21 ms·

Daylight saving time is 'not helpful' and has 'no upsides,' experts say

270 points by alwillis 5y ago

jdofaz 5y ago
I've lived in Arizona my whole life and I didn't know what DST was until I was in high school. Arizona hasn't observed DST since 1967. I've been in other states a few times during the changeover and it's always seemed annoying to me. We usually get our own selection in Time Zone menus, so that is kinda cool.
kuroguro 5y ago
In general I'm against DST, but I did enjoy sleeping the extra hour this morning :)
blakesterz 5y ago
Sometimes I see an "Experts Say" headline and wonder why we need an expert to say something that is so obvious to everyone. If there's one thing that unites all Americans, maybe every person on earth, it's damn Daylight Saving Time. I've yet to meet anyone who celebrates those days! I assume someone must think it's still a good idea for some reason?
- dugditches 5y ago
  Working a midnight shift on a Saturday evening and going home an hour 'early' is quite pleasant. Working a midnight shift on a Saturday evening and having to work an hour extra isn't. The 'extra' hour feels nice this time of year. When the days are getting shorter and it's getting colder. And you know colder and darker days are ahead. While in the Spring you have Spring to look forwards too. They often talk about the increase in accidents in the spring. But this time of year road conditions typically get worse. In terms of lack of daylight, more active wildlife and other small issues(first frost, wet roads, slippery leaves, Summer tires still on, etc).
  - wayoutthere 5y ago
    At least where I live (NE USA), February thru April is when we get our winter weather season. January is usually the coldest month, but we don’t get a lot of ice or snow until later in the season. Almost like clockwork we get hit by a big snowstorm the second week in April.
  - kstrauser 5y ago
    In the Navy, when you're sailing west and setting the clock back, it happens after noon so that the work day is an hour longer. When you're sailing east and setting the clock forward, it happens after midnight so that you're losing an hour of sleep.
- chrisco255 5y ago
  "Experts say" is a call to authority. It's a rhetorical trope of the lowest quality journalist. It's meant to shut down all debate and frame the headline as a foregone conclusion.
  - efa 5y ago
    Wow, perfectly stated. Thank you.
  - throw0101a 5y ago
    > "Experts say" is a call to authority. "Experts say" vaccines help (a) reduce your chances of getting COVID, and (b) not suffering as badly from it should you contract it. Perhaps some of the "experts" who study how daylight effects us should at least be consulted before changes be made. 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://doi.org/10.3389/fphys.2019.00944 https://doi.org/10.3389/fphys.2019.00944 * https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2019.00944/full?mod=article_inline https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2019.0094... We can still ignore the experts after they have their say of course.
- iso1631 5y ago
  People in Scotland are fans of it If they clocks were GMT year round in Inverness, sunrise at 0730 today, 0830 come December, 0900 on shortest day. But under GMT year round sunset in July would be before 2100, which seems a waste when culture has people getting up about 0700 (and if you did shift culture to get up an hour earlier, you'd be up for hours before sunrise in winter). With Daylight Saving sunrise at 10am not great. America is (aside from Alaska) quite far south, so the effect isn't as pronounced
- fourstar 5y ago
  Because people are sheep and the media has conditioned them to believe anything with that prefix in the title.
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago
  > I assume someone must think it's still a good idea for some reason? Nobody does. But ask a group of people what the solution should be and someone will start screaming bloody murder about how the correct time is standard or daylight. As a result, politically, forcing a move will get you (a) lots of people with meh level support for you and (b) a small, pissed off group. Which is, electorally, worse than useless.
- sjburt 5y ago
  If we didn't have daylight savings, the sun would rise at 4:30 in the summer. This seems quite unpleasant to me. I would rather have an extra hour of evening light. Alternatively, if we did DST all year round, the sun would rise at 8:30 in the winter. That also seems unpleasant.
- efa 5y ago
  I like the night you get an extra hour sleep!
bellyfullofbac 5y ago
It has the upside of generating headlines and occupying the otherwise idle 1% of the world [1] with another topic of useless discussion every 6 months. /s [1] https://www.overcomingbias.com/2021/08/what-is-elite-overproduction.html https://www.overcomingbias.com/2021/08/what-is-elite-overpro...
- sdfasf 5y ago
  Pretty much sums it
jcranmer 5y ago
Probably the biggest barrier to ending daylight saving time is... do you go to year-round winter time or summer time? And that's kind of the upside of daylight saving time: in winter, when days are short, you really want to get the daylight in the morning not in the evening; but in summer, when days are long, you want to move the extra morning daylight to the evening. So DST is kind of a compromise where we suffer the negative results of the changeover to get the positive results of morning light in winter and the positive results of extra evening light in summer.
- culopatin 5y ago
  The one that puts the sun where it belongs at 12
  - asoneth 5y ago
    I'd prefer one that fixes the clock to sunrise and lets noon and sunset drift rather than fixing noon and letting sunrise and sunset drift. I could also try and get my coworkers to move our meetings earlier in summer so I can leave work by 3, but for some reason changing a "clock" seems to be more effective than getting people to buy into summer hours and winter hours.
  - WithinReason 5y ago
    Where is that?
    - Mindless2112 5y ago
      Closest to zenith, I presume.
    - culopatin 5y ago
      Lol I meant the time that better aligns with the position of the sun relative to where you stand.
  - jedberg 5y ago
    For most people, that's never. But standard time would be closer more often than daylight time. The bigger question is why? Now that we have electric lights, why do you want equal daytime before and after noon?
idoh 5y ago
Adding to the pile of annoyances with DST - I’m now working at a fully remote company with employees spread across the US and the EU. The switch to DST is not synced between Europe and North America, which cause all types of scheduling havoc. Some meeting times switch, some do not. A totally avoidable mess.
- awillen 5y ago
  I had this exact thing with Portugal... the time changed something like two weeks apart, and we ended up spending half a day on each end just getting meeting times fixed.
- bellyfullofbac 5y ago
  Yeah, one of the fuckups that the presidency of Dubya left behind. It wasn't like this before 2005! https://newrepublic.com/article/79023/roll-back-the-bush-changes-daylight-saving-time https://newrepublic.com/article/79023/roll-back-the-bush-cha...
  - soperj 5y ago
    Big Candy wanted it after Halloween.
  - dml2135 5y ago
    Fuckups? I often say that this is the one good thing Bush the Younger got done lol. The less standard time the better as far as I'm concerned (I live in NY where 4pm sunsets in the winter are a huge bummer).
- noneeeed 5y ago
  Yep, we've had to shift a weekly meeting for one hour, for just this week as we (UK) have just changed, but SF changes next week. Very annoying.
- Max_aaa 5y ago
  Now add northern vs southern hemisphere scheduling. When DTS would work backwards and is also out of sync.
playpause 5y ago
It’s strange to say “no upsides” when there are a couple of obvious upsides (mentioned by other comments). Do the experts think it makes their case stronger when they make immediately disprovable claims? Isn’t it stronger to say “the upsides are massively outweighed by the downsides” or something like that?
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > It’s strange to say “no upsides” when there are a couple of obvious upsides (mentioned by other comments) None of the cited upsides require clock shifts. They aren't upsides of DST, but of being in the right timezone during winter, which DST does for parts of poorly drawn timezones in ways which are more simply addressed by drawing the timezones properly. That no one is pointing out problems solved that don't trace back to “without DST, we are in the wrong time zone in winter” is a strong clue that the real problem is wrong timezone and that that problem is just more acutely felt in winter.
  - jjulius 5y ago
    How would you redraw timezones that factor those winters in properly?
    - sumtechguy 5y ago
      I think what they are saying is timezones mostly follow along north south. When if they took into account the tilt of the earth it would not be as big of an issue the further north or south you go from the equator.
    - ItsMonkk 5y ago
      Get rid of them. Timezones are a leaky abstraction over daylight. They are to broad, so run into these failure modes. I would train people to run off of UTC time most of the time when they need to synchronize a specific time. Then train them to run off of sunrise/sunset offsets for situations where daylight matters. Most of the parks in my neighborhood are open sunrise to sunset, that's perfect. With modern digital clocks, this would be trivial to setup. When should work hours be? Either some UTC time if we're remote, or if all local, something like 10 hours before sunset to 2 hours before sunset.
kj4ips 5y ago
I personally disagree. I live on the extreme west end of a time zone, and I greatly enjoy having an more daylight during my after-work leisure time. Without DST, I would have almost no post-work sunlight outside of the actual summer months.
- jedberg 5y ago
  What if we just stayed on DST year round?
  - _ph_ 5y ago
    It wouldn't change a thing. The deeper cause of the day rythm is the daylight cycle. We adjust all our times, like start of work day or school start relative to that - mostly so that you get up after or not too long before sunrise and have most of the daylight during work time. If you change the time zone setting, day times are going to adjust accordingly.
  - Mindless2112 5y ago
    Some people with children don't like that because "[their] children will have to go to school in the dark" during the winter. That's what killed legislation to make DST permanent where I live.
    - _ph_ 5y ago
      More importantly, they might fail in getting their children awake and out of the house in the first place, it is before sunset :p
    - jedberg 5y ago
      I have children, and the time change is far worse than going in the dark. Also, kids in Alaska go in the dark all the time and survive just fine. And if they have an after school activity, they have to come home in the dark anyway. It's a red herring.
    - Apocryphon 5y ago
      Sounds like last year, when all of the schools were closed, would've been the optimal time to push through any sort of change.
ibirman 5y ago
This is rubbish. I like to ride my bike after work, which ends at 5pm. With DST I can ride all the way up to this week and still get home before dark. Please don't take this away from me, I hate it when it gets dark by 5pm.
- Something1234 5y ago
  let's end the fall back, and stay on DST. It's the time change that is stupid. It's more about when we want the light for our schedules.
  - codazoda 5y ago
    That’s what Utah plans to do but there is currently a federal law that prohibits the use of permanent DST. Utah, California, and a couple other states have asked the federal government to change that law and I believe there are plans to consider it soon. Utah has passed a law that makes DST permanent as soon as the federal law is removed. Edit: On further review, this seems to have died in committee. https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/6331/text https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/6331...
    - WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
      Florida passed theirs. Other states too but I don't recall which.
  - kstrauser 5y ago
    This is the worst option. Since we started caring about time, "noon" has meant "when the sun is straight overhead". Unless there's a parallel push to change noon to 1PM (and midnight to 1AM), I'd fight that tooth and nail.
    - dml2135 5y ago
      Correct me if I'm wrong but actual "high noon" and 12pm don't currently line up except for a couple days a year, do they?
lqet 5y ago
I am regularly surprised people have such a strong opinion on this topic. I personally enjoy that the sun only sets around 21:30 in the summer, and I like the cozy early sunset in winter. I never had any problems with the one hour less sleep once a year, especially since it is easy to allow for a transition phase of around a week. I have 1 clock in the house which doesn't adjust automatically, so this can hardly be called a nuisance. More than once I didn't even notice the change until the evening - I just got up when my alarm went off. When the European Union conducted a poll 3 years ago, 4,6 million people answered. That is less than one percent (!) of the population, which is evidence that the overwhelming majority of people just don't care.
- recursive 5y ago
  I belong to an exclusive group that has needed to write software that calculates the time span between two (local) instants in time. And now, we can't just use GMT. The inputs we get are local time, by specification. I have strong opinions about DST. And even more fringe-y, I have opinions about time zones too.
- lucasmullens 5y ago
  > When the European Union conducted a poll 3 years ago, 4,6 million people answered. That is less than one percent (!) of the European population, which is evidence that the overwhelming majority of people just don't care. I'm sorry what? Unless 100% percent of the population was surveyed and 99% told pollsters they "don't care", that isn't evidence of anything. I care about lots of issues and I respond to almost no polls.
  - lqet 5y ago
    This was a poll with extensive media coverage, and it was clear that the EU would use it to base a decision on. Polls were open for over 1 month. Clearly if less than 1% of the population would participate in a presidential election that would be evidence that the population just did not care about the outcome?
    - 5y ago
jp57 5y ago
I've been reading the anti-DST (or more properly anti-clock-shift) posts that appear hear and elsewhere every spring and fall for years. I really think this is a case of "be careful what you wish for". I think many folks, especially in northern latitudes, will regret the early summer sunsets or sunrises if we were to stay on standard time year round. In Seattle, for example, I think the sun would rise before 5 am as late as early August. On the other hand, if Seattle stayed on DST (+7) year-round then the sun would rise after 8AM from early November to late February, and as late as 9AM in December. Seattle is an extreme case, because it is so far north, but New York City is not that different, and I think more people would bemoan the lack of after-work daylight during spring and summer than currently bemoan the switch, and would be unhappy about it for a longer period each year. Of course, if we got rid of DST, we could all just agree to get up earlier in the summer. Maybe we could even standardize that by agreeing to all start getting up earlier on the same day each spring. :-)
- sterlind 5y ago
  God no. Because of DST Seattle is dark at 4pm in the winter. Going off DST would probably prevent some suicides.
- deerIRL 5y ago
  Having grown up somewhere northern that doesn't follow DST (Saskatchewan) I never really understood this argument. Winter months you get so little sunlight anyways I don't really see how it would make too much of a difference. Mind you this could be because of where I grew up, but moving to somewhere that follows DST I always saw it more as an inconvenience than anything else.
  - 8ytecoder 5y ago
    Essentially DST is making everyone wake up an hour early everyday for 7-8 months. I’d rather just let the people who want the “extra” hour of sunlight in the evening get up early. Our bodies sync with the earth’s clock and not what we set. (Also 1-hr timezones are not sufficient. We need 30 minute time zones as well. People in the westernmost US, for example, have an early start. DST makes it much much earlier.)
lbriner 5y ago
This should definitely be a banned topic on HN! The can of worms every time we change the clocks forwards and backwards and despite what the "experts" say, there is clearly no obvious advantage, otherwise we would just get rid of it. There are also differences between places of different latitude so I cannot speak to those on the equator or the extreme poles so no point assuming there is a single answer that everyone likes.
- throw0101a 5y ago
  > [...] espite what the "experts" say, there is clearly no obvious advantage, otherwise we would just get rid of it. When it comes to (possible) advantages, it depends on the context. AFAICT, the positions of most chronobiology and sleep societies is that we should stick with Standard ("winter" / non-summer) Time year-round. Of course this may not be advantageous culturally or socially ("daylight after work FTW!!!1").
- coding123 5y ago
  Definitely agree. If people actually cared, these topics would be discussed months before and after the switch. It seems to JUST come up in the spring and fall near the change.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - recursive 5y ago
    I'm happy to rant about it all year round, and regularly do.
WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
"To the relief of many Americans, the period of daylight saving time is finally coming to a close." I am fairly skeptical of the assertion that most Americans favor Standard time over DST. My skepticism extends to the 2019 poll[1] that asked Americans if they "Supported Ending Daylight Savings Time", a Q that bundles Standard Time with ending clock shifts. The Q to ask is "For year round time, would you prefer Standard Time or DST?" This would better allow us to consider what people at different latitudes want. [1] https://today.yougov.com/topics/lifestyle/articles-reports/2019/03/06/daylight-saving-time-poll-survey https://today.yougov.com/topics/lifestyle/articles-reports/2...
- snek_case 5y ago
  I think if you ask that question in a poll, you also have to explain the question that DST means "sun rises and sets later". The average person might not even know which is which.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - lamontcg 5y ago
    Or explain that DST means getting up earlier vs. sleeping in.
- jayspell 5y ago
  Just about everyone I know despises DST. There is some disagreement about what would become "standard time", but almost everyone wants it to end. The worst part of DST is the assumption that you can just reschedule a kid's body clock. A baby gets really upset with the time change, and older kids aren't that much better.
  - WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
    > Just about everyone I know despises DST. You may know them all then. Over a longish life intersecting about every class there is, I found ~0 people expressing a preference for Standard time. The preference for DST has been fairly universal. I have not lived at high latitudes however. Some comments here indicate opinions there may reasonably differ.
tombert 5y ago
I would be ok with getting rid of DST entirely, but I will say I got a lot less vocal about it once I got a smartwatch (initially a Pebble, now an Apple Watch), simply because it automatically adjusts the time for me. I'm someone who is wholly dependent on a wristwatch for nearly every aspect of my life. When I would forget to preemptively set my watch backward or forwards, I would be late for everything for a day, and it would lead to most of aspects of my life being worse. Now that my watch is automatically set for me by the phone towers, and my alarms are also automatically updated, DST has shifted from "ruining my day" to "mild annoyance".
- WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
  Most of my clocks auto-adjust but my sleep schedule still gets sabotaged 2x a year. What's that about?
DantesKite 5y ago
I don’t even notice daylight saving time days. At all. I’m sure it’s an annoyance to some people but it’s so low on my priorities. A glass of water is more important to me. Or the dirt in my backyard. Also anytime anyone says “experts” my first instinct to to believe they’re wrong.
- thehappypm 5y ago
  If it's not important, we should remove the complex system (clock changes) in favor of a simpler system (no clock changes).
  - riidom 5y ago
    There is a difference between "not noticing" and "not important".
nineplay 5y ago
I don't like to throw shade on my own profession, but I know some number of code bases that will need to be furiously updated if DST goes away. I wonder what's going on deep in some 'core infrastructure' code. Tracking time zones all over the world is hard, and a lot of code that does it was written decades ago. I wouldn't eagerly sign up to review it all. I'd much rather stick with DST than send some poor devs down that path.
- mnw21cam 5y ago
  If there's an example of a thing that you shouldn't try to do yourself other than crypto, it's timezones. The timezone database is there, and it is updated regularly by very dedicated and intelligent people. There's no excuse for not using it.
  - nineplay 5y ago
    Wikipedia suggests it's been there since 86. There is a whole lot of code written before 86 and I'm suspecting a whole lot of it doesn't get regularly refactored. I can tell you from experience that there's financial code with some dicey hard coding. I haven't seen it in a long time so hopefully some happy Cobol programmer jumped and used the money to retire early.
- throw0101a 5y ago
  Some of us were around for the last set of changes: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Policy_Act_of_2005#Change_to_daylight_saving_time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Policy_Act_of_2005#Chan... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time_in_the_United_States#2005%E2%80%932009:_Second_extension https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time_in_the_Un... Much patching / updating of tzdata and rebooting. I think that effort led to a bunch of changes that make for easier updates going forward. Until that point there wasn't really that much churn in things over the past few decades, so people became a little more bit complacent when it came to TZ code.
- philsnow 5y ago
  Shouldn't that code just do whatever tzdata says, and when tzdata says "don't change for DST", it just doesn't?
sushsjsuauahab 5y ago
Experts also told us that masks do nothing, and then that masks do something.
sfblah 5y ago
I prefer the idea of gradually eliminating time zones, by people starting to use UTC everywhere. It's as simple as individuals "reprogramming" the way they think about time. And, you can do it yourself and among friends without the government and the rest of society going along.
- maccolgan 5y ago
  That's impossible. 9am means a certain something everywhere on Earth, how are you going to fix that?
  - iggldiggl 5y ago
    Within a certain approximation to be honest, although all in all I'd agree with you. Also the fact that without time zones, for everybody who isn't lucky enough to live near wherever the meridian ends up the calendar date will now change somewhere during waking hours, which seems a rather confusing prospect.
- K2L8M11N2 5y ago
  https://qntm.org/abolish https://qntm.org/abolish
renewiltord 5y ago
DST is for people who have low control over their time, i.e. they are subject to control from others. This could be as simple as not being able to set when they work, which is fairly common. Or being subject to when daycare opens or whatever. Personally, I have great control over my time, so I just let my automated systems adjust their clocks and if I want "an extra hour of sleep", I just take it. If I want to go biking in the sun, I do it then. And so on and so forth. The important thing is that we devolve power adequately. So the federal government should drop DST/no-DST decisions completely to the states. Currently US Gov only lets states adhere to the non-DST time, or adopt DST. My state wants to go full DST and can't.
deleted 5y ago
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nemo44x 5y ago
I love it - unpopular opinion. I love the extra sunlight in the summer and that the Sun doesn't come up at 4AM and I love that in the winter it isn't dark until 8AM so I can actually be outside doing things (dog walking, kids to school, etc). I hope we don't change it as it's actually a great system and I think people would hate if we just stayed on a single time. Of course, people that live on certain latitudes probably care less about these optimizations and see it more as an annoyance.
- thehappypm 5y ago
  Stop saying you love the clock changes. You like the time zone that DST puts you into. Push your local government to make the time zone you like permanent.
  - nemo44x 5y ago
    No, I like that we change the clock. I like not having the Sun rise so early in the summer and so late in the winter. We have to adjust the clocks to make this a reality.
  - cameldrv 5y ago
    No, we love the changes. We want to wake up a certain amount of time after the sun rises and be on time to work/school. We then want the maximum amount of possible daylight in the afternoon/evening. We don't like DST in the winter because for many people this requires waking up in the dark if the time they have to get to work/school remains the same.
    - WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
      > because for many people this requires waking up in the dark if the time they have to get to school remains the same. Which is why the next step is to shift school schedules to align with kids' natural sleep schedules. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=study+school+start+times+sleep https://duckduckgo.com/?q=study+school+start+times+sleep
jleyank 5y ago
It might be just me but I can’t understand the difficulty of shifting one hour over a night or two. Flying across N America is 3+ hours and going to Europe can be 6-11. Do the people who can’t deal with an hour damn near die on trips such as this? If small kids have to be outside near traffic at any point, better than they get as much light as possible. Having little Johnny mushed by an suv tends to upset folks. And thinking about Cop26, perhaps we should minimize external lighting when possible to save energy and lessen impact on nature. Both of these, unfortunately, lean towards dst. Edit: forgot. I assume most people change when they get up on the weekend vs, the work week. If this assumption is correct, they might have more extreme time shifts every weekend than the once a year problem being discussed…
kevinpet 5y ago
I remain steadfast in my position that people who support year-round DST are utterly clueless and have not done the evaluation of what that means to kids going to school in the morning in winter.
- standardUser 5y ago
  Care to share your evaluation, and how it compares to implications for crime and traffic accidents in the evening hours? Or did you already accomplish your goal of calling a large number of people you've never met "utterly clueless"?
  - kevinpet 5y ago
    Right now in California sunrise in winter is around 7-7:30am. Many schools start as early as 7:15am, and most start by 8:15. Moving to year round DST would mean changing from some kids starting school right at sunrise to most kids walking to school in the dark. I chose my wording carefully. I don't think I can persuade you and I don't seek to persuade you. In my opinion, intentionally choosing a timezone deliberately offset from the historic and natural meaning of 12pm ~= noon, which requires significant support which I have never seen.
spullara 5y ago
I want DST year round in CA rather than the current standard time.
throwawayboise 5y ago
Experts created it, now experts say it's "not helpful." Maybe we need more common sense and less help from "experts."
- WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
  psssst. they aren't the same experts
sovande 5y ago
DST must go! It’s giving whole countries jet lag two times per year. It’s like leaded gasoline for the collective mind, which BTW was introduced around the same time and also considered a good idea. Except there is no scientific reasoning behind DST. It’s purely for convenience for some. The astronomer who seriously proposed it wanted more daylight hours to devote to collecting and examining insects… Arghh
aksss 5y ago
I think this argument is similar to advocacy for metric vs imperial - yeah, it probably makes sense, but the current system is workable enough that the pain of living with it is less than the pain of transitioning from it. IOW, nobody really cares enough about it but it’s fun to gripe about. Also, Firefly shouldn’t have been cancelled.
- riidom 5y ago
  So would you trade another season of Firefly for the imperial system then? :)
epaulson 5y ago
As someone who lives in a colder climate, I want to keep daylight saving. In the summer, I want the extra daylight in the evening - sunrise in June is 5am, without daylight saving it'd be 4am and the sun would go down at 8pm instead of 9pm. In the winter, I want the extra sunlight in the morning. That hour of sunlight is important to burn off fog and defrost things a bit. For the morning commute, I want that to get started as early as possible. Yeah, it sucks that the sun goes down at 4:30pm, but at least that darkness is warmer - the slush on the road is still warm enough that it often won't refreeze til after the evening commute is over with.
hnburnsy 5y ago
Seems like it will happen soon... >In the last four years, 19 states have enacted legislation or passed resolutions to provide for year-round daylight saving time, if Congress were to allow such a change, and in some cases, if surrounding states enact the same legislation. Because federal law does not currently allow full-time DST, Congress would have to act before states could adopt changes. The 19 states are: >Alabama, Georgia, Minnesota, Mississippi and Montana (2021). >Idaho, Louisiana, Ohio (resolution), South Carolina, Utah and Wyoming (2020). >Arkansas, Delaware, Maine, Oregon, Tennessee and Washington (2019). >Florida (2018; California voters also authorized such a change that year, but legislative action is pending). https://www.ncsl.org/research/transportation/daylight-savings-time-state-legislation.aspx https://www.ncsl.org/research/transportation/daylight-saving...
- Asmod4n 5y ago
  so all they wanna do is to change their timezone?
  - seniorsassycat 5y ago
    I think most of these laws have been written as wanting to use daylight time year round, which isn't allowed by federal law. Federally states can use standard time or switch between standard and daylight but they cannot always follow daylight time. Daylight time is the same as standard time of the time zone to the east, so I don't know why these states haven asked the transportation sec to reassign their timezones.
sparrc 5y ago
Seems like in general early-risers would prefer standard time, and people waking up around 7am or later would probably prefer daylight savings time year-round. My guess is that most people in the USA are _not_ early risers at this point and would prefer daylight savings time year-round, but would be interested to see data on this.
- joezydeco 5y ago
  I've got a 16 year-old high schooler (sorry, 'data point') that is nearly impossible to wake up when it's dark outside.
bigtex 5y ago
As a parent of young children I just want to go back to the time we don't change time at random. Also the older I get it takes longer to get use to the change.
therealrootuser 5y ago
Many states (by now) have already passed legislation to the effect that if/when the federal government allows it, they will simply stay on DST year-around. There are a number of bills on a federal level that would allow states to do this, but each of these bills have seemingly been lost in the torpid world of inaction.
- RKearney 5y ago
  I seriously doubt that would ever happen. Devices do not have a "always DST" mode, but they do in fact have a "never DST" mode. In order to stay in DST, the region would have to completely change which timezone they observe. Pacific Time would observe Mountain Time, Mountain -> Central, Central -> Eastern, and Eastern would have to observe whatever GMT-4 is.
tpoacher 5y ago
some experts say. subtle but crucial difference
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
new_realist 5y ago
In a world with smart clocks, every major metropolitan area should be in its own time zone, time should skew very slightly at three a.m. every morning, and sunrise should always be at seven a.m. DST can be improved.
asoneth 5y ago
DST is a sloppy attempt to shift the clock to make the time of sunrise more fixed instead of just rather than fixing the time of solar noon. We should just go all in and define 00:00 as sunrise rather than 12:00 as solar noon. Schools and shops would open around 01:00 or maybe 02:00 sunrise time. Typical office workers head home around 10:00. Where I am the sun would set around 09:00 in the winter and 15:30 in the summer. And of course anything on the internet or that requires cross-region coordination would be scheduled in UTC, perhaps with a user's local sunrise time displayed as a parenthetical. To decide when to call my Uncle Steve in Melbourne I'd look up his local time as I do today, but if we scheduled a call ahead of time we'd schedule it in UTC.
wnoise 5y ago
The only real solution is to straighten out the axis and eliminate the seasonal variation in daily hours sunlight.
- Ekaros 5y ago
  Just get rid of the planet in general. Would make everything so much easier. No more messy months or non integer year lengths. And even no more leap seconds. So many problems would be solved, just think of the efficiency.
pliftkl 5y ago
From article: "Sleep is also necessary for the body to heal and repair heart and blood vessels. Lack of sleep has been linked to an increased risk heart disease, kidney disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, obesity and stroke, experts say." I don't think that's a particularly controversial statement, but is it germane to a discussion of a twice yearly switch in sleep schedules? The general consensus for travelers is that it takes 1-2 days per hour of time difference to get past jet lag. There's a decent argument to be made based on accident avoidance, but the rest of the "health impacts" seem harder to justify.
- radu_floricica 5y ago
  That's called "scope insensitivity" :) It's a 1-2 day issue, multiplied by whole populations. It's pretty difficult for human brains to parse this, which is probably the cause of a lot of civilization inadequacies.
  - pliftkl 5y ago
    Ah - but the population of people-travel-days is also probably quite high, and while it doesn't impact a "whole population", it impacts a subset of the population frequently enough to be a comparable order of magnitude to the population as a whole. (Potentially bad) back of envelope calculations follow: 1. The entire US population of 330 million is impacted by a 1 hour shift twice per year (of which one shift is probably more impactful than the other to sleep health). 2. On a typical year, there are about 1 billion airline passengers in the US alone (domestic plus inbound/outbound international). This counts everyone on a flight as one passenger. Let's assume that people take on average 2 legs in one day (probably a slightly high estimate). That's 500 million people, but we should halve that again since people have outbound and inbound trips. So we're down to 250 million people being impacted by travel. 3. Some of the travel is in the same time zone, but other travel spans many time zones (inbound international flights or transcontinental flights). We can call that a wash, though we could probably get to actual data if I weren't being lazy. I'd also argue that the travel is going to be much more disruptive to sleep schedules since in addition to the actual time zone shifts, travelers have to deal with early departures and late arrivals. 4. Many of the people who travel are being counted multiple times here, so we don't have a true collection of 250 million people impacted, but it's not clear that 1 person experiencing jet lag 10 times should only be counted once, since this is a recurring 1-2 day issue. 5. We're not orders of magnitude off here in terms of people-days impacted by normal travel vs the great DST debate.
zzo38computer 5y ago
I dislike daylight saving time, and want the time zone offset to be the same all the time. I would rather have 12:00 solar noon (it make much more sense to me than the other way), but would also accept the other way; either way is better than switching for daylight saving time. If there is enough sun light then you can also see the time by the sun dial too. Also, the fact that the clock is switch back can confuse the time wrongly, since the clock will say the same number twice making it ambiguous and also you cannot simply to subtract the numbers to measure the intervals of time. You should be able to do things regardless of what number the clock says. Don't rely on the numbers on the clock to dictate everything you are doing all the time. If you want to go outside when it is not dark, then that is what you can do. If you want to eat dinner when it is not dark, then that is what you can do. If you want to sleep when it is dark, then that is what you can do. This can be done regardless of what number is on the clock. If you want to work or schedule something for some time you can do based on whatever criteria would be appropriate, regardless of what number is on the clock; regardless of what criteria are being used, the numbers on the clock will still tell you the intervals of time, and how long it takes. For example, opening hours need not be fixed, and holidays need not be fixed, etc. But, maybe you will not need to schedule something for a specific time anyways, in all circumstances. Also, if you want to wake up earlier, then you can set your alarm clock for an earlier time; you don't need daylight saving time for this to work.
BrandoElFollito 5y ago
We were this tiny close in the EU to remove DST. One of the rare citizen-driven decision across all countries. And bam! COVID came and froze all activities and our useless European bureaucrats now officially started that the topic is not on any radar screen
WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
This has been fun y'all. I'll see you again, week of March 7th 2022.
torstenvl 5y ago
In the U.S., DST runs from March to November, just shy of 2/3 of the year. Let's not fool ourselves anymore. DST is de facto standard time. It's Winter Time (Daylight Wasting Time) that needs to go.
isolli 5y ago
In March 2019, the European parliament voted to end daylight saving time in the EU by 2021 [0]. To this day I don't know why this was dropped. It may be because of the pandemic, but respect for democratic institutions means we should put it back on the table very soon. [0] https://www.dw.com/en/eu-parliament-votes-to-end-daylight-savings/a-48064185 https://www.dw.com/en/eu-parliament-votes-to-end-daylight-sa...
- Ekaros 5y ago
  And realistically 2020 or 2021 would have been perfect times to change this as everything was a mess anyway. So must wasted potential.

270 points by alwillis 5y ago

I've lived in Arizona my whole life and I didn't know what DST was until I was in high school. Arizona hasn't observed DST since 1967. I've been in other states a few times during the changeover and it's always seemed annoying to me. We usually get our own selection in Time Zone menus, so that is kinda cool.

kuroguro 5y ago

In general I'm against DST, but I did enjoy sleeping the extra hour this morning :)

blakesterz 5y ago

Sometimes I see an "Experts Say" headline and wonder why we need an expert to say something that is so obvious to everyone. If there's one thing that unites all Americans, maybe every person on earth, it's damn Daylight Saving Time. I've yet to meet anyone who celebrates those days! I assume someone must think it's still a good idea for some reason?

dugditches 5y ago
Working a midnight shift on a Saturday evening and going home an hour 'early' is quite pleasant. Working a midnight shift on a Saturday evening and having to work an hour extra isn't. The 'extra' hour feels nice this time of year. When the days are getting shorter and it's getting colder. And you know colder and darker days are ahead. While in the Spring you have Spring to look forwards too. They often talk about the increase in accidents in the spring. But this time of year road conditions typically get worse. In terms of lack of daylight, more active wildlife and other small issues(first frost, wet roads, slippery leaves, Summer tires still on, etc).
- wayoutthere 5y ago
  At least where I live (NE USA), February thru April is when we get our winter weather season. January is usually the coldest month, but we don’t get a lot of ice or snow until later in the season. Almost like clockwork we get hit by a big snowstorm the second week in April.
- kstrauser 5y ago
  In the Navy, when you're sailing west and setting the clock back, it happens after noon so that the work day is an hour longer. When you're sailing east and setting the clock forward, it happens after midnight so that you're losing an hour of sleep.
chrisco255 5y ago
"Experts say" is a call to authority. It's a rhetorical trope of the lowest quality journalist. It's meant to shut down all debate and frame the headline as a foregone conclusion.
- efa 5y ago
  Wow, perfectly stated. Thank you.
- throw0101a 5y ago
  > "Experts say" is a call to authority. "Experts say" vaccines help (a) reduce your chances of getting COVID, and (b) not suffering as badly from it should you contract it. Perhaps some of the "experts" who study how daylight effects us should at least be consulted before changes be made. 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://doi.org/10.3389/fphys.2019.00944 https://doi.org/10.3389/fphys.2019.00944 * https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2019.00944/full?mod=article_inline https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2019.0094... We can still ignore the experts after they have their say of course.
iso1631 5y ago
People in Scotland are fans of it If they clocks were GMT year round in Inverness, sunrise at 0730 today, 0830 come December, 0900 on shortest day. But under GMT year round sunset in July would be before 2100, which seems a waste when culture has people getting up about 0700 (and if you did shift culture to get up an hour earlier, you'd be up for hours before sunrise in winter). With Daylight Saving sunrise at 10am not great. America is (aside from Alaska) quite far south, so the effect isn't as pronounced
fourstar 5y ago
Because people are sheep and the media has conditioned them to believe anything with that prefix in the title.
JumpCrisscross 5y ago
> I assume someone must think it's still a good idea for some reason? Nobody does. But ask a group of people what the solution should be and someone will start screaming bloody murder about how the correct time is standard or daylight. As a result, politically, forcing a move will get you (a) lots of people with meh level support for you and (b) a small, pissed off group. Which is, electorally, worse than useless.
sjburt 5y ago
If we didn't have daylight savings, the sun would rise at 4:30 in the summer. This seems quite unpleasant to me. I would rather have an extra hour of evening light. Alternatively, if we did DST all year round, the sun would rise at 8:30 in the winter. That also seems unpleasant.
efa 5y ago
I like the night you get an extra hour sleep!

bellyfullofbac 5y ago

It has the upside of generating headlines and occupying the otherwise idle 1% of the world [1] with another topic of useless discussion every 6 months. /s [1] https://www.overcomingbias.com/2021/08/what-is-elite-overproduction.html https://www.overcomingbias.com/2021/08/what-is-elite-overpro...

sdfasf 5y ago
Pretty much sums it

jcranmer 5y ago

Probably the biggest barrier to ending daylight saving time is... do you go to year-round winter time or summer time? And that's kind of the upside of daylight saving time: in winter, when days are short, you really want to get the daylight in the morning not in the evening; but in summer, when days are long, you want to move the extra morning daylight to the evening. So DST is kind of a compromise where we suffer the negative results of the changeover to get the positive results of morning light in winter and the positive results of extra evening light in summer.

culopatin 5y ago
The one that puts the sun where it belongs at 12
- asoneth 5y ago
  I'd prefer one that fixes the clock to sunrise and lets noon and sunset drift rather than fixing noon and letting sunrise and sunset drift. I could also try and get my coworkers to move our meetings earlier in summer so I can leave work by 3, but for some reason changing a "clock" seems to be more effective than getting people to buy into summer hours and winter hours.
- WithinReason 5y ago
  Where is that?
  - Mindless2112 5y ago
    Closest to zenith, I presume.
  - culopatin 5y ago
    Lol I meant the time that better aligns with the position of the sun relative to where you stand.
- jedberg 5y ago
  For most people, that's never. But standard time would be closer more often than daylight time. The bigger question is why? Now that we have electric lights, why do you want equal daytime before and after noon?

idoh 5y ago

Adding to the pile of annoyances with DST - I’m now working at a fully remote company with employees spread across the US and the EU. The switch to DST is not synced between Europe and North America, which cause all types of scheduling havoc. Some meeting times switch, some do not. A totally avoidable mess.

awillen 5y ago
I had this exact thing with Portugal... the time changed something like two weeks apart, and we ended up spending half a day on each end just getting meeting times fixed.
bellyfullofbac 5y ago
Yeah, one of the fuckups that the presidency of Dubya left behind. It wasn't like this before 2005! https://newrepublic.com/article/79023/roll-back-the-bush-changes-daylight-saving-time https://newrepublic.com/article/79023/roll-back-the-bush-cha...
- soperj 5y ago
  Big Candy wanted it after Halloween.
- dml2135 5y ago
  Fuckups? I often say that this is the one good thing Bush the Younger got done lol. The less standard time the better as far as I'm concerned (I live in NY where 4pm sunsets in the winter are a huge bummer).
noneeeed 5y ago
Yep, we've had to shift a weekly meeting for one hour, for just this week as we (UK) have just changed, but SF changes next week. Very annoying.
Max_aaa 5y ago
Now add northern vs southern hemisphere scheduling. When DTS would work backwards and is also out of sync.

playpause 5y ago

It’s strange to say “no upsides” when there are a couple of obvious upsides (mentioned by other comments). Do the experts think it makes their case stronger when they make immediately disprovable claims? Isn’t it stronger to say “the upsides are massively outweighed by the downsides” or something like that?

dragonwriter 5y ago
> It’s strange to say “no upsides” when there are a couple of obvious upsides (mentioned by other comments) None of the cited upsides require clock shifts. They aren't upsides of DST, but of being in the right timezone during winter, which DST does for parts of poorly drawn timezones in ways which are more simply addressed by drawing the timezones properly. That no one is pointing out problems solved that don't trace back to “without DST, we are in the wrong time zone in winter” is a strong clue that the real problem is wrong timezone and that that problem is just more acutely felt in winter.
- jjulius 5y ago
  How would you redraw timezones that factor those winters in properly?
  - sumtechguy 5y ago
    I think what they are saying is timezones mostly follow along north south. When if they took into account the tilt of the earth it would not be as big of an issue the further north or south you go from the equator.
  - ItsMonkk 5y ago
    Get rid of them. Timezones are a leaky abstraction over daylight. They are to broad, so run into these failure modes. I would train people to run off of UTC time most of the time when they need to synchronize a specific time. Then train them to run off of sunrise/sunset offsets for situations where daylight matters. Most of the parks in my neighborhood are open sunrise to sunset, that's perfect. With modern digital clocks, this would be trivial to setup. When should work hours be? Either some UTC time if we're remote, or if all local, something like 10 hours before sunset to 2 hours before sunset.

kj4ips 5y ago

I personally disagree. I live on the extreme west end of a time zone, and I greatly enjoy having an more daylight during my after-work leisure time. Without DST, I would have almost no post-work sunlight outside of the actual summer months.

jedberg 5y ago
What if we just stayed on DST year round?
- _ph_ 5y ago
  It wouldn't change a thing. The deeper cause of the day rythm is the daylight cycle. We adjust all our times, like start of work day or school start relative to that - mostly so that you get up after or not too long before sunrise and have most of the daylight during work time. If you change the time zone setting, day times are going to adjust accordingly.
- Mindless2112 5y ago
  Some people with children don't like that because "[their] children will have to go to school in the dark" during the winter. That's what killed legislation to make DST permanent where I live.
  - _ph_ 5y ago
    More importantly, they might fail in getting their children awake and out of the house in the first place, it is before sunset :p
  - jedberg 5y ago
    I have children, and the time change is far worse than going in the dark. Also, kids in Alaska go in the dark all the time and survive just fine. And if they have an after school activity, they have to come home in the dark anyway. It's a red herring.
  - Apocryphon 5y ago
    Sounds like last year, when all of the schools were closed, would've been the optimal time to push through any sort of change.

ibirman 5y ago

This is rubbish. I like to ride my bike after work, which ends at 5pm. With DST I can ride all the way up to this week and still get home before dark. Please don't take this away from me, I hate it when it gets dark by 5pm.

Something1234 5y ago
let's end the fall back, and stay on DST. It's the time change that is stupid. It's more about when we want the light for our schedules.
- codazoda 5y ago
  That’s what Utah plans to do but there is currently a federal law that prohibits the use of permanent DST. Utah, California, and a couple other states have asked the federal government to change that law and I believe there are plans to consider it soon. Utah has passed a law that makes DST permanent as soon as the federal law is removed. Edit: On further review, this seems to have died in committee. https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/6331/text https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/6331...
  - WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
    Florida passed theirs. Other states too but I don't recall which.
- kstrauser 5y ago
  This is the worst option. Since we started caring about time, "noon" has meant "when the sun is straight overhead". Unless there's a parallel push to change noon to 1PM (and midnight to 1AM), I'd fight that tooth and nail.
  - dml2135 5y ago
    Correct me if I'm wrong but actual "high noon" and 12pm don't currently line up except for a couple days a year, do they?

lqet 5y ago

I am regularly surprised people have such a strong opinion on this topic. I personally enjoy that the sun only sets around 21:30 in the summer, and I like the cozy early sunset in winter. I never had any problems with the one hour less sleep once a year, especially since it is easy to allow for a transition phase of around a week. I have 1 clock in the house which doesn't adjust automatically, so this can hardly be called a nuisance. More than once I didn't even notice the change until the evening - I just got up when my alarm went off. When the European Union conducted a poll 3 years ago, 4,6 million people answered. That is less than one percent (!) of the population, which is evidence that the overwhelming majority of people just don't care.

recursive 5y ago
I belong to an exclusive group that has needed to write software that calculates the time span between two (local) instants in time. And now, we can't just use GMT. The inputs we get are local time, by specification. I have strong opinions about DST. And even more fringe-y, I have opinions about time zones too.
lucasmullens 5y ago
> When the European Union conducted a poll 3 years ago, 4,6 million people answered. That is less than one percent (!) of the European population, which is evidence that the overwhelming majority of people just don't care. I'm sorry what? Unless 100% percent of the population was surveyed and 99% told pollsters they "don't care", that isn't evidence of anything. I care about lots of issues and I respond to almost no polls.
- lqet 5y ago
  This was a poll with extensive media coverage, and it was clear that the EU would use it to base a decision on. Polls were open for over 1 month. Clearly if less than 1% of the population would participate in a presidential election that would be evidence that the population just did not care about the outcome?
  - 5y ago

jp57 5y ago

I've been reading the anti-DST (or more properly anti-clock-shift) posts that appear hear and elsewhere every spring and fall for years. I really think this is a case of "be careful what you wish for". I think many folks, especially in northern latitudes, will regret the early summer sunsets or sunrises if we were to stay on standard time year round. In Seattle, for example, I think the sun would rise before 5 am as late as early August. On the other hand, if Seattle stayed on DST (+7) year-round then the sun would rise after 8AM from early November to late February, and as late as 9AM in December. Seattle is an extreme case, because it is so far north, but New York City is not that different, and I think more people would bemoan the lack of after-work daylight during spring and summer than currently bemoan the switch, and would be unhappy about it for a longer period each year. Of course, if we got rid of DST, we could all just agree to get up earlier in the summer. Maybe we could even standardize that by agreeing to all start getting up earlier on the same day each spring. :-)

sterlind 5y ago
God no. Because of DST Seattle is dark at 4pm in the winter. Going off DST would probably prevent some suicides.
deerIRL 5y ago
Having grown up somewhere northern that doesn't follow DST (Saskatchewan) I never really understood this argument. Winter months you get so little sunlight anyways I don't really see how it would make too much of a difference. Mind you this could be because of where I grew up, but moving to somewhere that follows DST I always saw it more as an inconvenience than anything else.
- 8ytecoder 5y ago
  Essentially DST is making everyone wake up an hour early everyday for 7-8 months. I’d rather just let the people who want the “extra” hour of sunlight in the evening get up early. Our bodies sync with the earth’s clock and not what we set. (Also 1-hr timezones are not sufficient. We need 30 minute time zones as well. People in the westernmost US, for example, have an early start. DST makes it much much earlier.)

lbriner 5y ago

This should definitely be a banned topic on HN! The can of worms every time we change the clocks forwards and backwards and despite what the "experts" say, there is clearly no obvious advantage, otherwise we would just get rid of it. There are also differences between places of different latitude so I cannot speak to those on the equator or the extreme poles so no point assuming there is a single answer that everyone likes.

throw0101a 5y ago
> [...] espite what the "experts" say, there is clearly no obvious advantage, otherwise we would just get rid of it. When it comes to (possible) advantages, it depends on the context. AFAICT, the positions of most chronobiology and sleep societies is that we should stick with Standard ("winter" / non-summer) Time year-round. Of course this may not be advantageous culturally or socially ("daylight after work FTW!!!1").
coding123 5y ago
Definitely agree. If people actually cared, these topics would be discussed months before and after the switch. It seems to JUST come up in the spring and fall near the change.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- recursive 5y ago
  I'm happy to rant about it all year round, and regularly do.

WarOnPrivacy 5y ago

"To the relief of many Americans, the period of daylight saving time is finally coming to a close." I am fairly skeptical of the assertion that most Americans favor Standard time over DST. My skepticism extends to the 2019 poll[1] that asked Americans if they "Supported Ending Daylight Savings Time", a Q that bundles Standard Time with ending clock shifts. The Q to ask is "For year round time, would you prefer Standard Time or DST?" This would better allow us to consider what people at different latitudes want. [1] https://today.yougov.com/topics/lifestyle/articles-reports/2019/03/06/daylight-saving-time-poll-survey https://today.yougov.com/topics/lifestyle/articles-reports/2...

snek_case 5y ago
I think if you ask that question in a poll, you also have to explain the question that DST means "sun rises and sets later". The average person might not even know which is which.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- lamontcg 5y ago
  Or explain that DST means getting up earlier vs. sleeping in.
jayspell 5y ago
Just about everyone I know despises DST. There is some disagreement about what would become "standard time", but almost everyone wants it to end. The worst part of DST is the assumption that you can just reschedule a kid's body clock. A baby gets really upset with the time change, and older kids aren't that much better.
- WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
  > Just about everyone I know despises DST. You may know them all then. Over a longish life intersecting about every class there is, I found ~0 people expressing a preference for Standard time. The preference for DST has been fairly universal. I have not lived at high latitudes however. Some comments here indicate opinions there may reasonably differ.

tombert 5y ago

I would be ok with getting rid of DST entirely, but I will say I got a lot less vocal about it once I got a smartwatch (initially a Pebble, now an Apple Watch), simply because it automatically adjusts the time for me. I'm someone who is wholly dependent on a wristwatch for nearly every aspect of my life. When I would forget to preemptively set my watch backward or forwards, I would be late for everything for a day, and it would lead to most of aspects of my life being worse. Now that my watch is automatically set for me by the phone towers, and my alarms are also automatically updated, DST has shifted from "ruining my day" to "mild annoyance".

WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
Most of my clocks auto-adjust but my sleep schedule still gets sabotaged 2x a year. What's that about?

DantesKite 5y ago

I don’t even notice daylight saving time days. At all. I’m sure it’s an annoyance to some people but it’s so low on my priorities. A glass of water is more important to me. Or the dirt in my backyard. Also anytime anyone says “experts” my first instinct to to believe they’re wrong.

thehappypm 5y ago
If it's not important, we should remove the complex system (clock changes) in favor of a simpler system (no clock changes).
- riidom 5y ago
  There is a difference between "not noticing" and "not important".

nineplay 5y ago

I don't like to throw shade on my own profession, but I know some number of code bases that will need to be furiously updated if DST goes away. I wonder what's going on deep in some 'core infrastructure' code. Tracking time zones all over the world is hard, and a lot of code that does it was written decades ago. I wouldn't eagerly sign up to review it all. I'd much rather stick with DST than send some poor devs down that path.

mnw21cam 5y ago
If there's an example of a thing that you shouldn't try to do yourself other than crypto, it's timezones. The timezone database is there, and it is updated regularly by very dedicated and intelligent people. There's no excuse for not using it.
- nineplay 5y ago
  Wikipedia suggests it's been there since 86. There is a whole lot of code written before 86 and I'm suspecting a whole lot of it doesn't get regularly refactored. I can tell you from experience that there's financial code with some dicey hard coding. I haven't seen it in a long time so hopefully some happy Cobol programmer jumped and used the money to retire early.
throw0101a 5y ago
Some of us were around for the last set of changes: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Policy_Act_of_2005#Change_to_daylight_saving_time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Policy_Act_of_2005#Chan... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time_in_the_United_States#2005%E2%80%932009:_Second_extension https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time_in_the_Un... Much patching / updating of tzdata and rebooting. I think that effort led to a bunch of changes that make for easier updates going forward. Until that point there wasn't really that much churn in things over the past few decades, so people became a little more bit complacent when it came to TZ code.
philsnow 5y ago
Shouldn't that code just do whatever tzdata says, and when tzdata says "don't change for DST", it just doesn't?

sushsjsuauahab 5y ago

Experts also told us that masks do nothing, and then that masks do something.

sfblah 5y ago

I prefer the idea of gradually eliminating time zones, by people starting to use UTC everywhere. It's as simple as individuals "reprogramming" the way they think about time. And, you can do it yourself and among friends without the government and the rest of society going along.

maccolgan 5y ago
That's impossible. 9am means a certain something everywhere on Earth, how are you going to fix that?
- iggldiggl 5y ago
  Within a certain approximation to be honest, although all in all I'd agree with you. Also the fact that without time zones, for everybody who isn't lucky enough to live near wherever the meridian ends up the calendar date will now change somewhere during waking hours, which seems a rather confusing prospect.
K2L8M11N2 5y ago
https://qntm.org/abolish https://qntm.org/abolish

renewiltord 5y ago

DST is for people who have low control over their time, i.e. they are subject to control from others. This could be as simple as not being able to set when they work, which is fairly common. Or being subject to when daycare opens or whatever. Personally, I have great control over my time, so I just let my automated systems adjust their clocks and if I want "an extra hour of sleep", I just take it. If I want to go biking in the sun, I do it then. And so on and so forth. The important thing is that we devolve power adequately. So the federal government should drop DST/no-DST decisions completely to the states. Currently US Gov only lets states adhere to the non-DST time, or adopt DST. My state wants to go full DST and can't.

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nemo44x 5y ago

I love it - unpopular opinion. I love the extra sunlight in the summer and that the Sun doesn't come up at 4AM and I love that in the winter it isn't dark until 8AM so I can actually be outside doing things (dog walking, kids to school, etc). I hope we don't change it as it's actually a great system and I think people would hate if we just stayed on a single time. Of course, people that live on certain latitudes probably care less about these optimizations and see it more as an annoyance.

thehappypm 5y ago
Stop saying you love the clock changes. You like the time zone that DST puts you into. Push your local government to make the time zone you like permanent.
- nemo44x 5y ago
  No, I like that we change the clock. I like not having the Sun rise so early in the summer and so late in the winter. We have to adjust the clocks to make this a reality.
- cameldrv 5y ago
  No, we love the changes. We want to wake up a certain amount of time after the sun rises and be on time to work/school. We then want the maximum amount of possible daylight in the afternoon/evening. We don't like DST in the winter because for many people this requires waking up in the dark if the time they have to get to work/school remains the same.
  - WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
    > because for many people this requires waking up in the dark if the time they have to get to school remains the same. Which is why the next step is to shift school schedules to align with kids' natural sleep schedules. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=study+school+start+times+sleep https://duckduckgo.com/?q=study+school+start+times+sleep

jleyank 5y ago

It might be just me but I can’t understand the difficulty of shifting one hour over a night or two. Flying across N America is 3+ hours and going to Europe can be 6-11. Do the people who can’t deal with an hour damn near die on trips such as this? If small kids have to be outside near traffic at any point, better than they get as much light as possible. Having little Johnny mushed by an suv tends to upset folks. And thinking about Cop26, perhaps we should minimize external lighting when possible to save energy and lessen impact on nature. Both of these, unfortunately, lean towards dst. Edit: forgot. I assume most people change when they get up on the weekend vs, the work week. If this assumption is correct, they might have more extreme time shifts every weekend than the once a year problem being discussed…

kevinpet 5y ago

I remain steadfast in my position that people who support year-round DST are utterly clueless and have not done the evaluation of what that means to kids going to school in the morning in winter.

standardUser 5y ago
Care to share your evaluation, and how it compares to implications for crime and traffic accidents in the evening hours? Or did you already accomplish your goal of calling a large number of people you've never met "utterly clueless"?
- kevinpet 5y ago
  Right now in California sunrise in winter is around 7-7:30am. Many schools start as early as 7:15am, and most start by 8:15. Moving to year round DST would mean changing from some kids starting school right at sunrise to most kids walking to school in the dark. I chose my wording carefully. I don't think I can persuade you and I don't seek to persuade you. In my opinion, intentionally choosing a timezone deliberately offset from the historic and natural meaning of 12pm ~= noon, which requires significant support which I have never seen.

spullara 5y ago

I want DST year round in CA rather than the current standard time.

throwawayboise 5y ago

Experts created it, now experts say it's "not helpful." Maybe we need more common sense and less help from "experts."

WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
psssst. they aren't the same experts

sovande 5y ago

DST must go! It’s giving whole countries jet lag two times per year. It’s like leaded gasoline for the collective mind, which BTW was introduced around the same time and also considered a good idea. Except there is no scientific reasoning behind DST. It’s purely for convenience for some. The astronomer who seriously proposed it wanted more daylight hours to devote to collecting and examining insects… Arghh

aksss 5y ago

I think this argument is similar to advocacy for metric vs imperial - yeah, it probably makes sense, but the current system is workable enough that the pain of living with it is less than the pain of transitioning from it. IOW, nobody really cares enough about it but it’s fun to gripe about. Also, Firefly shouldn’t have been cancelled.

riidom 5y ago
So would you trade another season of Firefly for the imperial system then? :)

epaulson 5y ago

As someone who lives in a colder climate, I want to keep daylight saving. In the summer, I want the extra daylight in the evening - sunrise in June is 5am, without daylight saving it'd be 4am and the sun would go down at 8pm instead of 9pm. In the winter, I want the extra sunlight in the morning. That hour of sunlight is important to burn off fog and defrost things a bit. For the morning commute, I want that to get started as early as possible. Yeah, it sucks that the sun goes down at 4:30pm, but at least that darkness is warmer - the slush on the road is still warm enough that it often won't refreeze til after the evening commute is over with.

hnburnsy 5y ago

Seems like it will happen soon... >In the last four years, 19 states have enacted legislation or passed resolutions to provide for year-round daylight saving time, if Congress were to allow such a change, and in some cases, if surrounding states enact the same legislation. Because federal law does not currently allow full-time DST, Congress would have to act before states could adopt changes. The 19 states are: >Alabama, Georgia, Minnesota, Mississippi and Montana (2021). >Idaho, Louisiana, Ohio (resolution), South Carolina, Utah and Wyoming (2020). >Arkansas, Delaware, Maine, Oregon, Tennessee and Washington (2019). >Florida (2018; California voters also authorized such a change that year, but legislative action is pending). https://www.ncsl.org/research/transportation/daylight-savings-time-state-legislation.aspx https://www.ncsl.org/research/transportation/daylight-saving...

Asmod4n 5y ago
so all they wanna do is to change their timezone?
- seniorsassycat 5y ago
  I think most of these laws have been written as wanting to use daylight time year round, which isn't allowed by federal law. Federally states can use standard time or switch between standard and daylight but they cannot always follow daylight time. Daylight time is the same as standard time of the time zone to the east, so I don't know why these states haven asked the transportation sec to reassign their timezones.

sparrc 5y ago

Seems like in general early-risers would prefer standard time, and people waking up around 7am or later would probably prefer daylight savings time year-round. My guess is that most people in the USA are _not_ early risers at this point and would prefer daylight savings time year-round, but would be interested to see data on this.

joezydeco 5y ago
I've got a 16 year-old high schooler (sorry, 'data point') that is nearly impossible to wake up when it's dark outside.

bigtex 5y ago

As a parent of young children I just want to go back to the time we don't change time at random. Also the older I get it takes longer to get use to the change.

therealrootuser 5y ago

Many states (by now) have already passed legislation to the effect that if/when the federal government allows it, they will simply stay on DST year-around. There are a number of bills on a federal level that would allow states to do this, but each of these bills have seemingly been lost in the torpid world of inaction.

RKearney 5y ago
I seriously doubt that would ever happen. Devices do not have a "always DST" mode, but they do in fact have a "never DST" mode. In order to stay in DST, the region would have to completely change which timezone they observe. Pacific Time would observe Mountain Time, Mountain -> Central, Central -> Eastern, and Eastern would have to observe whatever GMT-4 is.

tpoacher 5y ago

some experts say. subtle but crucial difference

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new_realist 5y ago

In a world with smart clocks, every major metropolitan area should be in its own time zone, time should skew very slightly at three a.m. every morning, and sunrise should always be at seven a.m. DST can be improved.

asoneth 5y ago

DST is a sloppy attempt to shift the clock to make the time of sunrise more fixed instead of just rather than fixing the time of solar noon. We should just go all in and define 00:00 as sunrise rather than 12:00 as solar noon. Schools and shops would open around 01:00 or maybe 02:00 sunrise time. Typical office workers head home around 10:00. Where I am the sun would set around 09:00 in the winter and 15:30 in the summer. And of course anything on the internet or that requires cross-region coordination would be scheduled in UTC, perhaps with a user's local sunrise time displayed as a parenthetical. To decide when to call my Uncle Steve in Melbourne I'd look up his local time as I do today, but if we scheduled a call ahead of time we'd schedule it in UTC.

wnoise 5y ago

The only real solution is to straighten out the axis and eliminate the seasonal variation in daily hours sunlight.

Ekaros 5y ago
Just get rid of the planet in general. Would make everything so much easier. No more messy months or non integer year lengths. And even no more leap seconds. So many problems would be solved, just think of the efficiency.

pliftkl 5y ago

From article: "Sleep is also necessary for the body to heal and repair heart and blood vessels. Lack of sleep has been linked to an increased risk heart disease, kidney disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, obesity and stroke, experts say." I don't think that's a particularly controversial statement, but is it germane to a discussion of a twice yearly switch in sleep schedules? The general consensus for travelers is that it takes 1-2 days per hour of time difference to get past jet lag. There's a decent argument to be made based on accident avoidance, but the rest of the "health impacts" seem harder to justify.

radu_floricica 5y ago
That's called "scope insensitivity" :) It's a 1-2 day issue, multiplied by whole populations. It's pretty difficult for human brains to parse this, which is probably the cause of a lot of civilization inadequacies.
- pliftkl 5y ago
  Ah - but the population of people-travel-days is also probably quite high, and while it doesn't impact a "whole population", it impacts a subset of the population frequently enough to be a comparable order of magnitude to the population as a whole. (Potentially bad) back of envelope calculations follow: 1. The entire US population of 330 million is impacted by a 1 hour shift twice per year (of which one shift is probably more impactful than the other to sleep health). 2. On a typical year, there are about 1 billion airline passengers in the US alone (domestic plus inbound/outbound international). This counts everyone on a flight as one passenger. Let's assume that people take on average 2 legs in one day (probably a slightly high estimate). That's 500 million people, but we should halve that again since people have outbound and inbound trips. So we're down to 250 million people being impacted by travel. 3. Some of the travel is in the same time zone, but other travel spans many time zones (inbound international flights or transcontinental flights). We can call that a wash, though we could probably get to actual data if I weren't being lazy. I'd also argue that the travel is going to be much more disruptive to sleep schedules since in addition to the actual time zone shifts, travelers have to deal with early departures and late arrivals. 4. Many of the people who travel are being counted multiple times here, so we don't have a true collection of 250 million people impacted, but it's not clear that 1 person experiencing jet lag 10 times should only be counted once, since this is a recurring 1-2 day issue. 5. We're not orders of magnitude off here in terms of people-days impacted by normal travel vs the great DST debate.

zzo38computer 5y ago

I dislike daylight saving time, and want the time zone offset to be the same all the time. I would rather have 12:00 solar noon (it make much more sense to me than the other way), but would also accept the other way; either way is better than switching for daylight saving time. If there is enough sun light then you can also see the time by the sun dial too. Also, the fact that the clock is switch back can confuse the time wrongly, since the clock will say the same number twice making it ambiguous and also you cannot simply to subtract the numbers to measure the intervals of time. You should be able to do things regardless of what number the clock says. Don't rely on the numbers on the clock to dictate everything you are doing all the time. If you want to go outside when it is not dark, then that is what you can do. If you want to eat dinner when it is not dark, then that is what you can do. If you want to sleep when it is dark, then that is what you can do. This can be done regardless of what number is on the clock. If you want to work or schedule something for some time you can do based on whatever criteria would be appropriate, regardless of what number is on the clock; regardless of what criteria are being used, the numbers on the clock will still tell you the intervals of time, and how long it takes. For example, opening hours need not be fixed, and holidays need not be fixed, etc. But, maybe you will not need to schedule something for a specific time anyways, in all circumstances. Also, if you want to wake up earlier, then you can set your alarm clock for an earlier time; you don't need daylight saving time for this to work.

BrandoElFollito 5y ago

We were this tiny close in the EU to remove DST. One of the rare citizen-driven decision across all countries. And bam! COVID came and froze all activities and our useless European bureaucrats now officially started that the topic is not on any radar screen

WarOnPrivacy 5y ago

This has been fun y'all. I'll see you again, week of March 7th 2022.

torstenvl 5y ago

In the U.S., DST runs from March to November, just shy of 2/3 of the year. Let's not fool ourselves anymore. DST is de facto standard time. It's Winter Time (Daylight Wasting Time) that needs to go.

isolli 5y ago

In March 2019, the European parliament voted to end daylight saving time in the EU by 2021 [0]. To this day I don't know why this was dropped. It may be because of the pandemic, but respect for democratic institutions means we should put it back on the table very soon. [0] https://www.dw.com/en/eu-parliament-votes-to-end-daylight-savings/a-48064185 https://www.dw.com/en/eu-parliament-votes-to-end-daylight-sa...

Ekaros 5y ago
And realistically 2020 or 2021 would have been perfect times to change this as everything was a mess anyway. So must wasted potential.