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DST was a mistake and it needs to die. It solves no problems and only creates them. And not even the type of problem that someone could profit from, just plain

DST was a mistake and it needs to die. It solves no problems and only creates them. And not even the type of problem that someone could profit from, just plain old complete waste of time for everyone problems. Just stick to winter time (because that's the correct one) and adjust all working hours once and for all to be like summer time, for e.g. instead of business opening at 7AM and closing at 10PM they can open at 6AM and close a 9PM. There will be a period of adjustment, but we have a period of adjustment twice a year already, so nothing is lost. Why match working hours to summer time? Because I want to have more sunlight by the time I'm done with work. Especially during winter. We have it completely backwards, if we are going to adjust our clocks we should adjust them in a way that gives us more sunlight during winter, not less. I don't care if it's dawning by the time I'm going to work where I will be stuck indoors for nine hours, I want sunlight when I'm free again.

StopDisinfo910 1y ago
So you propose we stop shifting the clock but shift every opening and closing times instead producing exactly the same effect with basically no difference. And you want to abolish DST but the end of your comment is that you actually want even more shift including in winter. I fear I have trouble following your reasoning and understanding what you actually want.
- butlike 1y ago
  There's more clocks than storefronts
- xigoi 1y ago
  If I’m reading the parent correctly, they Want to switch to non-summer time and adjust opening hours to be effectively like summer time, forever.
  - hsbauauvhabzb 1y ago
    I wonder what the earliest sunrise time would be as a result, 2am?
    - jakewins 1y ago
      The earliest sunrise is that the sun does not set, which happens every summer for all the cities and towns north of the polar circle
  - ASalazarMX 1y ago
    I think PC is proposing using the natural time zone, and adjusting hours if you need sunlight to operate. Summer time is awful because different latitudes have different hours of sunlight, yet all are forced to the least common denominator. Cities closer to the poles might want to adjust more than one hour, or none at all since they see little sunlight for months anyway. Cities near the equator might not need to adjust at all. Businesses that need to be synchronized could still coordinate their operating hours. It's the most natural approach is DST had never existed.
- cameldrv 1y ago
  Yes shift the opening and closing times of everything. Get everyone to coordinate, so that your kids' school time doesn't shift relative to when you need to be at work, not to mention everything else where two different organizations have to do something that regularly happens at a particular time. Give up eliding this whole problem so that some programmers have an easier time scheduling backups or database compaction. In fact, as some have suggested, we should also give up time zones and just use UTC for everything. That way when you have to schedule a Zoom call a few thousand miles away, there is no confusion as to the time. Some idiot might retort that since people like to sleep when it's dark, that instead of looking up the time zone difference, you'd have to look up what time the sun rises where they live. I say screw them. Half of the world should just learn to live with sleeping during the "day" and go to work at "night." We've got electric lights now. It's a small price to pay so that programmers don't have to do time zone conversions.
  - anal_reactor 1y ago
    If we're talking about radical time-related ideas, mine is to shift midnight to be the current 4AM. The reasoning is that many events last until past midnight, while 4AM is more or less the time when both the party and the work people are asleep.
    - dathinab 1y ago
      also obviously remove support for 12hour clocks from everything, who the duck thought having two different 4 O'Clock times every day makes sense. And what the insanity is the nonsense that write 12 mean 0 a.m. I.e. going from 11:59am goes to 12pm, like seriously who thought clocks braking basic math is a good ideaf!?!? Like the rang [11:59am;12am] is 12 hour and 1 minute wide instead of just 1 minute even through it uses the same unit.
      - drdec 1y ago
        I say keep the 12 hour clock, it is too ingrained, instead let's have twice as many days. April 42nd anyone?
- malfist 1y ago
  Stores already do this. Check your hours at your local mall, Kroger or Lowes.
- HiPhish 1y ago
  > So you propose we stop shifting the clock but shift every opening and closing times instead producing exactly the same effect with basically no difference. Lol no, that would be indeed even worse. I want to do the shift once and forever. Well, first and foremost I want to get rid of the twice-a-year switch. The question that usually arises then is "should we be permanently on standard time or on DST", to which my proposal is standard time (because it's correct) but shift working hours once and forever so we have more sunlight all year around. During summer it would be the same as it already is and during winter we have one more hour of sunshine, which is the time of the year when I want sunshine the most.
  - kuboble 1y ago
    It could be better for YOU but you seem to assume it's a universal desire. many people prefer to have the daylight at the start of their day.
  - 4gotunameagain 1y ago
    There is no correct or wrong time, it's conventions that do not apply generally. Some countries have some timezones where summer time is more "correct" than winter time. Therefore why not just stick to summertime and skip the whole "change every opening hours" thingy ?
candiddevmike 1y ago
I'm all for abolishing DST, but I'm not sure which one I'd choose, both have trade offs.
- gpvos 1y ago
  Um, no? Using standard time in summer (assuming northern hemisphere) means that the time will be earlier when the sun goes up and under. So it will be darker at 9 PM and easier to put your children to bed. They may get up earlier though.
  - Yizahi 1y ago
    The early rising part of the population would love to pull that off, just like it actually happened for centuries now. The problem is that late rising part of the population has never disappeared and does have a voice. Late risers can't do anything with people collectively deciding to open work time at 7 or whatever. But they can and will voice their opinion when a public discussion about time zone will inevitably arise. Surprise, surprise, late risers exist, and they are also human. PS: by late risers I of course mean people with shifted circadian clock, and not "lazy" people, like they are sometimes presented.
    - Numerlor 1y ago
      Also anyone living at higher latitudes won't be thrilled by having the sun up even earlier. I don't live that high up compared to quite a lot of people in Europe, and during summer the sun already starts shining from below the horizon at 3 in the morning
      - rkomorn 1y ago
        I feel like, at higher latitudes, it should matter less? Whether sunrise is at 3am or 4am, you still basically need to have a way to sleep with unreasonable amounts of sunlight (eg 18-20 hour days). At lower latitudes, summer time makes more sense because the difference between a 5am and 6am sunrise goes from "too early" to "manageable". Same goes for 9am being too late compared to 8am in the winter for example. At higher latitudes, you have to accommodate no matter what. At lower latitudes, 1h makes a difference.
sllabres 1y ago
I don't want to be petty, but there is no 'winter time', only standard time and summer time or 'daylight saving time'. I first heard the term 'winter time' when it was discussed to decide weather to keep DST permanently or if people would like to keep 'winter time' always. And of course who would want to have winter-something always. ;)
- keithwinstein 1y ago
  If we're being really pedantic, in the U.S. context the zones observe "standard time" all year. "Standard time" refers to the standardization across the zone, and the practice of advancing the clock during daylight-saving time changes each zone's standard time. The Unix-style usage of "EST" vs. "EDT" isn't pedantically correct (e.g., New York observes "eastern standard time" even in summer). See 15 U.S.C. §§ 260a & 263 (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/chapter-6/subchapter-IX https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/chapter-6/subchap...).
  - dragonwriter 1y ago
    > and the practice of advancing the clock during daylight-saving time changes each zone's standard time. Even more pedantically, “standard time” is not necessarily consistent across each zone (particularly, during the period for which in parts of the zone it is advanced by an hour) since "standard time” only advances for those states, or parts of states, for which an exemption is not in place. So, the Unix-y convention of using PST for "Pacific Standard Time without advancement", and PDT for "Pacific Standard Time with advancement" is the simplest way of getting meaningful concise labels out of the US legal scheme. (This is only a theoretical issue for some US timezones, but it is a concrete one for at least the Pacific and Hawaii-Aleutian Time Zones.)
    - keithwinstein 1y ago
      > Even more pedantically, “standard time” is not necessarily consistent across each zone (particularly, during the period for which in parts of the zone it is advanced by an hour) since "standard time” only advances for those states, or parts of states, for which an exemption is not in place. I can't find a source (including 15 U.S.C. § 260a) that supports this reading, although I agree it's a little ambiguous. The law suggests that a region that doesn't observe DST is observing "the standard time otherwise applicable during that period" and is exempt from the provisions regarding advancement, not that "Pacific standard time" depends on where you are (see 15 U.S.C. § 263). > So, the Unix-y convention [] is the simplest way No argument there!
endgame 1y ago
Everyone carries a GPS in their pocket; why not use it for good? We can have people's clocks continually update so that 12:00 is solar noon at their current location each day, and avoid the jarring transitions into and out of DST. Don't ask what people living in the high altitudes will do - I'm still working on that.
- joshAg 1y ago
  please don't ditch timezones. https://qntm.org/continuous https://qntm.org/continuous
- pantalaimon 1y ago
  That's what people did before time zones were a thing. Is caused a major hassle for railway schedules when those started to be all the rage.
  - ndsipa_pomu 1y ago
    Here in Bristol, UK, we've got an old Corn Exchange that has a clock with two minute hands to show London time (GMT) and Bristol time which was about 10 minutes different. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Exchange,_Bristol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Exchange,_Bristol
    - BoxOfRain 1y ago
      'Oxford Time' is still used for a few things in Oxford, the clock at Christ Church reads five minutes slow with respect to GMT for example.
- TylerE 1y ago
  Do you not appreciate how incredibly annoying it would be if the clocks in the next town over were 5 minutes ahead of yours?
  - endgame 1y ago
    Not viscerally, but this was meant to be an obviously unserious proposal.
dkersten 1y ago
> because that's the correct one No it’s not. We assigned the meaning of time, we can assign it one hour shifted. Or better yet, just ditch timezones altogether. Summer time is much better where I am, winter days wouldn’t get dark quite so stupid early.
- joshAg 1y ago
  please don't ditch timezones. https://qntm.org/abolish https://qntm.org/abolish
  - zamadatix 1y ago
    The thing I don't like with these kinds of articles is rather than list potential pros/cons they make a wholly one sided story everyone is supposed to agree with the whole way and say "oh wow, yeah" at the end. Reality is it breaks right at the start - you don't really know when a good time to call someone is by the sun. You know because of when they wake up, when they go to bed, what hours they work, what you're calling them about, when they like to eat meals, etc. All of that varies by many hours within a timezone based on culture or individual, so it derails that build up pitch. It's a given the author isn't particularly swayed by that, but that they don't even talk about the detail and just move on spoils the rest of the (well put together) list IMO. One way or the other I don't think we'll make a big shift in timekeeping until/if we ever have a sizable population off Earth. Of course, that introduces its own time problems we don't have to deal with as much all being so close together :).
    - dijit 1y ago
      I don’t personally see a lot of difference in consulting a chart of “what time is it in x country” vs a chart of say “the time business starts in country x”. They’d be the same exact list. “offset +9 hours”- the only semantic difference would be that clocks don’t change. I should mention that I spent a little bit of time in Saudi Arabia and expecting them to be out and about at 7pm like in Western Europe and the USA is crazy, they seem to get up later and keep going until 3am. I’ve never seen rush hour at 3am until I spent time in Riyadh. It’s a false construct we’ve decided on: that everyone follows the same time pattern anyway. Why do we believe the world needs to wake up at 7am? If nothing else its so incredibly arbitrary to begin with.
hsbauauvhabzb 1y ago
In theory this is nice assuming you push the opening hours back but the cost of it would be significantly more than the developer time wasted by a mile. Binding times to timezones to geographic locations (which have different sunrise and sunset times) to opening hours to social stigmas (you wake up after 11am? Tisk tisk) is downright silly, but humans don’t like change so fixing it will never happen.
gilfoy 1y ago
NC has a house bill that has not passed committee to abolish DST, and a senate bill to only have DST.
anal_reactor 1y ago
I agree with you except I think we should stick to summer time because it's obviously the correct one. And hence the whole debate.
- throwaway106382 1y ago
  How about we cut the baby in half and just shift back by 30 minutes.
  - anal_reactor 1y ago
    That's a great idea. The concept of "any two places in US or EU are a full number of hours apart" is overrated.
    - throwaway106382 1y ago
      The Newfoundlanders were on to something
dathinab 1y ago
DST wasn't a mistake and did make a lot of time (at least if you are far enough away from the equator). Heck if you go back far enough local time might have varied by session/be relative to sun rise, and that did make sense in the past. What is the mistake is keeping it. Through changes need to be coordinated (e.g. in the EU across _all_ EU member states), which makes it an annoying topic to takle. That people tent to say "keep winter time" but it directly conflict with what sleep scientist tend to recommend is not helping either. In the end normal time is summer time and it is better for most peoples sleep rithm that is what we should go to. Oh also don't shift work start/end times, the whole point is to not shift when you need to wake up/go to bed but can have consistent healthy sleep.
- dathinab 1y ago
  PS: on the other hand the affect on sleep might not matter (as in there are many far large effects). I live north enough for the number of sunlight hours and sunrise/set in summer and winter to massively differ, with the sky never getting fully dark during the few longest days.
- bloppe 1y ago
  > In the end normal time is summer time I think you have this backward. Standard time is during winter. Daylight savings is during summer. That being said, I used to hate the switch, like you. Now, I'm convinced it's the best of only bad options. Just look at the history of DST. We've tried it all. We've tried year-round standard time. We've tried year-round DST. We've tried switching at all sorts of different dates. Every system has it's problems and it's advantages. The current system is basically the one that actually pissed people off the least.
  - dathinab 1y ago
    > I think you have this backward. oh, yes, I got that mixed up. That also mean permanent winter time would be better for the sleep not permanent summer times (it was whatever the "standard" time was as far as I remember). Either way people cant decide on what time they prefer makes any change harder. > I'm convinced it's the best of only bad options. idk. the time switch every year comes with an increase in traffic accidents for up to a weak after it happens. While most jobs today either aren't overly dependent on sunlight anymore or don't sync up with e.g. start of school or similar anyway (e.g. field work). I guess that argument does differ for any area widely dominated by farming and limited farming automation.
bloppe 1y ago
Everybody think DST is the worst and needs to be replaced in some way or another. Most people don't realize that their proposed "solution" has already been tried. Your particular solution of "year-round DST" was tried in America in 1973-1975. I'll just quote Wikipedia: > During the 1973 oil embargo by the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC), in an effort to conserve fuel, Congress enacted a trial period of year-round DST (P.L. 93-182), beginning January 6, 1974, and ending April 27, 1975.[17] The trial was hotly debated. Those in favor pointed to increased daylight hours in the summer evening: more time for recreation, reduced lighting and heating demands, reduced crime, and reduced automobile accidents. The opposition was concerned about children leaving for school in the dark and the construction industry was concerned about morning accidents.[18] After several morning traffic accidents involving schoolchildren in Florida, including eight children who were killed, Governor Reubin Askew asked for the year-round law to be repealed.[19] > Over three months from December to March, public support dropped from 79% to 42%.[19] Some schools moved their start times later.[19] Shortly after the end of the Watergate scandal caused a change of administration, the act was amended in October 1974 (P.L. 93-434) to return to standard time for four months, beginning October 27, 1974, and ending February 23, 1975, when DST resumed.[18][20] When the trial ended in October 1975, the country returned to observing summer DST (with the aforementioned exceptions).[12]
- BobaFloutist 1y ago
  Have we tried my solution of having a continuous curve of time adjustments instead of one big discrete jump? I think that would have been awful in the day of manually set, analog clocks, but surely in 2025 when everything's digital and many things are connected it's totally possible, no?
  - umbra07 1y ago
    It's still awful. The only devices I own that would give me a reliable time, would then be my phone, laptop, desktop, and maybe my TV. My microwave, oven, thermostat, alarm clock, car, watch, grandfather clock, etc would all be wrong. You would wreak unmeasurable havoc across the target country.
bmandale 1y ago
DST is just a hack to make the time roughly correspond to when the sun rises, instead of when noon is. It solves the problem that people want their day to start when the sun is up, not before, and not after. The problems it creates are mostly for programmers who can't be bothered to write good software. Well I say tough cookies, you'll have to handle the edge cases so the rest of us have comfortable mornings.
- Mistletoe 1y ago
  I don’t give a crap about the day starting when the sun comes up. I just want to go home at 5PM in winter and it not be dark already. There are plenty of studies about how this increases depression in the winter. The fact we keep persisting with this perverse nonsense infuriates me.
  - bmandale 1y ago
    You presumably also want to go to work and have it not still be dark. You can't have it both ways.
    - gbear605 1y ago
      I’d much rather go to work in the dark and have sunlight after work. The only people that it’s better for are children who would have to wait for the school bus outside in the dark, though in my experience growing up school started early enough that we were still waiting in the dark anyway.
    - Mistletoe 1y ago
      No I don't care if it is dark when I go to work. I'm fresh then and I can't garden and go outside at work like I can at 5pm at home.
    - Mawr 1y ago
      No? Why would I care? I'm going to work/school anyway. I want light during my free time in the evenings.
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LeonB 1y ago
In Superman III, the eponymous man straightens the leaning tower of Pisa, and in Superman II he spins the earth backwards to reverse time. A better idea would be to un-tilt the earth’s axis, thus getting rid of variable day lengths, annual seasons, the need for DST etc, just one enjoyable spring day, every where, all year round.
saghm 1y ago
So much of the discussion that happens around DST always end up coming across to me like they're based on people's subjective experiences that they seem to assume apply universally (or close enough to it to structure society around, with the assumption that only a small fraction of people don't experience things similarly). I don't think things are nearly so simple, and while having issues strong enough to be diagnosed with a condition like the ones I mentioned above is probably not super common, it seems pretty plausible to me that there's a lot more of a spectrum than just "people whose circadian rhythm perfectly matches the sun" and "outliers whose circadian rhythms are designed misaligned with the first group". It just doesn't seem obvious to me that the issue couldn't be that some people have different enough experiences in terms of their circadian rhythms that their optimal clock scheme might be an hour earlier or later than someone else, or that one person might be greatly affected by the total length of the sunlight in the day and another might be completely indifferent to it. There are a number of disorders[1][2][3][4] that relate to circadian rhythm, and I don't think it's that much of a stretch to imagine that even outside the bounds of a diagnosable condition people's experiences might be a spectrum rather than a binary of "majority of people who would all have the optimal experience with the exact same scheme for how clock time should work" and "small fraction of outliers who wouldn't agree with the obvious best solution that everyone else would". It's absolutely wild to me how many people feel so strongly about the "correct" way to handle this that when examined basically boil down to "well, this is what would make me happy". I don't doubt that people probably are correct about what would work better for them, but I also don't think it's that crazy to think that it might not be that uncommon for two arbitrary people to have optimal clock schemes that differ by an hour or more, or that whether or not their optimal clock scheme might vary direct by the time of year, especially given that the length of sunlight in a day isn't at all uniform at different latitudes. I don't pretend to know for sure whether DST is right or not, or what the correct hours to pick in the absence of it would be, but I can't help but be skeptical of an argument that it "needs to die and solves no problems" and that a certain time is the "correct" one because "I want <something>". It's totally valid to want and even argue for something, but that's not at all the same as anything else being automatically incorrect when your way of getting it is literally to enforce how time works for millions of people. Phrasing it like that just doesn't make it sound like your arguments are going to be very convincing. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circadian_rhythm_sleep_disorder#Types https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circadian_rhythm_sleep_disorde...
duskdozer 1y ago
A lot of the conflict over which of daylight and standard time is better would be solved by allowing people more freedom to choose their own working hours. A lot of the rhetoric around it seems to be about what the optimal sleep-wake schedule is, which strangely tends to match up with the speaker's own sleep-wake schedule.

StopDisinfo910 1y ago

So you propose we stop shifting the clock but shift every opening and closing times instead producing exactly the same effect with basically no difference. And you want to abolish DST but the end of your comment is that you actually want even more shift including in winter. I fear I have trouble following your reasoning and understanding what you actually want.

butlike 1y ago
There's more clocks than storefronts
xigoi 1y ago
If I’m reading the parent correctly, they Want to switch to non-summer time and adjust opening hours to be effectively like summer time, forever.
- hsbauauvhabzb 1y ago
  I wonder what the earliest sunrise time would be as a result, 2am?
  - jakewins 1y ago
    The earliest sunrise is that the sun does not set, which happens every summer for all the cities and towns north of the polar circle
- ASalazarMX 1y ago
  I think PC is proposing using the natural time zone, and adjusting hours if you need sunlight to operate. Summer time is awful because different latitudes have different hours of sunlight, yet all are forced to the least common denominator. Cities closer to the poles might want to adjust more than one hour, or none at all since they see little sunlight for months anyway. Cities near the equator might not need to adjust at all. Businesses that need to be synchronized could still coordinate their operating hours. It's the most natural approach is DST had never existed.
cameldrv 1y ago
Yes shift the opening and closing times of everything. Get everyone to coordinate, so that your kids' school time doesn't shift relative to when you need to be at work, not to mention everything else where two different organizations have to do something that regularly happens at a particular time. Give up eliding this whole problem so that some programmers have an easier time scheduling backups or database compaction. In fact, as some have suggested, we should also give up time zones and just use UTC for everything. That way when you have to schedule a Zoom call a few thousand miles away, there is no confusion as to the time. Some idiot might retort that since people like to sleep when it's dark, that instead of looking up the time zone difference, you'd have to look up what time the sun rises where they live. I say screw them. Half of the world should just learn to live with sleeping during the "day" and go to work at "night." We've got electric lights now. It's a small price to pay so that programmers don't have to do time zone conversions.
- anal_reactor 1y ago
  If we're talking about radical time-related ideas, mine is to shift midnight to be the current 4AM. The reasoning is that many events last until past midnight, while 4AM is more or less the time when both the party and the work people are asleep.
  - dathinab 1y ago
    also obviously remove support for 12hour clocks from everything, who the duck thought having two different 4 O'Clock times every day makes sense. And what the insanity is the nonsense that write 12 mean 0 a.m. I.e. going from 11:59am goes to 12pm, like seriously who thought clocks braking basic math is a good ideaf!?!? Like the rang [11:59am;12am] is 12 hour and 1 minute wide instead of just 1 minute even through it uses the same unit.
    - drdec 1y ago
      I say keep the 12 hour clock, it is too ingrained, instead let's have twice as many days. April 42nd anyone?
malfist 1y ago
Stores already do this. Check your hours at your local mall, Kroger or Lowes.
HiPhish 1y ago
> So you propose we stop shifting the clock but shift every opening and closing times instead producing exactly the same effect with basically no difference. Lol no, that would be indeed even worse. I want to do the shift once and forever. Well, first and foremost I want to get rid of the twice-a-year switch. The question that usually arises then is "should we be permanently on standard time or on DST", to which my proposal is standard time (because it's correct) but shift working hours once and forever so we have more sunlight all year around. During summer it would be the same as it already is and during winter we have one more hour of sunshine, which is the time of the year when I want sunshine the most.
- kuboble 1y ago
  It could be better for YOU but you seem to assume it's a universal desire. many people prefer to have the daylight at the start of their day.
- 4gotunameagain 1y ago
  There is no correct or wrong time, it's conventions that do not apply generally. Some countries have some timezones where summer time is more "correct" than winter time. Therefore why not just stick to summertime and skip the whole "change every opening hours" thingy ?

candiddevmike 1y ago

I'm all for abolishing DST, but I'm not sure which one I'd choose, both have trade offs.

gpvos 1y ago
Um, no? Using standard time in summer (assuming northern hemisphere) means that the time will be earlier when the sun goes up and under. So it will be darker at 9 PM and easier to put your children to bed. They may get up earlier though.
- Yizahi 1y ago
  The early rising part of the population would love to pull that off, just like it actually happened for centuries now. The problem is that late rising part of the population has never disappeared and does have a voice. Late risers can't do anything with people collectively deciding to open work time at 7 or whatever. But they can and will voice their opinion when a public discussion about time zone will inevitably arise. Surprise, surprise, late risers exist, and they are also human. PS: by late risers I of course mean people with shifted circadian clock, and not "lazy" people, like they are sometimes presented.
  - Numerlor 1y ago
    Also anyone living at higher latitudes won't be thrilled by having the sun up even earlier. I don't live that high up compared to quite a lot of people in Europe, and during summer the sun already starts shining from below the horizon at 3 in the morning
    - rkomorn 1y ago
      I feel like, at higher latitudes, it should matter less? Whether sunrise is at 3am or 4am, you still basically need to have a way to sleep with unreasonable amounts of sunlight (eg 18-20 hour days). At lower latitudes, summer time makes more sense because the difference between a 5am and 6am sunrise goes from "too early" to "manageable". Same goes for 9am being too late compared to 8am in the winter for example. At higher latitudes, you have to accommodate no matter what. At lower latitudes, 1h makes a difference.

sllabres 1y ago

I don't want to be petty, but there is no 'winter time', only standard time and summer time or 'daylight saving time'. I first heard the term 'winter time' when it was discussed to decide weather to keep DST permanently or if people would like to keep 'winter time' always. And of course who would want to have winter-something always. ;)

keithwinstein 1y ago
If we're being really pedantic, in the U.S. context the zones observe "standard time" all year. "Standard time" refers to the standardization across the zone, and the practice of advancing the clock during daylight-saving time changes each zone's standard time. The Unix-style usage of "EST" vs. "EDT" isn't pedantically correct (e.g., New York observes "eastern standard time" even in summer). See 15 U.S.C. §§ 260a & 263 (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/chapter-6/subchapter-IX https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/chapter-6/subchap...).
- dragonwriter 1y ago
  > and the practice of advancing the clock during daylight-saving time changes each zone's standard time. Even more pedantically, “standard time” is not necessarily consistent across each zone (particularly, during the period for which in parts of the zone it is advanced by an hour) since "standard time” only advances for those states, or parts of states, for which an exemption is not in place. So, the Unix-y convention of using PST for "Pacific Standard Time without advancement", and PDT for "Pacific Standard Time with advancement" is the simplest way of getting meaningful concise labels out of the US legal scheme. (This is only a theoretical issue for some US timezones, but it is a concrete one for at least the Pacific and Hawaii-Aleutian Time Zones.)
  - keithwinstein 1y ago
    > Even more pedantically, “standard time” is not necessarily consistent across each zone (particularly, during the period for which in parts of the zone it is advanced by an hour) since "standard time” only advances for those states, or parts of states, for which an exemption is not in place. I can't find a source (including 15 U.S.C. § 260a) that supports this reading, although I agree it's a little ambiguous. The law suggests that a region that doesn't observe DST is observing "the standard time otherwise applicable during that period" and is exempt from the provisions regarding advancement, not that "Pacific standard time" depends on where you are (see 15 U.S.C. § 263). > So, the Unix-y convention [] is the simplest way No argument there!

endgame 1y ago

Everyone carries a GPS in their pocket; why not use it for good? We can have people's clocks continually update so that 12:00 is solar noon at their current location each day, and avoid the jarring transitions into and out of DST. Don't ask what people living in the high altitudes will do - I'm still working on that.

joshAg 1y ago
please don't ditch timezones. https://qntm.org/continuous https://qntm.org/continuous
pantalaimon 1y ago
That's what people did before time zones were a thing. Is caused a major hassle for railway schedules when those started to be all the rage.
- ndsipa_pomu 1y ago
  Here in Bristol, UK, we've got an old Corn Exchange that has a clock with two minute hands to show London time (GMT) and Bristol time which was about 10 minutes different. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Exchange,_Bristol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Exchange,_Bristol
  - BoxOfRain 1y ago
    'Oxford Time' is still used for a few things in Oxford, the clock at Christ Church reads five minutes slow with respect to GMT for example.
TylerE 1y ago
Do you not appreciate how incredibly annoying it would be if the clocks in the next town over were 5 minutes ahead of yours?
- endgame 1y ago
  Not viscerally, but this was meant to be an obviously unserious proposal.

dkersten 1y ago

> because that's the correct one No it’s not. We assigned the meaning of time, we can assign it one hour shifted. Or better yet, just ditch timezones altogether. Summer time is much better where I am, winter days wouldn’t get dark quite so stupid early.

joshAg 1y ago
please don't ditch timezones. https://qntm.org/abolish https://qntm.org/abolish
- zamadatix 1y ago
  The thing I don't like with these kinds of articles is rather than list potential pros/cons they make a wholly one sided story everyone is supposed to agree with the whole way and say "oh wow, yeah" at the end. Reality is it breaks right at the start - you don't really know when a good time to call someone is by the sun. You know because of when they wake up, when they go to bed, what hours they work, what you're calling them about, when they like to eat meals, etc. All of that varies by many hours within a timezone based on culture or individual, so it derails that build up pitch. It's a given the author isn't particularly swayed by that, but that they don't even talk about the detail and just move on spoils the rest of the (well put together) list IMO. One way or the other I don't think we'll make a big shift in timekeeping until/if we ever have a sizable population off Earth. Of course, that introduces its own time problems we don't have to deal with as much all being so close together :).
  - dijit 1y ago
    I don’t personally see a lot of difference in consulting a chart of “what time is it in x country” vs a chart of say “the time business starts in country x”. They’d be the same exact list. “offset +9 hours”- the only semantic difference would be that clocks don’t change. I should mention that I spent a little bit of time in Saudi Arabia and expecting them to be out and about at 7pm like in Western Europe and the USA is crazy, they seem to get up later and keep going until 3am. I’ve never seen rush hour at 3am until I spent time in Riyadh. It’s a false construct we’ve decided on: that everyone follows the same time pattern anyway. Why do we believe the world needs to wake up at 7am? If nothing else its so incredibly arbitrary to begin with.

hsbauauvhabzb 1y ago

In theory this is nice assuming you push the opening hours back but the cost of it would be significantly more than the developer time wasted by a mile. Binding times to timezones to geographic locations (which have different sunrise and sunset times) to opening hours to social stigmas (you wake up after 11am? Tisk tisk) is downright silly, but humans don’t like change so fixing it will never happen.

gilfoy 1y ago

NC has a house bill that has not passed committee to abolish DST, and a senate bill to only have DST.

anal_reactor 1y ago

I agree with you except I think we should stick to summer time because it's obviously the correct one. And hence the whole debate.

throwaway106382 1y ago
How about we cut the baby in half and just shift back by 30 minutes.
- anal_reactor 1y ago
  That's a great idea. The concept of "any two places in US or EU are a full number of hours apart" is overrated.
  - throwaway106382 1y ago
    The Newfoundlanders were on to something

dathinab 1y ago

DST wasn't a mistake and did make a lot of time (at least if you are far enough away from the equator). Heck if you go back far enough local time might have varied by session/be relative to sun rise, and that did make sense in the past. What is the mistake is keeping it. Through changes need to be coordinated (e.g. in the EU across _all_ EU member states), which makes it an annoying topic to takle. That people tent to say "keep winter time" but it directly conflict with what sleep scientist tend to recommend is not helping either. In the end normal time is summer time and it is better for most peoples sleep rithm that is what we should go to. Oh also don't shift work start/end times, the whole point is to not shift when you need to wake up/go to bed but can have consistent healthy sleep.

dathinab 1y ago
PS: on the other hand the affect on sleep might not matter (as in there are many far large effects). I live north enough for the number of sunlight hours and sunrise/set in summer and winter to massively differ, with the sky never getting fully dark during the few longest days.
bloppe 1y ago
> In the end normal time is summer time I think you have this backward. Standard time is during winter. Daylight savings is during summer. That being said, I used to hate the switch, like you. Now, I'm convinced it's the best of only bad options. Just look at the history of DST. We've tried it all. We've tried year-round standard time. We've tried year-round DST. We've tried switching at all sorts of different dates. Every system has it's problems and it's advantages. The current system is basically the one that actually pissed people off the least.
- dathinab 1y ago
  > I think you have this backward. oh, yes, I got that mixed up. That also mean permanent winter time would be better for the sleep not permanent summer times (it was whatever the "standard" time was as far as I remember). Either way people cant decide on what time they prefer makes any change harder. > I'm convinced it's the best of only bad options. idk. the time switch every year comes with an increase in traffic accidents for up to a weak after it happens. While most jobs today either aren't overly dependent on sunlight anymore or don't sync up with e.g. start of school or similar anyway (e.g. field work). I guess that argument does differ for any area widely dominated by farming and limited farming automation.

bloppe 1y ago

Everybody think DST is the worst and needs to be replaced in some way or another. Most people don't realize that their proposed "solution" has already been tried. Your particular solution of "year-round DST" was tried in America in 1973-1975. I'll just quote Wikipedia: > During the 1973 oil embargo by the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC), in an effort to conserve fuel, Congress enacted a trial period of year-round DST (P.L. 93-182), beginning January 6, 1974, and ending April 27, 1975.[17] The trial was hotly debated. Those in favor pointed to increased daylight hours in the summer evening: more time for recreation, reduced lighting and heating demands, reduced crime, and reduced automobile accidents. The opposition was concerned about children leaving for school in the dark and the construction industry was concerned about morning accidents.[18] After several morning traffic accidents involving schoolchildren in Florida, including eight children who were killed, Governor Reubin Askew asked for the year-round law to be repealed.[19] > Over three months from December to March, public support dropped from 79% to 42%.[19] Some schools moved their start times later.[19] Shortly after the end of the Watergate scandal caused a change of administration, the act was amended in October 1974 (P.L. 93-434) to return to standard time for four months, beginning October 27, 1974, and ending February 23, 1975, when DST resumed.[18][20] When the trial ended in October 1975, the country returned to observing summer DST (with the aforementioned exceptions).[12]

BobaFloutist 1y ago
Have we tried my solution of having a continuous curve of time adjustments instead of one big discrete jump? I think that would have been awful in the day of manually set, analog clocks, but surely in 2025 when everything's digital and many things are connected it's totally possible, no?
- umbra07 1y ago
  It's still awful. The only devices I own that would give me a reliable time, would then be my phone, laptop, desktop, and maybe my TV. My microwave, oven, thermostat, alarm clock, car, watch, grandfather clock, etc would all be wrong. You would wreak unmeasurable havoc across the target country.

bmandale 1y ago

DST is just a hack to make the time roughly correspond to when the sun rises, instead of when noon is. It solves the problem that people want their day to start when the sun is up, not before, and not after. The problems it creates are mostly for programmers who can't be bothered to write good software. Well I say tough cookies, you'll have to handle the edge cases so the rest of us have comfortable mornings.

Mistletoe 1y ago
I don’t give a crap about the day starting when the sun comes up. I just want to go home at 5PM in winter and it not be dark already. There are plenty of studies about how this increases depression in the winter. The fact we keep persisting with this perverse nonsense infuriates me.
- bmandale 1y ago
  You presumably also want to go to work and have it not still be dark. You can't have it both ways.
  - gbear605 1y ago
    I’d much rather go to work in the dark and have sunlight after work. The only people that it’s better for are children who would have to wait for the school bus outside in the dark, though in my experience growing up school started early enough that we were still waiting in the dark anyway.
  - Mistletoe 1y ago
    No I don't care if it is dark when I go to work. I'm fresh then and I can't garden and go outside at work like I can at 5pm at home.
  - Mawr 1y ago
    No? Why would I care? I'm going to work/school anyway. I want light during my free time in the evenings.
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LeonB 1y ago

In Superman III, the eponymous man straightens the leaning tower of Pisa, and in Superman II he spins the earth backwards to reverse time. A better idea would be to un-tilt the earth’s axis, thus getting rid of variable day lengths, annual seasons, the need for DST etc, just one enjoyable spring day, every where, all year round.

saghm 1y ago

So much of the discussion that happens around DST always end up coming across to me like they're based on people's subjective experiences that they seem to assume apply universally (or close enough to it to structure society around, with the assumption that only a small fraction of people don't experience things similarly). I don't think things are nearly so simple, and while having issues strong enough to be diagnosed with a condition like the ones I mentioned above is probably not super common, it seems pretty plausible to me that there's a lot more of a spectrum than just "people whose circadian rhythm perfectly matches the sun" and "outliers whose circadian rhythms are designed misaligned with the first group". It just doesn't seem obvious to me that the issue couldn't be that some people have different enough experiences in terms of their circadian rhythms that their optimal clock scheme might be an hour earlier or later than someone else, or that one person might be greatly affected by the total length of the sunlight in the day and another might be completely indifferent to it. There are a number of disorders[1][2][3][4] that relate to circadian rhythm, and I don't think it's that much of a stretch to imagine that even outside the bounds of a diagnosable condition people's experiences might be a spectrum rather than a binary of "majority of people who would all have the optimal experience with the exact same scheme for how clock time should work" and "small fraction of outliers who wouldn't agree with the obvious best solution that everyone else would". It's absolutely wild to me how many people feel so strongly about the "correct" way to handle this that when examined basically boil down to "well, this is what would make me happy". I don't doubt that people probably are correct about what would work better for them, but I also don't think it's that crazy to think that it might not be that uncommon for two arbitrary people to have optimal clock schemes that differ by an hour or more, or that whether or not their optimal clock scheme might vary direct by the time of year, especially given that the length of sunlight in a day isn't at all uniform at different latitudes. I don't pretend to know for sure whether DST is right or not, or what the correct hours to pick in the absence of it would be, but I can't help but be skeptical of an argument that it "needs to die and solves no problems" and that a certain time is the "correct" one because "I want <something>". It's totally valid to want and even argue for something, but that's not at all the same as anything else being automatically incorrect when your way of getting it is literally to enforce how time works for millions of people. Phrasing it like that just doesn't make it sound like your arguments are going to be very convincing. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circadian_rhythm_sleep_disorder#Types https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circadian_rhythm_sleep_disorde...

duskdozer 1y ago

A lot of the conflict over which of daylight and standard time is better would be solved by allowing people more freedom to choose their own working hours. A lot of the rhetoric around it seems to be about what the optimal sleep-wake schedule is, which strangely tends to match up with the speaker's own sleep-wake schedule.