6 ms·

The Waste of Daylight – William Willett's Original Daylight Saving Time Proposal

58 points by vba 8y ago

focom 8y ago
After moving to a sunny place in the country I noticed how it affected my mood, so I think that every scheme to add natural light to our day is great for mental health. That's why stripping DST in Europe is in my opinion unfortunate.
- hnarn 8y ago
  Surely there's better ways to make sure people get more sunlight than arbitrarily changing the measurement of time?
  - williamdclt 8y ago
    I don't know, there's certainly other ways but if you have the power to do it, changing the very measurement of time sounds like one of the better ways to me
    - hnarn 8y ago
      It just seems so heavy-handed, if your goal is that people should get off work earlier to enjoy more sun for example, why not just make working days shorter, or move them back? Why change the entire measurement?
      - MiddleEndian 8y ago
        Waking up in the dark is similarly exhausting to me. Perhaps a short work day of a couple hours of scheduled meeting and let everyone do their technical work on their own schedule like undergraduates would.
      - randyrand 8y ago
        Because it's a lot fewer measurements that need to be changed. It's just one. It's so easy.
      - jasode 8y ago
        >, or move them back? Why change the entire measurement? Because that's the easier method for society en masse to change 2 times per year. E.g. Some businesses have their opening hours painted on glass windows[1] so repainting them to say 8am-4pm instead of 9am-5pm is more complicated. That's just a single example. I mentioned some others in a previous comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11277093 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11277093 [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=store+opening+closing+times+window&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=store+opening+closing+times+...
        tacostakohashi 8y ago
        If they want to have different opening times for different times of the year painted onto their windows, they can achieve that without repainting: 8am-4pm (2nd Sunday in March - 1st Sunday in November) 9am-5pm (1st Sunday in November - 2nd Sunday in March) In fact, many business already use this technique successfully to display different opening hours for different days of the week.
        jasode 8y ago
        >(2nd Sunday in March - 1st Sunday in November) Adding calendar qualifications like that to the times makes it even more complicated. To use another commenter's example about "valid hours of parking" printed on narrow street signs, there's no space to append long conditional text (like your suggested verbiage) to the times. Also, the DST change date isn't stable. Over the years, the DST date boundaries have changed: from the last week in April -- then to first week in April -- then to March. The DST rules may further be refined to be always or never. Did you look at my link to my previous message? The business hours on the window was only one example of complexity.
  - paganel 8y ago
    Good luck with changing the start working hours for most of the companies from an entire continent from around 8-9 in the morning to about 7 in the morning, so that people could have the chance of catching an hour of daylight in the winter by going home at around 3 or 4 in the afternoon. That's not going to happen anytime soon.
    - davidw 8y ago
      And don't forget schools, too.
    - gpderetta 8y ago
      Amen. Worse is better.
    - toast0 8y ago
      You could legislate that. Or you could simply legislate government office and school hours and wait for private industry to match the behavior.
      - tzs 8y ago
        The problem with the "change the time we do things" approach is that we write down times in permanent or semi-permanent places. Buildings have hours of operation signs. Streets have lane restriction and parking hours signs. We print schedules for buses, planes, boats, and trains. If we just change so we do all of these things an hour earlier in summer we either have to change a whole bunch of signs and other printed material twice a year, or we just have to remember that we need to mentally take an hour off the printed time during that time of year. The former would be a major hassle and possibly an expensive one, and the later would confuse a lot of people for days or weeks after the switches. Clocks, on the other hand, are designed to be changed. If we want things to start an hour earlier in summer, and we want that to apply to everything, than implementing that by moving the clocks an hour forward is easier, cheaper, and less confusing. The main hassle with changing the clocks is that there are so many of the damn things, although I think we may be getting past that. (I say this is the main hassle, rather than the hassle of dealing with biological rhythms getting messed up for a while around the time changes because this post is about how, if we are going to have DST, it should be implemented--change schedules or change clocks. The biology thing is the same under both, so is not relevant in this comment) At one time, say before the 1970s, it wasn't much of an issue because we didn't actually have all that many clocks. A typical family might have wall clocks in the kitchen and living room, table top alarm clocks in the bedrooms, and watches. It was in the '70s and '80s that clocks started appearing everywhere, and worse, no two seemed to have the same mechanism for setting them and the mechanisms were usually almost impossible to figure out without the instructions. DST changing could be a frustrating evening of alternating trying to guess how to set a clock and searching through every place you might have left the manual. But now, although everything still has a clock whether it needs it or not, those clocks are more and more likely to be self-setting. I think I have 15 clocks in my house and garage right now, and only 3 of them did not handle this morning's return to PST from PDT automatically. (And all three are or are in old things that if bought today probably would automatically handle the time change).
- mattnewton 8y ago
  I think the better solution is to change your alarm cocks for what fits your schedule, instead of changing all the clocks in the country for all uses.
  - ajmurmann 8y ago
    I used to strongly agree to this until someone pointed out that you don't have that option if you have children that are tied to the schedule decided on by their school or kindergarten.
    - watwut 8y ago
      Yep. Plus people working in factories or cops or teachers or those working in stores or restaurants or any customer facing office etc are tied too. Flexible schedule of programmers is more of an exception then norm.
- ajuc 8y ago
  DST in Europe makes no sense anyway, because of political reason countries as far away as Spain and Poland use the same time zone (CEST). So today daylight in Warsaw was 6:36-16:01, and in Madrid it's 7:47-18:08. If people really cared about daylight saving - they should use the correct timezone in the first place and then worry about changing time.
  - Reason077 8y ago
    Yes, Spain is in the "wrong" time zone geographically and should really go back an hour relative to CEST. This would put it in the same time zone as Portugal, Britain, Ireland and Morocco. Personally, here in the UK I'd like to see daylight saving time abolished, but we should stay permanently in summer time. In winter the sun is usually up well before I am, but in the evening it gets dark far too early.
    - lozf 8y ago
      > here in the UK I'd like to see daylight saving time abolished, but we should stay permanently in summer time We tried that for a couple of years at the start of the 1970's... Clearly it didn't last.
- michelledepeil 8y ago
  Wait, what? You don't gain extra natural light in summer due to DST. The days become longer naturally due to the angle of the earth wrt the sun. DST makes you get up earlier to "enjoy" that longer, sunnier day, but that one hour is probably pointless in terms of mental health improvement. Besides, summer isn't the time when sunlight is lacking. Winter is when people get vitamin D depressed, and no time change is going to fix that for northern countries.
  - Puer 8y ago
    Yep, it makes no difference. I get up at 5:30 to go to work. Even during DST it's still dark in the morning, and it's not like I'm really getting any exposure to the light on the bus to work. But the consequence is that when I leave work at 4, it's pitch black outside where the sun would have been setting before. DST is pointless and antiquated.
    - pmontra 8y ago
      Which country do you live in? In the south of Europe we center the day (lunch) around 13:00 to 15:00 so if Earth axis would be perpendicular to its orbit (always 12 hours of light) we would pick sunrise at 8 and sunset at 20. With DST we have sunrise at 5 and sunset at 21 in June. A double or triple DST would suit us better. If we stop using DST in Europe I hope that my country moves at least one time zone to the east.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
upofadown 8y ago
>I therefore venture to propose that at 2 a.m. on each of four Sunday mornings in April, standard time shall advance 20 minutes; and on each of four Sundays in September, shall recede 20 minutes, ... This sounds a bit closer to the ideal of just working with respect to sun rise. It eliminates the abrupt transition twice a year and allows the adjustment to be greater or less than an hour which is good because the useful adjustment changes with latitude. These days we could just skip the discrete changes all together and just use solar time directly.
- tensor 8y ago
  Or just shift to DST permanently. Nearly everyone is awake 4-7 so why not just have sun then and have mornings and nights sometimes sunny?
- Retric 8y ago
  Computationally it's not a problem, but other issues abound. We want time zones to coordinate across large areas. A similar issue exists because the day has different length the further you are from the north pole. With southern summers and northern winters occurring at the same time.
  - tzs 8y ago
    If we can assume that clocks have decent computing power, and if we can assume that people that need to do time calculations across significant longitude differences have access to decent interactive computing power (smart phones, tablets, desktops), then I think some kind of dual time system might be workable. Clocks would display both a "World Time" and a "Zone Time". The World Time would probably simply be UTC. For coordinating across significant longitude differences World Time would be used. The Zone Time applies to a region similar to a current time zone, and is an idealized solar time, adjusted so that sunrise each day is around 6:00 AM LZT (Local Zone Time). Schools, stores, most offices, mass transit routes that are mostly in the zone, theaters, meals, and similar things would base their schedules on LZT. So office hours, for example, would typically be 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM LZT, year around. This would let most people work on a schedule that syncs well to the Sun, which should have tangible benefits for many people. There would be no going to work or school in the dark, and in summer the longer daylight time would automatically come after work/school. This needs to assume people have decent access to interactive computing power because it would complicate planning things that involve interactions between LZT and World Time, especially when planning events weeks or months ahead. (And yes, under this system 6:00 AM LZT from one day to 6:00 AM LZT the next day would not be exactly 24 hours. So? Things for which that matters would be scheduled on World Time, not on LZT).
johnminter 8y ago
Shifting the clocks is an idea that adds a lot of cost and questionable benefits. We have the daylight hours that our location's geography provides. Why not simply set the time zone boundaries such that the location is closest to having the daylight centered around noon and leave the clocks alone. Having changing time zones causes costs in updating all the software.
jve 8y ago
> This is the whole cost of the scheme. We lose nothing, and gain substantially. Well not in todays connected world. > For Continental trains only will special time tables be required, one for April, a second for May, June, July and August, and a third for September Yep, more like it. I think DST today is less relevant. Light is cheap. I dont actually need candles. Cities and towns also have lights. Today most power is being used by manufacuring, be it at day or at night. I dont think savings is relevant here. Dont get me wrong - I love daylight. But I enjoy that we @ europe will get rid of DST. I just hope we get to stay in summer time :)
- LeoPanthera 8y ago
  Am I the only one that thinks staying in summer time is insane? The clock face is not arbitrary. Midday is the middle of the day. Midnight is the middle of the night. (To the nearest hour.) If we abandon these conventions, anything left is entirely arbitrary, and having time zones at all seems like a huge complication vs a single global time zone. We can all get more light in the “evening” by shifting the conventional hours for work and life backwards a bit. Abandoning timekeeping conventions instead just so that we can start work at some arbitrary number on the clock seems crazy.
  - rectang 8y ago
    If you can convince everyone in the entire world to move their schedules earlier by one hour, I'm with you. If not, I'm willing to live with midday and midnight being conceptually misaligned, as they have been for the half of my life I've spent on daylight savings time so far.
  - pmontra 8y ago
    There are countries where people have lunch at 12:00 and countries where they have it at 14:00 or later. Dinner and bed time are set in consequence. For the people in those first countries it makes sense to never have DST. For the others it would make sense to have double DST. We can argue that they could shift two hours backward with no consequences but cultural habits are hard to change (I live in one of those countries.) Having light late in the evening (22:00) is great if people are still out. Nobody use sunlight at 5:00 if they're sleeping.
LeoPanthera 8y ago
Am I the only one that thinks staying in summer time is insane? The clock face is not arbitrary. Midday is the middle of the day. Midnight is the middle of the night. (To the nearest hour.) If we abandon these conventions, anything left is entirely arbitrary, and having time zones at all seems like a huge complication vs a single global time zone. We can all get more light in the “evening” by shifting the conventional hours for work and life backwards a bit. Abandoning timekeeping conventions instead just so that we can start work at some arbitrary number on the clock seems crazy.
SubiculumCode 8y ago
For me practically, I hate this time change. It is already getting dark a little after 5PM. Now it is definitely dark by 5PM. I work in a fairly windowless office. Not seeing the sun is depressing. I like having a few hours of sun after work, psychologically.
dahart 8y ago
I love checking out daylight charts for weird places like Iceland or Svalbard. https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/norway/longyearbyen https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/norway/longyearbyen I didn't know the original proposal was to do it in multiple small shifts, nor that it included an energy savings argument. Most of my life I thought I didn't like daylight saving time. Then recently I looked at the daylight chart (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time#/media/File:Greenwich_GB_DaylightChart.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time#/media/Fi...) and really imagined what it would be like without daylight saving time, and I changed my mind. If I stayed on summer time all year, then in the winter sunrise would be around 9am, and I'd have to commute in the dark. If I stayed on winter time, then in the summer the sun would be up at 5am and down at 8pm. On a normal work schedule, I'd miss the morning time and wish for more sun in the evening.
- fyfy18 8y ago
  DST works pretty well for London and the south of England, but if you go somewhere more north, say Aberdeen, the sun doesn't rise until nearly 9am in the winter and sets before 3:30pm. [0] In the summer it's light enough to drive without lights from 4am - 11pm. Shifting either of those times by one hour to maintain the same time zone all year around work make barely any different to most people. On mainland Europe it's even worse, the sun rises 1.5 hours later in the west of Spain compared to the east of Poland, yet they all share the same timezone. [0] https://www.gaisma.com/en/location/aberdeen.html https://www.gaisma.com/en/location/aberdeen.html
  - dahart 8y ago
    Yeah, agreed. There are definitely places where daylight saving time doesn't make that much sense. Aberdeen doesn't have an official night time for 3.5 months of the year, or an astronomical twilight for 2 months. https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/uk/aberdeen https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/uk/aberdeen Still, without it, in June the sun rises at 3am and sets at 9pm, it still seems like trading the morning hour for one in the evening would be a net positive for most people, even if it's small. Unless I was on a strange work schedule, I would definitely sleep through the first few hours of sun in the morning, and always be awake for the sunset. I suddenly started to wonder, if we care about daylight, whether work schedules might make more sense if they started at 8 am rather than 9, just to be more symmetric around noon. Or even 7am, if we're preserving evening daylight. But I dunno, that sounds too early. ;)
danschumann 8y ago
No more dst. No more timezones. What happens when we colonize Mars? We need to switch to star dates.

58 points by vba 8y ago

After moving to a sunny place in the country I noticed how it affected my mood, so I think that every scheme to add natural light to our day is great for mental health. That's why stripping DST in Europe is in my opinion unfortunate.

hnarn 8y ago
Surely there's better ways to make sure people get more sunlight than arbitrarily changing the measurement of time?
- williamdclt 8y ago
  I don't know, there's certainly other ways but if you have the power to do it, changing the very measurement of time sounds like one of the better ways to me
  - hnarn 8y ago
    It just seems so heavy-handed, if your goal is that people should get off work earlier to enjoy more sun for example, why not just make working days shorter, or move them back? Why change the entire measurement?
    - MiddleEndian 8y ago
      Waking up in the dark is similarly exhausting to me. Perhaps a short work day of a couple hours of scheduled meeting and let everyone do their technical work on their own schedule like undergraduates would.
    - randyrand 8y ago
      Because it's a lot fewer measurements that need to be changed. It's just one. It's so easy.
    - jasode 8y ago
      >, or move them back? Why change the entire measurement? Because that's the easier method for society en masse to change 2 times per year. E.g. Some businesses have their opening hours painted on glass windows[1] so repainting them to say 8am-4pm instead of 9am-5pm is more complicated. That's just a single example. I mentioned some others in a previous comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11277093 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11277093 [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=store+opening+closing+times+window&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=store+opening+closing+times+...
      - tacostakohashi 8y ago
        If they want to have different opening times for different times of the year painted onto their windows, they can achieve that without repainting: 8am-4pm (2nd Sunday in March - 1st Sunday in November) 9am-5pm (1st Sunday in November - 2nd Sunday in March) In fact, many business already use this technique successfully to display different opening hours for different days of the week.
        jasode 8y ago
        >(2nd Sunday in March - 1st Sunday in November) Adding calendar qualifications like that to the times makes it even more complicated. To use another commenter's example about "valid hours of parking" printed on narrow street signs, there's no space to append long conditional text (like your suggested verbiage) to the times. Also, the DST change date isn't stable. Over the years, the DST date boundaries have changed: from the last week in April -- then to first week in April -- then to March. The DST rules may further be refined to be always or never. Did you look at my link to my previous message? The business hours on the window was only one example of complexity.
- paganel 8y ago
  Good luck with changing the start working hours for most of the companies from an entire continent from around 8-9 in the morning to about 7 in the morning, so that people could have the chance of catching an hour of daylight in the winter by going home at around 3 or 4 in the afternoon. That's not going to happen anytime soon.
  - davidw 8y ago
    And don't forget schools, too.
  - gpderetta 8y ago
    Amen. Worse is better.
  - toast0 8y ago
    You could legislate that. Or you could simply legislate government office and school hours and wait for private industry to match the behavior.
    - tzs 8y ago
      The problem with the "change the time we do things" approach is that we write down times in permanent or semi-permanent places. Buildings have hours of operation signs. Streets have lane restriction and parking hours signs. We print schedules for buses, planes, boats, and trains. If we just change so we do all of these things an hour earlier in summer we either have to change a whole bunch of signs and other printed material twice a year, or we just have to remember that we need to mentally take an hour off the printed time during that time of year. The former would be a major hassle and possibly an expensive one, and the later would confuse a lot of people for days or weeks after the switches. Clocks, on the other hand, are designed to be changed. If we want things to start an hour earlier in summer, and we want that to apply to everything, than implementing that by moving the clocks an hour forward is easier, cheaper, and less confusing. The main hassle with changing the clocks is that there are so many of the damn things, although I think we may be getting past that. (I say this is the main hassle, rather than the hassle of dealing with biological rhythms getting messed up for a while around the time changes because this post is about how, if we are going to have DST, it should be implemented--change schedules or change clocks. The biology thing is the same under both, so is not relevant in this comment) At one time, say before the 1970s, it wasn't much of an issue because we didn't actually have all that many clocks. A typical family might have wall clocks in the kitchen and living room, table top alarm clocks in the bedrooms, and watches. It was in the '70s and '80s that clocks started appearing everywhere, and worse, no two seemed to have the same mechanism for setting them and the mechanisms were usually almost impossible to figure out without the instructions. DST changing could be a frustrating evening of alternating trying to guess how to set a clock and searching through every place you might have left the manual. But now, although everything still has a clock whether it needs it or not, those clocks are more and more likely to be self-setting. I think I have 15 clocks in my house and garage right now, and only 3 of them did not handle this morning's return to PST from PDT automatically. (And all three are or are in old things that if bought today probably would automatically handle the time change).
mattnewton 8y ago
I think the better solution is to change your alarm cocks for what fits your schedule, instead of changing all the clocks in the country for all uses.
- ajmurmann 8y ago
  I used to strongly agree to this until someone pointed out that you don't have that option if you have children that are tied to the schedule decided on by their school or kindergarten.
  - watwut 8y ago
    Yep. Plus people working in factories or cops or teachers or those working in stores or restaurants or any customer facing office etc are tied too. Flexible schedule of programmers is more of an exception then norm.
ajuc 8y ago
DST in Europe makes no sense anyway, because of political reason countries as far away as Spain and Poland use the same time zone (CEST). So today daylight in Warsaw was 6:36-16:01, and in Madrid it's 7:47-18:08. If people really cared about daylight saving - they should use the correct timezone in the first place and then worry about changing time.
- Reason077 8y ago
  Yes, Spain is in the "wrong" time zone geographically and should really go back an hour relative to CEST. This would put it in the same time zone as Portugal, Britain, Ireland and Morocco. Personally, here in the UK I'd like to see daylight saving time abolished, but we should stay permanently in summer time. In winter the sun is usually up well before I am, but in the evening it gets dark far too early.
  - lozf 8y ago
    > here in the UK I'd like to see daylight saving time abolished, but we should stay permanently in summer time We tried that for a couple of years at the start of the 1970's... Clearly it didn't last.
michelledepeil 8y ago
Wait, what? You don't gain extra natural light in summer due to DST. The days become longer naturally due to the angle of the earth wrt the sun. DST makes you get up earlier to "enjoy" that longer, sunnier day, but that one hour is probably pointless in terms of mental health improvement. Besides, summer isn't the time when sunlight is lacking. Winter is when people get vitamin D depressed, and no time change is going to fix that for northern countries.
- Puer 8y ago
  Yep, it makes no difference. I get up at 5:30 to go to work. Even during DST it's still dark in the morning, and it's not like I'm really getting any exposure to the light on the bus to work. But the consequence is that when I leave work at 4, it's pitch black outside where the sun would have been setting before. DST is pointless and antiquated.
  - pmontra 8y ago
    Which country do you live in? In the south of Europe we center the day (lunch) around 13:00 to 15:00 so if Earth axis would be perpendicular to its orbit (always 12 hours of light) we would pick sunrise at 8 and sunset at 20. With DST we have sunrise at 5 and sunset at 21 in June. A double or triple DST would suit us better. If we stop using DST in Europe I hope that my country moves at least one time zone to the east.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]

upofadown 8y ago

>I therefore venture to propose that at 2 a.m. on each of four Sunday mornings in April, standard time shall advance 20 minutes; and on each of four Sundays in September, shall recede 20 minutes, ... This sounds a bit closer to the ideal of just working with respect to sun rise. It eliminates the abrupt transition twice a year and allows the adjustment to be greater or less than an hour which is good because the useful adjustment changes with latitude. These days we could just skip the discrete changes all together and just use solar time directly.

tensor 8y ago
Or just shift to DST permanently. Nearly everyone is awake 4-7 so why not just have sun then and have mornings and nights sometimes sunny?
Retric 8y ago
Computationally it's not a problem, but other issues abound. We want time zones to coordinate across large areas. A similar issue exists because the day has different length the further you are from the north pole. With southern summers and northern winters occurring at the same time.
- tzs 8y ago
  If we can assume that clocks have decent computing power, and if we can assume that people that need to do time calculations across significant longitude differences have access to decent interactive computing power (smart phones, tablets, desktops), then I think some kind of dual time system might be workable. Clocks would display both a "World Time" and a "Zone Time". The World Time would probably simply be UTC. For coordinating across significant longitude differences World Time would be used. The Zone Time applies to a region similar to a current time zone, and is an idealized solar time, adjusted so that sunrise each day is around 6:00 AM LZT (Local Zone Time). Schools, stores, most offices, mass transit routes that are mostly in the zone, theaters, meals, and similar things would base their schedules on LZT. So office hours, for example, would typically be 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM LZT, year around. This would let most people work on a schedule that syncs well to the Sun, which should have tangible benefits for many people. There would be no going to work or school in the dark, and in summer the longer daylight time would automatically come after work/school. This needs to assume people have decent access to interactive computing power because it would complicate planning things that involve interactions between LZT and World Time, especially when planning events weeks or months ahead. (And yes, under this system 6:00 AM LZT from one day to 6:00 AM LZT the next day would not be exactly 24 hours. So? Things for which that matters would be scheduled on World Time, not on LZT).

johnminter 8y ago

Shifting the clocks is an idea that adds a lot of cost and questionable benefits. We have the daylight hours that our location's geography provides. Why not simply set the time zone boundaries such that the location is closest to having the daylight centered around noon and leave the clocks alone. Having changing time zones causes costs in updating all the software.

jve 8y ago

> This is the whole cost of the scheme. We lose nothing, and gain substantially. Well not in todays connected world. > For Continental trains only will special time tables be required, one for April, a second for May, June, July and August, and a third for September Yep, more like it. I think DST today is less relevant. Light is cheap. I dont actually need candles. Cities and towns also have lights. Today most power is being used by manufacuring, be it at day or at night. I dont think savings is relevant here. Dont get me wrong - I love daylight. But I enjoy that we @ europe will get rid of DST. I just hope we get to stay in summer time :)

LeoPanthera 8y ago
Am I the only one that thinks staying in summer time is insane? The clock face is not arbitrary. Midday is the middle of the day. Midnight is the middle of the night. (To the nearest hour.) If we abandon these conventions, anything left is entirely arbitrary, and having time zones at all seems like a huge complication vs a single global time zone. We can all get more light in the “evening” by shifting the conventional hours for work and life backwards a bit. Abandoning timekeeping conventions instead just so that we can start work at some arbitrary number on the clock seems crazy.
- rectang 8y ago
  If you can convince everyone in the entire world to move their schedules earlier by one hour, I'm with you. If not, I'm willing to live with midday and midnight being conceptually misaligned, as they have been for the half of my life I've spent on daylight savings time so far.
- pmontra 8y ago
  There are countries where people have lunch at 12:00 and countries where they have it at 14:00 or later. Dinner and bed time are set in consequence. For the people in those first countries it makes sense to never have DST. For the others it would make sense to have double DST. We can argue that they could shift two hours backward with no consequences but cultural habits are hard to change (I live in one of those countries.) Having light late in the evening (22:00) is great if people are still out. Nobody use sunlight at 5:00 if they're sleeping.

LeoPanthera 8y ago

Am I the only one that thinks staying in summer time is insane? The clock face is not arbitrary. Midday is the middle of the day. Midnight is the middle of the night. (To the nearest hour.) If we abandon these conventions, anything left is entirely arbitrary, and having time zones at all seems like a huge complication vs a single global time zone. We can all get more light in the “evening” by shifting the conventional hours for work and life backwards a bit. Abandoning timekeeping conventions instead just so that we can start work at some arbitrary number on the clock seems crazy.

SubiculumCode 8y ago

For me practically, I hate this time change. It is already getting dark a little after 5PM. Now it is definitely dark by 5PM. I work in a fairly windowless office. Not seeing the sun is depressing. I like having a few hours of sun after work, psychologically.

dahart 8y ago

I love checking out daylight charts for weird places like Iceland or Svalbard. https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/norway/longyearbyen https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/norway/longyearbyen I didn't know the original proposal was to do it in multiple small shifts, nor that it included an energy savings argument. Most of my life I thought I didn't like daylight saving time. Then recently I looked at the daylight chart (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time#/media/File:Greenwich_GB_DaylightChart.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time#/media/Fi...) and really imagined what it would be like without daylight saving time, and I changed my mind. If I stayed on summer time all year, then in the winter sunrise would be around 9am, and I'd have to commute in the dark. If I stayed on winter time, then in the summer the sun would be up at 5am and down at 8pm. On a normal work schedule, I'd miss the morning time and wish for more sun in the evening.

fyfy18 8y ago
DST works pretty well for London and the south of England, but if you go somewhere more north, say Aberdeen, the sun doesn't rise until nearly 9am in the winter and sets before 3:30pm. [0] In the summer it's light enough to drive without lights from 4am - 11pm. Shifting either of those times by one hour to maintain the same time zone all year around work make barely any different to most people. On mainland Europe it's even worse, the sun rises 1.5 hours later in the west of Spain compared to the east of Poland, yet they all share the same timezone. [0] https://www.gaisma.com/en/location/aberdeen.html https://www.gaisma.com/en/location/aberdeen.html
- dahart 8y ago
  Yeah, agreed. There are definitely places where daylight saving time doesn't make that much sense. Aberdeen doesn't have an official night time for 3.5 months of the year, or an astronomical twilight for 2 months. https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/uk/aberdeen https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/uk/aberdeen Still, without it, in June the sun rises at 3am and sets at 9pm, it still seems like trading the morning hour for one in the evening would be a net positive for most people, even if it's small. Unless I was on a strange work schedule, I would definitely sleep through the first few hours of sun in the morning, and always be awake for the sunset. I suddenly started to wonder, if we care about daylight, whether work schedules might make more sense if they started at 8 am rather than 9, just to be more symmetric around noon. Or even 7am, if we're preserving evening daylight. But I dunno, that sounds too early. ;)

danschumann 8y ago

No more dst. No more timezones. What happens when we colonize Mars? We need to switch to star dates.