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American Academy of Sleep Medicine calls for elimination of daylight saving time

• taeric 6y ago
  This is something everyone wants, but I suspect many would hate in the middle of winter. Folks seem to think that the day is static and we shift it. It is a bit more complicated than that.
  • Cd00d 6y ago
    I'm confused. Standard time is already the time in winter, so abandoning ST won't change anything about the middle of winter.... That said, I agree with an above comment to just be DT year round. I _do_ hate afternoons/evenings in the middle of winter.
    • taeric 6y ago
      Apologies, I had to cut my comment short. You are right that the folks getting rid of it would be fine for winter. But summer would have issues. I was anticipating the folks that want it permanent. Who would then complain on winter. You could probably go for more divisions in the year nowadays. Almost like it would be if you were doing true sun clocks. But there really are no panaceas here.
      • Cd00d 6y ago
        I like more divisions. I'm sure it fails large subsets of the population, but for many of us time is told to us by an always internet-connected device. NOBODY claims to be 3 minutes late because their watch was off anymore - we all see the same time to the second. So, why can't we just have our devices just gradually shift the time by a few seconds each day? So that in our time zone noon stays roughly when the sun is overhead. We have (supposed?) benefits of switching our time, without the dangerous and disruptive discrete 1-hour events! Not realistic, implementable, but fun and preferable to the current rough transitions.
        • taeric 6y ago
          Agreed. As someone that have used an alarm clock ever in my life, I can most relate to folks that want the day to be with natural light. And now that I have kids convincing them that it is bed time when the sun is out, is not easy. My sympathies to folks way way off the equator.
• crazygringo 6y ago
  No... make daylight savings time permanent instead. As the paper states, the biggest problem is with the transition. The paper also argues that standard time aligns more naturally with our circadian rhythm... but doesn't bother to compare that with the psychological benefit we get from hanging out with friends in daylight after work in the summer, or the psychological benefit of it not being dark when you go home and have dinner with your family. I totally get that people who wake up early in the winter prefer standard time... but it really seems that for the population as a whole, permanent DST is the better option. And implementing it is so easy: once we're already in DST in the summer... you just never "fall back" to standard in the fall.
  • buzzy_hacker 6y ago
    I came here to make this exact comment. In New York, it gets dark around 4:30pm in the winter. It’s depressing. Keep the sunlight around longer!
    • totaldude87 6y ago
      exactly this, often, when I look out from office window, it feels like the night is already on us, yet the watch says 5pm :(
  • AtHeartEngineer 6y ago
    Yes, summer time forever!
  • mjevans 6y ago
    I prefer 'winter time', but would settle for just eliminating the shift. Shifting IS the worst. Heck even the orbital tilt changing the length of daylight in semi-northern latitudes is icky.
    • wlesieutre 6y ago
      Eliminate the orbital tilt!
• idoh 6y ago
  Either eliminate it (preference) or make it permanent. Either choice is better than this fall back / spring forward nonsense. A - with kids it was super annoying having to deal with this B - noon is defined as when the sun is at the highest point in the sky (with allowance for timezones), simple C - just let people figure out sleep patterns that work the best for them, do we really need a national law around this?
  • tkzed49 6y ago
    with respect to C, probably, because many people don't choose the clock time at which they have to be at work, at school, etc.
    • Ericson2314 6y ago
      Winter time, 8-4 work week. Do what we can so that sleep schedule is closer to centered around the darkest point.
    • umvi 6y ago
      But surely they have the agency to choose the clock time at which they go to bed, no?
      • fnenrjfkdke 6y ago
        Not really.
      • shados 6y ago
        Neighbors and city noise ordinance dictates when you can go to bed. Neighbors, city noise ordinance, work and school hours dictate when you have to wake up.
        • nitrogen 6y ago
          One of the reasons I had to leave SF was because the sleepable window was just too squeezed. Between people making noise in the evening, cars and motorcycles racing at night, and sunlight, cars, and construction in the morning, there just wasn't enough time to wind down (this can take a long time depending on chronotype) and get enough sleep.
• coucou 6y ago
  For non-dst reader https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84aWtseb2-4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84aWtseb2-4
• sjburt 6y ago
  Have they examined the effects of the sun rising at 4:30am in the summer (if we adopted permanent standard time) or 9am in the winter (permanent daylight time)? What our current system does is keep sunrise time more consistent at the expense of more variation in setting time. I think this is reasonable compromise: work and school schedules are fixed, most people like to awake near when the sun comes up, and most people have a fixed morning regime.
  • noahtallen 6y ago
    I feel that the current system makes it more difficult to have a fixed morning routine since it totally throws off my sleep rhythms. Plus, DST introduces a pretty abrupt change in when the sun rises and sets. If there were no DST, then it would be a very gradual shift in those times, which I think would be easier to handle.
• kylecordes 6y ago
  Like many others, I agree with summer time year-round; but oppose staying on wintertime year-round. This is a trade-off between time at work/school versus free time, socialization time, outdoor leisure activities, etc., and how the two categories split the limited resource of daylight.
  • Ericson2314 6y ago
    What if we did winter time but switched to 8-4 workday? :O :O :O Once we stop switching, the numbers are arbitrary.
    • fnenrjfkdke 6y ago
      Who's "we"?
      • coronadisaster 6y ago
        Every one who agrees
    • geofft 6y ago
      What if we did winter time but switched to a 1-5 workday? The 9-5 schedule came from an era when roughly half as many people (per capita) were in the workforce. :)
      • Ericson2314 6y ago
        Hahaha, easy there, can't propose too many good idea at once or the argumentative experiment looses it's controls. :)
  • bonzini 6y ago
    Where I live, winter time year round means the sun has risen at 4.30 in the summer (and not being able to have dinner without artificial illumination). Summer time year round means total darkness until 8.30 in the winter. Either way it sucks. There are places where DST is indeed the best of both worlds.
• personlurking 6y ago
  Lots of geographical locations in my time zone (AST), including Puerto Rico and USVI, don't observe DST [1]. It's nice to not have to care about it for a change, as opposed to when I was living stateside. 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_Time_Zone#Areas_covered https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_Time_Zone#Areas_cover...
  • coronadisaster 6y ago
    There are different issues in PR... Like how long it takes to get power back after a hurricane
• dexterdog 6y ago
  Can we just all go UTC and be done with this nonsense? Let organizations change their hours throughout the year. People would get used to the cycle fast enough, you know, after they're done killing people like me who think this is a good idea.
  • tantalor 6y ago
    So You Want To Abolish Time Zones (2015) https://qntm.org/abolish https://qntm.org/abolish
    • recursive 6y ago
      Reading about people trying to accomplish things in this article is like watching the black-and-white portion of an info-mercial where seemingly basic tasks are suddenly feats of intense expertise.
    • bnj 6y ago
      Came here specifically to see if this had been added yet, glad to see it!
  • flukus 6y ago
    Then there would be a thousand timezones and no one would agree what normal business hours are.
    • nitrogen 6y ago
      What are the advantages of normal business hours, in an era when most office work can be done asynchronously, and most retail stores have extended or 24 hour schedules? "Normal business hours" meant that when I was living in SF, nearly everything in my neighborhood closed by 3PM.
    • asdff 6y ago
      business hours would just follow whatever the national stock exchange settles upon, like they do now. people in finance in SF keep eastern time.
• vyrotek 6y ago
  No DST is definitely something I love about living in Phoenix.
• robbiemitchell 6y ago
  I'm generally in favor of keeping DST permanent, as others have said. But if you wanted to make it more consistent and strike a balance, would it make more sense to flip the adjustments? Pull back on the nighttime daylight during summer, and add to it during winter. In NYC during summer it would get dark around 7pm, and in winter around 5:30pm... instead of 8pm and 4:30pm like we have now.
• mmhsieh 6y ago
  imagine the opposite: suppose we do not have the clock switching, killer (literally) chaos twice a year. someone proposes it, with predictable deaths to ensue every year, forever. who would support it? i would not!
• xellisx 6y ago
  Down with timeshifting. Add more timezones, and possibly move some boundaries around.
• jb775 6y ago
  > 63 percent support the elimination of seasonal time changes in favor of a national, fixed, year-round time, and only 11 percent oppose it This is some early-bird conspiracy BS. Those stats obviously don't mean people want to eliminate daylight savings time, it means they want to eliminate the change itself. I think a much higher % would prefer making daylight savings time permanent (staying light out later). Also, their justification for earlier darkness is sleep related health issues. But what about the health issues related to hearth disease: the #1 cause of death in the USA?[1]....think about the amount of exercise done between the hours of 5pm-9pm (after work jogs/walks/gym, youth sports, etc). There's no doubt in my mind there would be less overall exercise if it were constantly dark out earlier. [1] - https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm
  • xyhopguy 6y ago
    waking up two hours befor sunrise is miserable no matter how dark it stays. In anycase, for anyone in the northern US the sun would still set before or at 5:30.
    • dade_ 6y ago
      No, it is glorious watching the sun rise each morning. I miss it.
• coronadisaster 6y ago
  the person who invented this must not like gradual changes like the sun provides naturally
  • tzs 6y ago
    I've wondered if at some point it would be feasible to add a second, sunrise based time system (SBT) for use within time zones in addition to the standard zone based time (ZBT). You'd use ZBT for things that need to by synced or coordinated across time zones, and SBT for things like school hours, work hours for businesses that only have to deal with things within the time zone, store hours, local concerts and shows and games, and similar. The key feature of SBT is that sunrise would occur at a fixed time, say 06:00, every day. Yes, this means that on an SBT clock, noon would not necessarily correspond to the point of highest sun, and even more radically the interval from 06:00 one day to 06:00 would not necessarily be exactly 24 hours. This is essentially a continuous form of DST. In many places this would actually give you more sunlight after work than the current DST system does, and has no disruptive transitions. Another advantage is that it would let more people go on schedules that let them wake up naturally from sunrise instead of having to use an alarm. It would be computationally more complex than what clocks currently do, but we are at the point where it is cheap and easy to include sufficient computing power in clocks to handle it.
    • pseudalopex 6y ago
      https://qntm.org/continuous https://qntm.org/continuous
      • tzs 6y ago
        Note that what that page is talking about is quite different from what I was wondering about. It's talking about replacing time zone based clock time with local noon based clock time. Each current time zone would go from having one time within it to having 3600 times within it (assuming clocks only keep time to 1 second resolution). That has many drawbacks which your link ably covers. What I'm talking about is adding a second kind of clock time within each time zone. Each time zone would have two times within it, the current time, which I'll call zone based time (ZBT), and a time that keeps sunrise fixed, which I'll call sunrise based time (SBT). It's not meant as a replacement for time zones like the thing in the link. It's meant to address the same issue as daylight savings time--better utilization of daylight during the summer. Many proponents of eliminating the twice yearly DST time change acknowledge that we probably still should have some kind of seasonal schedule adjustment at latitudes where there is a big different between the amount of daylight in summer and winter, and usually suggest we do it by changing the hours of things like work and school. E.g., instead of working 8 to 5 year around, we'd work 8 to 5 part of the year and 7 to 4 part of the year. You can divide everything into two categories: (1) things whose times change between winter and summer, and (2) things whose times do not change. The idea then is to put these categories on separate clocks. Things in category #2 are on a clock that does not have any notion of standard or daylight time. It just ticks on, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Things in category #1 are on a clock that does get adjusted. So instead of having to note the date, recall if that is in the range of dates during which we shift work an hour, so you know if you need to be in by 7 or by 8 that day, you'd just have to remember that your work schedule is on the SBT clock, not the ZBT clock, so you go to work the same time every time, year around, on your SBT clock. But why stop there? If the SBT clock just changes by an hour twice a year it has all the disruption that the daylight savings time has. If we are going to have a separate clock for those things we want to vary seasonally, and that clock is going to automatically adjust, why not go all the way and make it adjust daily? For each region, we can figure out the best way to make use of the available daylight for each day throughout the year, and have SBT time make it so 8 to 5 on the SBT clock each day fits in with that. Do this right and there are no more big schedule jumps, and most people will be able to have a sleep schedule that allows them to wake up naturally due to the brightening morning instead of having to regularly use an alarm clock. This might seem like it would be pretty inconvenient because you'd be constantly dealing with some things on SBT and some on ZBT...but would you? Most things you do locally that aren't directly tied to work or school are still going to be influenced by them, because we need to fit other things around them. So I think we'd end up using SBT for most of the stuff we deal with in our region. We'd most use ZBT for things outside the region. For instance, TV networks would be on ZBT. But most people do things like watch TV in the evening. I think what would happen is that you'd use SBT during the work/school day, and when doing other things in your city, then after dinner you'd stop looking at your SBT clock and start paying attention to your ZBT clock.
• beefman 6y ago
  The natural change in daylight hours is pretty sudden, actually. Either sunrise or noon (or both) have to move. DST is a compromise to keep them from moving too much. But sunrise is a more important time than noon. So I've proposed something I call Sunrise Standard Time. It abolishes DST and splits the 24 primary longitudinal time zones into as many as 120 zones by cutting at the tropics and polar circles. Clocks adjust gradually each day to keep sunrise near 6am. The tropics would follow sunrise at the equator, and the temperate zones (between the tropics and polar circles) would follow sunrise at ~ 30deg N or S. That adjustment is about 1 minute per day. To refine things slightly, sunrise can be fixed at the latitude which divides the population in half in each zone (with the constraint that the N and S zones are mirrored). Those latitudes are approximately: 13.5deg for the tropical zone, 34.5deg for the temperate zones, and 68.5deg for all 2 million people living in the polar zones. A further refinement is to split the per-capita sunrise aberration instead. This pushes the boundaries to slightly higher latitudes. For the temperate zones, the minimum per-capita offset of sunrise from 6am on the solstice is achieved by following sunrise at 37.5deg. That's pretty close to Washington DC (39deg), Beijing (40deg), and Tokyo (36deg). I suggest the tropics use the equator for simplicity. SST will improve sun tracking for the vast majority of the world's population with no sudden changes. It will also be easier to understand than DST. There are no dates to remember and, because the N and S zones are mirrors, it's easy for someone in e.g. New York to understand what's going on in Sydney. Supporting links: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e1/Hours_of_daylight_vs_latitude_vs_day_of_year_cmglee.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e1/Hours_of... http://world.andersen.im/ http://world.andersen.im/
  • jhardy54 6y ago
    Obligatory: https://qntm.org/calendar https://qntm.org/calendar
    • jhardy54 6y ago
      Oops, I meant: https://qntm.org/continuous https://qntm.org/continuous
  • thdrdt 6y ago
• whereistimbo 6y ago
  Luckily I don't have to put myself into all of this nonsense since I'm living in the equator area.
• maerF0x0 6y ago
  Call me entitled, but Why not just get up with the sun and go to bed with the sun. If the time of year makes "8" on a ticking device too early, maybe wake up a 8:22? Core hours make sense for businesses, but at the fringes we should just let it float.
  • CamelCaseName 6y ago
    This is what I used to do. It was glorious. Unfortunately with a partner, and being a light sleeper, it's simply not possible anymore. My bedtime is up to me, but my wake up time now has a hard ceiling.
  • aaron695 6y ago
    Because we are a society and most of the good comes from working together with some cohesion in all parts. That's not to say as a good hacker you can't just live on the fringes and both reap the rewards of society and be individualistic when you want. But it's hard, when I tried to go on daylight savings when it wasn't locally implemented I couldn't pull it off, hit to many roadblocks.
  • ginko 6y ago
    >Why not just get up with the sun and go to bed with the sun. Where I live that would give me about 2 hours of sleep in Summer.
• ReptileMan 6y ago
  Depends on the latitude. DST makes amazing sense in the latitudes between Sicily and Moscow. And I never had problem with switching. Takes a night sleep or two at most. I think the issue just moves into culture war territory.
  • wott 6y ago
    > And I never had problem with switching. Takes a night sleep or two at most. Don't bother to try arguing that here or on Reddit. Apparently 99% of people in those conversations go to sleep, fall asleep and wake up at the exact same time every single day of the year. No week-end, no trip, no dinner, no special thing to care about, no sport, no entertainment, nothing. Nothing ever changes their habit. And in that parallel world, they must also all leave under the equator, since the sun does also rise at the exact same time all year long, rising time doesn't shift much more than a one-hour change (heck, actually even under the equator, you get a similar span of variation). Also, energy savings are usually dismissed as being tiny. Except that we spend years investing billions and billions in order to save energy / reduce CO2 emissions and barely reach this "tiny" level of savings which is obtained by simply shifting the needle of a clock twice a year, in a simplistic process which has been working for decades.
• m0zg 6y ago
  The problem is more complicated than that IMO. For any of this stuff to make sense at all, our life and work patterns need to be able to adjust to the fluctuation in circadian rhythm throughout the year. I do not see how this could be done if we insist on 9-5 workday (and rigid scheduling for schools, childcare, etc).
• jlos 6y ago
  This thread is exactly why it will never change - you'll never get consensus which time to choose. I don't care which we pick, I just don't want to flip my (and my kids) schedule every 6 months
• elihu 6y ago
  I wonder what the logistical challenges would be to adding an hour of actual daylight to a medium-sized U.S. city around dusk by means of orbital mirrors? Sunlight irradiance is about 1000 watts per square meter if the sun is straight up. We'll say that a city center is about 10 square km, and that 300 watts per square meter is an acceptable afternoon-evening light level. So, if I did the math right, that's 3 billion watts if we wanted to illuminate electrically with 100% efficient bulbs, or 3 million kwhs to provide one evening of light, which would be $300,000 per night at 10 cents per kwh. On the other hand, a giant sheet of mylar in space, correctly positioned, might have a similar effect with no recurring energy cost. I imagine the orbital mechanics and optics situation would be challenging, but could at least be fun and interesting to talk about.
  • matsemann 6y ago
    Sounds like the Norwegian town Rjukan that doesn't get any sunlight during winter, so they put a huge mirror on a mountain top. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/06/rjukan-sun-norway-town-mirrors https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/06/rjukan-sun-nor...
    • elihu 6y ago
      I like that kind of problem solving.
  • _Microft 6y ago
    What environmental impacts would you expect?
    • elihu 6y ago
      Confused animals. Also, the mirror would cause shading on whatever part of the Earth they passed over, which all things considered is probably a good thing. (If the mirror is big enough and close enough, some people might get to see a full eclipse.) There'd be local heating in the target city though, which could be good or bad. If the mirror is only used in the winter, it could be a net positive and reduce icy road conditions and heating bills somewhat.
• basicplus2 6y ago
  How about split the difference and keep that permanently..
• ekianjo 6y ago
  Next: make the actual time where you are located closer to the actual solar time instead of being several hours off (plus or minus) versus the actual solar time.
• warabe 6y ago
  My point is kind of off-topic, but as a financial analyst, I really want every country to stop using DST. It is such a hustle to cope with financial tick data taking DST into consideration... If you focus on only one country, it is not a major problem. However, when you start looking at various markets (e.g. London, U.S., Japan etc) at the same time, things get crazy...
  • dade_ 6y ago
    It adds to the confusion for meetings as some places don’t change time, others at different times of the year. I am happy to take Russia’s lead on this one.
• Guthur 6y ago
  I don't care which we pick but I personally find a centrally managed shift in everyone's daily rhythm twice a year highly draconian, i have the somewhat luxury that I don't really need to shift my sleeping pattern immediately but it's highly disruptive to have to shift my daily routines. So yes please let's all stop this archaic ritual.
• tvelichkov 6y ago
  For me the big issue with DST is the stress to the organism it's causing at every transition from winter to summer time. So I was wondering instead of picking between Winter and Summer time, can't we make the transition less stresfull? I.e. instead of shifting the time by 1 hour twice a year, shift it by 15 minutes 8 times in a year? Maybe this way the organism won't feel it so much?
  • grugagag 6y ago
    Everybody would be confused and late. It’s much simpler to stick to one - DST - and not change it at all
• 4WIW 6y ago
  Would love for this pointless hack to be abolished. One less reason for confused aliens to declare our civilization an evolutionary dead end and vote for our recycling.
• austincheney 6y ago
  I don’t even think we need time zones. India and China do not observes DST or time zones and they aren’t having any problems waking up, going to work, or living due to the hour on their clocks.
  • danans 6y ago
    The majority of the population of those countries is distributed on a north-south axis. China's population is primarily on its eastern plains, not the western mountainous regions. India has one time zone, but it's still covers more degrees of latitude than longitude, so the difference in sunrise time between Kolkata in the east and Bombay in the west is about an hour. This is about the same as the difference in sunrise time between Boston and Kalamazoo, also both in the same timezone.
  • pseudalopex 6y ago
    Some people in India think it's a problem.[1] Some people in western China unofficially use the same time zone as neighboring countries.[2] [1] https://qz.com/india/1542969/indias-single-time-zone-may-effect-education-and-poverty/ https://qz.com/india/1542969/indias-single-time-zone-may-eff... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_Time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_Time
    • austincheney 6y ago
      Looking at the article the Xinjiang Time looks more political than functional with the result being confusion and nonsense. Political divisions are the only practical reason why people maintain time zones. There are people through out the world who do just fine living on UTC or Zulu time.
• audiodude 6y ago
  Just came here to give props to the title of the article, using the proper Daylight Saving Time (A system of Time for Saving Daylight) and not the commonly heard Daylight Savings And Loan Time.
• sunkenvicar 6y ago
  A no-brainer. Permanent DST is pushed by people without a clue.
• mrg2k8 6y ago
  Just wanted to say that here in the EU we have voted to abolish time changing, with the countries deciding if they want to stick with the summer time or winter time. https://ec.europa.eu/transport/themes/summertime_en https://ec.europa.eu/transport/themes/summertime_en
  • dgellow 6y ago
    > On 26 March 2019, the European Parliament adopted its position on the Commission proposal, supporting a stop to the seasonal clock changes by 2021. The Council has not yet finalised its position. It’s not done yet. The process was handled a bit amateurishly unfortunately, which resulted in delays and push back.
  • Vinnl 6y ago
    I don't think we did. The European Commission held a non-representative (e.g. Germans were overrepresented) poll that said people prefer abolishing it. Which is fine: not every decision needs to be voted on. But we shouldn't fool ourselves that it was a democratic process either.
  • corty 6y ago
    I'm not holding my breath for the implementation of this decision. After the public poll, politicians quickly claimed to want to implement this right away. Just to descend into the usual inability to decide upon anything (who wants which time zone, how do we align neighbouring timezones, do we want a timezone-difference between France and Germany (that geographically should be there, etc) that is characteristic for the EU. My prediction is that the abolition will be delayed for another 7 or 8 years, after which they will just decide to drop the matter since "it's already a decade old".
    • TazeTSchnitzel 6y ago
      EU laws have fixed implementation deadlines and financial penalties for failing to implement them. If it completes the legislative process, it will happen. But indeed said process could be slow.
  • 6y ago
• 01100011 6y ago
  So I keep seeing more and more support for getting rid of DST and a consensus seems to be building. Who are the holdouts? What's their reasoning?
• pc2g4d 6y ago
  Most people seem to have missed that this association of experts in _sleep_ are saying it is better for us to have solar noon and official noon more closely aligned. It's not a popular position, but overall I think it would be better for us to move to standard time permanently and shift our society to accommodate the _sun_ rather than pretending it isn't there.
  • alert0 6y ago
    At my previous job we were discussing this, I think because it was up for a vote in California. My friend's argument was that children would be walking to school in the dark and more would end up getting hit by cars. It was really funny to me that we won't consider that our school schedules are stupid, or that our driving requirements or vehicles are somehow inadequate, but no, in fact it is time that is wrong.
    • bosie 6y ago
      why are the school schedules stupid? aren't they inheriated by the work schedules of the parents?
      • mcny 6y ago
        > why are the school schedules stupid? aren't they inheriated by the work schedules of the parents? the whole idea that schools are places to dump your kids so you can go to work is stupid. we can't have it both ways. i've been saying this for a long time but unless people revolt and refuse to have children until we "pay" people to raise their children, things won't get better. lets see where they find more consumers to buy/pay for crap when everyone just refuses to bear children. i don't necessarily mean pay as in with money but with worker's rights which I guess does translate to money...
        • freewilly1040 6y ago
          Isn’t that already happening?
        • 6y ago
• imoverclocked 6y ago
  I would love to see a new standard of time that talks about sunrise+1hr instead of artificially moving our antiquated wall clocks around. We have enough technology to make it happen and what we really care about is when the Sun comes up on a particular part of the globe anyway. The whole time zone + offset is such an antique way of looking at things.
  • pseudalopex 6y ago
    https://qntm.org/continuous https://qntm.org/continuous
• jader201 6y ago
  The obvious solution is to just surround the earth in a giant spherical LED source that is on for the entire globe for 16 hours, then off for 8. Repeat for all 365 days.
  • topher515 6y ago
    Instead of evenly distributing the lights on the inner surface we could distribute them at random. That way at "night" we could turn the LEDs to very low and still have "stars". Then during the day we would turn them up and it would be pretty cool to have thousands and thousands of micro suns.
  • Buttons840 6y ago
    Ok. But let's use really cheap bluish LEDs to save some money.
  • anaganisk 6y ago
    Yeah lets mess up, the entire light sensitive ecosystems of many creatures, just so that we can have meetings on time. Just wait a second and think c'mon.
• usr1106 6y ago
  Here openening hours have been "liberalized" a lot during the last 5-10 years. Bars are open until 4 - 5 am, supermarkets even 24/7. And an increasing amount of people are using those, otherwise businesses wouldn't offer them. Many travel over timezones more than once year just for fun. All that disrupts sleep patterns. The one hour twice a year seems minor in comparison.
  • Jolter 6y ago
    I think if you look up the actual facts, less than 10% of the world’s population travels internationally in any given year. Check your privilege please.
• ponker 6y ago
  A lot of the people here clamoring for permanent Daylight Time get to set their own hours and often wake up at 10am. But is a less powerful socioeconomic class that has to wake up at 3am to take two hours of public transit to open a coffeeshop at 6 before we get there. They don't have much political power but they need to be considered in this decision.
• sumanthvepa 6y ago
  What I love about living in the tropics, is that the time of sunrise varies very little. In my location in South India, sunrise is between 5:45 AM and 6:30 AM and sunset similarly between 5:45 PM and 6:30 PM. Twilight is short. So essentially, I don't need an alarm to wake up. Sunlight streams through my windows in the moringing, and when it's dark I know that its time to stop working. I love that. I used to live Seattle earlier, and never got used to the wide variations in when sunrise and sunset actually happened.
• 867-5309 6y ago
  I wonder if they name-drop themselves in every headline..
• vmurthy 6y ago
  I don't see a mention of the spike in accidents directly attributable to DST anywhere in this post on HN. I recently read "Why we sleep"[0] and there's a fascinating section on the spike in accidents following the shift in timings. I can't quite find the exact article but this[1] study showed a 6.3% increase in number of _fatal_ accidents in the 6-day period after DST kicks in compared to (presumably) other days. And this was consistent over a 10-year period! So... given the pros and cons(especially around health and safety) .. what would be your answer? :) [0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34466963-why-we-sleep https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34466963-why-we-sleep [1] https://cars.usnews.com/cars-trucks/does-daylight-saving-time-cause-auto-accidents https://cars.usnews.com/cars-trucks/does-daylight-saving-tim...
  • vosper 6y ago
    I’m not saying that specific section of the book is wrong, but you should be aware that both the book and author have come in for some pretty serious criticism, including misrepresenting research https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep
    • vmurthy 6y ago
      Thank you for this :) . Will read this article get the opposing views as well and hopefully improve my thinking.
• dudeinjapan 6y ago
  Imagine there's no time zones. It's easy if you try. No AM or PM. And no Daylight Saving Time. Imagine all the people... using UTC. You--ooh--ooh-ooh-ooh You may say I'm dreamer. Because I set my alarm wrong. I hope someday you will join us. And the world will live as one.
  • idbehold 6y ago
    https://qntm.org/abolish https://qntm.org/abolish
    • dudeinjapan 6y ago
      Just wait until we become a multi-planet species...!
  • ifdefdebug 6y ago
    Would be OK for me, I live in UTC anyway... Utc+1 actually now in the Summer
• awl130 6y ago
  The whole genesis of DST was to save energy costs (particularly during 70s oil crisis). I don't see that mentioned anywhere
  • dade_ 6y ago
    It is a fallacy. The only real reason I ever found were people in positions of influence and power wanted another hour in the evening for a round of golf. Though we can make DST permanent, keep the hour and eliminate the horrible time changes.
• itsmanantomar 6y ago
  https://typelocation.com/how-to-plan-your-first-trip/ https://typelocation.com/how-to-plan-your-first-trip/
• mark_l_watson 6y ago
  Right on. We live in Arizona where daylight savings time is not implemented. Much nicer and there is not time transition twice a year. Off topic, but monitoring your sleep can serve as a training resource for improving sleep. My wife and I allow our AppleWatches to share sleep data with our iPhones (data never leaves the watch/phone, never goes to the cloud). My sleep is so much better now because I have learned habits that improve my sleep metrics. Recommended.
• marcrosoft 6y ago
  Let’s switch to the metric system too! In today’s political climate I could totally see this becoming political. “ it’s unamerican” to want to the metric system!”
  • wjsetzer 6y ago
    I have to constantly look up US imperial amounts. I like that the imperial system is sometimes based on twelves, the problem is where it isn't (volume is based on doubling, inches are successive halving). It's really easy to divide things into halves, quarters, and thirds in imperial, where in the metric system you have to round. Honestly, a system completely standardized around twelves or sixties would be near optimal.
    • zeveb 6y ago
      I forget where I first saw the idea, but I have adopted it as my own: the really sane thing for the French revolutionaries to have done would have been to switch to a duodecimal ('dozenal') counting system, not to base things on ten (which is a really terrible number).
• the_other 6y ago
  We could go further. We could use a nonn-based clock. Wake at -5, or -6; Lunch around 0; bed around +10. (Or whenever suits. I’m not too serious about this. I’ve not thought it through.
• fiatjaf 6y ago
  There was never any proof or big evidence that DST has any advantage in any aspect. It was implemented using pure ignorance. In Brazil it was suspended last year and I hope this year too. No one was upset by the change, much to the contrary, and as far as I know no one said anything about noticeable changes in energy consumption or anything.
• 6510 6y ago
  It often happens during my night shifts. You cant imagine how many plannings can go wrong. Finishing work in 1 hour less is just about as funny as spending an extra hour at work without actual work to do. I wonder how much fun people who have to communicate plannings across borders get to have: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time_by_countr...
• projektfu 6y ago
  We should also renormalize time zones or use modern technology to eliminate them. It’s obnoxious having the sun rise so late in the western edge of time zones or so early in places (like the Eastern seaboard) that should be one zone ahead.
  • minusSeven 6y ago
    Well getting rid of daylight saving time will be one step to that.
• kevsim 6y ago
  Can we get rid of timezones next?
• dathinab 6y ago
  (German, sorry) Since communication yt channel which sums up the facts quite good: - Sleep: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LprmzAzarRU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LprmzAzarRU - DST: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwmQ6RhWk7g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwmQ6RhWk7g But here is a view things (Sleep): - we don't have a fixed inner clock, but a cyclic one which can be adjusted "early birds" have a cycle <24h and "late owls" a cycle >24h (this means that only the abrupt change is fundamentally bad) - society is biased to benefit "early birds" - but in current society more then half of all people are "late owls" - using a alarm to forcefully wake you up has negative effects even if you got enough sleep - the amount of sleep you need is independent of weather you are an early bird or late owl - forcing owls to stand up early causes sleep deprivation - you can manipulate your inner clock through light exposure, food and sport. - the best light to affect you is the natural sun, going out (Added by me from context:in the morning) can be especially useful - How your long your inner cycle is depends on your age, this effect seems to be biologically based and appear in all people around the world - Sleep scientist try to convince (middle) schools to start at 9am instead of 8am because of the previous point. And for DST: - 80% of people in a EU questionnaires "voted" in favor of the removal of DST - more people wanted to keep summer time then winter time - But this should be decided based on since as this has major biological effects on the body - In Germany "common time" is winter time, summer time was set as sun rises earlier in summer. (Me: No idea if that's the case in the US to or if it's the other way around, people in Germany also use the terms summer and winter time so "common time" isn't really a thing anymore) - Recap of previous points ("early birds"/"late owls"), (btw. the terms where freely translated by me, in Germany they use Lark and Owl as terms, Lark is known as the "early bird") - Explanation of Yet Lack and why it can a bit of time to fix it. (The inner clock is a "strong oscillator") - More details of how the clock self calibrates itself. - The differences in the inner clock are often just a view minutes but due to how it synchronizes with the day the actual differences are larger - Just the sunlight rising difference in the same time zone can lead to noticeable differences in when people "naturally" stand up. - There is a social yet lag (your inner clock being out of sync with society) - Having sleep deprivation (e.g. because of social yet lack) is correlating with all kind of problems from reduced mental capacity/abilities over mode swings to overweight. - Permanent summer time would make it worse for people already being affected by social yet lack (i.e. late owls). - Because of this the scientific consensus is that (most?) scientist in that field warn that permanent summer time would be a very bad idea for health reason. - Me: Interestingly I did observe that late owls tend to more likely to have strong opinions about permanent summer time even through this would be biologically bad for them. - Most people are neither "early birds" nor "late owls" but somewhere in between, there are more people edging in the direction of late owls. - Hardly anyone (<2%) has a negative social yet lack (most likely through indirect effects). While much more have a positive social yet lack, i.e. stand up earlier then they should. Which is way to reason why permanent summer time would be generally bad for society due to negative biological effects on many people. - How bad permanent summer time is for people in general isn't clear, but we know it is bad. - The negative effects are tricky to measure as they appear long time. - We should get away from ideas like "the early bird catches the worm" or starting schools at 8am. - Due to the potential serve (accumulated) consequences of choosing the wrong time (i.e. permanent summer time) the decision should be based on scientific analysis not of opinions about how people feel about it.
• dathinab 6y ago
  Given that today most people do: - Use smartphones as a primary (or major) clock - Have clocks at home which automatically sync the clock. I wonder if we can just split the one large change of 1h to 6 smaller changes of each 10 minutes spaced apart by a week or two. I guess people with traditional wristband clocks or similar would be really annoyed by it. But then if you forget you are only 10min late/early ;) (which yes might be fatal if you miss a train or so). Anyway research shows that permanent summer time would have bad biological consequences especially for people with a social jet lack, i.e. people which need to stand up before their inner clock likes it. Ironically this tend to also be the people which often favor permanent summer time as it allows them to better use the reduced sunlight time in winter. Except that this has a very good chance of making their social yet lack worse. Which can have all kind of negative health effect from reduced mental capacity over mode swings to overweight (or at least correlates with such negative effect, and I know correlation is not causation).
  • efreak 6y ago
    > Have clocks at home which automatically sync the clock. I'd say not. Your computer has a clock in it, yes, but it's unlikely to be your main method of telling time. Same for any smart devices you have. There's several analog wall clocks and several digital alarm clocks with battery backups in my house; none of these sync the time. In comparison, there's only 4 rooms with computers in them, and these are usually off or on screensaver. The time on a computer is small and only shown in the status/menu bar, making it hardly convenient to check from the doorway. Smart speakers only respond to their owners, and require stopping what you're doing to hear a response. The average user on HN is far more likely to have such devices than the average person in general; most of my friends have at most one such devices in either their living room or bedroom, and that's it. Half the people I work with wear and use a wristwatch at work (_not_ a smartwatch).
• __MatrixMan__ 6y ago
  Can we nix time zones while we're at it? If I want to eat breakfast when the sun comes up, what does it have to do with the numbers on the clock?
• wittyusername 6y ago
  Another reason to love Puerto Rico and move here - our time zone, Atlantic Standard Time, has no daylight savings. All my fist shaking at the clouds in EST/EDT, welp, I solved it!
• lovetocode 6y ago
  I have been rallying around this for a long time. I think we should eliminate time zones while we are at it.
• coding123 6y ago
  Usually when this kind of article comes up there are 3 things that pop up and are just unresolved by the next day and after enough time that no action will be had. 1. Make it so that we're all on ST. 2. Make it so that we're on permanent DST. 3. Make it so that we're all on GMT. So can we cut the crap with these yearly things and just live with the fact that because we invented the internet nothing in this area is going to change?
• valuearb 6y ago
  Just move to Arizona, we never had it!
• semerda 6y ago
  I read that “every year on the Monday after the springtime switch, hospitals report a 24% spike in heart-attack visits around the US.”. Source: https://www.businessinsider.com/daylight-saving-time-is-deadly-2018-3 https://www.businessinsider.com/daylight-saving-time-is-dead... If this is true then daylight saving is a bigger killer than covid-19. Why is this even up for a debate when we killed every country’s economy for Covid but here we are debating how our lifestyles will need to change if we remove daylight savings. ️
• semerda 6y ago
  Daylight saving is not observed in few Australian states like Queensland, the Northern Territory, Western Australia, Christmas Island or the Cocos (Keeling) Islands. They seem to be doing well.
  • lostsock 6y ago
    We have daylight savings time in Melbourne, Australia. Without it the sun would set at 4:07pm on the shortest day of the year, which is incredibly depressing. I'm so glad we have DST.
• around_here 6y ago
  This entire thread is full of anti-DST madness, and since it’s HN, I can only assume you’re all from areas that don’t have a massive swing in the length of days. DST is amazing.
• jim-greer 6y ago
  Without DST, I either bike my kids to school in darkness at 8am, or the sun rises before 5am in summer. This is in San Francisco.
• perryizgr8 6y ago
  I never understood the appeal. If you want to do things earlier or later in the day, do it. What's it for to do with the clocks? My school used to have different summer and winter timings. No need to decide a horribly convoluted system of changing clocks every year.
• shmerl 6y ago
  Pick either one, but stop switching it back and forth.
• mschuster91 6y ago
  While we're at it, mandatory staggering of school open times and flexibilization of work times would also be a great idea.
• bananabiscuit 6y ago
  The best solution would be to keep DST but change “spring forward” to occur not on Sunday night, but instead, an hour before lunchtime on Monday.
• jalk 6y ago
  Serious question: The people who are sensitive to the DST swap, do they avoid crossing into other time zones and sleep there, as that has the exact same effect on the clock.