8 ms·

Daylight Savings Time (2020)

36 points by evandijk70 5y ago

briffle 5y ago
Oregon and Washington have already passed bills to change, but the bills require California to also pass one, and they have not. Oregon signed their bill in 2019.
- ghaff 5y ago
  It may be worth noting that most of the population in Washington, Oregon, and northern California is quite far west in the Pacific timezone so standard time in those areas is roughly equivalent to daylight saving time in much of the northeast US at least some of which would be in Atlantic time if we respected actual longitude more. In other words, the west coast already gets a lot of evening light and it gets light relatively later in the morning even without DST.
- plopz 5y ago
  A whole lot of states have been proposing all different changes. This site had a list of all the proposed changes back in 2019, I wonder what it looks like now. https://www.worldtimezone.com/dst_news/dst_news_usa07.html https://www.worldtimezone.com/dst_news/dst_news_usa07.html
taeric 5y ago
This is pretty silly nowadays. Sure, we don't need it. But I give even odds that folks would complain about how off sunrise and sunset are in non equator places. Edit: I should say that my post is mostly inline with the updates to this article.
latentwhisper 5y ago
We don't.
Apreche 5y ago
We need daylight savings time. What we don't need is standard time.
- fennecfoxen 5y ago
  Why not just use standard time, and shift schedules so that standard office hours are from 10am-6pm?
  - phailhaus 5y ago
    It is far more difficult to get thousands of businesses to coordinate on a fundamental cultural shift to a 10a-6p working day, than to just not change clocks back after switching to DST one last time.
    - mac01021 5y ago
      People say that but I'm not sure it's true. As long as they all agree about what time it is at any given moment (which is something we're not proposing to change) why do their business hours even have to line up perfectly? And to the extend that they do need to, wouldn't they just sort of figure it out over the course of a week or a month and then not have to worry about at again from that point on? Also, it would be a shift to an 8-4 working day, right, if we were going to keep the clocks on standard time year round?
      - phailhaus 5y ago
        > wouldn't they just sort of figure it out over the course of a week or a month and then not have to worry about at again from that point on? You'd have to re-negotiate every time you work with a new client. Are they on 9-5? Or 10-6? When can we schedule that weekly call? Businesses have no incentive to go through this headache, so they won't. We already shift our working hours twice a year with practically no issues. Let's just not switch back once.
        troglonoid 5y ago
        > You'd have to re-negotiate every time you work with a new client. Are they on 9-5? Or 10-6? When can we schedule that weekly call? Businesses have no incentive to go through this headache, so they won't. My experience is that these meeting coordinations still have to happen. Even within your own company, in the same office building.
tptacek 5y ago
The US tried a 2-year experiment of eliminating Daylight Savings Time back in the 1970s, and it was so reviled in practice that it was cancelled after 7 months.
- toyg 5y ago
  People tend to hate change in general, so these things are hard to shift once put in place. That doesn't take away the fact that humanity managed to thrive without DST for thousands of years, so clearly it can be done.
  - joegahona 5y ago
    Semantics gymnastics: Isn't "change" what would be getting removed, if we got rid of DST? We change our clocks twice per year.
  - justinlink 5y ago
    They thrived without clocks at all. They worked where they lived. They didn't start work at 9 and end at 5. We're in much different circumstances.
  - tzs 5y ago
    > That doesn't take away the fact that humanity managed to thrive without DST for thousands of years, so clearly it can be done. They effectively did have DST. They just didn't implement at as a two segment step function like we do. They implemented it as a 365 segment step function (366 segments in leap years). I.e., they synchronized their activities to sunrise.
Uehreka 5y ago
I care more about sunset than sunrise, so if people are proposing to get rid of DST instead of making permanent DST I will fight them tooth and nail. I get that it's subjective, but my subjective view is that having sunlight after work is more important, and I stand by that.
- mac01021 5y ago
  What if we kept standard time year round but you were allowed to change your work schedule from month to month as the seasons changed?
  - justinlink 5y ago
    What about schools? What about retail business hours? What time do restaurants open and close? Does each of those change every month? It's much easier to change our clocks twice a year.
    - mac01021 5y ago
      I would absolutely prefer school and business hours to change every month rather than have this 1-hour clock shift twice per year.
    - ASalazarMX 5y ago
      It's better for society to adapt to people's biological clocks than to force DST on populations at different latitudes for commercial reasons. In reality, schedules would change every six or three months, not every month. The logistics problem seems overstated, because countries that have different time zones manage fine.
  - Uehreka 5y ago
    That feels like the “what if instead of legalizing gay marriage we just got rid of marriage” take in this debate. In the sense that “people being able to work when they want to” is a utopian thing that isn’t going to happen, in part because there is real value in people being in the workplace (or even just logged in) at the same time. And even of I did change my working hours, stores and restaurants and coffee shops operating on the normal schedule would open/close at the “wrong times” for me. Plus when I have kids someday I won’t be able to change when they go to school. Much as we’d all like to be special snowflakes who march to the beat of our own drum, the fact of the matter is that society moves as a unit, and our happiness is often dictated by where it is moving to.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
syx 5y ago
Does this mean that we would have to change all the standard Time libraries we use in our code if a countries suddenly decide to switch?
- gsich 5y ago
  Your OS has a database for this.
throw7 5y ago
It's funny how the real reason we jump through time hoops escapes the conversation... the business class doesn't want to offer flexable work time for employees. The OP links to another site that says the science is in: "Wake up to the morning sun". Well, clearly, the answer is then to get rid of the stupid two shift shuffle each year (use standard time), get up to the sunrise, and go to fucking work. But NO, business leaders of america will sob and whine... working hours are 9 to 5 ONLY! Natch, no cookie for politicians.
- echelon 5y ago
  Even if you had flexible work hours, you'd have to start early to enjoy evening sun. That's not great. And your friends would have to have the same flexibility. Also, you'll have to use your flexibility to go to bed before them to wake up and enjoy your evening sun. Just move sunset later. It's a simple logistical option to apply uniformly that will maximize happiness.
  - avgcorrection 5y ago
    > Even if you had flexible work hours, you'd have to start early to enjoy evening sun. That's not great. Or you could wake up later in order to not screw up your circadian rhythm and in turn lower your risks of various ailments. It would be your own choice.
- SamBam 5y ago
  In the end, wouldn't it result in much the same thing? Assuming that we want everyone to know that we're waking up earlier in the summertime and closing up shop later, it would be preferable to coordinate this, right? We couldn't want all banks and shops and things closing at their own time. Or schools starting two minutes earlier every single day as we approach summer, to match up exactly with the sun, right? So we could coordinate it all to happen in one big step. We'd say "Hey, from March 14th onward, all public schools are now going to be starting at 7:30 AM instead of 8:30 AM, and banks will open at 8:00 AM, and post offices will close at 4:00 PM. And then we could so the same thing in the Fall, backwards. But then, with nothing forcing private businesses and private schools from following this, wouldn't we get some horrible mismash? We'd have to call up every restaurant before making a reservation: hey, do you follow personal summertime hours? Banks would have their own closing hours, your older kid's public high school starts 1.5 hours before the private elementary school instead of a half hour, etc etc..
justinlink 5y ago
We absolutely need Daylight Savings Time, you can argue about Standard Time not being necessary. Without DST, in my hometown, it will get dark at 6pm every day from Sept 23rd to March 4th. That's depressing for the 9-5ers with commutes. I wouldn't see the sun past 7pm outside of May 1st -> August 16th. If we're getting rid of DST, we need to switch the working day from 9-5 to 8-4 or 7-3.
- kvgr 5y ago
  Where i live the sunset will change next week from 17:44 to 16:42. absolute depression switch.
  - mac01021 5y ago
    Can you just start waking up, going to work, going home, and going to sleep, an hour earlier (as measured by the new clock)? Maybe your boss (if you have one) would let you do it.
    - kvgr 5y ago
      I don't have boss. But I am not going to go to sleep at 10pm, just to wake up at 6, because I do things later in the day. Like going out with friends and going to sauna later in the evening and 10-6 schedule would be disturbed a lot.
- et-al 5y ago
  > Without DST, in my hometown, it will get dark at 6pm every day from Sept 23rd to March 4th. To clarify, is your hometown in the southern hemisphere? DST generally occurs in the summer months.
  - justinlink 5y ago
    No. I'm in the northern. I'm giving time ranges as examples of when it will get dark without DST. Yes, it only benefits me March -> Nov.
- 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
seanalltogether 5y ago
The older I've gotten, the more I'm convinced that people don't care what the clock on the wall says, what they care about is minimizing the effects of sunrise/sunset. No one wants to be awake or get their kids awake before sunrise, and many jobs can't continue after sunset. Lifestyles will adjust forwards or backwards to match the hours in between
- riemannzeta 5y ago
  Exactly. Whenever I have this conversation with folks, I point out that the purpose of clocks is to keep human behavior in synch, and all that daylight saving time does is make that harder in an age in which people don't rely upon the position of the sun in the sky anymore to determine when it's time to do things. Yes, we are diurnal animals. Yes, sunlight matters to how we sleep. But why do we care whether the hands on the clock are pointing up when the sun is highest overhead? Everybody could do what they needed to do sleep wise regardless of where they were pointing. The simplest solution is not only to do away with DST, but to adopt a single universal time. This would make keeping in synch easy. No longer would time zone conversions be necessary. No longer would we have to adjust our sleep schedules twice a year or worry about whether whomever we had to collaborate with in a different part of the world was doing the same. But outside a handful of industries and technical fields, we seem unable to stomach the thought that the clock might read 17:00 as the sun rises. and 7:00 as it sets. That's just too weird. And why should Tavarua have to tolerate that when Greenwich gets to live with the historical norms? Politics. Politics are the end reason for why we fight over what the clock says.
  - SamBam 5y ago
    > or worry about whether whomever we had to collaborate with in a different part of the world was doing the same. How would having a single universal time solve knowing whether your collaborators were asleep or having dinner or whatever? You could have some kind of lookup table -- "Australians usually wake up around 18:00 UTC" -- but then what have you solved?
    - WithinReason 5y ago
Gunax 5y ago
I have always been of the opinion that it's the schedule, not the clock! You need to change the schedule if you don't like the hours. Changing the clock does nothing! If the point is that business are closing too late so we lose too much daylight during winter, then we need to tell businesses to move their operating hours earlier. My gut says that we decided school should operate 8-3 and work 9-5 for a reason. If we were to move the clock permanently by an hour, why wouldn't those times just shift as well?
- leoedin 5y ago
  Just look at Spain. For historical reasons they're in the European time zone even though they're really aligned with the UK. Culturally they do everything "late" - start work, finish work, eat dinner. That's just the schedule shifting to meet the sun.
lowercased 5y ago
Could we just move it 30 minutes in between the current 2 options and make that permanent? Honest question. No one will ever be happy with any choice, but if we split the difference, we'd still have some unhappy people, but one less thing to deal with 2x per year.
cyberge99 5y ago
Sorry for the pedantry, but it’s “Daylight Saving Time”.
- amitp 5y ago
  Yes. I used "savings" in the title and first paragraph for SEO reasons. This blog post is from 2006, when google didn't change words into other words without asking, so it was useful to use the variant that people search for rather than the version that is correct.
frankus 5y ago
The whole point of time zones is to make it somewhat close to noon when the sun is at its peak, and do make midnight somewhat close to the middle of the night. Otherwise we should all just use UTC. That's my main objection to permanent DST: it's really just shifting everyone one timezone to the east. What I learned from this post is that one of the big reasons that permanent DST is appealing is that a lot of areas in the current timezones really ought to be one timezone to the east. For example (see https://observablehq.com/@awoodruff/daylight-saving-time-gripe-assistant-tool https://observablehq.com/@awoodruff/daylight-saving-time-gri...) Nevada ought to be in the Mountain timezone and Alabama ought to be in the Eastern timezone. And a lot of the states that split into multiple timezones probably shouldn't (at least if you focus only on optimizing sunrise and sunset times).
kaminar 5y ago
You do realize DST is purely to reduce crime, right? Minimum 10% reduction, even with all the leftist cities crime sprees, riots, burning and destruction.

36 points by evandijk70 5y ago

Oregon and Washington have already passed bills to change, but the bills require California to also pass one, and they have not. Oregon signed their bill in 2019.

ghaff 5y ago
It may be worth noting that most of the population in Washington, Oregon, and northern California is quite far west in the Pacific timezone so standard time in those areas is roughly equivalent to daylight saving time in much of the northeast US at least some of which would be in Atlantic time if we respected actual longitude more. In other words, the west coast already gets a lot of evening light and it gets light relatively later in the morning even without DST.
plopz 5y ago
A whole lot of states have been proposing all different changes. This site had a list of all the proposed changes back in 2019, I wonder what it looks like now. https://www.worldtimezone.com/dst_news/dst_news_usa07.html https://www.worldtimezone.com/dst_news/dst_news_usa07.html

taeric 5y ago

This is pretty silly nowadays. Sure, we don't need it. But I give even odds that folks would complain about how off sunrise and sunset are in non equator places. Edit: I should say that my post is mostly inline with the updates to this article.

latentwhisper 5y ago

We don't.

Apreche 5y ago

We need daylight savings time. What we don't need is standard time.

fennecfoxen 5y ago
Why not just use standard time, and shift schedules so that standard office hours are from 10am-6pm?
- phailhaus 5y ago
  It is far more difficult to get thousands of businesses to coordinate on a fundamental cultural shift to a 10a-6p working day, than to just not change clocks back after switching to DST one last time.
  - mac01021 5y ago
    People say that but I'm not sure it's true. As long as they all agree about what time it is at any given moment (which is something we're not proposing to change) why do their business hours even have to line up perfectly? And to the extend that they do need to, wouldn't they just sort of figure it out over the course of a week or a month and then not have to worry about at again from that point on? Also, it would be a shift to an 8-4 working day, right, if we were going to keep the clocks on standard time year round?
    - phailhaus 5y ago
      > wouldn't they just sort of figure it out over the course of a week or a month and then not have to worry about at again from that point on? You'd have to re-negotiate every time you work with a new client. Are they on 9-5? Or 10-6? When can we schedule that weekly call? Businesses have no incentive to go through this headache, so they won't. We already shift our working hours twice a year with practically no issues. Let's just not switch back once.
      - troglonoid 5y ago
        > You'd have to re-negotiate every time you work with a new client. Are they on 9-5? Or 10-6? When can we schedule that weekly call? Businesses have no incentive to go through this headache, so they won't. My experience is that these meeting coordinations still have to happen. Even within your own company, in the same office building.

tptacek 5y ago

The US tried a 2-year experiment of eliminating Daylight Savings Time back in the 1970s, and it was so reviled in practice that it was cancelled after 7 months.

toyg 5y ago
People tend to hate change in general, so these things are hard to shift once put in place. That doesn't take away the fact that humanity managed to thrive without DST for thousands of years, so clearly it can be done.
- joegahona 5y ago
  Semantics gymnastics: Isn't "change" what would be getting removed, if we got rid of DST? We change our clocks twice per year.
- justinlink 5y ago
  They thrived without clocks at all. They worked where they lived. They didn't start work at 9 and end at 5. We're in much different circumstances.
- tzs 5y ago
  > That doesn't take away the fact that humanity managed to thrive without DST for thousands of years, so clearly it can be done. They effectively did have DST. They just didn't implement at as a two segment step function like we do. They implemented it as a 365 segment step function (366 segments in leap years). I.e., they synchronized their activities to sunrise.

Uehreka 5y ago

I care more about sunset than sunrise, so if people are proposing to get rid of DST instead of making permanent DST I will fight them tooth and nail. I get that it's subjective, but my subjective view is that having sunlight after work is more important, and I stand by that.

mac01021 5y ago
What if we kept standard time year round but you were allowed to change your work schedule from month to month as the seasons changed?
- justinlink 5y ago
  What about schools? What about retail business hours? What time do restaurants open and close? Does each of those change every month? It's much easier to change our clocks twice a year.
  - mac01021 5y ago
    I would absolutely prefer school and business hours to change every month rather than have this 1-hour clock shift twice per year.
  - ASalazarMX 5y ago
    It's better for society to adapt to people's biological clocks than to force DST on populations at different latitudes for commercial reasons. In reality, schedules would change every six or three months, not every month. The logistics problem seems overstated, because countries that have different time zones manage fine.
- Uehreka 5y ago
  That feels like the “what if instead of legalizing gay marriage we just got rid of marriage” take in this debate. In the sense that “people being able to work when they want to” is a utopian thing that isn’t going to happen, in part because there is real value in people being in the workplace (or even just logged in) at the same time. And even of I did change my working hours, stores and restaurants and coffee shops operating on the normal schedule would open/close at the “wrong times” for me. Plus when I have kids someday I won’t be able to change when they go to school. Much as we’d all like to be special snowflakes who march to the beat of our own drum, the fact of the matter is that society moves as a unit, and our happiness is often dictated by where it is moving to.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

syx 5y ago

Does this mean that we would have to change all the standard Time libraries we use in our code if a countries suddenly decide to switch?

gsich 5y ago
Your OS has a database for this.

throw7 5y ago

It's funny how the real reason we jump through time hoops escapes the conversation... the business class doesn't want to offer flexable work time for employees. The OP links to another site that says the science is in: "Wake up to the morning sun". Well, clearly, the answer is then to get rid of the stupid two shift shuffle each year (use standard time), get up to the sunrise, and go to fucking work. But NO, business leaders of america will sob and whine... working hours are 9 to 5 ONLY! Natch, no cookie for politicians.

echelon 5y ago
Even if you had flexible work hours, you'd have to start early to enjoy evening sun. That's not great. And your friends would have to have the same flexibility. Also, you'll have to use your flexibility to go to bed before them to wake up and enjoy your evening sun. Just move sunset later. It's a simple logistical option to apply uniformly that will maximize happiness.
- avgcorrection 5y ago
  > Even if you had flexible work hours, you'd have to start early to enjoy evening sun. That's not great. Or you could wake up later in order to not screw up your circadian rhythm and in turn lower your risks of various ailments. It would be your own choice.
SamBam 5y ago
In the end, wouldn't it result in much the same thing? Assuming that we want everyone to know that we're waking up earlier in the summertime and closing up shop later, it would be preferable to coordinate this, right? We couldn't want all banks and shops and things closing at their own time. Or schools starting two minutes earlier every single day as we approach summer, to match up exactly with the sun, right? So we could coordinate it all to happen in one big step. We'd say "Hey, from March 14th onward, all public schools are now going to be starting at 7:30 AM instead of 8:30 AM, and banks will open at 8:00 AM, and post offices will close at 4:00 PM. And then we could so the same thing in the Fall, backwards. But then, with nothing forcing private businesses and private schools from following this, wouldn't we get some horrible mismash? We'd have to call up every restaurant before making a reservation: hey, do you follow personal summertime hours? Banks would have their own closing hours, your older kid's public high school starts 1.5 hours before the private elementary school instead of a half hour, etc etc..

justinlink 5y ago

We absolutely need Daylight Savings Time, you can argue about Standard Time not being necessary. Without DST, in my hometown, it will get dark at 6pm every day from Sept 23rd to March 4th. That's depressing for the 9-5ers with commutes. I wouldn't see the sun past 7pm outside of May 1st -> August 16th. If we're getting rid of DST, we need to switch the working day from 9-5 to 8-4 or 7-3.

kvgr 5y ago
Where i live the sunset will change next week from 17:44 to 16:42. absolute depression switch.
- mac01021 5y ago
  Can you just start waking up, going to work, going home, and going to sleep, an hour earlier (as measured by the new clock)? Maybe your boss (if you have one) would let you do it.
  - kvgr 5y ago
    I don't have boss. But I am not going to go to sleep at 10pm, just to wake up at 6, because I do things later in the day. Like going out with friends and going to sauna later in the evening and 10-6 schedule would be disturbed a lot.
et-al 5y ago
> Without DST, in my hometown, it will get dark at 6pm every day from Sept 23rd to March 4th. To clarify, is your hometown in the southern hemisphere? DST generally occurs in the summer months.
- justinlink 5y ago
  No. I'm in the northern. I'm giving time ranges as examples of when it will get dark without DST. Yes, it only benefits me March -> Nov.
5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

seanalltogether 5y ago

The older I've gotten, the more I'm convinced that people don't care what the clock on the wall says, what they care about is minimizing the effects of sunrise/sunset. No one wants to be awake or get their kids awake before sunrise, and many jobs can't continue after sunset. Lifestyles will adjust forwards or backwards to match the hours in between

riemannzeta 5y ago
Exactly. Whenever I have this conversation with folks, I point out that the purpose of clocks is to keep human behavior in synch, and all that daylight saving time does is make that harder in an age in which people don't rely upon the position of the sun in the sky anymore to determine when it's time to do things. Yes, we are diurnal animals. Yes, sunlight matters to how we sleep. But why do we care whether the hands on the clock are pointing up when the sun is highest overhead? Everybody could do what they needed to do sleep wise regardless of where they were pointing. The simplest solution is not only to do away with DST, but to adopt a single universal time. This would make keeping in synch easy. No longer would time zone conversions be necessary. No longer would we have to adjust our sleep schedules twice a year or worry about whether whomever we had to collaborate with in a different part of the world was doing the same. But outside a handful of industries and technical fields, we seem unable to stomach the thought that the clock might read 17:00 as the sun rises. and 7:00 as it sets. That's just too weird. And why should Tavarua have to tolerate that when Greenwich gets to live with the historical norms? Politics. Politics are the end reason for why we fight over what the clock says.
- SamBam 5y ago
  > or worry about whether whomever we had to collaborate with in a different part of the world was doing the same. How would having a single universal time solve knowing whether your collaborators were asleep or having dinner or whatever? You could have some kind of lookup table -- "Australians usually wake up around 18:00 UTC" -- but then what have you solved?
  - WithinReason 5y ago

Gunax 5y ago

I have always been of the opinion that it's the schedule, not the clock! You need to change the schedule if you don't like the hours. Changing the clock does nothing! If the point is that business are closing too late so we lose too much daylight during winter, then we need to tell businesses to move their operating hours earlier. My gut says that we decided school should operate 8-3 and work 9-5 for a reason. If we were to move the clock permanently by an hour, why wouldn't those times just shift as well?

leoedin 5y ago
Just look at Spain. For historical reasons they're in the European time zone even though they're really aligned with the UK. Culturally they do everything "late" - start work, finish work, eat dinner. That's just the schedule shifting to meet the sun.

lowercased 5y ago

Could we just move it 30 minutes in between the current 2 options and make that permanent? Honest question. No one will ever be happy with any choice, but if we split the difference, we'd still have some unhappy people, but one less thing to deal with 2x per year.

cyberge99 5y ago

Sorry for the pedantry, but it’s “Daylight Saving Time”.

amitp 5y ago
Yes. I used "savings" in the title and first paragraph for SEO reasons. This blog post is from 2006, when google didn't change words into other words without asking, so it was useful to use the variant that people search for rather than the version that is correct.

frankus 5y ago

The whole point of time zones is to make it somewhat close to noon when the sun is at its peak, and do make midnight somewhat close to the middle of the night. Otherwise we should all just use UTC. That's my main objection to permanent DST: it's really just shifting everyone one timezone to the east. What I learned from this post is that one of the big reasons that permanent DST is appealing is that a lot of areas in the current timezones really ought to be one timezone to the east. For example (see https://observablehq.com/@awoodruff/daylight-saving-time-gripe-assistant-tool https://observablehq.com/@awoodruff/daylight-saving-time-gri...) Nevada ought to be in the Mountain timezone and Alabama ought to be in the Eastern timezone. And a lot of the states that split into multiple timezones probably shouldn't (at least if you focus only on optimizing sunrise and sunset times).

kaminar 5y ago

You do realize DST is purely to reduce crime, right? Minimum 10% reduction, even with all the leftist cities crime sprees, riots, burning and destruction.