11 ms·
Why is permanent DST being considered instead of an absolute abolition of DST?
by snickerbockers 8y ago
Why is permanent DST being considered instead of an absolute abolition of DST?
- arijun 8y agoNo DST means that solar noon is always at 12:00. While useful for figuring out what time it is without a watch that's a less common occurrence nowadays. DST, on the other hand, pushes daytime later, so if you wake up at say 8 (after sunrise for most of the year) and go to sleep at midnight (after sunset), you see more daylight.
- Natanael_L 8y agoJust fix your schedule... Edit: downvoted for asking people to go up at another clock time in order to match the daylight, instead of going up at the same clock time and changing the clock to follow daylight. Really? What's so important about the number on the clock? Why not just be consistent with daylight, and let the clocks be normal?
- surye 8y ago> What's so important about the number on the clock? Because jobs, business hours, travel schedules?
- Natanael_L 8y agoYes, those places can fix their schedules to follow the daylight. Problem solved. Now you don't need to have permanent DST anymore. Why again does people want clock time not to match solar time? It's far more sane to change the numbers on the schedule than to change the clock.
- anyfoo 8y agoIf DST was abolished instead of made permanent, what is your plan to make everyone (including businesses, events, transport time tables...) move their hours by one hour earlier? Making DST permanent "just" requires a singular change of legislation, and basically never switching the clocks back to "normal" time. As has already been stated twice in a sibling discussion here, "changing an entire culture is hard", but I'm honestly interested in hearing your approach.
- Natanael_L 8y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18011554 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18011554
- wpietri 8y agoHow could having every business and school change their hours twice a year as they please be easier than just agreeing on couple of dates and switching everything? Instead of one time zone every thousand miles or so, you're talking about effectively having several time zones per block. That doesn't sound sane to me.
- Natanael_L 8y agoDoesn't everybody already have different schedules? Aren't seasonal schedules already a thing? Just communicate better. You can already find things like updated opening times in Google maps, etc.
- wpietri 8y ago"Just communicate better" puts an enormous burden on people. I already know the opening times for places I go regularly. Seasonal schedules are not a thing here, presumably because of DST. It's ridiculous to suggest that it's easider for every business update Google (and Yelp and everything else) twice yearly, and that everybody check that before they go anywhere. That is way more human labor than daylight savings.
- Natanael_L 8y agoGoogle could also have the entire year's schedule listed.
- wpietri 8y agoDid you notice that you picked the one point you thought you could snipe at, but ignored the rest? Because I sure did. That's the sign of a bad interlocutor.
- Natanael_L 8y agoNo, because that point pretty much proves it's possible to solve. You haven't heard of Google Now / Assistant, etc? Your phone can notify you of schedule changes pretty easily. In fact even my regular calendar app can support this but itself, it can notify me of changes in booked appointments automatically. And even that's assuming you didn't already know the change in schedule because it was listed right there on the website.
- henrikschroder 8y ago> What's so important about the number on the clock? Convention. You may not like it, you may not understand it, but other people like their conventions, and you're simply in a tiny, tiny minority if you don't get that.
- Natanael_L 8y agoThe sunlight is the convention I follow.
- fineline 8y agoRight, I'll explain that to my kids school then: "Hi, our family's switched from observing the clock, like everyone else in school, to operating on a schedule that is in rhythm with the ebb and flow of sunrise through the year. From now on, we'd like our kids' school attendance and lesson times to start and finish on a solar timescale. Perhaps a separate buzzer tone could be set up to convenience any kids who will be running their day according to the sun. We do understand the challenge to teachers in accomodating this natural schedule alongside other students who stick with the more familiar clock-based one, but hey - the sunlight is the convention we follow." I mean I live in quite a hippy place but that just ain't gonna fly.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- dragonwriter 8y ago> Just fix your schedule... Clocks are standardized, which means there's a simple point of coordination for fixing them. Schedules are...not.
- Natanael_L 8y agoWrote about that here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18011554 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18011554
- aidenn0 8y agoNo DST usually means that solar noon is at 12:00 somewhere in the timezone. There are many places in the US of equal longitude but differing timezones.
- AstralStorm 8y agoThe timezones are supposed to be small enough to be accurate +/- 30 min of the actual solar noon. In some countries, even to +/-15 min - Russia comes to mind.
- LoSboccacc 8y agoNot necessarily. Lot of places have an offset compared to their ‘natural’ timezone for economical or political reasons.
- marcelluspye 8y agoI'm not sure I understand your question? The point is to stop changing times twice a year. If you do that, you have to pick one of two GMT offsets: the one you were using in the summer or winter. Picking either one solves the problem.
- Natanael_L 8y agoMany people intentionally don't want solar noon to match clock noon (permanent DST), apparently because they don't want to update their schedules and have to go up at another clock time. (Seems bizarre to me.) They want their clocks to be permanently shifted one hour, instead of shifting their schedule one hour.
- eridius 8y agoNoon is not the center of the waking day for most people anymore. Also, even if you use DST, most people still won't have the sun be directly overhead at noon.
- bsimpson 8y agoSchedules are social artifacts. If restaurants, bars, workplaces, schools, shops, etc. were available at all hours, caring about clock time might be silly. However, since people's lifestyles tend to be anchored around these institutions, it's easier to adjust everyone's clock than to wait hopefully that each institution you care about adjusts its schedule to suit your needs.
- Natanael_L 8y agoWith some planning, you could convince most of them to change schedules at the same time as you change the DST regulations.
- henrikschroder 8y agoWith some planning, you could convince most Americans to switch to the metric system as well! Not gonna hold my breath for that one.
- nikmobi 8y agoI would personally prefer it, just so that it's not always dark before I leave the office. The more daylight at the end of the day the better, IMO.
- icedchai 8y agoDST feels more natural to me. When the clocks go back in November, the "dark times" begin, and it's depressing as hell.
- baddox 8y agoThat’s my experience. I always feel like the clocks move in the wrong direction in November.
- H1Supreme 8y agoIn my experience, most people feel this way. More daylight after noon is more desirable for the majority of us who work a 9-5 type of job. I'm curious how many people are confused about which part of the year is Daylight Savings Time. I've corrected people who "hate daylight savings" on a few occasions. They had it backwards.
- TomK32 8y agoit's mad to fit our inner body-clock and live around something as arbitary as a 9-5 and the railroad clock...
- toyg 8y agoMillions of years of evolving to fit our environment, and then an asshole invents “office hours” and we’re all screwed. File under “qwerty-level bad choices”.
- coldtea 8y ago>and then an asshole invents “office hours” and we’re all screwed Assholes invent all kinds of things. It's those who enforce and tolerate it at fault. >File under “qwerty-level bad choices” Qwerty wasn't actually that bad, and Dvorak was more like self-promoted infomercial-snake-oil-style cargo-cult https://www.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/keys1.html https://www.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/keys1.html
- skullt 8y agoBecause in many places, standard time is the exceptional case. In the US, at least, we spend almost twice as much of the year in daylight saving time than in standard time. For example, standard time during the 2017 to 2018 winter lasted 127 days. Daylight saving time this spring through fall lasts 238 days.
- mattm 8y agoHaving lived in Japan that doesn't use DST, it really sucks. In the summer, it starts getting light just after 4am but then it's dark by 7:30pm. The daylight time is wasted.
- jac_no_k 8y agoEx-pat in Japan, Tokyo area here. Not having to change clocks is nice. Pressure companies / employers to have flex time to allow earlier starts and earlier leaves. Even though Japan culture tends to lag 10 to 15 years behind, it does change. Now if the rest of the world (London / New York) would stop shifting clocks around on different dates, it would make global synch ups easier to handle.
- wpietri 8y agoHow many clocks do people really have to change these days? Everybody has a phone in their pocket that magically has the right time.
- Osiris 8y agoEverytime the government changes the rules, people have to modify the firmware of basically any device with a clock, the people have to go around updating those (especially ones that don't have any auto update mechanism). Source: I'm a software engineer and I had too update hundreds of copy machines manually a few years ago.
- __david__ 8y agoI replaced all the wall clocks in my house with ones that set themselves from the NIST radio broadcast. My computers (and presumably phone) are all ntp based. None of those require firmware updates. It's quite nice to never mess with the clocks and have everything just be correct.
- isostatic 8y ago
- samstave 8y agoPersonally, i just recommend were introduce temporal lag. Time moves too fast in general. So we should just slow it down. Just like the Fed can print more money, the government can just make minutes worth more. Why do we need 60 minutes in an hour? If we only had 30 minutes in an hour, then we would get twice as much done in half the time!
- PeterisP 8y agoBecause our culture has shifted a few hours later than 'natural' time - for the vast majority of people, midnight isn't nowhere close to the middle of your night, and noon isn't the middle of your day; we stay up long past sunset and (except in northern winters) wake up significantly after dawn. Furthermore, this time is very "sticky" with all kinds of regulations, processes, organizational practices etc having fixed on a particular start-end time, so one does not simply live according to a natural schedule, and it's much harder to change that than the single centralized decision of the time zone. Thus, switching to a timezone where middle of the astronomical day is 13:00 means that the people's day is better aligned with the sun.
- goflyapig 8y ago> Because our culture has shifted a few hours later than 'natural' time ... we stay up long past sunset and (except in northern winters) wake up significantly after dawn. But wouldn't DST be the opposite of what you want, then? Shifting the clocks one hour forward, as DST does, pushes typical business and waking hours one hour earlier in the astronomical day.
- PeterisP 8y agoNo, that's the whole point, the hours have shifted later, and DST brings them back closer to where they "should" be. Due to accumulated cultural baggage from earlier centuries where the "habits" were formed in a very different environment with different needs than we have now, currently we (well, most of us, e.g. farmers have different schedules) have unused/spare daylight in mornings and too much darkness in evenings after work, so pushing typical business and waking hours one hour (or possibly more) earlier in the astronomical day is just the thing that we need, giving us more daylight in the evenings (which we all need) at the cost of less daylight in mornings (which most of us waste). It's just that for the current interconnected set of practices it's a sticky "local minimum" where there's a disadvantage for any person or organization to deviate from the accepted local hours (e.g. businesses can't deviate from habits of customers, schools can't deviate from time needs of parents/teachers, customers can't deviate from schedules of their large employers and kids schools, etc), so we can't expect to ever switch gradually, and the best solution to that coordination problem is a global change for everyone at once like switching a timezone.
- masklinn 8y agoBecause 12:00 is not the middle of the waking day, at least in western countries. It's closer to the first third or so.
- ken 8y agoSo? I genuinely can't figure out why people keep bringing this up. If you want clock noon in "the middle of the waking day", for some reason, then by your on admission, permanent-DST (+1hr) isn't going to solve your problem, either. Once you decouple clock noon from physical noon, I don't see why it has to be 1 hour, or even a multiple of 1 hour.
- rlanday 8y agoProbably because states that observe daylight saving time are already on it for eight months of the year. It’s actually a smaller change to stay on it all the time.