11 ms·
> Changing our clocks twice a year has little benefit, economic or otherwise I've lived in 2 different places in the world that did not do DST, and I have to r
by as-j 7y ago
> Changing our clocks twice a year has little benefit, economic or otherwise
I've lived in 2 different places in the world that did not do DST, and I have to respectfully disagree for many cases. In the summer the sun would rise before 5am and set by 6:30 or 7pm. This does curtain outside activities. Sitting outside at a restaurant, maybe having a drink, is much easier to do while the sun is up, the bugs are at a bay, etc. Or maybe a BBQ in the backyard etc, all are much easier to do when there's natural sunlight. (then let's talk about sports games, no major leagues but kids sports, etc, etc)
So yes we could all start getting up earlier and say going to work earlier...Say starting work at 7am and leaving at 4pm...but this is what DST does for us.
Caveat:
It greatly depends on where you are in the timezone, and how far north you are. Growing up in northern Canada the sun set at 11pm and rose at 4am, so it did make little difference.
2nd Caveat:
Yes full time DST could be right for some places. But! That's damn confusing if someone has a different time through the year. When I lived in Indiana they didn't do DST, so the time didn't change. And it felt like half the phone calls outside the start started with "what time is it now." So there's something to be said for consistency. :/
- bobbylarrybobby 7y agoIsn’t the solution then to just keep the clocks moved back? There is no need to change them twice a year
- as-j 7y agoNo, because I like doing things outside in the summer after 6:30pm.
- fiblye 7y agoYou mean in the sunlight? Because...keeping the clocks moved means that extra hour of sunlight in the evening without blinding light at 4 AM.
- bonzini 7y agoIt also means no light until 9am in the morning in places where the winter sun would rise at 8. That's depressing, thanks but no thanks. :-)
- carlmr 7y agoBut you get that hour in the evening. In the morning you're home and then you go to work or at work (at least for most people), so you don't really even use that hour of sunlight. If you're at work like most people you might not even see it. In the evening you can enjoy that hour and be less depressed.
- vineyardmike 7y agoNo you don’t use that hour of sunlight. Some people like it. Personally, my day is so much better when I wake up to the sun vs to cloud/fog/darkness. I just wake up happier, and I have no control over the sun. So no I wouldn’t agree to trade my happiness throughout the day in exchange for eating dinner outside or whatever else people claim they need sunlight for at night.
- bonzini 7y agoNo, I don't use that hour in the evening. I work 9-6 and cannot start working earlier because I have to take my son to school and come back home. Sometimes even 9-7 if I take a break to go running or whatever (which in the winter I must do when the sun is very high). That would be after the sun has set (5pm) even with year-round DST. Then I start cooking dinner. In fact, working from home means that I do not go out at all after the sun has set.
- kiba 7y agoThen just adjust the time you do it instead of forcing everybody to deal with DST.
- tzs 7y agoA lot of people in places far enough away from the equator to have significant changes in sunlight hours want the increased daylight hours in summer to happen after work rather than before work, and/or do not want them to happen while they are still asleep or trying to sleep in the morning. Yes, we could leave the clocks alone, and change the clock times at which we do things. We could have businesses open at, say, 9 AM in the winter and 8 AM in the summer. We could have schools start an hour earlier in the summer. People tend to want to arrange their sleep schedule so that they pretty much just prepare for work and/or school after waking and then leave, so that their non-work time is all after work. That way they get their non-work time in one block, instead of split into two smaller blocks with work in between. That means we'd be changing our wake up times by an hour in the summer to accommodated business/school opening hours. (Which means those who rely on alarm clocks to wake on time would be changing their alarm time...so much for escaping fiddling with clocks!). Much of what we do is tied to our sleep or work schedules, such as when we get hungry and when we need transit. So...we end up with pretty much everything that operates on a regular schedule having a separate winter and summer schedule. Every place we print schedules has to have two schedules that get swapped between summer and winter. Every place that has an alarm or an alert tied to work or sleep needs to have alarm times swapped between summer and winter. Dealing with all that will involve making more changes twice a year--some to things that can be a hassle to change like signage. Or we can just change the clocks--which are designed to be easy to change, and nowadays most of them can even do it automatically.
- ClumsyPilot 7y agoI live in a country with DST, I currently have 3 devices in my house showing incorrect time. On my way to th city centre I came across 2 public clocks, one at a bus stop, one at a metro stop showing incorrect time. I walk into the KFC and time on the checkout counter is wrong. Which part of this mess is "designed to be easy to change"??
- coldtea 7y agoYou don't like "doing things outside in the summer after 6:30pm". You like doing things outside in the summer when the sun is at a certain point. You can do that regardless of whether that point is called 5:30pm, 6:30pm, or 7:30pm....
- bonzini 7y agoPerhaps he also has to work until 6pm and cannot choose to start one hour earlier. Perhaps he wants to do things outside just before going out for dinner; in some places restaurants do not open before 7:30pm. And so on. Daylight savings time is only useful in a reduced range of latitudes, I grant that. But where it makes sense, it is way worth one hour of sleep once a year.
- coldtea 7y ago>Perhaps he also has to work until 6pm and cannot choose to start one hour earlier. Perhaps he wants to do things outside just before going out for dinner; in some places restaurants do not open before 7:30pm. And so on. If enough people in a country want to do things "when the sun is at a certain point" and that point coincides with a working hour, they can move the 9-5 to 8-4 or whatever. Coordination does not have to correspond to renaming the hours...
- big_chungus 7y agoYou can't just move the time at which society operates. The dependency chain of one thing needing to open with another and so on is too complex for a single entity to control.
- ClumsyPilot 7y agoThat's exactly what you do by moving the time. He is suggesting we stop foing it the stupid way, and move the workhours themselves. The current system is like dragging the carpet to move a chair sitting on top. Leave the carpet alone and move the fucking chair directly.
- throw0101a 7y agoAnd the article goes into that: > All the processes happening in our bodies are co-ordinated by our biological clocks, located in our brains and all other organs. The argument in favour of permanent DST is that there would be more light in the evening. While this is true, we can’t change the number of hours of light in the day. More evening light means less morning light. But importantly, it’s the light in the morning that is most important in resetting our biological clocks. [...] The problem is that we live in societies that force us to get up and go to work or school at times that we don’t get to choose. > Chronobiologists, the name given to scientists who study biological timing, call this situation “social jet lag,” when the body clock doesn’t match the social clock. The article is based on physiology and health effects.
- NeedMoreTea 7y agoDST as we have it seems suited to a world that still has a third of the population working outside in the fields. A world where work start time and sunrise were inextricably linked. Most people would be far better served by our timezones sticking with summer time year round so we can have brighter evenings. I'm far enough north that one of my commutes will be in darkness, by skewing it to the morning one when it's around the equinox I am guaranteed no daylight in personal time: I'm either commuting, in a permanently illuminated office, or at home -- in winter darkness. I would be far happier with more evening light.
- pkulak 7y agoIt's pretty unhealthy to wake up in the dark. And schools generally let out in the early afternoon, so summer time would just send kids to school in the dark for the winter.
- CydeWeys 7y agoIf you're at far enough north latitudes you don't have much of a choice; daylight isn't long enough in winter and there's not enough of it to go around to all times when you'd want it. Optimizing for daylight in the morning when the earliest risers are waking, at the expense of having it go dark soon after lunchtime, isn't a great trade-off.
- jerf 7y agoTo put some concrete numbers around that, by meaningless cosmic coincidence, it happens that around the 45 latitude line, the summer/winter oscillation occurs at nearly exactly 1/3rd and 2/3rds, that is, in winter you get 8 hours of daylight and 16 of darkness, and in summer you get 16 hours of daylight and 8 hours of darkness. The 45th runs through the northern United States, putting nearly all of Canada in an even more extreme environment, and runs through the middle of Western Europe and the southern part of Eastern Europe. So it's a very significant portion of the northern hemisphere that is subject to these conditions, both by geography and by population centers. So, it's not just a few stragglers at the poles or something; it's a major chunk of civilization. As it happens, not much of the land mass of the southern hemisphere is south of 45S. See https://www.mapsofindia.com/worldmap/latitude-longitude.html https://www.mapsofindia.com/worldmap/latitude-longitude.html , for instance.
- k1t 7y agoIndiana is a pretty good example. They have a surprisingly lengthy DST history: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Indiana https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Indiana
- shagie 7y agohttps://github.com/eggert/tz/blob/master/northamerica https://github.com/eggert/tz/blob/master/northamerica is also a fun read.
- caiocaiocaio 7y agoI lived in China for several years, and I had to travel around the country for work. Having one big timezone with no DST makes everything easier on everyone all the time and the fact that the sun sets a bit earlier or later on the peripheries had no negative consequences at all - it's just the normal thing and everyone's used to it. Moving back to Canada and having to feel like a zombie for three weeks every spring is painful. I'd also point out that, growing up slightly farther north, I grew up going to school in the dark for about four months of the year anyway, even with DST.
- bcrosby95 7y agoOne big time zone sucks. Either one part of the country has a thrown off sleep pattern (because they're sleeping during daylight and coming home at night) or the timezone still exists but its just "unofficial" now because work starts at 5am rather than 8am and ends at 2pm instead of 5pm.
- hunter2_ 7y agoOne big time zone sucks only if everyone incorrectly assumes everyone else in that zone has the same sleep/work schedule, rather than letting knowledge of the other person's location better inform that assumption. This tactic scales all the way up to the whole world just using UTC without clocks being set differently anywhere. Instead of a time zone meaning "a zone where clocks are offset by X amount" it's replaced by "a zone where the typical start of work is X o'clock." Of course, then we have to decide if "noon" and "midnight" need to be redefined not to mean precisely 12:00 and 0:00 respectively, but instead to be used as vague ideas the way we use the vague "midday" and so forth. Edit: Or not vague per se, but calculated and looked up exactly how we do sunrise/sunset.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- dguest 7y agoHaving work start at 5 am doesn't make time unofficial, does it? It would seem like it would make starting work at 8 am non-standard, but I don't see any logistical or biological reason that people have to go to work when a clock says "8:00". In fact breaking from the "8:00 means go to work" custom seems like less of a strain on transit systems (among other things). Or are you saying that "start work at 8:00" is so ingrained that people create another unofficial time zone to deal with it?
- BeetleB 7y agoFor every person who enjoys the extra hour of sun in the summer, there's a person who detests an extra hour of darkness in the morning in winter. And I'll also find you one who doesn't like late sunsets. Some people do not eat dinner prior to sunset. Living in northern climates, we have the sun setting at 9pm in summer. No one here is going to be impacted if it sets at 8pm. Personally, the only people I know who like permanent daylight time are those who live in a system where the clock changes. I've lived in and interacted with people in countries where they have permanent standard time, and they never expressed a desire to switch their clocks by one hour permanently. I think those who advocate permanent daylight time are the ones seeking an unnatural solution. Let's simply acknowledge that everyone has a preference, and there's no objective winner here. Switching to permanent daylight means your location will be out of whack with the concept of time zones. Most of the world either switches their clock or has permanent standard time. Having your locale be permanent daylight will make for really weird global time zone maps, and will break the notion of "if you travel east beyond a certain point, the time zone will shift by one hour."
- ralph84 7y agoGlobal time zone maps are already really weird. There are plenty of places where traveling east doesn’t change the time zone for thousands of miles, or changes it by something other than one hour.
- baq 7y agoLiving in the EU I can say that the opinion of most people is: stop this madness but if possible align with neighbor countries and perhaps prefer a bit more sun after work, in this order.
- reaperducer 7y agoI've lived in 2 different places in the world that did not do DST, and I have to respectfully disagree for many cases. It's nice to hear from someone who's experienced both. These kinds of discussions are almost universally one-sided people moaning about Daylight Savings. If we didn't have Daylight Savings, they'd moan about not having Daylight Savings, or the inconveniences caused by the shift in sunlight that you, someone who actually knows what he's talking about, detail. Honestly, people just like to moan about things, and since the internet now makes it easier for small people to complain to large groups of people, it's all just imaginarily aggrieved people trying to make their voices heard above the rest of the rabble. Complaining about Daylight Savings is like complaining about traffic, or daily weather — it's an easy target because it's abstract.