21 ms·

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

by 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.)
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - mannykannot 5y ago
    It is not really practical to try to run one's life an hour ahead of the schedule of society, as set by things like business hours, transit schedules, and the times of public events and performances. This is why I personally would be sorry to lose DST where I live, even though it is an ugly hack.
    - GoblinSlayer 5y ago
      Performances are held around the clock, you can't visit them all anyway.
- stormbrew 5y ago
  I live in the middle part of alberta and I'm in the same boat, and during the recent referrendum on switching to DST I couldn't believe the amount of "But in the northern part of the province sunrise will be too late for kids going to school!" as if: - ...Sunrise wasn't already too late for kids going to school anyways, since Because Capitalism school has to start before work does, - ..."Sunrise" is a fixed point when you get any further north from me in the winter. It's more like a couple hours of varying degrees of "glowing horizon" centered around "sunrise" to begin with.
strig 5y ago
Yukon got rid of DST switch and stays on Pacific daylight time all year round: https://yukon.ca/en/seasonal-time-change https://yukon.ca/en/seasonal-time-change
mjevans 5y ago
I live in (a suburb of) Seattle. We're screwed by a 'lite' version of arctic winters no matter what. Compare and contrast different cities (intentionally sorted) https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/prudhoe-bay https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/prudhoe-bay https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/anchorage https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/anchorage https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/seattle https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/seattle https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/los-angeles https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/los-angeles https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/honolulu https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/honolulu Nothing except blackout curtains and artificial light solve the issues. DST just makes scheduling stuff stupid.
kstrauser 5y ago
I'd love to see a move by state governments to 1) end DST, and 2) formally adopt summer/winter hours, with encouraging businesses to follow their lead.
- cameldrv 5y ago
  This creates a coordination problem. For example, your workplace adopts summer hours and now you have to get to work an hour earlier, but you kids' daycare hasn't. Or, the bakery wants to deliver pastries to the cafe an hour earlier, but the cafe workers haven't shown up yet. DST perfectly solves this problem -- everyone switches on the same day. This makes life easier for the entire population, and causes slight headaches for computer programmers.
  - kstrauser 5y ago
    Forgive me, but this reads like "we're avoiding a giant coordination problem by implementing a giant coordination problem". It would be just as easy to remind everyone that winter hours start on X date as to remind them to change their clocks on X date.
    - asoneth 5y ago
      I'd be fine with either DST or summer/winter hours but the latter is a significatnly harder coordination problem. Not all businesses would change you'd end up having to keep track of which things have shifted and which things have not and all the downstream implications of that. Compare that to the five minutes a year I spend setting the handful of non-internet-connected clocks in my house. (And of course if you legally mandated that everyone had to shift their hours twice a year at the exact same time then you just invented DST with extra steps.)
      - logfromblammo 5y ago
        Seasonal business hours can be posted as any time of day in UTC. DST can only adjust by exactly 1 hour.
Meerax 5y ago
"I think more people would bemoan the lack of after-work daylight during spring and summer than currently bemoan the switch" I think this argument would also apply nicely in challenge of our concept of a modern work week. '9-5' got a harsh reality check with COVID for a lot of people, so why don't we challenge it and not just shifting DST. (I acknowledge that this currently only applies to people who could work remotely.)
barbazoo 5y ago
As you said, it depends whether you stay in "standard time" or DST. In BC we're planning on permanently staying on PDT. I agree with what you said about permanent standard time. I actually had to look it up to make sure we're actually gonna stay on PDT. Phew.
ironrabbit 5y ago
I always assumed we'd keep the summer hours year round. I don't even think about DST during the summer, it's during the fall where we suddenly lose an hour of evening sunlight that I complain. Unless I'm misreading, your comment is just pointing out that keeping the winter hours year-round is sub-optimal (I agree) but not arguing in favour of switching the clocks twice per year.
- snek_case 5y ago
  I would also much prefer we stay on DST (sun rises/sets later) year round. However, if DST were to end, it's not guaranteed that it would go that way. I think that unfortunately many people see the winter time (sun rises/sets earlier) as the default. IMO, having the sun set later is better because it means I get to enjoy a bit more sunlight in the evening, after the work day. But I'm also really not a morning person.
  - throw0101a 5y ago
    > I think that unfortunately many people see the winter time (sun rises/sets earlier) as the default. It is the default. That's why it is called Atlantic/Eastern/Central/Mountain/Pacific Standard Time in North America.
    - jsdalton 5y ago
      It’s also the time that most closely aligns solar noon to clock noon. People who advocate for “summer time all the time” basically just want to wake up earlier but want clocks to trick them into doing it. (The more legitimate argument is for western regions to align to summer time to be closer in clock time to their eastern neighbors.)
      - harg 5y ago
        Not quite. If your workday ends at 6pm then being on DST means you get usable daylight for more of the year after work. Even if you were prepared to get up and go to bed earlier many jobs have a fixed set of hours.
sokoloff 5y ago
I live on the eastern edge of ET. My in-laws live on the western edge of it (their solar noon is about 49 minutes later than mine). I prefer the DST shifted time, which is partly because I’m on the edge of the timezone that benefits most from that. I wonder how many people who have strong feelings one way or the other have them in part because of their longitudinal position in the timezone.
- gs17 5y ago
  Same here, but on the eastern edge of central. If I was a little bit over in eastern time, I'd definitely have the opposite opinion.
thrower123 5y ago
There's just not much to be done in places that get eight or nine hours of daylight in the winter and fifteen or sixteen in the summer. Or worse, if you're even farther north than that. In December and January, you go to work in the dark, you come home from work in the dark, and you barely see the sun for a couple months.
Swizec 5y ago
As someone who grew up in Europe at the same latitude as Montreal ... eh. During winter you get daylight at 7:45am and it lasts until 4:27pm. Despite daylight savings. It's basically irrelevant. And we're not even that far north for Europe. Ljubljana is basically right next to Venice. Imagine how bad this gets in the UK. London is a full 5 degrees further north. edit: turns out Ljubljana is 1 degree more South than Seattle. My point that it can't make much of a difference for a place like Seattle stands. Winters are dark, there isn't a lot of daylight hours to go around no matter how you slice it.
- handrous 5y ago
  I live about halfway down the US, and we have at least a month and a half in which the only sunlight an 8/8:30-5 worker (nobody actually works 9-5) is going to get is the sun blinding them while rising during their morning commute, and blinding them while setting during their evening commute. No amount of screwing around with the clock keeps the sun up longer. The only way to give people more free daylight hours in the winter, would be to have significantly shorter working hours.
kwhitefoot 5y ago
Seattle is not far north. I live 12 degrees further north (Norway a little south of Oslo) and I would be quite happy to have permanent summer time. Lighter evenings are worth more to me than lighter mornings. Also the whole of the UK is further north than Seattle. From '68 to '71 we had permanent summer time in the UK and where I come from in the south it was popular.
snarf21 5y ago
We shouldn't get rid of DST, we should just stay on it year round. The change is worthless, causes accidents, disrupts everyone's sleep all for nothing.
maerF0x0 5y ago
> 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. Your comment points out the real absurdity which is why are so stuck on the machinations of numbers on a clock, and ~24 granular timezones rather than just having humans be human and 1) get the sleep they need and 2) be productive when it makes sense to, regardless of the digits. I doubt pre-industrial people thought to hard about if they chopped wood at exactly 9am, or if it might have been 8:37 or even 11am.
- xyzzyz 5y ago
  Preindustrial people haven’t been a part of global economy nearly to the same degree we are. They haven’t had to coordinate so much with other people in their daily tasks. Think about a factory working in shifts: it cannot work effectively if every worker comes whenever it suits him, works for 8 hours and leaves. You need coordination to achieve efficiency. Same is true for most other places of employment. Government offices and retail establishments have opening hours. Schools have schedules. Sure, in some jobs, there is a lot of flexibility, but not all of them can provide that, so as a society, we will be stuck with schedules and tyranny of the clock for the foreseeable future.
  - pishpash 5y ago
    Government and retail opening hours are already very grating. People do what they can online which is more convenient.
  - maerF0x0 5y ago
    > Government offices and retail establishments have opening hours. Online fixes like 99% of this. > Schools have schedules and yet khan academy does not > Think about a factory working in shifts yes, but there's no reason these shifts have to be fixed in time across the year, people are so hung up on 9-5, or 8-5 or some other hour bound fixed pattern. Why not come in at 8am on June 21, and 1 minute later per day until Dec 21, then 1 minute earlier per day till june 21? See the point here? The majority of cases can be entirely eliminated / designed out of existence. Many can become flexible to the reality of the sunrise/set and circadian rhythms . A few will have to still provide 24 hour coverage for emergency or utility backup type things.
cloche 5y ago
Agree. I lived in Japan which doesn't change clocks. In the summer the sun rises at 4:30am but it's only light out until maybe just before 8pm.
fatnoah 5y ago
I grew up in a northern latitude on the east coast and played golf as a fall sport. Without DST, the season would have to end much earlier since it would get dark too early to actually play a round after school.
fullstop 5y ago
Move it 30 minutes and call it a day.
bingohbangoh 5y ago
As of now, with daylights saving, places like London don't have the sun come up until 8am. It does wear on you mentally.
- WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
  > with daylights saving, places like London don't have the sun come up until 8am. I'd take that over an afternoon sunset.
Someone 5y ago
The local time of sunrise and sunset depends not only on latitude but also on the difference between local solar time and the local time zone’s time. According to http://blog.poormansmath.net/how-much-is-time-wrong-around-the-world/ http://blog.poormansmath.net/how-much-is-time-wrong-around-t..., that difference can exceed 90 minutes in Spain and even over 3 hours in western China. That’s the price they pay for China having a single time zone (that apparently was introduced by Mao Zedong, to show the country was unified) And yes, not everybody likes that (https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/17/world/asia/china-single-time-zone.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/17/world/asia/china-single-t...)
tolmasky 5y ago
Yeah, as another post here has said, what most people actually want is year-round DST. However, I believe this is a confusing way to express it to people not heavily involved in the DST “controversy” (it sounds like you’re supporting doing fine changes, or perhaps wanting even more time changes or something), so I think it’s often just short handed to “ending daylight savings time”, but yes, like everything, unnecessarily complicated and confusing. This clarification and conversation thus also takes place every year.
asoneth 5y ago
I agree, and I'm glad we'll probably never end up getting rid of DST. If we got rid of DST then I'd lose an extra hour of daylight on summer evenings which would be disappointing. And in exchange I'd have to invest in blackout curtains because on the summer solstice the sun would shine through my East-facing window at ~4:07am. If we made DST permanent then the sun wouldn't rise until ~8:10am on the winter solstice which means a lot of kids in my neighborhood biking and walking to school in the dark in the winter. I'd be fine scrapping DST if schools and offices agreed to use "summer hours" and "winter hours" but coordinating such a switch twice a year seems like DST by another name.
apexalpha 5y ago
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. This is, for me, the only argument that matters. I live in the Netherlands, which has significant seasonal changes in daily sunlight. So, in the summer there is extra light. Do you want this sunlight between 5.45 and 6.45 or between 21.00 and 22.00? I choose the latter, as the light in the (very) early morning is simply of no use to me at all. 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. :-) This is exactly what DST is. Agreeing to all get up earlier.
- lamontcg 5y ago
  > Agreeing to all get up earlier. My biology and I do not agree.
- GoblinSlayer 5y ago
  If it's just you, why do you want all people do it? You can adjust your clock and get desirable digits there.
nathanfig 5y ago
We can make either time the permanent one and adjust accordingly, it’s the twice a year disruption that people hate. Especially difficult to explain to a child why their bedtime suddenly shifted despite established circadian rhythms. It’s weirder to me that so many people care about which arbitrary number on the clock correlates to the position of the sun.
gHosts 5y ago
Don't care. Want my morning time back. I hate Morning Losing Time.
- WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
  I hate 5:30 sunsets. A few hours from here are 4:49 sunsets which I'd super hate.
chrismcb 5y ago
Half a dozen of one... In December Seattle either has a late sunrise or an early sunset. Currently it is dark by 5pm in Dec.
stormbrew 5y ago
I'm kind of amused at calling Seattle a "northern latitude". I live quite a bit north of that and I can tell you that as you go into actual northern latitudes if you wanted to have any of these useful effects you'd have to be changing the time a lot more often than just twice a year. The bonuses of DST up here last maybe a few weeks before it really doesn't matter anymore, and likewise for the standard time shift, except probably even shorter time being useful. Yet we still have to do it, even though it causes demonstrable harm to shift clocks twice a year.
- Ekaros 5y ago
  From Finland I see that Seattle is around Switzerland. Which I consider central Europe or even being very much in south. Noticed that standard time was actually useful this time of year. Where there was no light before it, but now there is at least some for while. And I see it much more important for morning than evening.
  - stormbrew 5y ago
    To me it just means I get sad twice when I stop seeing the sun in the morning again. I've never found it worth it. I'm somewhere between finland and seattle, latitude-wise. A quirk of the structure of European vs. North American landmass is that northern europe is a lot more 'habitable' than northern America, so I am literally in the farthest north >1m person city in the americas and it feels about the same as, say, Stockholm except without direct ocean warmth.
GoblinSlayer 5y ago
USA doesn't even properly have northern latitudes: Seattle is southern north, not far north. Also summer sunsets are late, not early: day expands into evening and morning equally and there's no reason to regret them.
LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
What is wrong with feeling the changes of season, depending on your geographical location? Personally that arbitrary shifting 2 times a year always disturbed me. And why TEE EFF should we all get up together? Ever heard of chronobiology and different chronotypes? 'Night Owls vs. Larks', so to speak?
hardsoftnfloppy 5y ago
It's literally clickbait every year. No experts are saying this, if they are, they should have their "expert" tag be taken away. Even in the south, the nights come earlier and we get sick of it until the shift. But fuck it, lets go back to the pre-Julian calendar, nothing means anything yolo
TwoNineFive 5y ago
> In Seattle Well that was a dumb thing to say. https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/its-daylight-saving-time-again-how-long-do-we-have-to-keep-switching-the-clock-back-and-forth/ https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/its-daylight-savin... If I remember right this change has something like 71% approval amongst the population up here. It's overwhelmingly supported and popular. We can't get rid of DST fast enough.

by jp57 5y ago

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.)
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- mannykannot 5y ago
  It is not really practical to try to run one's life an hour ahead of the schedule of society, as set by things like business hours, transit schedules, and the times of public events and performances. This is why I personally would be sorry to lose DST where I live, even though it is an ugly hack.
  - GoblinSlayer 5y ago
    Performances are held around the clock, you can't visit them all anyway.
stormbrew 5y ago
I live in the middle part of alberta and I'm in the same boat, and during the recent referrendum on switching to DST I couldn't believe the amount of "But in the northern part of the province sunrise will be too late for kids going to school!" as if: - ...Sunrise wasn't already too late for kids going to school anyways, since Because Capitalism school has to start before work does, - ..."Sunrise" is a fixed point when you get any further north from me in the winter. It's more like a couple hours of varying degrees of "glowing horizon" centered around "sunrise" to begin with.

strig 5y ago

Yukon got rid of DST switch and stays on Pacific daylight time all year round: https://yukon.ca/en/seasonal-time-change https://yukon.ca/en/seasonal-time-change

mjevans 5y ago

I live in (a suburb of) Seattle. We're screwed by a 'lite' version of arctic winters no matter what. Compare and contrast different cities (intentionally sorted) https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/prudhoe-bay https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/prudhoe-bay https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/anchorage https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/anchorage https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/seattle https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/seattle https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/los-angeles https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/los-angeles https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/honolulu https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/honolulu Nothing except blackout curtains and artificial light solve the issues. DST just makes scheduling stuff stupid.

kstrauser 5y ago

I'd love to see a move by state governments to 1) end DST, and 2) formally adopt summer/winter hours, with encouraging businesses to follow their lead.

cameldrv 5y ago
This creates a coordination problem. For example, your workplace adopts summer hours and now you have to get to work an hour earlier, but you kids' daycare hasn't. Or, the bakery wants to deliver pastries to the cafe an hour earlier, but the cafe workers haven't shown up yet. DST perfectly solves this problem -- everyone switches on the same day. This makes life easier for the entire population, and causes slight headaches for computer programmers.
- kstrauser 5y ago
  Forgive me, but this reads like "we're avoiding a giant coordination problem by implementing a giant coordination problem". It would be just as easy to remind everyone that winter hours start on X date as to remind them to change their clocks on X date.
  - asoneth 5y ago
    I'd be fine with either DST or summer/winter hours but the latter is a significatnly harder coordination problem. Not all businesses would change you'd end up having to keep track of which things have shifted and which things have not and all the downstream implications of that. Compare that to the five minutes a year I spend setting the handful of non-internet-connected clocks in my house. (And of course if you legally mandated that everyone had to shift their hours twice a year at the exact same time then you just invented DST with extra steps.)
    - logfromblammo 5y ago
      Seasonal business hours can be posted as any time of day in UTC. DST can only adjust by exactly 1 hour.

Meerax 5y ago

"I think more people would bemoan the lack of after-work daylight during spring and summer than currently bemoan the switch" I think this argument would also apply nicely in challenge of our concept of a modern work week. '9-5' got a harsh reality check with COVID for a lot of people, so why don't we challenge it and not just shifting DST. (I acknowledge that this currently only applies to people who could work remotely.)

barbazoo 5y ago

As you said, it depends whether you stay in "standard time" or DST. In BC we're planning on permanently staying on PDT. I agree with what you said about permanent standard time. I actually had to look it up to make sure we're actually gonna stay on PDT. Phew.

ironrabbit 5y ago

I always assumed we'd keep the summer hours year round. I don't even think about DST during the summer, it's during the fall where we suddenly lose an hour of evening sunlight that I complain. Unless I'm misreading, your comment is just pointing out that keeping the winter hours year-round is sub-optimal (I agree) but not arguing in favour of switching the clocks twice per year.

snek_case 5y ago
I would also much prefer we stay on DST (sun rises/sets later) year round. However, if DST were to end, it's not guaranteed that it would go that way. I think that unfortunately many people see the winter time (sun rises/sets earlier) as the default. IMO, having the sun set later is better because it means I get to enjoy a bit more sunlight in the evening, after the work day. But I'm also really not a morning person.
- throw0101a 5y ago
  > I think that unfortunately many people see the winter time (sun rises/sets earlier) as the default. It is the default. That's why it is called Atlantic/Eastern/Central/Mountain/Pacific Standard Time in North America.
  - jsdalton 5y ago
    It’s also the time that most closely aligns solar noon to clock noon. People who advocate for “summer time all the time” basically just want to wake up earlier but want clocks to trick them into doing it. (The more legitimate argument is for western regions to align to summer time to be closer in clock time to their eastern neighbors.)
    - harg 5y ago
      Not quite. If your workday ends at 6pm then being on DST means you get usable daylight for more of the year after work. Even if you were prepared to get up and go to bed earlier many jobs have a fixed set of hours.

sokoloff 5y ago

I live on the eastern edge of ET. My in-laws live on the western edge of it (their solar noon is about 49 minutes later than mine). I prefer the DST shifted time, which is partly because I’m on the edge of the timezone that benefits most from that. I wonder how many people who have strong feelings one way or the other have them in part because of their longitudinal position in the timezone.

gs17 5y ago
Same here, but on the eastern edge of central. If I was a little bit over in eastern time, I'd definitely have the opposite opinion.

thrower123 5y ago

There's just not much to be done in places that get eight or nine hours of daylight in the winter and fifteen or sixteen in the summer. Or worse, if you're even farther north than that. In December and January, you go to work in the dark, you come home from work in the dark, and you barely see the sun for a couple months.

Swizec 5y ago

As someone who grew up in Europe at the same latitude as Montreal ... eh. During winter you get daylight at 7:45am and it lasts until 4:27pm. Despite daylight savings. It's basically irrelevant. And we're not even that far north for Europe. Ljubljana is basically right next to Venice. Imagine how bad this gets in the UK. London is a full 5 degrees further north. edit: turns out Ljubljana is 1 degree more South than Seattle. My point that it can't make much of a difference for a place like Seattle stands. Winters are dark, there isn't a lot of daylight hours to go around no matter how you slice it.

handrous 5y ago
I live about halfway down the US, and we have at least a month and a half in which the only sunlight an 8/8:30-5 worker (nobody actually works 9-5) is going to get is the sun blinding them while rising during their morning commute, and blinding them while setting during their evening commute. No amount of screwing around with the clock keeps the sun up longer. The only way to give people more free daylight hours in the winter, would be to have significantly shorter working hours.

kwhitefoot 5y ago

Seattle is not far north. I live 12 degrees further north (Norway a little south of Oslo) and I would be quite happy to have permanent summer time. Lighter evenings are worth more to me than lighter mornings. Also the whole of the UK is further north than Seattle. From '68 to '71 we had permanent summer time in the UK and where I come from in the south it was popular.

snarf21 5y ago

We shouldn't get rid of DST, we should just stay on it year round. The change is worthless, causes accidents, disrupts everyone's sleep all for nothing.

maerF0x0 5y ago

> 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. Your comment points out the real absurdity which is why are so stuck on the machinations of numbers on a clock, and ~24 granular timezones rather than just having humans be human and 1) get the sleep they need and 2) be productive when it makes sense to, regardless of the digits. I doubt pre-industrial people thought to hard about if they chopped wood at exactly 9am, or if it might have been 8:37 or even 11am.

xyzzyz 5y ago
Preindustrial people haven’t been a part of global economy nearly to the same degree we are. They haven’t had to coordinate so much with other people in their daily tasks. Think about a factory working in shifts: it cannot work effectively if every worker comes whenever it suits him, works for 8 hours and leaves. You need coordination to achieve efficiency. Same is true for most other places of employment. Government offices and retail establishments have opening hours. Schools have schedules. Sure, in some jobs, there is a lot of flexibility, but not all of them can provide that, so as a society, we will be stuck with schedules and tyranny of the clock for the foreseeable future.
- pishpash 5y ago
  Government and retail opening hours are already very grating. People do what they can online which is more convenient.
- maerF0x0 5y ago
  > Government offices and retail establishments have opening hours. Online fixes like 99% of this. > Schools have schedules and yet khan academy does not > Think about a factory working in shifts yes, but there's no reason these shifts have to be fixed in time across the year, people are so hung up on 9-5, or 8-5 or some other hour bound fixed pattern. Why not come in at 8am on June 21, and 1 minute later per day until Dec 21, then 1 minute earlier per day till june 21? See the point here? The majority of cases can be entirely eliminated / designed out of existence. Many can become flexible to the reality of the sunrise/set and circadian rhythms . A few will have to still provide 24 hour coverage for emergency or utility backup type things.

cloche 5y ago

Agree. I lived in Japan which doesn't change clocks. In the summer the sun rises at 4:30am but it's only light out until maybe just before 8pm.

fatnoah 5y ago

I grew up in a northern latitude on the east coast and played golf as a fall sport. Without DST, the season would have to end much earlier since it would get dark too early to actually play a round after school.

fullstop 5y ago

Move it 30 minutes and call it a day.

bingohbangoh 5y ago

As of now, with daylights saving, places like London don't have the sun come up until 8am. It does wear on you mentally.

WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
> with daylights saving, places like London don't have the sun come up until 8am. I'd take that over an afternoon sunset.

Someone 5y ago

The local time of sunrise and sunset depends not only on latitude but also on the difference between local solar time and the local time zone’s time. According to http://blog.poormansmath.net/how-much-is-time-wrong-around-the-world/ http://blog.poormansmath.net/how-much-is-time-wrong-around-t..., that difference can exceed 90 minutes in Spain and even over 3 hours in western China. That’s the price they pay for China having a single time zone (that apparently was introduced by Mao Zedong, to show the country was unified) And yes, not everybody likes that (https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/17/world/asia/china-single-time-zone.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/17/world/asia/china-single-t...)

tolmasky 5y ago

Yeah, as another post here has said, what most people actually want is year-round DST. However, I believe this is a confusing way to express it to people not heavily involved in the DST “controversy” (it sounds like you’re supporting doing fine changes, or perhaps wanting even more time changes or something), so I think it’s often just short handed to “ending daylight savings time”, but yes, like everything, unnecessarily complicated and confusing. This clarification and conversation thus also takes place every year.

asoneth 5y ago

I agree, and I'm glad we'll probably never end up getting rid of DST. If we got rid of DST then I'd lose an extra hour of daylight on summer evenings which would be disappointing. And in exchange I'd have to invest in blackout curtains because on the summer solstice the sun would shine through my East-facing window at ~4:07am. If we made DST permanent then the sun wouldn't rise until ~8:10am on the winter solstice which means a lot of kids in my neighborhood biking and walking to school in the dark in the winter. I'd be fine scrapping DST if schools and offices agreed to use "summer hours" and "winter hours" but coordinating such a switch twice a year seems like DST by another name.

apexalpha 5y ago

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. This is, for me, the only argument that matters. I live in the Netherlands, which has significant seasonal changes in daily sunlight. So, in the summer there is extra light. Do you want this sunlight between 5.45 and 6.45 or between 21.00 and 22.00? I choose the latter, as the light in the (very) early morning is simply of no use to me at all. 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. :-) This is exactly what DST is. Agreeing to all get up earlier.

lamontcg 5y ago
> Agreeing to all get up earlier. My biology and I do not agree.
GoblinSlayer 5y ago
If it's just you, why do you want all people do it? You can adjust your clock and get desirable digits there.

nathanfig 5y ago

We can make either time the permanent one and adjust accordingly, it’s the twice a year disruption that people hate. Especially difficult to explain to a child why their bedtime suddenly shifted despite established circadian rhythms. It’s weirder to me that so many people care about which arbitrary number on the clock correlates to the position of the sun.

gHosts 5y ago

Don't care. Want my morning time back. I hate Morning Losing Time.

WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
I hate 5:30 sunsets. A few hours from here are 4:49 sunsets which I'd super hate.

chrismcb 5y ago

Half a dozen of one... In December Seattle either has a late sunrise or an early sunset. Currently it is dark by 5pm in Dec.

stormbrew 5y ago

I'm kind of amused at calling Seattle a "northern latitude". I live quite a bit north of that and I can tell you that as you go into actual northern latitudes if you wanted to have any of these useful effects you'd have to be changing the time a lot more often than just twice a year. The bonuses of DST up here last maybe a few weeks before it really doesn't matter anymore, and likewise for the standard time shift, except probably even shorter time being useful. Yet we still have to do it, even though it causes demonstrable harm to shift clocks twice a year.

Ekaros 5y ago
From Finland I see that Seattle is around Switzerland. Which I consider central Europe or even being very much in south. Noticed that standard time was actually useful this time of year. Where there was no light before it, but now there is at least some for while. And I see it much more important for morning than evening.
- stormbrew 5y ago
  To me it just means I get sad twice when I stop seeing the sun in the morning again. I've never found it worth it. I'm somewhere between finland and seattle, latitude-wise. A quirk of the structure of European vs. North American landmass is that northern europe is a lot more 'habitable' than northern America, so I am literally in the farthest north >1m person city in the americas and it feels about the same as, say, Stockholm except without direct ocean warmth.

GoblinSlayer 5y ago

USA doesn't even properly have northern latitudes: Seattle is southern north, not far north. Also summer sunsets are late, not early: day expands into evening and morning equally and there's no reason to regret them.

LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago

What is wrong with feeling the changes of season, depending on your geographical location? Personally that arbitrary shifting 2 times a year always disturbed me. And why TEE EFF should we all get up together? Ever heard of chronobiology and different chronotypes? 'Night Owls vs. Larks', so to speak?

hardsoftnfloppy 5y ago

It's literally clickbait every year. No experts are saying this, if they are, they should have their "expert" tag be taken away. Even in the south, the nights come earlier and we get sick of it until the shift. But fuck it, lets go back to the pre-Julian calendar, nothing means anything yolo

TwoNineFive 5y ago

> In Seattle Well that was a dumb thing to say. https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/its-daylight-saving-time-again-how-long-do-we-have-to-keep-switching-the-clock-back-and-forth/ https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/its-daylight-savin... If I remember right this change has something like 71% approval amongst the population up here. It's overwhelmingly supported and popular. We can't get rid of DST fast enough.