5 ms·

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 tha

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]
MisterBastahrd 5y ago
Yeah, that's most people, I think. We're fine with getting rid of the time shift, but if we're going to do that, it makes more sense that the back half of the day have sunlight for longer. People need to do things and kids need to play. Most folks aren't going to work to plow fields anymore.
- ginko 5y ago
  But is the best way to keep a systemic off by one error for ever? Is this really the only way to allow people to get out of work earlier?
  - MisterBastahrd 5y ago
    Why does it have to be a "one off error?" When's the last time you used a sundial to figure out the time down to a quarter hour or didn't have a device with you that gave you the current time? I think most people would agree on two things: (1) that having time after work to do things during daylight hours is ideal, and (2) that the work hours they already have are fine. A shift in working hours might be fine for childless adults, but it doesn't work for most people. People have to be present to get their kids ready for school or daycare, and you're never going to get teacher's unions to agree that they should be in the doors of a school by 6am to receive students. So... this fall, no shift. For now or ever. Boom, done. Yes, the days get a bit shorter, but you're still talking about a 6:45pm sunset in Texas, which gives people about 2 hours of active time in the evenings, which is preferable to the 45 minutes previously.
    - ginko 5y ago
      > When's the last time you used a sundial to figure out the time down to a quarter hour or didn't have a device with you that gave you the current time? I live in Scandinavia some 500km South of the Arctic circle. Let me tell you that it's very obvious that the sun is one hour off at "midnight" in Summer. If we kept DST in Winter it would be even more noticeable. It would also mean that there'd be some 3 months per year where I need to go to and leave from work in complete darkness. At least right now I get to wake up to some sunlight in December. Daytime is fundamentally an astronomic concept. Proponents of permanent DST could at least be intellectually honest and admit they want everyone to get up an hour earlier rather than force everyone to pretend that 11am is actually 12pm. > Yes, the days get a bit shorter, but you're still talking about a 6:45pm sunset in Texas That's cute. I just walked back home from work and the sun was already setting here at 5:30. And it's still Autumn.
echelon 5y ago
Hard agree. I think that most people would want to switch to permanent daylight saving time. This moves the sunset "later" in the day so that you get more sunlight after work. This is good for restaurants and leisure activities. Arguments against this typically come in a few flavors every time this subject comes up: > But the sun should be overhead at noon. This doesn't work geographically in practice anyway. It doesn't matter to anyone either. We're not an agrarian society without clocks. > But kids will have to go to school in the dark. They often have to do this anyway. Schools could change the starting hours if they cared. Most people don't have kids. > But employers could just start work earlier. This isn't going to happen worldwide at any scale. And who wants to start work earlier? > But early risers prefer to enjoy time before work than after work. Fair point, but I think this is the minority of folks. Most social activities are at night, and this is when venues make the most money.
- evandijk70 5y ago
  I think most people have difficulty waking up in time and difficulty falling asleep early enough. To fix this, doesn't it make sense to have daylight in the morning and darkness in the evening?
- ginko 5y ago
  >This doesn't work geographically in practice anyway. It's still more correct than DST. >And who wants to start work earlier? You ARE starting work earlier with DST. That's the whole point. I sometimes wonder if there's some fundamental difference in understanding. To me the time in your watch is just a numeric value the _actual_ time of day is the location of the sun on the sky.
- paganel 5y ago
  Plus one hour less of sun-exposure for half a year (I mean, if we get rid of DST) will most certainly decrease the quantity of vitamin D absorbed by many, not sure if the powers that be factored that in their decision-making process.
avgcorrection 5y ago
> I get that it's subjective It is not subjective according to the scientists.
jxy 5y ago
There will also be people who do not want to wake up to a pitch black sky and the coldest of the night. Some people like to wake up at 5 AM to work. Some people like to wake up at 5 AM to play. Some people like to play and go to bed at 5 AM. The source of the issue is the fixed 9 to 5 work hour instead of which hour we call 9 AM. So use your tooth and nail for whoever tells to work from 9 to 5 instead of the divided opinion of when exactly is 9 AM.
tzs 5y ago
The problem in northern latitudes with permanent DST is that morning darkness is generally more harmful than evening darkness. First, the weather tends to be worse in the morning. It tends to be colder. Fog is more likely. Ice on the sidewalks and roads is more likely. Second, people's schedules are generally more synced in the mornings. People tend to go to work or school over a narrower morning time span than the evening time span in which people come home. Morning darkness then means you are putting the time when you have the most people traveling at the time you have the worst travel conditions of the day. In the northern parts of the US, permanent DST wouldn't even give most people much usable after-work sunlight. Here in the vicinity of Seattle, for example, on the last day of DST this year sunset is 5:43 PM. If you are a 9 to 5 worker your commute likely uses up most or all of your evening sunlight.
agent327 5y ago
I totally understand your point. I don't see why all the daylight hours need to happen during the time when I'm stuck in the office (or otherwise at work), leaving only darkness for the hours I'm not at work. This may have made sense in an era when the majority of people worked in the field, but today most people work in buildings, and a great many of those buildings sadly have permanently shuttered windows and artificial lighting.
throw0101a 5y ago
> I get that it's subjective, but my subjective view is that having sunlight after work is more important, and I stand by that. Plenty of folks that study chronobiology do not think it is subjective. The Society for Research on Biological Rhythms: > Local and national governments around the world are currently considering the elimination of the annual switch to and from Daylight Saving Time (DST). As an international organization of scientists dedicated to studying circadian and other biological rhythms, the Society for Research on Biological Rhythms (SRBR) engaged experts in the field to write a Position Paper on the consequences of choosing to live on DST or Standard Time (ST). The authors take the position that, based on comparisons of large populations living in DST or ST or on western versus eastern edges of time zones, the advantages of permanent ST outweigh switching to DST annually or permanently. Four peer reviewers provided expert critiques of the initial submission, and the SRBR Executive Board approved the revised manuscript as a Position Paper to help educate the public in their evaluation of current legislative actions to end DST. * https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31170882/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31170882/ * https://doi.org/10.1177/0748730419854197 https://doi.org/10.1177/0748730419854197 World Federation of Societies for Chronobiology: > In summary, the scientific literature strongly argues against the switching between DST and Standard Time and even more so against adopting DST permanently. […] * https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2019.00944/full?mod=article_inline https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2019.0094... * https://doi.org/10.3389/fphys.2019.00944 https://doi.org/10.3389/fphys.2019.00944 Article that links to various other societies and such: * https://herf.medium.com/why-standard-time-is-better-e586b500923 https://herf.medium.com/why-standard-time-is-better-e586b500... * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26416574 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26416574
loonster 5y ago
Over the long term, it doesn't matter. People will change business hours that best suite them.

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]

MisterBastahrd 5y ago

Yeah, that's most people, I think. We're fine with getting rid of the time shift, but if we're going to do that, it makes more sense that the back half of the day have sunlight for longer. People need to do things and kids need to play. Most folks aren't going to work to plow fields anymore.

ginko 5y ago
But is the best way to keep a systemic off by one error for ever? Is this really the only way to allow people to get out of work earlier?
- MisterBastahrd 5y ago
  Why does it have to be a "one off error?" When's the last time you used a sundial to figure out the time down to a quarter hour or didn't have a device with you that gave you the current time? I think most people would agree on two things: (1) that having time after work to do things during daylight hours is ideal, and (2) that the work hours they already have are fine. A shift in working hours might be fine for childless adults, but it doesn't work for most people. People have to be present to get their kids ready for school or daycare, and you're never going to get teacher's unions to agree that they should be in the doors of a school by 6am to receive students. So... this fall, no shift. For now or ever. Boom, done. Yes, the days get a bit shorter, but you're still talking about a 6:45pm sunset in Texas, which gives people about 2 hours of active time in the evenings, which is preferable to the 45 minutes previously.
  - ginko 5y ago
    > When's the last time you used a sundial to figure out the time down to a quarter hour or didn't have a device with you that gave you the current time? I live in Scandinavia some 500km South of the Arctic circle. Let me tell you that it's very obvious that the sun is one hour off at "midnight" in Summer. If we kept DST in Winter it would be even more noticeable. It would also mean that there'd be some 3 months per year where I need to go to and leave from work in complete darkness. At least right now I get to wake up to some sunlight in December. Daytime is fundamentally an astronomic concept. Proponents of permanent DST could at least be intellectually honest and admit they want everyone to get up an hour earlier rather than force everyone to pretend that 11am is actually 12pm. > Yes, the days get a bit shorter, but you're still talking about a 6:45pm sunset in Texas That's cute. I just walked back home from work and the sun was already setting here at 5:30. And it's still Autumn.

echelon 5y ago

Hard agree. I think that most people would want to switch to permanent daylight saving time. This moves the sunset "later" in the day so that you get more sunlight after work. This is good for restaurants and leisure activities. Arguments against this typically come in a few flavors every time this subject comes up: > But the sun should be overhead at noon. This doesn't work geographically in practice anyway. It doesn't matter to anyone either. We're not an agrarian society without clocks. > But kids will have to go to school in the dark. They often have to do this anyway. Schools could change the starting hours if they cared. Most people don't have kids. > But employers could just start work earlier. This isn't going to happen worldwide at any scale. And who wants to start work earlier? > But early risers prefer to enjoy time before work than after work. Fair point, but I think this is the minority of folks. Most social activities are at night, and this is when venues make the most money.

evandijk70 5y ago
I think most people have difficulty waking up in time and difficulty falling asleep early enough. To fix this, doesn't it make sense to have daylight in the morning and darkness in the evening?
ginko 5y ago
>This doesn't work geographically in practice anyway. It's still more correct than DST. >And who wants to start work earlier? You ARE starting work earlier with DST. That's the whole point. I sometimes wonder if there's some fundamental difference in understanding. To me the time in your watch is just a numeric value the _actual_ time of day is the location of the sun on the sky.
paganel 5y ago
Plus one hour less of sun-exposure for half a year (I mean, if we get rid of DST) will most certainly decrease the quantity of vitamin D absorbed by many, not sure if the powers that be factored that in their decision-making process.

avgcorrection 5y ago

> I get that it's subjective It is not subjective according to the scientists.

jxy 5y ago

There will also be people who do not want to wake up to a pitch black sky and the coldest of the night. Some people like to wake up at 5 AM to work. Some people like to wake up at 5 AM to play. Some people like to play and go to bed at 5 AM. The source of the issue is the fixed 9 to 5 work hour instead of which hour we call 9 AM. So use your tooth and nail for whoever tells to work from 9 to 5 instead of the divided opinion of when exactly is 9 AM.

tzs 5y ago

The problem in northern latitudes with permanent DST is that morning darkness is generally more harmful than evening darkness. First, the weather tends to be worse in the morning. It tends to be colder. Fog is more likely. Ice on the sidewalks and roads is more likely. Second, people's schedules are generally more synced in the mornings. People tend to go to work or school over a narrower morning time span than the evening time span in which people come home. Morning darkness then means you are putting the time when you have the most people traveling at the time you have the worst travel conditions of the day. In the northern parts of the US, permanent DST wouldn't even give most people much usable after-work sunlight. Here in the vicinity of Seattle, for example, on the last day of DST this year sunset is 5:43 PM. If you are a 9 to 5 worker your commute likely uses up most or all of your evening sunlight.

agent327 5y ago

I totally understand your point. I don't see why all the daylight hours need to happen during the time when I'm stuck in the office (or otherwise at work), leaving only darkness for the hours I'm not at work. This may have made sense in an era when the majority of people worked in the field, but today most people work in buildings, and a great many of those buildings sadly have permanently shuttered windows and artificial lighting.

throw0101a 5y ago

> I get that it's subjective, but my subjective view is that having sunlight after work is more important, and I stand by that. Plenty of folks that study chronobiology do not think it is subjective. The Society for Research on Biological Rhythms: > Local and national governments around the world are currently considering the elimination of the annual switch to and from Daylight Saving Time (DST). As an international organization of scientists dedicated to studying circadian and other biological rhythms, the Society for Research on Biological Rhythms (SRBR) engaged experts in the field to write a Position Paper on the consequences of choosing to live on DST or Standard Time (ST). The authors take the position that, based on comparisons of large populations living in DST or ST or on western versus eastern edges of time zones, the advantages of permanent ST outweigh switching to DST annually or permanently. Four peer reviewers provided expert critiques of the initial submission, and the SRBR Executive Board approved the revised manuscript as a Position Paper to help educate the public in their evaluation of current legislative actions to end DST. * https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31170882/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31170882/ * https://doi.org/10.1177/0748730419854197 https://doi.org/10.1177/0748730419854197 World Federation of Societies for Chronobiology: > In summary, the scientific literature strongly argues against the switching between DST and Standard Time and even more so against adopting DST permanently. […] * https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2019.00944/full?mod=article_inline https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2019.0094... * https://doi.org/10.3389/fphys.2019.00944 https://doi.org/10.3389/fphys.2019.00944 Article that links to various other societies and such: * https://herf.medium.com/why-standard-time-is-better-e586b500923 https://herf.medium.com/why-standard-time-is-better-e586b500... * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26416574 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26416574

loonster 5y ago

Over the long term, it doesn't matter. People will change business hours that best suite them.