5 ms·

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

by 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]

by focom 8y ago

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]