9 ms·
Making daylight saving time permanent could reduce crime
- nakedrobot2 11y agoCan we just go ahead and put the clocks forward 3 or 4 hours then? Mornings are not worth living anyway, and we could have glorious evenings where the sun sets at 8pm in the winter, and at midnight in the summer. Wouldn't that be lovely? :-)
- darkhorn 11y agoSeems like China.
- de_Selby 11y agoThe article seems to be making a lot of assumptions. For example another explanation could be that crime is just seasonal. People who are less well off would probably be able to survive on less during summer when they don't have heating costs. Or maybe they're just in a better mood.
- jedmeyers 11y ago"[The increase of the period of daylight saving time by four weeks] produced a useful natural experiment for our paper," authors Jennifer Doleac and Nicholas Sanders write at Brookings, "which helped us isolate the effect of daylight from other seasonal factors that might affect crime."
- de_Selby 11y agoAh ok, it seems I skimmed over that bit! That makes it more interesting.
- jusben1369 11y agoI think you missed what makes this result so compelling. As far as these things go this was a pretty significant controlled change.
- PepeGomez 11y agoHow significant?
- gruez 11y agoCall me a traditionalist, but shouldn't 12pm be when the sun is directly overhead? (by definition)
- sib 11y agoNeither, really. It should just be 12m (meridian). "am" means ante (before) meridian, while "pm" is "post" (after) meridian. So, midnight should be both 12am and 12pm ;)
- hugh4 11y agoAh, but 12pm doesn't mean "twelve hours after the meridian", it means "the hour labelled 'twelve' which happens after the meridian".
- alwaysdoit 11y agoWhy would you want to reset the counter in the middle of the day?
- AustinG08 11y agomaybe on the equator...
- sokoloff 11y agoon the equinox...
- baddox 11y agoThat works well enough until people are able to move or send communications faster than 30mph or so.
- eridius 11y agoTime zones already mean that's not true. Pretty recently there was a post (I think here on HN) that shaded the entire world to show how far off from 12pm they are when the sun is directly overhead. There were some pretty serious gradients on a lot of time zones (where the left edge is far off in one direction and the right edge is far off in the other direction). And there were a lot of time zones where the entire zone was offset in one direction. Unfortunately I don't remember enough to find that post again.
- DarkLinkXXXX 11y agoWouldn't it be better to increase the timezone by one, and abolish DST, so that it wouldn't be so confusing?
- im3w1l 11y agoAnd yet other research says we should start studying/working later. Can't have it both ways. http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/08/why-school-should-start-later/401489/ http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/08/why-sch... http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/shortcuts/2015/sep/09/why-you-should-start-work-at-10am-unless-youre-in-your-50s http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/shortcuts/2015/sep/0...
- cortesoft 11y agoSure you can! Go to work later, come home earlier. Problem solved!
- Natsu 11y agoBetter off just abolishing it. It's also been linked to more car accidents and such. If you want to set summer hours, fine, do that, but it's just silly to play with the clock to do so.
- msbarnett 11y agoThere's no meaningful difference between abolishing DST and making DST permanent. It's really just a question about whether you'd permanently like a little more sun in the morning, or the afternoon. In the Northern city that I live in, in the winter, a permanent DST would be preferable. We're already in the preferable situation 8 months of the year. No reason not to just extend it the other 4 months, permanently.
- hugh4 11y agoThere's a meaningful difference, it the question of whether your whole timing system is based on a lie. Is midnight in the middle of the night? Is midday in the middle of the day?
- msbarnett 11y ago> There's a meaningful difference, it the question of whether your whole timing system is based on a lie. Is midnight in the middle of the night? Is midday in the middle of the day? Solar midday already isn't the middle of the day in much of the world. It happens around 3pm for me in the summer, and before noon in the winter. Not everyone in the world lives close to the equator. All time is, in a very real sense, just a consensual lie we agree to tell ourselves.
- melling 11y agoCould? Are we playing with statistics again? Yesterday I learned on HN that you're 8x more likely to be killed by a cop than by a terrorist. This also turns out to be the same odds as being killed by your furniture. https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2015/10/29/youre-8-times-more-likely-to-be-killed-by-a-police-officer-than-by-furniture/ https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2015/10/29/youre-8-times-more-l...
- xixi77 11y agoWell, if you actually look at the article, they, for example, find a statistically significant 7% drop in robberies (with up to 27% in a specific hour).
- melling 11y agoDo you think we're permanently changing human behavior and perhaps there are people who are less likely to commit crimes? Thus there will be fewer robbers in the world, for example? These people are emboldened by the darkness and smaller crowds? Were there particular areas where the crimes occurred? So many more questions...
- thaumasiotes 11y agoThat's nothing -- if you do observe daylight savings time, you'll see a 100% drop in crime (and everything else) during one specific hour.
- robbrown451 11y agoAnd when people get used to it, shift the time forward by another hour? This makes as much sense as those people who set their clocks forward by 15 minutes so they aren't late.
- esrauch 11y agoIt doesn't, because the numbers of time have an independent meaning that people follow that is unrelated to the sun, which is the entire reason that daylight savings time even works: people don't just ignore it and work 9-5 this week and 8-4 next week even though those are the same natural times.
- Natsu 11y agoYeah, they do have a meaning in terms of coordinating when we do things with other people. Which seems to be a better reason NOT to mess with it at all, really... There's no DST where I live. That's a good thing. Now I only have to worry about people who didn't resend Outlook invites after the time change or such.
- bendykstra 11y agoOne interesting consequence of this is that the further west that you look within a timezone, the less sleep people tend to get. > Examination of ATUS activity logs shows that workers experiencing earlier sunset also go to bed earlier and that this correlation between sunset and bedtime persists even if the worker goes to bed well after dark. Coordinated work start times translate this earlier bedtime into longer sleep. Time Use and Productivity: The Wage Returns to Sleep, Matthew Gibson and Jeffrey Shrader
- robbrown451 11y agoThey have that meaning because we are used to it. We'd adapt when a get used to the new situation.
- xixi77 11y agoIt does make sense though. I would love for everyone to change typical working hours to 6 to 3 instead of the current 8 to 5, but it seems unlikely. Perhaps I'm subjective here -- but really, how often do you hear people complain about it being dark in late morning, as opposed to early afternoon? (FWIW, I do set the wall clock forward, too :) it does in fact help.)
- acaloiar 11y ago> In 2007, Congress increased the period of daylight saving time (DST henceforth) by four weeks, adding three weeks in the spring and one in the fall. "This produced a useful natural experiment for our paper," My knee-jerk reaction to reading this is that their paper's conclusions must be based on a single observation.
- riffic 11y agoStop playing games with time. Instead of year-long daylight saving time, I'd rather we stick with standard time all year long.
- xixi77 11y agoCare to explain why?
- nostrademons 11y agoI think he's saying that if you're going to make daylight-savings time permanent, it's become the "standard", so why not call it standard time? Anyway, what the article is really saying is that people should work 8-4 instead of 9-5, because then they commute home before it gets dark and are at less risk for muggings, robberies, and rapes. Which is true, but it's kinda silly that to get there we should just change the meaning of time rather than the hours we work. Then again, maybe that is the most effective way to effect society-wide change.
- xixi77 11y agoWell, (1) it's an easy way to solve the coordination problem, and (2) is MUCH lower cost through having to update every single instance where a person or organization's working hours are mentioned :)
- riffic 11y agoI'm not saying to implement year long DST and call it standard time. We already have Standard time. Daylight saving time is Standard time +1 hour. My idea would be to stay on this, all year long, without pushing the clocks ahead/back twice a year.
- qyv 11y agoInvariably when I am trying to setup some kind of international conf call I cant help but think that communication would be easier without timezones. Imagine the ease of coordinating world-wide tele-meetings if everyone just understood and used UTC. Yes technology often uses it under the hood, but if used it societally things would be so much simpler.
- akg_67 11y ago> Most street crime occurs in the evening around common commuting hours of 5 to 8 PM Instead of mucking with Time, which we may later find out have some 'unintended' consequences, why not businesses, schools and workplaces change their open and work hours? This will change the timing of the "commuting" hours and spread over longer duration potentially also reducing the rush hour traffic issues.
- intopieces 11y ago>Why not businesses, schools and workplaces change their open and work hours? It's far easier to legislate DST than to to regulate every business, school and workplace. In Indiana, DST and Time Zones are already political sore spots. There would be absolute revolt if they attempted to tell everyone to change the time they operate and everyone certainly wouldn't do it of their own volition.
- nommm-nommm 11y agoCanada changed their DST hours to coordinate with the US a few years later. Is there any data of this type from Canada?
- daveloyall 11y agoThis is why we can't have nice things.
- thought_alarm 11y agoIf it were up to me North America would only have two time zones, and no DST. I stopped changing my clocks years ago and I've never been happier. I'm on the west coast and I set all of my devices to "Phoenix, AZ" time zone, which is Mountain Standard Time year round (or Pacific Daylight Time year round). Most calendar software works fine with multiple time zones. Set your appointments in Pacific Time, and they're shown in Mountain Standard Time. There's really only 3 weeks of the year where mornings are unusually dark. The interesting thing is I naturally wake a little later during the dark mornings, and naturally wake a little earlier as the mornings become lighter. I enjoy it. I don't have to deal with the shock of losing an hour sleep in the spring, or the shock of the sun suddenly setting at 4:50 PM in the fall. The only negative is that Colbert is on an hour later than normal for a few months.
- JeffreyKaine 11y agoHow do you communicate with the rest of the world? Do you often make the mistake of setting a meeting up an hour off, and are you ever an hour off from other people's expectations?
- thought_alarm 11y agoFor formal appointments, you use your calendar software and enter your appointments in the local time zone. The software will automatically convert a 3:00 PM pacific-time appointment to your preferred time zone (Mountain Standard Time). For informal appointments, you get used to "7:00 PM your time, 8:00 PM my time" for the 4 months. In rare cases you may get it backwards and you're off by two hours, but those errors are usually caught quickly. The only time it's a real problem is when someone on the street asks you the time and you don't realize that you've put them off by an hour until you've walked away.
- PhasmaFelis 11y agoI'm not clear how any of this benefits you directly.
- avdempsey 11y agoI made an IPython notebook awhile back exploring the advantages and disadvantages of various DST proposals for my lat/long (you could download and plug in your own). (Please forgive the attempts at humor in the notebook, they were sloppy). https://github.com/avdempsey/IPython-Notebooks/blob/master/Daylight%20Savings/Concerning%20Daylight%20Savings%20Time.ipynb https://github.com/avdempsey/IPython-Notebooks/blob/master/D...
- ScottBurson 11y agoIt's possible that the 2007 DST extension reduced evening crime because sunset was still late enough for the difference to matter. I'm not sure that will remain true all winter. That is, even if DST ran all year, in the depth of winter it might still get dark early enough for the street criminals to come out between 5 and 8 PM. The link (near the bottom of the article) about how DST causes problems for farmers is baffling. Surely if any enterprise should be run on solar time rather than clock time, it's a farm! Why can't they just adjust their schedules so the DST change is irrelevant??
- scrollaway 11y ago> Why can't they just adjust their schedules so the DST change is irrelevant?? Because it's known to be bollocks. Lowest grade quality article.
- douche 11y agoI've always lived far enough north that the difference in daylight between summer/winter is very significant. In June, the sun is up at 5:30 in the morning, and doesn't set until after 9. In the winter, it's sometimes not light by 9AM when I go to work, and it is pitch black again by 4:30. It doesn't help that it is cold as hell at the same time that it is dark all the time. My sleep cycle tends to be very sunlight dependent, so I'm seriously dragging all winter, since my body wants to still be asleep when I have to get up, and by the end of the day, I'm already shutting down. Daylight savings time screws things up even more - turning the clocks back in the fall isn't terrible, but those first weeks in the spring are brutal.
- Houshalter 11y agoThere's no such thing as permanent daylight savings time. The point of daylight savings time is to shift everyone's routines forward during one section of the year, and backwards during another. If you don't shift, and the new times are fixed, then people will get used to it and just move their routines back 2 hours. People will treat new:6:00 as if it's really old:5:00, because it is. Nothing will change besides the numbers on paper.
- intopieces 11y agoI don't follow. How are people moving their routines back 2 hours? Shops aren't changing their hours and my work starts at the same time. I don't do anything according to the sun, I do everything because other people are doing that thing at that time.
- Houshalter 11y agoI meant 1 hour. But anyway that is the point of daylight savings time. The actual time doesn't change, just the number on the clock. Causing everyone to move their routines back 1 hour, so that they have more sunlight in the afternoon. Daylight savings time would work just as well if everyone decided to go to work from 8-4 during half of the year, and keep the clocks the same.
- intopieces 11y agoHow do you propose getting all workplaces to change their schedules to 8-4, nevermind the places that don't run those hours? Legislation? This solution keeps coming up and the practicality of it seems nonexistent. Any legislation of business is riddle with exceptions, there would be end to them for such a move as changing working hours.
- Houshalter 11y agoWhat are you talking about? I never suggested that was a good idea. I just said it would have the same effect. I was trying to explain the purpose of daylight savings time, because you didn't seem to understand it. My original comment was just saying that "permanent daylight savings time" is nonsensical. Since you bring it up, I do find it absolutely horrifying that we rely on the government to mandate that people miscalibrate their clocks once a year. Instead of businesses and stuff doing the right thing and moving their schedules back so people can have more afternoon time. But unfortunately that's the world we live in.
- angmarsbane 11y agoAm morning person. Must not be a criminal.