7 ms·

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 e

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.
      - kixiQu 5y ago
        I mean, okay, let's change which hours they're fixed to! Let's not break the entire concept of noon because America sucks at collective action problems.
        KptMarchewa 5y ago
        What you call "the entire concept of noon" is extremely minor concept in timekeeping for most humans. What's important, is when they work, when places are open, and when other humans are awake.
        kixiQu 5y ago
        https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/emres/longhourstraining/light.html https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/emres/longhourstraining/light.html > The light/dark cycle of the sun has a powerful effect on the circadian clock, sleep, and alertness. If you understand these effects, you can manipulate light exposure to help yourself sleep better at night and be more alert during the day. Keep in mind your circadian clock uses light and dark signals to predict what to do in the future: when to prepare you to be active and when to prepare you to sleep. Noon corresponds to light. Traditional time keeping has been built around light forever for reasons that are still relevant even though we now have plenty of artificial light. There is no reason why we cannot adjust when we work, keep places open, and share waking hours around the sun, but we cannot adjust the sun.
        function_seven 5y ago
        > There is no reason why we cannot adjust when we work, keep places open, and share waking hours around the sun This is the entire point of DST. To adjust when we work, keep places open, and share waking hours around the sun. > but we cannot adjust the sun. Of course, but we can adjust the angle of the hour hand on a clock. So we do that.
        kixiQu 5y ago
        > This is the entire point of DST. To adjust when we work, keep places open, and share waking hours around the sun. Perspective may vary here, but it seems to me it's to avoid having to adjust when we work by having the government enforce an artificial aberration on top of the normal social construct of time, a construct that at least hinges on the objective reality of Where The Sun Is. It's to avoid moving "a 9-to-5" to "an 8-to-4", to avoid it by pretending that noon isn't noon and making all of us mess with our clocks to keep up that pretense.
    - function_seven 5y ago
      I want to wake up earlier and want the clocks to trick everyone else into also doing so, which is the only way I'll be able to get away with it. Gotta coordinate things like this, otherwise it won't happen.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - icedchai 5y ago
    How is it the default when we are actually on daylight time most of the time now (mid March through early November)? Daylight is the norm, "standard" is actually the exception. What's the point of switching to "standard" time for 4 months?
- cactus2093 5y ago
  > But I'm also really not a morning person. I think this is really the crux of it, it's just a matter of personal preference and there's no one right answer. When I was younger I used to wake up later and I thought permanent DST was a no-brainer for the extra hour of light in the evenings. Now in my 30's for whatever reason my body clock has shifted a lot and I pretty much always wake up by 6:30 am. The last few weeks with the sun not rising until 7:30 in northern CA have been kind of depressing and I can't wait for DST to end, I'd now rather have that extra hour of light in the morning than the evening.
  - alwillis 5y ago
    Being a morning person or a night person isn’t only a personal preference; it’s also genetic. I’ve learned a huge amount of sleep lately and every cell in our bodies is regulated by our circadian rhythms. A great place to start: https://pca.st/episode/f062bb8c-6609-4dca-8666-177a17678117 https://pca.st/episode/f062bb8c-6609-4dca-8666-177a17678117
  - ASalazarMX 5y ago
    There's also the problem of lumping together cities at different latitudes. The summer time is aligned ideally with one region, at the cost of other regions following suit and having to wake up at night. Ideally, each region would have their summer time adapted to their latitude, but that would be more chaotic than simply scrapping it.
gpt5 5y ago
That's not what happened in the two states that alleviated DST (Arizona and Hawaii). They are always on winter time.
- throwawayboise 5y ago
  I grew up in Indiana when they were on standard time year-round. It was light until well after 8:00pm in the summer, that's enough.
  - jetpackjoe 5y ago
    Is that due to being so far West in the Eastern Timezone?
    - throwawayboise 5y ago
      Maybe? Yes? I'm not opposed to the idea of more, narrower time zones, though I think that in practice anything less than one-hour differences would be more complicated than it's worth. Chicago has the opposite problem, where it's dark at 4:30pm in the winter.
      - fsckboy 5y ago
        you want the timezones to be 30 minutes apart? (i assume you aren't proposing 15) that sounds so much worse than the status quo
  - logfromblammo 5y ago
    At the expense of standing at the school bus stop in complete darkness for most mornings of the school year. 13 years of rising hours before dawn and walking and waiting in darkness is enough. I would suggest that the government of any state or nation not be allowed to ever say what [civil] time it is, and require that they take technical timekeeping information--for TAI, UTC, UT1, and the like--from non-political scientific bodies.
    - 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
LeoPanthera 5y ago
Keeping DST year round just seems so crazy. If "midday" and "midnight" no longer approximate the middle of the day and night then what is even the point of time zones? The reason we don't all use UTC is because it is useful to be able to figure out roughly what time of day it is somewhere else on the planet. If we collectively agree that is no longer necessary then we are giving up a fundamental part of timekeeping. If you want an example of how crazy this is, just look to China, which only has a single time zone. It is so large that in some parts of the country the sun doesn't set until "midnight". Time actually means something, don't mess with it.
- i_am_proteus 5y ago
  Madrid's solar noon is around 1 PM during standard time and 2 PM during summer time, the rest of Spain is a bit off from this, and I noted when I lived there that the Spanish custom seems to be to keep later hours.
  - nerdawson 5y ago
    Spain should be on GMT. It was a political decision by Franco to align timezones with Germany during WWII.
    - kgwgk 5y ago
      Interestingly the UK also changed to GMT+1 during the war. And during the Spanish Civil war Republicans had already moved to GMT+1 in 1938, a change that was undone after the war before switching again to GMT+1 in 1940.
- TuringTest 5y ago
  If "midday" didn't get changing twice a year and always coincided with noon (i.e. the sun being highest), we could build a schedule based on working when there is light on the sky and still have some left after work. > Time actually means something, don't mess with it. That would be great advice for not changing the clock every six months.
mdp2021 5y ago
> we'd keep the summer hours year round Not clear. Those you call «winter hours» are supposed to be the actual, real hours: noon equals zenith, midnight equals nadir. You can have some reasonable exception, but to call "midnight" all year what is not midnight makes no sense. It amounts to "falsehood", where it would be just social agreement to just wake, work, dine sooner or later.
- labster 5y ago
  Actually, winter time is zero-indexed, and summer time has an index of one. “Real hours” depends on whether you like C or SQL more.
  - mdp2021 5y ago
    Watchmakers took their stance, setting 12 at the zenith.
- stormbrew 5y ago
  The entire concept of time is a "social agreement". Including when noon is. Solar noon is never at clock noon where I live or for that matter in most places, it's off by an amount dictated by political decisions and boundaries as well as by the fact that it literally drifts a bit over the course of the year.
  - mdp2021 5y ago
    In a way, but it is not "anarchic performance art": it tends to adhere to the actual objective time - it makes sense to create a system that applies reasonable compromises, but attached with a rubber band to the real thing. Approximate flexibly but do not lose the anchor. People in Paris know they have a pretty severe offset, ~50m (those in Vigo even ~95m). If you added a sticky +1h, the offset against solar time would increase to ~110m and ~155m.

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.
    - kixiQu 5y ago
      I mean, okay, let's change which hours they're fixed to! Let's not break the entire concept of noon because America sucks at collective action problems.
      - KptMarchewa 5y ago
        What you call "the entire concept of noon" is extremely minor concept in timekeeping for most humans. What's important, is when they work, when places are open, and when other humans are awake.
        kixiQu 5y ago
        https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/emres/longhourstraining/light.html https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/emres/longhourstraining/light.html > The light/dark cycle of the sun has a powerful effect on the circadian clock, sleep, and alertness. If you understand these effects, you can manipulate light exposure to help yourself sleep better at night and be more alert during the day. Keep in mind your circadian clock uses light and dark signals to predict what to do in the future: when to prepare you to be active and when to prepare you to sleep. Noon corresponds to light. Traditional time keeping has been built around light forever for reasons that are still relevant even though we now have plenty of artificial light. There is no reason why we cannot adjust when we work, keep places open, and share waking hours around the sun, but we cannot adjust the sun.
        function_seven 5y ago
        > There is no reason why we cannot adjust when we work, keep places open, and share waking hours around the sun This is the entire point of DST. To adjust when we work, keep places open, and share waking hours around the sun. > but we cannot adjust the sun. Of course, but we can adjust the angle of the hour hand on a clock. So we do that.
        kixiQu 5y ago
        > This is the entire point of DST. To adjust when we work, keep places open, and share waking hours around the sun. Perspective may vary here, but it seems to me it's to avoid having to adjust when we work by having the government enforce an artificial aberration on top of the normal social construct of time, a construct that at least hinges on the objective reality of Where The Sun Is. It's to avoid moving "a 9-to-5" to "an 8-to-4", to avoid it by pretending that noon isn't noon and making all of us mess with our clocks to keep up that pretense.
  - function_seven 5y ago
    I want to wake up earlier and want the clocks to trick everyone else into also doing so, which is the only way I'll be able to get away with it. Gotta coordinate things like this, otherwise it won't happen.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- icedchai 5y ago
  How is it the default when we are actually on daylight time most of the time now (mid March through early November)? Daylight is the norm, "standard" is actually the exception. What's the point of switching to "standard" time for 4 months?
cactus2093 5y ago
> But I'm also really not a morning person. I think this is really the crux of it, it's just a matter of personal preference and there's no one right answer. When I was younger I used to wake up later and I thought permanent DST was a no-brainer for the extra hour of light in the evenings. Now in my 30's for whatever reason my body clock has shifted a lot and I pretty much always wake up by 6:30 am. The last few weeks with the sun not rising until 7:30 in northern CA have been kind of depressing and I can't wait for DST to end, I'd now rather have that extra hour of light in the morning than the evening.
- alwillis 5y ago
  Being a morning person or a night person isn’t only a personal preference; it’s also genetic. I’ve learned a huge amount of sleep lately and every cell in our bodies is regulated by our circadian rhythms. A great place to start: https://pca.st/episode/f062bb8c-6609-4dca-8666-177a17678117 https://pca.st/episode/f062bb8c-6609-4dca-8666-177a17678117
- ASalazarMX 5y ago
  There's also the problem of lumping together cities at different latitudes. The summer time is aligned ideally with one region, at the cost of other regions following suit and having to wake up at night. Ideally, each region would have their summer time adapted to their latitude, but that would be more chaotic than simply scrapping it.

gpt5 5y ago

That's not what happened in the two states that alleviated DST (Arizona and Hawaii). They are always on winter time.

throwawayboise 5y ago
I grew up in Indiana when they were on standard time year-round. It was light until well after 8:00pm in the summer, that's enough.
- jetpackjoe 5y ago
  Is that due to being so far West in the Eastern Timezone?
  - throwawayboise 5y ago
    Maybe? Yes? I'm not opposed to the idea of more, narrower time zones, though I think that in practice anything less than one-hour differences would be more complicated than it's worth. Chicago has the opposite problem, where it's dark at 4:30pm in the winter.
    - fsckboy 5y ago
      you want the timezones to be 30 minutes apart? (i assume you aren't proposing 15) that sounds so much worse than the status quo
- logfromblammo 5y ago
  At the expense of standing at the school bus stop in complete darkness for most mornings of the school year. 13 years of rising hours before dawn and walking and waiting in darkness is enough. I would suggest that the government of any state or nation not be allowed to ever say what [civil] time it is, and require that they take technical timekeeping information--for TAI, UTC, UT1, and the like--from non-political scientific bodies.
  - 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

LeoPanthera 5y ago

Keeping DST year round just seems so crazy. If "midday" and "midnight" no longer approximate the middle of the day and night then what is even the point of time zones? The reason we don't all use UTC is because it is useful to be able to figure out roughly what time of day it is somewhere else on the planet. If we collectively agree that is no longer necessary then we are giving up a fundamental part of timekeeping. If you want an example of how crazy this is, just look to China, which only has a single time zone. It is so large that in some parts of the country the sun doesn't set until "midnight". Time actually means something, don't mess with it.

i_am_proteus 5y ago
Madrid's solar noon is around 1 PM during standard time and 2 PM during summer time, the rest of Spain is a bit off from this, and I noted when I lived there that the Spanish custom seems to be to keep later hours.
- nerdawson 5y ago
  Spain should be on GMT. It was a political decision by Franco to align timezones with Germany during WWII.
  - kgwgk 5y ago
    Interestingly the UK also changed to GMT+1 during the war. And during the Spanish Civil war Republicans had already moved to GMT+1 in 1938, a change that was undone after the war before switching again to GMT+1 in 1940.
TuringTest 5y ago
If "midday" didn't get changing twice a year and always coincided with noon (i.e. the sun being highest), we could build a schedule based on working when there is light on the sky and still have some left after work. > Time actually means something, don't mess with it. That would be great advice for not changing the clock every six months.

mdp2021 5y ago

> we'd keep the summer hours year round Not clear. Those you call «winter hours» are supposed to be the actual, real hours: noon equals zenith, midnight equals nadir. You can have some reasonable exception, but to call "midnight" all year what is not midnight makes no sense. It amounts to "falsehood", where it would be just social agreement to just wake, work, dine sooner or later.

labster 5y ago
Actually, winter time is zero-indexed, and summer time has an index of one. “Real hours” depends on whether you like C or SQL more.
- mdp2021 5y ago
  Watchmakers took their stance, setting 12 at the zenith.
stormbrew 5y ago
The entire concept of time is a "social agreement". Including when noon is. Solar noon is never at clock noon where I live or for that matter in most places, it's off by an amount dictated by political decisions and boundaries as well as by the fact that it literally drifts a bit over the course of the year.
- mdp2021 5y ago
  In a way, but it is not "anarchic performance art": it tends to adhere to the actual objective time - it makes sense to create a system that applies reasonable compromises, but attached with a rubber band to the real thing. Approximate flexibly but do not lose the anchor. People in Paris know they have a pretty severe offset, ~50m (those in Vigo even ~95m). If you added a sticky +1h, the offset against solar time would increase to ~110m and ~155m.