6 ms·

It's "standard" for a reason. Humanity settled on these numbers long ago because they work best. It boggles my mind why anyone would choose otherwise since what

• jamie_ca 7mo ago
  The US decided (and Canada followed) that daylight time was more correct for the larger portion of the year, presumably it's easier to transition the remaining 4mo to daylight than it is to move 8mo to standard. But also, all the opinion polling (business and individual) was like over 90% in favour of year-round daylight time, so here we are.
  • tzs 7mo ago
    > The US decided (and Canada followed) that daylight time was more correct for the larger portion of the year, presumably it's easier to transition the remaining 4mo to daylight than it is to move 8mo to standard. How is transitioning permanently to one easier than transitioning permanently to the other? How to transition to permanent DST: wait until we are in DST and then stop switching. How to transition to permanent Standard time: wait until we are in standard time and then stop switching.
    • tempestn 7mo ago
      If we assume that the ideal time for 8 months of the year is DST and for 4 months is standard, but we want to eliminate the switch, then permanent DST gives you only 4 months out of the ideal timezone rather than 8.
    • toast0 7mo ago
      If you adopt permanent DST, the there's a 1 hour difference between the current clock and the future clock for 4 months, and nothing for 8 months. If you adopt permanent ST, the difference between the current clock and future clock is 1 hour for 8 months and nothing for 4 months. It's a 4 month-hour difference over the year, instead of an 8 month-hour difference. Personally, I'd prefer standard time, but having all days be 86400 seconds is a pretty great improvement over status quo. I find what most people really would like to change is the amount of time with sunlight in the winter, especially the more north they live... but changing the clock doesn't change the number of hours of sunlight; Vancouver, BC just doesn't have much sunlight in the winter.
• delta_p_delta_x 7mo ago
  > It's "standard" for a reason The reason is that with standard time, solar noon coincides with local noon, so the day is approximately symmetric about noon, not regarding atmospheric refraction lengthening the day. It wasn't done on a whim.
• deleted 7mo ago
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• jcranmer 7mo ago
  A lot of people hate standard time in winter because the sun sets at 4 or 5, and they want the sun to instead set at 8 or 9 like it does in summer. DST in winter doesn't actually give you the 8 or 9 sunset, it gives you a 5 or 6 sunset (which doesn't get you all that much) combined with moving your sunrise to 8 or 9, which causes its own set of issues most people don't think about. The last time we went to year-round DST, we stopped almost immediately because people experienced what winter DST was actually like and went "wait, this sucks."
  • somat 7mo ago
    Obviously(/s) the solution is to change to a sunset centered day. new day starts at sunset so people can get up late and enjoy the maxim number of daylight hours. I always find it strange how particular people are about the numbers attached a purely astronomical phenomena(myself included, but I am pretty hard in the "let the sun figure it out camp"). If they want more "daylight" hours then get up at a time to enjoy them. But people would rather bend over backwards fiddling with the numbers as if that is going to change how long a day is.
    • anal_reactor 7mo ago
      I think that midnight should be around current 4AM because that's the brief moment when party people already sleep and work people aren't awake yet.
    • toast0 7mo ago
      Does the night belong to the day it follows or the day it precedes? Does it become Friday at dawn, at sunset, at noon, or at midnight? This is all convention and not something that can be decided objectively.
      • hdjrudni 7mo ago
        The new day ought to begin at the darkest hour. Opposite of high noon. Which is apparently called 'solar midnight'.
    • 7mo ago
• Gimpei 7mo ago
  I’d guess that there is less of a need for light at the beginning of the day since most people don’t farm. Personally I prefer more light at the end of the day.
  • 1718627440 7mo ago
    I don't get that argument. The numeric time is just a measure for the state of the sun in the sky. When you choose your day to have ended is completely independent. There is already a high enough variance of people deciding when they go to sleep, that DST is hardly relevant. Some people have dinner at half past 5, some do at half past 8, the hour daylight saving time can't possibly make that difference.
    • wat10000 7mo ago
      It's not just a measure for the state of sun in the sky, it's also a measure for the state of society on the ground. It's an arbitrary number in a sense, but it also strongly influences my schedule. And yes, we could have all the schools and everything else open later in the winter than the rest of the year, but it turns out it's easier to change the clocks.
      • 1718627440 7mo ago
        But the school schedule does already shift and it shifts later, so in the opposite direction. The policy trend is going in the opposite of what you want to achieve with year-long DST, you could instead vote for the status quo and have the same effect.
        • wat10000 7mo ago
          Do BC schools have a different winter schedule? That's not how it is where I live, at least. It seems like it would be pretty annoying to have to reschedule activities around getting to/from school twice a year.
          • 7mo ago
• sorenjan 7mo ago
  They worked best when everybody were farmers and had to get up early and go to bed early. Now most people don't live their lives centered around noon, our free time comes after our work is done at around 17:00, so having more light in the evening instead of worthless light in the night makes sense.
  • bryanlarsen 7mo ago
    That's a myth. Farmers have to wake up early because their animals wake up at sunrise and some tasks are best performed at that time. So they wake up before sunrise regardless of the clock time. Human, like farm animals, are better off if they wake up at sunrise and go to sleep in full dark. At the equator that's easy, wake at 6, bed at 10PM. And standard work hours are 7-3 or 8-4.
    • sorenjan 7mo ago
      Right, but where I live sunrise is in the middle of the night in the summer (around 03:30). Using standard time in the summer gives me one less hour of useful sunlight in the evening, and while it doesn't technically disappear it gets moved to where I can't use it because that's when I sleep. It's the same for people further south as well, another bright hour in the early morning before they wake up is a wasted bright hour that would make more sense in the evening, when most modern humans are awake. The argument "noon should coincide with solar noon" is nonsensical to me, the clock is a social construct and should make sense for how most of us live our lives.
      • bryanlarsen 7mo ago
        Optimizing for summer is silly. Summer gets lots of daylight already. We need to optimize for winter.
        • layer8 7mo ago
          People disagree on whether to prioritize mornings or afternoons in the winter. For the summer, only very few people care if the sun rises at four or five (or whatever), but most people like having long summer evenings. Therefore the summer tips the scales.
• mhurron 7mo ago
  And that reason was that it was the standard before the standard was rethought. There's no deeper meaning to it. And we rethought it yet again, should we go on the time standard (DST) that we're already on for ~65% of the year, or the one we're on for ~35% the year. It should be pretty obvious why DST is the new winner, it's the current standard.
• taeric 7mo ago
  Sadly, this isn't really right. Humanity settled on solar time. For somewhat obvious reasons. Alas, I don't see my preferred method of changing the clock by 10 minutes every month taking hold. Basically ever. :D I also don't think this is nearly as important for places that are not further away from the equator. If you are on the equator, you are almost certainly fine with no change throughout the year.
  • fhars 7mo ago
    That method wont work, that is a too large change that happens to seldom. What you want is a leap second every hour for five months to switch between standard and daylight savings time and back, with a month of constant time around each solstice. That gives you a smooth transition without perceptible discontinuities.
    • computomatic 7mo ago
      Seems to me the most obvious answer is to return to sundials, no?
      • taeric 7mo ago
        Only works during the day? Which, come to think of it, I'm not entirely clear how humans kept time at night long ago. I'm assuming they learned roughly where some constellations were?
    • taeric 7mo ago
      I challenge the idea that 10 minutes is too large of a change? I accept that it was too many changes back when we didn't have smart phones/clocks controlling the vast majority of time pieces. Even most cars, nowadays, set themselves off of a GPS signal. Nowadays, though? A surprising number of people flat out don't notice that the time even changed until people tell them about it. As the other response said, though; if you look at when people were on solar time, the length of an hour just flat out wasn't constant. Such that most animals are already used to wake times changing throughout the year. It was specifically our move to a mechanical method that was constant that is causing this. To that end, shifting to a change every month would, in many ways, be a step back towards how sundials worked with constant changes. As you say, we could go even more continuous someday. That feels like it would have slightly more complications. But by the time everything is controlled by a central computer like thing, most of them would be completely obviated.
• tbrownaw 7mo ago
  We don't use standard time because it works best, we use it because it's "correct" relative to the position of the sun. Now, standard business hours (9-5 or whatever) were probably chosen for working well in the circumstances where they became standard, and it might be interesting to watch for whether tweaking the clocks leads to tweaking the nominal time of things...
• wvenable 7mo ago
  > Humanity settled on these numbers long ago because they work best. Absolutely not. It was a compromise tempered by practical and political considerations.
• wat10000 7mo ago
  Not that long ago, and we keep fiddling with them. The US time zones were adopted just over a century ago. The dates for daylight saving time were changed less than 20 years ago. Much of Western Europe changed time zones (much of it rather violently) in the 1940s, as did China. The tz database often requires updates for changes. If you want to go with what was settled long ago, that would probably be a return to each town observing its own time based on local solar noon, which would be pretty annoying.
• karlosvomacka 7mo ago
  the reason was valid 50 years ago when most people didn't work 9-5 in front of a computer.
  • 1718627440 7mo ago
    Yeah they started work at 6. So the working schedule shifted later by three hours, but with year-long DST it will shift back only one hour. Sounds like people don't actually want what they now vote for. My bet is that the work hours will just move later yet another hour in the future.
• throwaway7783 7mo ago
  The article, however, says 93% wanted daylight savings in the linked public engagement report.
• rawgabbit 7mo ago
  Meh. The nerd in me prefers the French Revolutionary clock of 10 hours in a day. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time. I want to be able to say I sleep from 0 to 3 hours or 30 percent of the day.
• Zak 7mo ago
  > Humanity settled on these numbers long ago because they work best. Standardized time zones are a recent invention (late 1800s through early 1900s). Working hours in that period were determined by what factory owners could get away with, and later shortened by pressure from labor movements. Some time-related practices, like high school in most of the USA starting especially early in the morning are at odds with what research suggests would work best (teenagers on average perform best later in the day than adults or younger children). It's wise to consider the reasons behind existing standards before changing them, but unwise to assume they're what works best without examining whether that's reality.