, but we don’t get a lot of ice or snow until later in the season. Almost like clockwork we get hit by a big snowstorm the second week in April.
If they clocks were GMT year round in Inverness, sunrise at 0730 today, 0830 come December, 0900 on shortest day.
But under GMT year round sunset in July would be before 2100, which seems a waste when culture has people getting up about 0700 (and if you did shift culture to get up an hour earlier, you'd be up for hours before sunrise in winter).
With Daylight Saving sunrise at 10am not great.
America is (aside from Alaska) quite far south, so the effect isn't as pronounced
> I assume someone must think it's still a good idea for some reason?
Nobody does. But ask a group of people what the solution should be and someone will start screaming bloody murder about how the correct time is standard or daylight. As a result, politically, forcing a move will get you (a) lots of people with meh level support for you and (b) a small, pissed off group. Which is, electorally, worse than useless.
I think this argument is similar to advocacy for metric vs imperial - yeah, it probably makes sense, but the current system is workable enough that the pain of living with it is less than the pain of transitioning from it. IOW, nobody really cares enough about it but it’s fun to gripe about. Also, Firefly shouldn’t have been cancelled.
I've lived in Arizona my whole life and I didn't know what DST was until I was in high school. Arizona hasn't observed DST since 1967. I've been in other states a few times during the changeover and it's always seemed annoying to me.
We usually get our own selection in Time Zone menus, so that is kinda cool.
Just get rid of the planet in general. Would make everything so much easier. No more messy months or non integer year lengths. And even no more leap seconds. So many problems would be solved, just think of the efficiency.
I prefer the idea of gradually eliminating time zones, by people starting to use UTC everywhere. It's as simple as individuals "reprogramming" the way they think about time. And, you can do it yourself and among friends without the government and the rest of society going along.
Within a certain approximation to be honest, although all in all I'd agree with you.
Also the fact that without time zones, for everybody who isn't lucky enough to live near wherever the meridian ends up the calendar date will now change somewhere during waking hours, which seems a rather confusing prospect.
DST is a sloppy attempt to shift the clock to make the time of sunrise more fixed instead of just rather than fixing the time of solar noon. We should just go all in and define 00:00 as sunrise rather than 12:00 as solar noon.
Schools and shops would open around 01:00 or maybe 02:00 sunrise time. Typical office workers head home around 10:00. Where I am the sun would set around 09:00 in the winter and 15:30 in the summer.
And of course anything on the internet or that requires cross-region coordination would be scheduled in UTC, perhaps with a user's local sunrise time displayed as a parenthetical. To decide when to call my Uncle Steve in Melbourne I'd look up his local time as I do today, but if we scheduled a call ahead of time we'd schedule it in UTC.
I would be ok with getting rid of DST entirely, but I will say I got a lot less vocal about it once I got a smartwatch (initially a Pebble, now an Apple Watch), simply because it automatically adjusts the time for me.
I'm someone who is wholly dependent on a wristwatch for nearly every aspect of my life. When I would forget to preemptively set my watch backward or forwards, I would be late for everything for a day, and it would lead to most of aspects of my life being worse.
Now that my watch is automatically set for me by the phone towers, and my alarms are also automatically updated, DST has shifted from "ruining my day" to "mild annoyance".
"Sleep is also necessary for the body to heal and repair heart and blood vessels. Lack of sleep has been linked to an increased risk heart disease, kidney disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, obesity and stroke, experts say."
I don't think that's a particularly controversial statement, but is it germane to a discussion of a twice yearly switch in sleep schedules? The general consensus for travelers is that it takes 1-2 days per hour of time difference to get past jet lag. There's a decent argument to be made based on accident avoidance, but the rest of the "health impacts" seem harder to justify.
That's called "scope insensitivity" :) It's a 1-2 day issue, multiplied by whole populations. It's pretty difficult for human brains to parse this, which is probably the cause of a lot of civilization inadequacies.
Ah - but the population of people-travel-days is also probably quite high, and while it doesn't impact a "whole population", it impacts a subset of the population frequently enough to be a comparable order of magnitude to the population as a whole.
(Potentially bad) back of envelope calculations follow:
1. The entire US population of 330 million is impacted by a 1 hour shift twice per year (of which one shift is probably more impactful than the other to sleep health).
2. On a typical year, there are about 1 billion airline passengers in the US alone (domestic plus inbound/outbound international). This counts everyone on a flight as one passenger. Let's assume that people take on average 2 legs in one day (probably a slightly high estimate). That's 500 million people, but we should halve that again since people have outbound and inbound trips. So we're down to 250 million people being impacted by travel.
3. Some of the travel is in the same time zone, but other travel spans many time zones (inbound international flights or transcontinental flights). We can call that a wash, though we could probably get to actual data if I weren't being lazy. I'd also argue that the travel is going to be much more disruptive to sleep schedules since in addition to the actual time zone shifts, travelers have to deal with early departures and late arrivals.
4. Many of the people who travel are being counted multiple times here, so we don't have a true collection of 250 million people impacted, but it's not clear that 1 person experiencing jet lag 10 times should only be counted once, since this is a recurring 1-2 day issue.
5. We're not orders of magnitude off here in terms of people-days impacted by normal travel vs the great DST debate.
This is rubbish. I like to ride my bike after work, which ends at 5pm. With DST I can ride all the way up to this week and still get home before dark. Please don't take this away from me, I hate it when it gets dark by 5pm.
This is completely arbitrary. We could switch to DST all year round and work 9-5, or we could switch to normal time year-round, and work 8-4. It's the same thing - you're just calling it something different.
You're right and this is the single dumbest argument I see all the time for why we need the clock switch.
It's far easier to change the local office hours for workplaces and schools during winter time as needed. For extreme northern areas, they could even move it by more than one hour. It can be their choice! Let the work hours be decided locally rather than a blanket rule for the poles and equator. Match our behavior to the daylight rather than the other way round - you know, like every other species on Earth
Public transport schedules need to be adjusted, too, and local networks often tie into regional networks, which in turn tie into the national network (where such a thing exists). Each municipality choosing its own date for switching could cause a lot of complications in that regard.
That’s what Utah plans to do but there is currently a federal law that prohibits the use of permanent DST. Utah, California, and a couple other states have asked the federal government to change that law and I believe there are plans to consider it soon.
Utah has passed a law that makes DST permanent as soon as the federal law is removed.
Edit: On further review, this seems to have died in committee.
This is the worst option. Since we started caring about time, "noon" has meant "when the sun is straight overhead". Unless there's a parallel push to change noon to 1PM (and midnight to 1AM), I'd fight that tooth and nail.
This- Even if your work allows you to set your own schedule, there many other aspects of society that don't. Schools and daycares, in particular, can dictate the schedule of parents. If you can't start off to work because the bus/dropoff isn't till 830a it doesn't matter when your office lets you come in.
Even if there aren't external factors and there is theoretically flexibility around working hours cultural norms can make it difficult. My workgroup/division seems to have a strong norm about not scheduling meetings before 930a, but scheduling from 4-5p is normal.
In March 2019, the European parliament voted to end daylight saving time in the EU by 2021 [0]. To this day I don't know why this was dropped. It may be because of the pandemic, but respect for democratic institutions means we should put it back on the table very soon.
I love it - unpopular opinion. I love the extra sunlight in the summer and that the Sun doesn't come up at 4AM and I love that in the winter it isn't dark until 8AM so I can actually be outside doing things (dog walking, kids to school, etc).
I hope we don't change it as it's actually a great system and I think people would hate if we just stayed on a single time. Of course, people that live on certain latitudes probably care less about these optimizations and see it more as an annoyance.
Stop saying you love the clock changes. You like the time zone that DST puts you into. Push your local government to make the time zone you like permanent.
No, we love the changes. We want to wake up a certain amount of time after the sun rises and be on time to work/school. We then want the maximum amount of possible daylight in the afternoon/evening.
We don't like DST in the winter because for many people this requires waking up in the dark if the time they have to get to work/school remains the same.
No, I like that we change the clock. I like not having the Sun rise so early in the summer and so late in the winter. We have to adjust the clocks to make this a reality.
As a parent of young children I just want to go back to the time we don't change time at random. Also the older I get it takes longer to get use to the change.
I don't like to throw shade on my own profession, but I know some number of code bases that will need to be furiously updated if DST goes away. I wonder what's going on deep in some 'core infrastructure' code.
Tracking time zones all over the world is hard, and a lot of code that does it was written decades ago. I wouldn't eagerly sign up to review it all.
I'd much rather stick with DST than send some poor devs down that path.
Much patching / updating of tzdata and rebooting. I think that effort led to a bunch of changes that make for easier updates going forward.
Until that point there wasn't really that much churn in things over the past few decades, so people became a little more bit complacent when it came to TZ code.
If there's an example of a thing that you shouldn't try to do yourself other than crypto, it's timezones. The timezone database is there, and it is updated regularly by very dedicated and intelligent people. There's no excuse for not using it.
Wikipedia suggests it's been there since 86. There is a whole lot of code written before 86 and I'm suspecting a whole lot of it doesn't get regularly refactored. I can tell you from experience that there's financial code with some dicey hard coding. I haven't seen it in a long time so hopefully some happy Cobol programmer jumped and used the money to retire early.
DST must go! It’s giving whole countries jet lag two times per year. It’s like leaded gasoline for the collective mind, which BTW was introduced around the same time and also considered a good idea. Except there is no scientific reasoning behind DST. It’s purely for convenience for some. The astronomer who seriously proposed it wanted more daylight hours to devote to collecting and examining insects… Arghh
Seems like in general early-risers would prefer standard time, and people waking up around 7am or later would probably prefer daylight savings time year-round.
My guess is that most people in the USA are _not_ early risers at this point and would prefer daylight savings time year-round, but would be interested to see data on this.
Many states (by now) have already passed legislation to the effect that if/when the federal government allows it, they will simply stay on DST year-around.
There are a number of bills on a federal level that would allow states to do this, but each of these bills have seemingly been lost in the torpid world of inaction.
I seriously doubt that would ever happen. Devices do not have a "always DST" mode, but they do in fact have a "never DST" mode.
In order to stay in DST, the region would have to completely change which timezone they observe. Pacific Time would observe Mountain Time, Mountain -> Central, Central -> Eastern, and Eastern would have to observe whatever GMT-4 is.
In a world with smart clocks, every major metropolitan area should be in its own time zone, time should skew very slightly at three a.m. every morning, and sunrise should always be at seven a.m. DST can be improved.
It might be just me but I can’t understand the difficulty of shifting one hour over a night or two. Flying across N America is 3+ hours and going to Europe can be 6-11. Do the people who can’t deal with an hour damn near die on trips such as this?
If small kids have to be outside near traffic at any point, better than they get as much light as possible. Having little Johnny mushed by an suv tends to upset folks.
And thinking about Cop26, perhaps we should minimize external lighting when possible to save energy and lessen impact on nature. Both of these, unfortunately, lean towards dst.
Edit: forgot. I assume most people change when they get up on the weekend vs, the work week. If this assumption is correct, they might have more extreme time shifts every weekend than the once a year problem being discussed…
In Seattle, for example, I think the sun would rise before 5 am as late as early August. On the other hand, if Seattle stayed on DST (+7) year-round then the sun would rise after 8AM from early November to late February, and as late as 9AM in December.
Seattle is an extreme case, because it is so far north, but New York City is not that different, and I think more people would bemoan the lack of after-work daylight during spring and summer than currently bemoan the switch, and would be unhappy about it for a longer period each year.
Of course, if we got rid of DST, we could all just agree to get up earlier in the summer. Maybe we could even standardize that by agreeing to all start getting up earlier on the same day each spring. :-)