5 ms·

Does permanent daylight savings time seem to anyone else like a symptom of a society with a case of light-at-night induced jetlag? Why should the only visible m

Does permanent daylight savings time seem to anyone else like a symptom of a society with a case of light-at-night induced jetlag? Why should the only visible marker of the day---noon---not be approximately noon on the clock? If we need to shift school and work start times relative to the sun, we could you know, just do that...

ajross 4y ago
Conversely, why should the "middle" of our daily schedule, when lunch breaks etc. are scheduled, have to coincide with the solar maximum? Modern society compresses "boring stuff" into the first half of the day and puts the fun stuff at the end. Why not give it more light? Meh. Just pick something, I guess. But this isn't an engineering problem and there's no correct solution.
- _ph_ 4y ago
  Our breaks don't have to coincide with the solar maximum. We can set them at any time we want. Which is why "permanent dst" makes no sense. However, calibrating our wall time so that noon marks the high point of the sun is the obviously correct thing from setting up the system. This is why this has been done historically. What we decide as the right time to get up, have lunch, is derived from the calibration. People who live at the extreme ends of a time zone tend to adjust their day schedule accordingly.
- jameshart 4y ago
  Took me years after moving to the US to get used to the idea that 12-1 is lunch hour, rather than 1-2.
  - inciampati 4y ago
    And also not 2:30-4...
- sandworm101 4y ago
  >> this isn't an engineering problem and there's no correct solution. It was an engineering problem, very literally an engineer problem. Standardized time zones were needed to keep trains, the big heavy things driven by engineers, from smacking into each other at speed. Coordinating all the train station clocks wasn't done for social reasons but for safety and efficiency. Imagine trying to run a modern air transport network if every airport changed its clock a few minutes every day. Total chaos.
  - ajross 4y ago
    I don't know about trains specifically, but air transport planning happens in UTC for exactly that reason. If "time zones" were indeed an engineering solution, they were the wrong solution.
    - sandworm101 4y ago
      Time zones are part of standard time, but the core concept is that everyone agrees to synchronize their clocks. Time zones are an abstraction layer above.
adhesive_wombat 4y ago
> Why should the only visible marker of the day---noon---not be approximately noon on the clock? Conversely, why should it? Clocks are artificial devices that serve human needs, there's no physical law that says you can't have the top of the clock be sunrise every day, or any other system you could imagine.
- inciampati 4y ago
  Yeah there is no physical law that prevents that. Except that sunrise is not stable, so now your whole time system needs to slew and skew around to match the changes, and the meaning of day divisions changes seasonally and even daily. Considering all that there might actually be some physical limits to what my infinite life Casio watch is going to handle. Maybe when it gets GPS it could work.
  - tzs 4y ago
    > Except that sunrise is not stable, so now your whole time system needs to slew and skew around to match the changes, and the meaning of day divisions changes seasonally and even daily Wait a second...that's only because you are using noon as a reference. The intervals from noons to consecutive noons decrease for half the year and increase for half the year, averaging 24 hours, with the swing being about a minute. Similar for the intervals from sunrises to consecutive sunrises, except the swing can reach around 4 or 5 minutes. Either of those is stable enough to use its average as a reference.
danaris 4y ago
Give the way we structure our time zones, noon can only ever match the sun's zenith for some subset of people.
- xvedejas 4y ago
  It could be within 30 minutes of correct for nearly everyone, if we decide that's a goal for the system.
  - s1artibartfast 4y ago
    But for most people it seems like a terrible goal. Solar maximum is much less important to daily life than sunrise and sunset
    - inciampati 4y ago
      A sunrise centered clock would be awesome and insanely impractical. Your days will be longer than 24hrs from winter to summer solstice, and shorter from summer to winter. You cannot have the same time system across an entire line if longitude. Which sunrise do you pick? The equitorial one? 45 north? This may be more fraught than you were considering.
      - s1artibartfast 4y ago
        OK, you convinced me. I have decided I am now a sunrise local time absolutist. We could move from measuring time with a 24 hour clock to one based on solar angle. We could also measure geographic distance in relative change of solar angle, combining our time and distance systems. Some think it overly complex, but the increased geometry proficiency would save many lives.
      - rssoconnor 4y ago
        One perk of work-from-home is that I try to structure my day around sunrise like this. I set my alarm for sunrise (usually I only adjust it once a week), with the nice perk that when DST rolls around I don't lose any sleep, I just wake up "later". I am far enough north that at some point as summer rolls around, I transition to sunset based structure, setting my morning alarm for 9 or 10 hours after sunset.
yurishimo 4y ago
The overhead though. Sure, we could decide to move when things start/open throughout the year, but the amount of mental overhead is astronomical at scale. Some people just don't care enough. I don't read half the emails I get. What if the school district email reminding parents about the time change goes to spam? What if my kid forgets to give me the paper notice they received in class? What about the changes from my pharmacy or supermarket? Not to mention geography also plays a huge part in this. 4pm in the Netherlands vs 4pm in Egypt could look very different outside depending on the local weather. If you live in a part of the world with constant cloud cover, it will seem darker outside than in the desert, but you both share the same clock. The upside to the way method we use now, is that it only happens twice a year and at most, you might miss something by 1 day. If that happened once a quarter, maybe we could get everyone on board, but again it's highly dependent on where you live. Some places can add 3-5 minutes of extra sunlight per day in the Spring! Over a week or two, that's a substantial amount of extra light/darkness. While I agree that the current situation is not ideal, there are a lot of scenarios I can imagine being much worse for very little gain.
- inciampati 4y ago
  We already move things seasonally. Business hours change seasonally. We are active at different times and in different places depending on season. I'm not putting forward insane counterfactuals. I'm just saying that we can set things up so that noon is very approximately local noon, with no changes at random parts of the year, and we will be fine. As in, the state of things before we started trying to "save" daylight. Why daylight savings time should be the new normal is beyond me, and it doesn't seem that anyone can explain why except that it's some kind of funny political phenomenon.
crazygringo 4y ago
> If we need to shift school and work start times relative to the sun, we could you know, just do that... Actually we can't, the coordination problem is so massive as to basically be impossible. For various reasons, it's actually far, far, far easier to change clocks. And to put your question back at you -- why should the sun be highest at noon? Because that's actually a very arbitrary thing (number 12 = highest) and it's not even perfectly true except for one special longitude in a time zone. The purpose of time zones is really just so we can have a common vocabulary for when the daily rhythms of events happen. If anything, aligning 12:00 pm with lunchtime is probably the biggest cultural anchor. Not the sun.
- inciampati 4y ago
  Noon is the only stable, visible marker. You don't see midnight. Unless you're at the equator sunrise and sunset will always shift. 12 is totally arbitrary. We could use a decimal clock. That's all historical. But because noon is when the sun is highest, most people can look at the light quality outside and know immediately what time of day it is. Many cultures eat lunch at different times than noon. Some modern cultures even like to completely skip lunch. And I agree. The coordination problem is impossibly large and annoying. So just skip it. Don't shift clocks around to try to coordinate. Give businesses and schools more ability to set and change their hours. Why on earth and sun should we use this arbitrary artifact of a failed attempt to drive social coordination (daylight savings) as the new normal?
  - crazygringo 4y ago
    > most people can look at the light quality outside and know immediately what time of day it is Most people really can't. Not only do most people simply not pay enough attention, but it varies dramatically by month the further you get from the equator. The light at 3 pm in August is totally different from 3 pm light in November. > Give businesses and schools more ability to set and change their hours. You're missing the fact that they effectively can't. Business hours are set around school hours, because employees have children. School hours are set around business hours, because of parents' jobs. Not to mention train schedules, airlines schedules, and everything. The only way we can change it is all at once, and the only way to ensure everyone follows is to change the clock itself. Not to mention changing every clock is so much easier than changing every single calendar event everywhere, because we already have systems for the former, but not for the latter. Timekeeping is just a tool designed to benefit humans, it's not divine. We can use it as a tool to implement coordination changes that result in a net societal benefit around when we experience daylight. Why wouldn't we use it for that? The fact that solar noon is then at 12:37 pm instead of 11:37 am for somebody somewhere is nearly irrelevant compared to that.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
gmiller123456 4y ago
>If we need to shift school and work start times relative to the sun, we could you know, just do that... But that is exactly what we're doing when we all agree to switch our clocks. Whoever ends up in the minority that really feels strongly one way or the other can still adjust their schedules if it's convenient for them.
6gvONxR4sf7o 4y ago
> the only visible marker of the day---noon Why don't sunset and sunrise count?
- inciampati 4y ago
  Because except at the equator they do not make even, stable divisions of the day.
Fatnino 4y ago
I think the underlying goal is to have people not be sleeping at times when the sun is up because that's a waste. In the bay area daylight hours will vary, going as low as 10 hours in winter and as high as 14 hours in summer. Standard time in December has 5pm occur after sunset. Assume a standard 8 hour workday of 9 to 5. That's 8 of the 10 daylight hours dedicated to "work" with none left over for after work leisure time. Numbers above are rough estimates, don't come at me with exact sunset time of some arbitrary day. I propose that a very large percentage of workers do not do a type of work that is dependent on sunlight. The vast majority of people work indoors in a building with electric lights. Leisure time on the other hand is often spent outdoors. Or would be if we were to arrange our clocks so that there was more daylight after work. Let's go wildly overboard with this thought experiment: Create a time zone overlay called "Fun in the Sun Time". FitST has 12 noon occur around the time when the sun rises. Everyone will have woken up while it's still dark out using some electric lights at home, then gone to work (where the lights are on 100% of the work hours regardless of what timezone, real or imagined). Lunch break takes place during sunlight hours, and after work there are still at least 5 hours to go hiking/biking/sun bathing/BBQing/whatever. This is a bit extreme, obviously, but a somewhat less extreme version of this would be to have the bay area run on Eastern Standard Time (or equivalent) year round. This 3 hour shift would synchronize businesses here with the east coast. Or we could do the easiest, least intrusive thing, shift to PDT now in March and never switch back.

ajross 4y ago

Conversely, why should the "middle" of our daily schedule, when lunch breaks etc. are scheduled, have to coincide with the solar maximum? Modern society compresses "boring stuff" into the first half of the day and puts the fun stuff at the end. Why not give it more light? Meh. Just pick something, I guess. But this isn't an engineering problem and there's no correct solution.

_ph_ 4y ago
Our breaks don't have to coincide with the solar maximum. We can set them at any time we want. Which is why "permanent dst" makes no sense. However, calibrating our wall time so that noon marks the high point of the sun is the obviously correct thing from setting up the system. This is why this has been done historically. What we decide as the right time to get up, have lunch, is derived from the calibration. People who live at the extreme ends of a time zone tend to adjust their day schedule accordingly.
jameshart 4y ago
Took me years after moving to the US to get used to the idea that 12-1 is lunch hour, rather than 1-2.
- inciampati 4y ago
  And also not 2:30-4...
sandworm101 4y ago
>> this isn't an engineering problem and there's no correct solution. It was an engineering problem, very literally an engineer problem. Standardized time zones were needed to keep trains, the big heavy things driven by engineers, from smacking into each other at speed. Coordinating all the train station clocks wasn't done for social reasons but for safety and efficiency. Imagine trying to run a modern air transport network if every airport changed its clock a few minutes every day. Total chaos.
- ajross 4y ago
  I don't know about trains specifically, but air transport planning happens in UTC for exactly that reason. If "time zones" were indeed an engineering solution, they were the wrong solution.
  - sandworm101 4y ago
    Time zones are part of standard time, but the core concept is that everyone agrees to synchronize their clocks. Time zones are an abstraction layer above.

adhesive_wombat 4y ago

> Why should the only visible marker of the day---noon---not be approximately noon on the clock? Conversely, why should it? Clocks are artificial devices that serve human needs, there's no physical law that says you can't have the top of the clock be sunrise every day, or any other system you could imagine.

inciampati 4y ago
Yeah there is no physical law that prevents that. Except that sunrise is not stable, so now your whole time system needs to slew and skew around to match the changes, and the meaning of day divisions changes seasonally and even daily. Considering all that there might actually be some physical limits to what my infinite life Casio watch is going to handle. Maybe when it gets GPS it could work.
- tzs 4y ago
  > Except that sunrise is not stable, so now your whole time system needs to slew and skew around to match the changes, and the meaning of day divisions changes seasonally and even daily Wait a second...that's only because you are using noon as a reference. The intervals from noons to consecutive noons decrease for half the year and increase for half the year, averaging 24 hours, with the swing being about a minute. Similar for the intervals from sunrises to consecutive sunrises, except the swing can reach around 4 or 5 minutes. Either of those is stable enough to use its average as a reference.

danaris 4y ago

Give the way we structure our time zones, noon can only ever match the sun's zenith for some subset of people.

xvedejas 4y ago
It could be within 30 minutes of correct for nearly everyone, if we decide that's a goal for the system.
- s1artibartfast 4y ago
  But for most people it seems like a terrible goal. Solar maximum is much less important to daily life than sunrise and sunset
  - inciampati 4y ago
    A sunrise centered clock would be awesome and insanely impractical. Your days will be longer than 24hrs from winter to summer solstice, and shorter from summer to winter. You cannot have the same time system across an entire line if longitude. Which sunrise do you pick? The equitorial one? 45 north? This may be more fraught than you were considering.
    - s1artibartfast 4y ago
      OK, you convinced me. I have decided I am now a sunrise local time absolutist. We could move from measuring time with a 24 hour clock to one based on solar angle. We could also measure geographic distance in relative change of solar angle, combining our time and distance systems. Some think it overly complex, but the increased geometry proficiency would save many lives.
    - rssoconnor 4y ago
      One perk of work-from-home is that I try to structure my day around sunrise like this. I set my alarm for sunrise (usually I only adjust it once a week), with the nice perk that when DST rolls around I don't lose any sleep, I just wake up "later". I am far enough north that at some point as summer rolls around, I transition to sunset based structure, setting my morning alarm for 9 or 10 hours after sunset.

yurishimo 4y ago

The overhead though. Sure, we could decide to move when things start/open throughout the year, but the amount of mental overhead is astronomical at scale. Some people just don't care enough. I don't read half the emails I get. What if the school district email reminding parents about the time change goes to spam? What if my kid forgets to give me the paper notice they received in class? What about the changes from my pharmacy or supermarket? Not to mention geography also plays a huge part in this. 4pm in the Netherlands vs 4pm in Egypt could look very different outside depending on the local weather. If you live in a part of the world with constant cloud cover, it will seem darker outside than in the desert, but you both share the same clock. The upside to the way method we use now, is that it only happens twice a year and at most, you might miss something by 1 day. If that happened once a quarter, maybe we could get everyone on board, but again it's highly dependent on where you live. Some places can add 3-5 minutes of extra sunlight per day in the Spring! Over a week or two, that's a substantial amount of extra light/darkness. While I agree that the current situation is not ideal, there are a lot of scenarios I can imagine being much worse for very little gain.

inciampati 4y ago
We already move things seasonally. Business hours change seasonally. We are active at different times and in different places depending on season. I'm not putting forward insane counterfactuals. I'm just saying that we can set things up so that noon is very approximately local noon, with no changes at random parts of the year, and we will be fine. As in, the state of things before we started trying to "save" daylight. Why daylight savings time should be the new normal is beyond me, and it doesn't seem that anyone can explain why except that it's some kind of funny political phenomenon.

crazygringo 4y ago

> If we need to shift school and work start times relative to the sun, we could you know, just do that... Actually we can't, the coordination problem is so massive as to basically be impossible. For various reasons, it's actually far, far, far easier to change clocks. And to put your question back at you -- why should the sun be highest at noon? Because that's actually a very arbitrary thing (number 12 = highest) and it's not even perfectly true except for one special longitude in a time zone. The purpose of time zones is really just so we can have a common vocabulary for when the daily rhythms of events happen. If anything, aligning 12:00 pm with lunchtime is probably the biggest cultural anchor. Not the sun.

inciampati 4y ago
Noon is the only stable, visible marker. You don't see midnight. Unless you're at the equator sunrise and sunset will always shift. 12 is totally arbitrary. We could use a decimal clock. That's all historical. But because noon is when the sun is highest, most people can look at the light quality outside and know immediately what time of day it is. Many cultures eat lunch at different times than noon. Some modern cultures even like to completely skip lunch. And I agree. The coordination problem is impossibly large and annoying. So just skip it. Don't shift clocks around to try to coordinate. Give businesses and schools more ability to set and change their hours. Why on earth and sun should we use this arbitrary artifact of a failed attempt to drive social coordination (daylight savings) as the new normal?
- crazygringo 4y ago
  > most people can look at the light quality outside and know immediately what time of day it is Most people really can't. Not only do most people simply not pay enough attention, but it varies dramatically by month the further you get from the equator. The light at 3 pm in August is totally different from 3 pm light in November. > Give businesses and schools more ability to set and change their hours. You're missing the fact that they effectively can't. Business hours are set around school hours, because employees have children. School hours are set around business hours, because of parents' jobs. Not to mention train schedules, airlines schedules, and everything. The only way we can change it is all at once, and the only way to ensure everyone follows is to change the clock itself. Not to mention changing every clock is so much easier than changing every single calendar event everywhere, because we already have systems for the former, but not for the latter. Timekeeping is just a tool designed to benefit humans, it's not divine. We can use it as a tool to implement coordination changes that result in a net societal benefit around when we experience daylight. Why wouldn't we use it for that? The fact that solar noon is then at 12:37 pm instead of 11:37 am for somebody somewhere is nearly irrelevant compared to that.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

gmiller123456 4y ago

>If we need to shift school and work start times relative to the sun, we could you know, just do that... But that is exactly what we're doing when we all agree to switch our clocks. Whoever ends up in the minority that really feels strongly one way or the other can still adjust their schedules if it's convenient for them.

6gvONxR4sf7o 4y ago

> the only visible marker of the day---noon Why don't sunset and sunrise count?

inciampati 4y ago
Because except at the equator they do not make even, stable divisions of the day.

Fatnino 4y ago

I think the underlying goal is to have people not be sleeping at times when the sun is up because that's a waste. In the bay area daylight hours will vary, going as low as 10 hours in winter and as high as 14 hours in summer. Standard time in December has 5pm occur after sunset. Assume a standard 8 hour workday of 9 to 5. That's 8 of the 10 daylight hours dedicated to "work" with none left over for after work leisure time. Numbers above are rough estimates, don't come at me with exact sunset time of some arbitrary day. I propose that a very large percentage of workers do not do a type of work that is dependent on sunlight. The vast majority of people work indoors in a building with electric lights. Leisure time on the other hand is often spent outdoors. Or would be if we were to arrange our clocks so that there was more daylight after work. Let's go wildly overboard with this thought experiment: Create a time zone overlay called "Fun in the Sun Time". FitST has 12 noon occur around the time when the sun rises. Everyone will have woken up while it's still dark out using some electric lights at home, then gone to work (where the lights are on 100% of the work hours regardless of what timezone, real or imagined). Lunch break takes place during sunlight hours, and after work there are still at least 5 hours to go hiking/biking/sun bathing/BBQing/whatever. This is a bit extreme, obviously, but a somewhat less extreme version of this would be to have the bay area run on Eastern Standard Time (or equivalent) year round. This 3 hour shift would synchronize businesses here with the east coast. Or we could do the easiest, least intrusive thing, shift to PDT now in March and never switch back.