4 ms·

It's the switch that everyone hates. Instead of ending DST, can we agree to stop using Standard Time?

• chillaxtian 11y ago
  amen
• mws 11y ago
  yes please!
• tempestn 11y ago
  Agreed! I'd rather have sun in the evening when I can enjoy it than when I'm sleeping or working. DST year round would be fantastic.
  • anon4 11y ago
    Oh god please no. If that's what you want, go to work one hour earlier. I can't wake up that early.
  • zanny 11y ago
    That is blaming a symptom for a problem. The fact people "expect" the sun to rise between 4-6am and go down between 6-9pm is just a product of a broken timekeeping system from two hundred years ago. "Time" is not a thing that cares what side of the planet you are on, and it makes international scheduling and communication literally hell when you have to calculate time zones. If we are going to fix time, we should switch everyone to UTC time. If you want to go to work in the dark and leave when the sun rises, have your company schedule hours accordingly. Changing DST now doesn't change that, your business is still setting hours arbitrarilly based around an archaic model of "wake up at 7 work 9-5 go to bed at 11" no matter where you are on the planet. It just makes no sense, and is simply culturally normative so people expect it and structure their internal model of time around it.
    • AnthonyMouse 11y ago
      > Changing DST now doesn't change that, your business is still setting hours arbitrarilly based around an archaic model of "wake up at 7 work 9-5 go to bed at 11" no matter where you are on the planet. It just makes no sense, and is simply culturally normative so people expect it and structure their internal model of time around it. It actually makes a certain amount of sense. There are people who have to work in the daytime, e.g. because they work outside. Farmers, construction workers, etc. Then their administrative staff needs to work at the same time as the outside workers, and their customers and suppliers need to work at the same time as the administrative staff, etc. So everybody works 9-5, where "9-5" is some approximation to daylight hours. But changing clocks twice a year is still stupid.
      • zanny 11y ago
        Except you are conflating "work in the daytime" with "work 9-5". There is absolutely nothing wrong with your sunlight hours where people work being from 1900-0300 rather than 0900 to 1700 hours. If you made that switch everyone living in an area will get used to the times the sun rises and sets, and the normal work hours of the locale based off universal time rather than arbitrary regional timezones or DST. When you travel, you don't have to have migraines trying to manage the clocks, because your clock is always right. You would still have the same trouble adapting to another regional work cycle than you would now - you just remove the unnecessary burden of arbitrary timezones to make everyones sunrise happen at "roughly the same numerical time but never at the same actual time".
        • AnthonyMouse 11y ago
          If you're not actually going to change the times that things happen then nothing stops you from using UTC already. The whole problem with daylight savings time isn't that you have to change your clock, it's that you have to change your schedule. It would be excellent if everybody responded to daylight savings time by scheduling work to happen from 10-6 instead of 9-5, so that nothing actually changed but the clock. But that obviously only works if everybody does it.
    • 11y ago
• frik 11y ago
  Yes, this.
• twoodfin 11y ago
  Agree. Or just rejigger North America's time zones generally. There is no reason why Bostonians should have to tolerate 4:15 sunsets. The most frequent modern objection I hear is that children will have to go to school in the dark, but school schedules aren't orbital mechanics: Shift those around instead.
  • ghaff 11y ago
    Much as I'd prefer year-round DST in general (as we once had), I have enough flexibility these days that it really doesn't matter that much. At one level I wouldn't be opposed to moving New England to Atlantic Time where it "belongs." But, if I'm being honest, I have to admit that it's probably not worth putting Boston in a separate timezone from New York and the rest of the East Coast (and creating a 4 hour difference from California).
  • tossaway1 11y ago
    I don't think shifting school schedules is as easy as you'd think. The start times in my town (and I assume most) are structured to enable working parents to get to work around 9 (depending on their commute) after getting their kids off to school. Pushing school times back an hour would be a big disruption for a large percentage of the population.
    • ryandrake 11y ago
      Then start work earlier. Again, not rocket science.
      • matthewmacleod 11y ago
        It's not rocket science, but that doesn't mean it's easy.
      • prebrov 11y ago
        That is exactly what DST does. Once a year everybody shifts their schedule one hour earlier and start working and go to school one hour earlier.
• _kyran 11y ago
  While you're at it, I'd be happy to even bump it forward another hour!
• usrusr 11y ago
  Not everyone hates it. At my latitude, winter mornings at the summer offset would be terribly depressing and summer evenings would lose much of their appeal without it. Also I actually enjoy having the yearly ebb and flow of daylight getting spiced up with some predictable discontinuity, but I see how this is a personal preference: It gives me a clear marker for when to stop bothering with the little remaining after work daylight which is less frustrating than being torn on the threshold for weeks.
• im3w1l 11y ago
  I see what you are saying but I think it would be better we instead moved the clocks the other way, and by two hours. That way we could all enjoy lazy mornings and more easily pull off late night coding sessions.
• transfire 11y ago
  How about we split the difference and be done with it. Spring forward 30 mins and leave it.