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The US Tried Permanent Daylight Saving Time in the ’70s. People Hated It
- JoeAltmaier 5y agoPeople are different now. It's the old tired refrain "We already tried that!* (*under different circumstances, at a different time, with a different generation)
- Wowfunhappy 5y agoHow do you know people are different now? Shouldn't we learn from history and do something different this time around, like permanent standard time? We did permanent standard time in the past too, and people didn't seem to have a problem with it. I think we should go with the option that society liked in the past, not the one they disliked.
- extheat 5y agoI hear there was a time that we did some pretty messed up things in the US, and some people didn't seem to have a problem with it at the time. Doesn't sound so catchy right? Society changes, people adapt. If there was not a strong desire, it wouldn't have passed unanimously.
- Wowfunhappy 5y ago> If there was not a strong desire, it wouldn't have passed unanimously. I don't think this has been thought through properly. Time changes are difficult to reason about, and DST is associated with the part of year when the sun is up for longer anyway. Everyone thinks "yay sunlight" without realizing what that really entails (waking up earlier relative to our internal clocks, which are set by the sunrise). Hence why we should look at public sentiment at the time we actually implemented this. Almost all scientists who study sleep say we should be doing permanent standard time, not permanent DST.
- extheat 5y agoThe New York Times article on the subject discusses some of the benefits: > In one 2017 study[1] from Denmark, scientists analyzed a psychiatric database of more than 185,000 people from 1995 to 2012. They found that the fall transition to standard time was associated with an 11 percent increase in depressive episodes, an effect that took 10 weeks to dissipate. The spring switch, by contrast, had no similar effect. > Retail and leisure industries have argued that more light in the evenings would give consumers more time to spend money, and proponents also argue that lighter evenings would translate to fewer robberies[2] and safer roads[3]. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/15/us/politics/daylight-saving-time-senate.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/15/us/politics/daylight-savi... 1 https://journals.lww.com/epidem/Fulltext/2017/05000/Daylight_Savings_Time_Transitions_and_the.7.aspx https://journals.lww.com/epidem/Fulltext/2017/05000/Daylight... 2 https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brookings-now/2015/10/29/fighting-crime-with-daylight-saving-time/#cancel https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brookings-now/2015/10/29/figh... 3 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12067111/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12067111/
- Wowfunhappy 5y ago> In one 2017 study[1] from Denmark, scientists analyzed a psychiatric database of more than 185,000 people from 1995 to 2012. They found that the fall transition to standard time was associated with an 11 percent increase in depressive episodes, an effect that took 10 weeks to dissipate. The spring switch, by contrast, had no similar effect. Yeah, I've seen that before, and I've always found it incredibly unconvincing. The thing about the fall is that there's also less sunlight in general, at any time of day, and DST won't change that. I'd be very curious to see a study conducted before/after temporary all-year DST in the 70s, although it probably doesn't exist.
- hackernewds 5y agoI hear there were some huge mistakes the populace of Germany made. However, this time is different and the people of the US should accept no learnings from that situation. Is that right framing?
- LocalH 5y agoStraw man argument. It seems disingenuous to immediately bring up some of the most extreme and heinous behavior from our national history, in a discussion about time shifts. The actions of legislators are not, in a practical sense, directly representative of the citizenry. Sure, some things end up going to popular vote, but some things are just proposed and passed with zero citizen input.
- ehutch79 5y agoFine, make standard time permanent instead.
- aeternum 5y agoPermanent DST makes more sense as a lot more people are awake at 6pm vs. 6am. From an optimization problem / energy conservation point-of-view we should try to place noon as close as possible to the midpoint of the population's wakefulness window.
- GekkePrutser 5y agoThis.. At 6am I'll be asleep or trying to wake up. Not enjoying the day. At 6pm I could enjoy some time outside before dark after I finish work.
- cafard 5y agoI was there, Charlie. In the winter of 1973-1974 I was carpooling to college, leaving the house about 6:30 to get to campus before 8. I could have done without the DST. It was imposed with the notion of saving energy after the oil shock. Did it really save energy, though?
- ouid 5y agoIs this really all fueled by having to change your clocks? The primary driver of your circadian rhythm is the hours of daylight. Left to their own devices, (ie literally excluding alarm clocks) humans wake up at sunrise. Daylight savings time is an attempt to make it easy for institutions to have canonical hours while also attempting to account for this essential fact about human physiology. It feels weird because it's optimizing two things simultaneously.
- area51org 5y agoIt's fueled by the exhaustion caused by monkeying with what time it is. It's not about circadian rhythms. It's about having to wake up an hour early and pretend that you got enough sleep, and for no good reason.
- haveyoubeen 5y agoWhy not go to bed an hour earlier or start work later? Are you a prisoner?
- chaorace 5y agoWhy yes, I am! It's dark, there's hardly any room to move around, and I'm constantly surrounded in cerebrospinal fluid.
- haveyoubeen 5y agoJokes aside, Don't let your society push you around.
- thawaya3113 5y agoYour comment neatly encapsulates the problem. If the primary driver of our circadian rhythm is sunlight, switching from DST and back leads you to doing stuff an hour off from your body’s natural circadian rhythm. It’s not about changing your clock. It’s about changing your body’s schedule.
- area51org 5y agoThe past is prologue and not necessarily predictive. That was then; this is now.
- jamesliudotcc 5y agoInstitutions have computers now. So they should be able to have hours to fit the sun with far less trouble.
- tryptophan 5y agoSeriously. Don't understand why businesses can't have hours like "from sunup to sundown". Wouldn't even need to check the time to see if it is open or not, you can just look outside. Plus...we have the super advanced technology needed to figure out when sundown is on our smartphones!
- moltke 5y agoMany parks do this. It makes a ton of sense. IMO the best system for businesses that need rigid times would be to have separate winter and summer hours or just make the opening time <x> integer hours from sunrise.
- tyldum 5y agoPolar area here. So, in the transition from summer to winter the day is shortened about 15-20 minutes each day. And vice versa from winter to summer. And at some point in the summer, the sun never sets. During winter it never rises... Time isn't easy on a global scale.
- moltke 5y agoRight, I think local rules make way more sense than DST for situations like that just like they make more sense for places close to the equator.
- Arainach 5y agoSunup and sundown are subjective. At "sunset" it's not pitch black out. Is sundown earlier if I'm in a neighborhood behind a hill? I don't want to have to guess if a business will still open by the time I get there. I know that it's 6:15, it's a 22 minute drive, and the business closes at 7. I have no idea if "sundown" will have happened by the time I get there.
- rdtwo 5y agoNorthern folks will finally get an hour back after work to do things
- qball 5y agoAlso, it'll give that privilege to everyone else who doesn't work standard 9-5- it helps those who work 8-4, and 7-3. It doesn't help 10-6ers, but those are almost universally office jobs (who generally tend to have the luxury of windows). It's quite difficult to understand just how much no sun in the morning sucks until you've had to live through it. On Standard time only, you'll go down into the artificial-light-only place in the dark, and you'll come out of it in the dark, for half the year. Switching permanently to DST means this sector of the population gets an opportunity to see the sun after work before it goes away even when the sun sets at what would normally be 3:30-4 PM. They aren't going to see the sun in the morning no matter what anyway; they're waking up in the dark even if DST is permanent. Sure, people will complain about the purity of "but 12 means noon", but most of our modern systems of measure have no human-scale base units and everyone loves those, so there's no reason why time should be based on that either.
- rdtwo 5y agoYeah if you are 10-6 odds are you have the option to come in earlier anyway.
- sschueller 5y agoWhy can't we do a 30 minute shift? Then we get rid of this back and forth and we get the best of both worlds. What am I missing here?
- tedunangst 5y ago10 minute adjustment on the first of each month.
- interestica 5y agodaily adjustments.
- WorldMaker 5y agoIt depends on what you are optimizing for and where you are optimizing for. Standard and Daylight times have different meanings in different sides of the time zone. On Eastern edges of a time zone Standard time truly is more "standard" with respect to solar noon. On Western edges of a time zone Daylight time starts to be more preferable and closer to solar noon. Half-hour between the two might favor the "middle" of the time zone perhaps and/or it might just leave all the populations on either side of the time zone unhappy. Arguably our timezones have grown too wide to accommodate preferences of both edges. Our timezones were optimized for train schedules and full hour-wide zones made some sense based on the speed of train travel. Maybe instead of trying to pick just "Standard" Time or just Daylight Time we should instead be talking about narrowing our time zones (to half-hour wide, perhaps) and better figure out what geography we are best trying to represent versus solar noon, the center of a timezone, one edge or the other.
- windows2020 5y agoIt's an interesting idea. 'Micro time zones' of sorts. People already survive on time zone boundaries. Why stop at 30 minutes? It'd be most convenient for local events, but maybe not for non-local events. I'd open my bar at the most eastern point.
- 5y ago
- mdavis6890 5y agoTimeZones and DST are for humans and physical realities, such as the tilt of the earth and circadian rhythms. And they serve to address these things in a universal, coordinated way rather than asking each of us to change our schedules individually. During DST, we all agree to start our days, open our business, and adjust our schedules one hour earlier, but without changing our individual clock times. With DST all year long, can we choose to send our children to school at 9:30 instead of 8:30 during the winter? Should the school have a different winter schedule than a summer one? Or should we just wake up our young children well before dawn and drag them off?
- Wowfunhappy 5y agoAren't you basically still replicating the clock change? Everyone who goes to, works inside, or drops children off at the school will be less productive, at greater risk of heart attack, etc. If we were really accounting for physical realities, we'd change our schedules by a much smaller amount every week or even every day, as the sun gradually shifts over time, instead of by an hour all at once. But nobody wants to coordinate that. I think the only logical thing to do is have permanent standard time...
- metadat 5y agoPeople in Hawaii and Arizona seem to be doing just fine. Hell, have you heard about how the daylight cycles work in Alaska? They generally somehow don't complain about it much. The time change is super inconvenient, both as a regular person who doesn't like futzing with the oven clock, and as a programmer for whom it is pure madness to try and comprehend all the rules and edge case when converting between time zones. p.s. mdavis6890, I find myself wanting to leave spiteful words in response to your post. Upon inspecting this, I accept that these feelings are on me. You haven't really done anything. I think it stems from feeling like trash due to the hour time shift, combined with my own deeply seated desire to live in a slightly less nonsensical and insane version of reality. In this present version we seem to be forever saddled by the bullshit of y'ore. See also: Texas and as of today also Idaho regarding abortion rights rollbacks. Combine that with the highly suspicious conflict of interest of our newly appointed supreme court justices ( https://www.npr.org/2022/03/14/1086535100/wife-of-justice-thomas-rebuts-claims-of-conflict-of-interest https://www.npr.org/2022/03/14/1086535100/wife-of-justice-th... ) and we're in full-on regression insanity mode. All I want at the moment is to stop being subjected to time zone shift fatigue without the benefit of getting to travel somewhere.
- scruffyherder 5y agoI've been in Hong Kong for nearly 9 years with no DST and it's been AWESOME. DST is absolutely jarring and has the worst aspects of jetlag. Let it die already, trust me not having it is great.
- eyelidlessness 5y agoI’ve wanted this since I moved to Seattle 20 years ago (whoa)… until this winter. I still want to stop time changes, but now I’d definitely prefer permanent standard time. What changed? Until about three years ago, I was a night owl with chronic insomnia. Since then, I’ve done some important mental healthy work, and I got a pup. The former helped with my insomnia and helped me adjust to an earlier schedule. The pup, well she used to rise with the sun, but going into her third year she has a much more stable internal clock. Now I understand the dread people feel waking early in wintertime in a way I never did. It feels like waking up in my insomniac days, except that I’d still be able to sleep. I still understand why others prefer this, and I don’t think there’s a solution that will please everyone. It’s just really strange to (potentially) get something I wanted for almost my entire adult life, just as I’ve had a change of heart.
- zeroimpl 5y agoIf we can’t agree on permanent DST vs permanent standard time, I propose we divide the continent in half and have permanent DST on the West and permanent standard time on the East, leaving a 2 hour time gap between the coasts. Over time the morning people will flock to one side and the evening people the other, and all will be harmonious.
- gutitout 5y agoI hate how much I love this idea.
- notjustanymike 5y agoHear me out: Alternating Standard Time (AST). We take an hour from one day, then give it back the next. That way you get the glory of sleeping in every other day, it's perfect!
- mbg721 5y agoCan we do it a minute at a time?
- notjustanymike 5y agoAh to be back in school, watching the clock tick down before lunch.
- pc2g4d 5y agoSplit the difference: shift by half an hour and stay there all year
- culopatin 5y agoThis is the way
- randcraw 5y agoThat Washingtonian story was a big nothing. In December 1973, supposedly 80% of Americans favored DST through the winter, but this fell by fully half to 40% only three months later — during the DARKEST three months of the year? How does that make any sense? Americans then would rather that darkness begin at 5, BEFORE they can drive home? Nonsense. Any statistic that counterintuitive bears much fuller explanation. It reeks of manipulation, such as a PR campaign by some social influencer of the day claiming to “protect our helpless little children brought to death's door by a wicked law obviously invented by Communists”. However, if a greater context behind the story HAD been provided, it's likely there woyld be no story — just as there WAS no threat to schoolchildren. (Nor would there be any today, since nobody walks to school anymore.) Now THIS is news I can’t use.
- interestica 5y ago"The US Tried Permanent Daylight Saving Time in the ’70s. People Hated It" There would be no difference here if the article said: "The US Tried Permanent Daylight Saving Time in the ’70s. People Loved It" Both imply (some) people. Both would (technically) be correct. A story could be squeezed out of either. Bad writing.
- _8j50 5y agoUnpopular opinion: I like DST switching just the way it is. I hate it when I finish work and it's already dark or it's still dark at like 7AM. It works well with the circadian rythm and all. I don't think the simplicity of permanent DST is worth it. If I had my way every month the time would shift to where 6 AM is the time the sun rises in that time zone. Our bodies and subconscious is tuned to sunlight in many ways.