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I'm in BC. The astro-nerd in me would have preferred to see permanent Standard Time instead of a permanent +1 offset. Instinctively, I think morning light is im

I'm in BC. The astro-nerd in me would have preferred to see permanent Standard Time instead of a permanent +1 offset. Instinctively, I think morning light is important to our biology for a daily reset and the solar cue of "high noon" is also a real thing. I'm sure I've read that sleep health experts have historically supported a change to permanent Standard Time, not DST. I respect there are economic arguments for permanent DST. But I question the road safety stat I hear with announcements like this. Kids walking, biking, and being driven to school in mornings in darkness ... that's also what permanent DST gives us. Oh well, I am in the minority it seems. So R.I.P. "high noon" ... I'll never see you again here. And, yes, I understand that depending on where one is within a time zone, a true "high noon" is only in theory. But it's a nice ideal. :-)

matthewdgreen 7mo ago
I'm a relatively early riser, but: if you steal an hour of my summer evening time, I think that would call for civil unrest.
- singpolyma3 7mo ago
  What time the clock says shouldn't affect this
zetanor 7mo ago
I've seen arguments about kids going to school in the darkness being thrown around a lot, but I've never understood why that (against fresh drivers) is always taken to be worse than kids coming home in the darkness (against exhausted drivers).
- bryanlarsen 7mo ago
  Average school start/end times in BC are 8:30 AM and 3 PM. Standard time in Vancouver puts sunrise/sunset at 8AM/415PM at winter solstice for standard time. That's 30 minutes of daylight before school and 75 minutes after school. IOW, kids are more likely to be walking in the dark in the morning, even with standard time. Switching to daylight time will switch sunrise/sunset to 9AM/515PM, guaranteeing kids will be walking in the dark in the morning.
  - deleted 7mo ago
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  - bryanlarsen 7mo ago
    P.S. Switching to daylight time makes more sense in Eastern BC than it does in Western BC. But Eastern BC is relatively unpopulated. The population of Penticton is 40,000 vs 3,000,000 in metro Vancouver. Second largest metro (Victoria) is west of Vancouver. Penticton experiences sunrise/sunset about 25 minutes before Vancouver, so their kids experience approximately equal amounts of sun before & after school on the winter solstice.
    - sefrost 7mo ago
      I know exactly what you mean with your comment, but interesting fact, Vancouver is in the East of BC! BC is huge in both directions.
      - bryanlarsen 7mo ago
        Even more so when you consider that most of metro Vancouver lives east of Vancouver city.
    - deleted 7mo ago
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    - __turbobrew__ 7mo ago
      Penticton is also in a valley so in reality the sun goes behind the mountains in the west around 3:30PM.
  - throw0101c 7mo ago
    * https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/canada/vancouver?month=12&year=2025 https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/canada/vancouver?month=12&ye...
  - amatecha 7mo ago
    yeah the 4:15 PM sunset actually means it's getting dark at 3:30 PM. Pretty ridiculous. For everyone like "the kids have to walk to school in the dark!" it seems like they aren't considering that kids generally don't care at all what the morning is like because their day is about to be consumed by an obligation they never agreed to (school). When they're finally free for the day, it's effectively dark outside. The perspective among my peer group when I was a kid was that daylight savings system is totally clueless, has never made sense, and we should permanently switch to the schedule that allows more daylight after school (aka DST).
- tzs 7mo ago
  In addition to the reason already given (kids get home before the evening traffic picks up), another reason is that generally driving conditions are worse in the morning than they are in the evening so if there isn't enough light for both the morning and evening drives to be in light it is safer to give the light to the morning drive.
  - 1718627440 7mo ago
    > kids get home before the evening traffic picks up When we change the general time, this applies to school days as well as office hours, so the kids go home to evening traffic relation will stay constant.
  - crazygringo 7mo ago
    > another reason is that generally driving conditions are worse in the morning than they are in the evening Wait, why? Where? I've never heard this. Which driving conditions are you talking about? Rain? Snow?
    - gosub100 7mo ago
      It's coldest at night, so morning ice would be worse than evening, when daily highs are reaches and roads have been driven on more.
    - tzs 7mo ago
      Generally the coldest part of the day is just after sunrise. The warmest part of the day is typically in the early afternoon, around 1-4 pm. This makes a few driving hazards more likely or more intense in mornings, including fog, sleet, and ice. Also tires have less traction when they are colder. In the morning it is less likely for snowplows or earlier traffic to have cleared paths on secondary roads. Driver assist systems tend to have more trouble with sensor fogging, frosting, or icing in the morning. That's not to say evening is a piece of cake. Evening tends to have denser traffic which increases the risk of accidents. Places that are in shadow for much of the day might maintain ice while most of the morning ice melts, or might start developing new evening ice earlier than places the heated up more in the day which could be particularly bad--if most of the road is ice free in the evening people might let down their guard.
- jbm 7mo ago
  I agree with you. I also need to shout at the clouds on this because the experts who make the argument for time changes drive me crazy. I live in Calgary. At a previous grade school my daughter went to, school started early enough that she left in pitch black conditions in winter, regardless of "experts" and their precious daylight savings time. 'You need sunshine when you wake up' is really a ridiculous argument, there is no sunshine even with DST. Get rid of it. Maybe egg the houses of the "experts" too. (As for my kids, thankfully, they did remote school during Covid (hence late mornings) and then I moved to a place where the school starting time was later than 8.)
  - bena 7mo ago
    Yes, a lot of griping about "standard time" is really griping about winter. There are fewer hours of daylight in the winter. That's just the way it is. You can't fool time.
    - deleted 7mo ago
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    - bombcar 7mo ago
      You can also just change the hours when things start without changing the clock for the entire country. Anyone in the north has seen “winter hours” and “summer hours”.
- dddddaviddddd 7mo ago
  > I've seen arguments about kids going to school in the darkness being thrown around a lot I’m sure there’s some correlation with the time zone, but it feels like a “think of the children!” argument that ignores much more significant factors (e.g. traffic speed and volume).
- loloquwowndueo 7mo ago
  > kids coming home in the darkness (against exhausted drivers). If you’re exhausted you shouldn’t be driving. Period. You’re the danger to kids, not light or darkness. (Your headlights are in working order, right?)
  - denkmoon 7mo ago
    Nice sentiment, sadly we live in the real world
  - Mawr 7mo ago
    Correct. Alas, we've designed our society around the expectation of everyone always getting everywhere via driving. And once you've driven to work, you probably don't have any other real option than to drive back.
    - loloquwowndueo 7mo ago
      Im so glad I don’t live in the same society as you.
- dylan604 7mo ago
  > (against fresh drivers) How many people roll out of bed, rush out the door and jump in the car before they're actually awake? In my circles, that would be a larger percentage that of those that get up with plenty of time to wake up. I'm not sure any time of the day is safer regarding attentive drivers. Especially if we're going to consider idiots on their phones while driving.
  - 1718627440 7mo ago
    There is still a typical morning routine of an hour. How long do people need to wake up? If they are chronically tired is this going to get better through out the day?
    - dylan604 7mo ago
      Personally, I need multiple hours. I'm not the type to open my eyes, jump out of bed, and hit the floor running. I'm more the type of "fuck, why am I awake?" but then at the end of the day if there's stuff to do, I can be up for a while. So I'm much better at night than in the morning. Even if I'm my keyboard at 10am, I'm still not up to speed. My best comes later in the day. I think part of that is I've worked for places for so long that I was in meetings all day, and never got to do my actual job until late in the day when everyone else was winding down.
      - duskdozer 7mo ago
        You could just have a different chronotype but are forced to conform to societal expectations around when you should do work.
- cyberax 7mo ago
  I grew up in an area outside the US, and quite a bit more to the north. I still remember how for several weeks each year I had to walk to school in the dark, sometimes having issues with seeing where I was walking. The DST changes abruptly made everything visible again. Around that time we were also getting a permanent snow cover. And the whiteness of the snow significantly improved visibility for the rest of the winter. So I don't think that the concerns are completely unfounded, but they are probably not as dire either.
  - BeetleB 7mo ago
    Am I missing something? DST will make walking to school in the darkness more likely, not less. DST means a later sunrise.
    - cyberax 7mo ago
      I mean, the change from the DST ("summer") time to the standard ("winter") time.
- macintux 7mo ago
  One difference between morning and evening: in the mornings, some or even many students must wait outdoors for their bus to arrive, because they live too far away from the bus stop to run out when the bus pulls up. That means they are standing around in the darkness and the cold. In the evenings, they can go straight home from the bus.
scythe 7mo ago
Thankfully, this is a situation we don't need to speculate about without evidence. Spain is on de facto permanent DST, serving as a natural experiment. I bet the results support you.
- shagie 7mo ago
  That's partly because it's in the same timezone as Poland. Madrid is further west that London, but London is an hour behind. Moving Spain to permanent DST puts it on the same effective timezone as London. http://blog.poormansmath.net/images/SolarTimeVsStandardTime.png http://blog.poormansmath.net/images/SolarTimeVsStandardTime.... Without the DST offset, Spain much more "red" than England. It's not so much a "permeant DST" but rather a "we want to change to GMT without moving out of the CET timezone."
  - 1718627440 7mo ago
    That map is interesting, so most of the world prefers "red" to "green"? Why is that?
    - shagie 7mo ago
      Most of the world tends to prefer to not be too far from the center of the timezone (where solar noon matches solar time in standard time). Geographic and political boundaries make it so that often it's more red. The extremes of north and south tend not to care as much because it doesn't matter as much. https://andywoodruff.com/blog/where-to-hate-daylight-saving-time-and-where-to-love-it/ https://andywoodruff.com/blog/where-to-hate-daylight-saving-...
      - 1718627440 7mo ago
        I don't think that explains it. The "red" offenders are basically Russia, China?, Sudan, Argentina and Alaska. The only "green" offender is Greenland, which is still large enough to enough red to justify it. I get China, it aligns with the population density. Sudan likely wants to have the same time as Somalia and Ethiopia. Why Argentina? Why Alaska? And why does Russia basically have zones that range from +2 to the +1 offset? They don't even have the excuse of avoiding 2 hour jumps like between Alaska and Canada, because they still have that.
throw0101c 7mo ago
> I'm in BC. The astro-nerd in me would have preferred to see permanent Standard Time instead of a permanent +1 offset. So would the folks who study circadian rhythms: > Over much of the highly-populated areas of Canada, the sun would not rise until about 9 am in winter under DST, and the daylight will linger an hour later in summer evenings than under Standard Time. As a Northern country, Canada includes higher latitudes where the effects of late winter dawns and late summer dusks under DST would be felt more profoundly. What long-term effects on health can we expect from year-round DST? As predicted from our understanding of the human biological clock, our brain clock will try to synchronize to dawn and push us to go to bed later. However, our social clock will force us to wake an hour earlier in the morning. Will this have any health effects? > We have good evidence for the negative impact of being an hour off of biological time, and this comes from studies on the health of populations living on the edges of time zones. We have arbitrarily divided the earth into one-hour time zones, so that people on the east side of a time zone see the sun rise an hour earlier (according to their social clocks) than people on the west side of the same time zone. Researchers have analyzed the health records and economic status of those two populations, and have found poorer health outcomes on the west side: increased rates of obesity and diabetes, heart disease, and cancer (Gu et al., 2017). Moreover, people on the west sides of time zones earned 3% less in per capita income (Giuntella and Mazzonna, 2019). What could account for this? As predicted, people on the west sides of time zones go to bed later than people on the east sides, but then have to get up at the same time in the morning because of fixed work and school schedules. Therefore they lose sleep: about 20 minutes per weeknight, which adds up to a significant sleep debt over the week. We know from other research that sleep deprivation negatively impacts health and workplace performance. We can already see the negative impacts of a one-hour difference across a time zone, and year-round DST would put our social clocks another hour out of alignment with our biological clocks. * https://www.chronobiocanada.com/official-statements https://www.chronobiocanada.com/official-statements * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronobiology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronobiology
- Aerroon 7mo ago
  I guess northern Europe must be an unpopulated wasteland where everybody's health just instantly declines. I find these explanations to these studies so bizarre. We know that there are large populations living significantly further north, who don't get sunlight in the morning in winter, no matter whether there's DST or not. We also know that they get almost perpetual light during summer. If these explanations were true then you would expect a country like Sweden to have an impact on life expectancy and illness from this. But it's not. It's about as rich as Canada and has about the same life expectancy.
lunatuna 7mo ago
I don't get why we just don't cut it down the middle. Go +0.5 offset and get a little bit of both. Love the idea of no one being able to do the math when talking to people outside the province. I can't tell you what time it is in mountain time, NFLD, or Saskatchewan. Nothing bad comes of it.
- tmp10423288442 7mo ago
  No one wants another Indian time zone in the world - one is already enough of a hassle to deal with.
- anon84873628 7mo ago
  Or just have schools change their hours as needed. Time changes are just a hack to make every business change their effective office hours back when the sign on the door - and coordination - mattered. Today brick and mortar is way less relevant. Way more people are working from home or going to work at random hours. The time change doesn't affect going to grocery store or restaurants or the gym. It's basically just schools, banks, and the DMV. Why not have a given entity change its hours through the year, if the relation to the sun actually matters? (And no, I don't buy that there needs to be time coordination between schools, since they are all already slightly different anyway. Different kids have different after school programs different days. Different parents are already going to work different hours. There's no way to coordinate for everyone to be happy, ever.)
deleted 7mo ago
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cluoma 7mo ago
I live in the Yukon so will now be in sync with BC time again after this change. The concerns about commuting to school in the dark seem almost comical, given the experiences of everybody here with the winter darkness. For other reasons, I also wish we were closer to solar noon though. High noon is actually closer to 2pm here and seems to push the whole day back in the summer. The best (warmest) parts of the day get pushed too late into the afternoon.
singpolyma3 7mo ago
Can't you just get up at a different time if you prefer different sunlight?
- ImJamal 7mo ago
  Will all jobs, schools, stores, etc also change their working hours?
  - singpolyma3 7mo ago
    Usually there are several hours of reasonable buffer in the morning. We're only talking about moving wakeup time by one hour here.
    - ImJamal 7mo ago
      That massively depends on where you live. The northern most city of British Columbia is Atlin and during some parts of the year the sun doesn't rise until 9:54 AM. If you take into account places further north than British Columbia it gets even more extreme. Barrows Alaska has the sunrise after 1 PM some days. Do you think businesses, schools, etc are going to start at 1 PM on those days?
      - singpolyma3 7mo ago
        I think if you live where the sun doesn't rise until after noon (or never rises, etc) the DST change wasn't helping or hurting you either way here.
    - duskdozer 7mo ago
      Unless the required morning start time is already too early for you on either ST/DST
pwg 7mo ago
> Oh well, I am in the minority it seems. Given it one winter season across the solstice and I'd bet a lot of your fellow residents will come around to your viewpoint.
- tempestn 7mo ago
  I'm really curious how people will feel about it after experiencing a year of continuous PDT. I expect I'll personally like it, but the polling will be interesting for sure.
jorvi 7mo ago
> Instinctively, I think morning light is important to our biology for a daily reset I'd bet people would happily trade away the inkling of light they get during their winter commute before locking themselves into their office for some extra daylight when they leave that office. Daylight is most enjoyable if you can actually make use of it.
- allknowingfrog 7mo ago
  Well, I'm not one of those people. I like waking up with the sun and driving to work in the daylight. The idea that DST solves anything absolutely blows my mind. If you want the ability to start your work day earlier and end it earlier, that seems like a worker protection bill that needs to be passed. DST is the kludgiest kludge that ever kludged.
  - davidw 7mo ago
    > If you want the ability to start your work day earlier and end it earlier, that seems like a worker protection bill that needs to be passed. I don't think that's very realistic though is it? School times are fixed and that anchors a lot of families to those specific times, and businesses tend to have set hours. Changing the time to give people more light in the evening frees up a bunch of people to enjoy some sunlight without making it a whole fight to have different hours at work.
    - whycome 7mo ago
      School and the workday already awkwardly don't work together. Schools often end an hour or two after the traditional work day. It wouldn't be crazy to have an effective 'DST' via just adjusting the school start/end times -- start at 10am for part of the year dammit.
  - alpinisme 7mo ago
    Where I live June sunrise (with DST) is 5:11am and sunset is 8:21pm (a city on the American east coast). I just can’t imagine a majority of people would want 4:11 rising and 7:21 setting.
kmm 7mo ago
Everytime people extoll the virtues of high noon, I ask the same question: why does it matter if the sun reaches it highest point near 12 o' clock? You're awake for 4-6 hours before 12, and you remain awake for 10-12 hours after it. Noon isn't the middle of the day for nearly anyone in the western world. I understand the argument for having an early sunset, clearly having sunlight when you're awake has an effect. But who cares about having an early high noon, when there's still two thirds of the day left at best?
- __turbobrew__ 7mo ago
  100%. Almost nobody goes to bed at 8pm and wakes up at 4am, so high noon is a pointless exercise.
- wyre 7mo ago
  this might be controversial and a sign of growing up in America, but i think its a lot like people preferring Celsius over Fahrenheit. I don't care if water boils and freezes at exactly 100 and 0 degrees, it's easy to know its state by looking at it. But its very easy to understand what temp differences will feel like between 90, 70, 50 degrees F etc compared to 31, 22, and 4 degrees C.
  - sparrc 7mo ago
    As someone who grew up in America but lived abroad a few years, you just start using different markers but it's the same idea. Something like 0, 10, 15, 20, 30, 40 gives you the full range from freezing to pleasant to very hot.
  - lucumo 7mo ago
    So because we're used to it? I know perfectly how those C numbers will feel. Haven't got a clue about the F numbers. Anyway, I doubt that that analogy goes for noon. I eat lunch by the clock, not when the sun's highest. I expect most people do. Especially the ones that are cooped up in an office during the daytime.
  - stephen_g 7mo ago
    In the same way, I have absolutely zero idea of what 90, 70 or 50 degrees Fahrenheit feels like - literally no intuition, those numbers seem foreign and disconnected from my experience, having always known and used Celsius. Celsius temperatures just make sense to me. It's literally just about growing up with it.
GuB-42 7mo ago
About 50% of people want permanent standard time, 50% want permanent DST, 50% want to keep time changes. Doesn't add up? That's the point. Everyone finds arguments that suits them. Some will quote "sleep experts", others will mention economic reasons, others will talk about road safety, each one with studies proving their point, peer-reviewed for the most sophisticated. My take is that we are all different, and whatever you choose, some people will be better off, others will be worse off. There is a high chance that that variety is an evolutionary advantage, at least it was for our ancestors, as a group where everyone is sleeping at the same time is more vulnerable. Not great for office hours though.
tempestn 7mo ago
In the winter I can see arguments both ways (though I'm personally in the evening light is better camp). But in the summer, it already gets light earlier than almost anyone would want to be awake. An extra hour of sunlight at 4am is little benefit to anyone, and likely just makes it harder to sleep. Light evenings in the summer are wonderful though. I think part of the health argument against DST is that those light evenings make it harder to get to sleep at night, which is fair, but I still wouldn't want to give them up!
mapt 7mo ago
If you have a problem with school start times, you could also just change school start times.
dzhiurgis 7mo ago
> Kids walking, biking, and being driven to school in mornings in darkness. It's not 1900s anymore. Cars have fancy headlights and sensor suites for AEB. And generally street lighting is available around schools.
- apparent 7mo ago
  Some kids walk and bike for a mile or more. Lighting around schools only helps with the very last bit.
Affric 7mo ago
100% with you. And every argument I hear from the pro DST group is really just an argument for ending adult work at 15.30 rather than 17.00 and maintaining a 9.00 start time. It blows my mind that we are all meant to wrap our lives around bullshit jobs.
fragmede 7mo ago
just move it by .5 permanently
gerdesj 7mo ago
I live a bit north of Whistler. BC is rather larger than the UK but it is very roughly the same in north/south extent. Yeovil (Somerset) is about the same lat as Calgary, next door to you. Unfortunately we live on an oblate spheroid what spins around the sun and its a bit tricky when the sun comes on and is switched off. It doesn't help that the basted planet is tilted to the ecliptic too so we end up with daylight/nighttime procession and all that equinox/solstice bollocks. I live quite close to both Glastonbury and Stonehenge. People have some pretty odd ideas about reality, let alone time in these parts 8) The "perfect" solution is of course moving the clock continuously and keeping 12:00 fixed to peak daylight. Sadly that wont work too well when the time changes every 50 miles or so! No one will ever be happy when it comes to fiddling with clocks - that is the way of life. There is no right answer for everyone and never will be. I might accept an arguement based on road fatality statistics but not much else and then you'll get some sort of economic based falacy in response.
dlenski 7mo ago
Same, also in BC. I agree with everything you write, and in principle I'd prefer just to stay on standard time forever. However for my selfish individual interests: I work with a lot of people in Europe, and this change to permanent DST will make the time difference once hour less for 4 months a year… until the rest of the world goes this way too, at least.
confidantlake 7mo ago
Seems dumb that we change the time to an offset rather than changing from 9 to 5 to 8 to 4.
CalChris 7mo ago
+0 vs +1 boils down to dropping kids off vs shopping.
francislavoie 7mo ago
Hell noooo. 4:30pm sunsets are ultra depressing in the winter. Less light in the morning is not at all a problem in comparison.
eru 7mo ago
> Instinctively, I think morning light is important to our biology for a daily reset and the solar cue of "high noon" is also a real thing. You know, you can just set your watch to whatever you feel like? > I'm sure I've read that sleep health experts have historically supported a change to permanent Standard Time, not DST. What difference does it make? If people want to get up later or especially earlier, they can, no matter what the 'official' time is. For an example: Spaniards and Poles are officially in the same timezone, but the Spaniards do everything 'late'. At least when you only look at the clocks; not so much when you look at the sun.
- duskdozer 7mo ago
  They "can" if they don't have jobs that demand they stick to arbitrary hours.
  - eru 7mo ago
    Sure, social coordination is always a thing. In any case, most people can get up earlier, if they want to.
14 7mo ago
I agree and would have preferred that as well. But what I really thought they would do was split the two and just meet in the middle.
zenoprax 7mo ago
As a fellow astro-nerd you are much calmer about this than me! DST is just a way to uniformly enforce "summer" and "winter" hours of operation on everyone. If all the evidence supports starting our activities later in the day during winter why don't we just... change the start time of our activities rather than all our clocks? Why stop at one hour ahead? Let's add three hours to standard time... I'm still livid :D
MitchSchwartz 7mo ago
The obvious stupid answer is half way between.
Reason077 7mo ago
> ”Kids walking, biking, and being driven to school in mornings in darkness ... that's also what permanent DST gives us.” Can’t schools just open 60 (or 30) minutes later if this is a problem? ie: school has winter hours where class starts at 9AM instead of 8:30AM?
- rkomorn 7mo ago
  I don't get how having "random" things change opening hours is any better than changing clocks. I'm not a parent, but I can imagine that if some of my schedule had to change by 30 minutes some months out of the year, I'd find it more inconvenient. What if school starts/ends at a different time but my job does not? What if I have a standing appointment at a business that keeps its hours year round that now conflicts with one that changed to winter hours? It seems more like a different set of problems than a solution.
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
  - mongol 7mo ago
    It is completely obvious to me. There is only one uniform time, and thousands of arguments for what is a good time to do this or that. Reschedule things to work better. Don't force everything else according to some most important thing
    - rkomorn 7mo ago
      How is "rescheduling some things" a solution and not a different problem?
- throwaway613746 7mo ago
  [dead]
alexhans 7mo ago
Don't get discouraged by being in the minority in one particular forum, specially when specific angles dominate. People put different weights to different arguments. For the Spain argument below. I actually think it's quite uncomfortable to be +1 and +2 in daily life because people leaving office at 5pm are actually leaving at 3pm under scorching sun. The difference of having light until 23 instead of 22 is negligible in a country that is still up at night in winter. I can't cite anything at the moment but from what I can recall, economic benefits of switching during the year have not been as tauted and the cost of changing every year has been harmful in many ways (operational being one), but I think here the discussion is where should countries land. I hope that a country like UK doesn't decide to switch to +1 and the same for Europe, further separating themselves from the American continent countries with the focus on summer sunlight where summer already has a huge window of sun and people often tend to want to escape that heat.
- sillyfluke 7mo ago
  Yes, once you look at the daylight times it's clear that UK time naturally fits Spain better.
sillyfluke 7mo ago
>Kids walking, biking, and being driven to school in mornings in darkness ... that's also what permanent DST gives us. I think this is the worst thing about it frankly, the kids. And you can't just push the school time back cause it interferes with the parents getting to work.
dheera 7mo ago
Times are just numbers, just shift your work hours accordingly. The only real problem is that the people seeing you leave at 4pm and grumble are the same sort of people who don't acknowledge you starting work at 7am. As long as you don't have those sorts of people around you're fine.
theshrike79 7mo ago
This has to be done in two steps 1) Do ANYTHING you can to stop the clocks being fucked with twice a year. 2) After that is done and stabilised, everything has been updated to non-wobbly time. Now's the time you can start arguing what the exact time zone should be. Never try to argue both at the same time. This is what prevents the EU from stopping the DST madness.
- vbarrielle 7mo ago
  I'm in strong agreement with this. Even though I'd prefer winter time all year round, I would rather enjoy permanent summer time over switching twice a year. And I'm living in France, so my "winter time" is actually already a DST compared to the standard time (France's timezone should be UTC like the UK, but WW2 changed that to UTC+1 and we never switched back), so the "summer time" is actually a "double DST".
- Wowfunhappy 7mo ago
  I actually prefer changing the clocks twice a year to permanent DST. Changing the clocks is annoying a couple weeks each year. Permanent DST will suck all winter.
dmos62 7mo ago
Speaking of, I've recently started using a daylight therapy lamp 10k lumens @ 10-30cm for at least 20 minutes within 1 hour of waking up: the first few days, the effect is dramatic. Later, when the body is readjusted you don't feel it as vividly, but if I don't do it for a few days I can feel my mood and energy drop. I recommend everyone who doesn't get much light (bright enough to make you squint) in the morning try it.
wolvoleo 7mo ago
I personally love the DST option because I'd have some useful daylight after work in winter. The mornings are just wasted daylight anyway because I'm just on the way to work.
tgv 7mo ago
I don't know what time the sun rises in BC, but during the summer the sun rises here at 5 o'clock in DST. That would be 04:00 without. That means people (not everyone can darken their room sufficiently) waking up really early, and that can't be healthy.
- dalmo3 7mo ago
  Eyemasks are extremely cheap and effective.
  - tgv 7mo ago
    That's admitting it's bad for your sleep. So why would sleep experts say otherwise? Why do they think an early sun rise is better? Perhaps it's situation dependent.
vhodges 7mo ago
It's purely personal, but my body really seems to prefer daylight savings. I always have very rough and fluctuating sleep schedules during the winter. They seem to go away after the spring ahead (it could just be the longer daylight hours that become more apparent during spring). Greetings from Mission!
- Wowfunhappy 7mo ago
  Yeah, I would argue strongly it's just because you have more sunlight during daylight savings. Having the sun rise later in winter would just make your sleep worse. If you wanted to test this, try setting your alarm one hour earlier for a few weeks in winter and see if it makes you feel better.
- roysting 7mo ago
  I would prefer you simply adjust your personal schedule (yes, it’s far more likely the shorter daylight and probably insufficient Vitamin D) than that we permanently turn the one hour offset from high noon of the sun…the very basis for time itself coupled to the natural phenomenon of earth’s rotation … into the standard now. “Daddy, why is the sun at its highest point at 1300 and not noon like since the beginning of time?” … “because right before humans destroyed themselves they became idiots and lost their mind and started being confused about their genitals, time itself, whether they should be alive or not, and even tried convincing themselves that the Big Arch burger was not disgusting food-product slop; that’s why, my AI robot son, that’s why!”
sampo 7mo ago
> I'm sure I've read that sleep health experts have historically supported a change to permanent Standard Time, not DST. Yes, science is very clear: Permanent standard time is best for health. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0748730419854197 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/07487304198541... https://srbr.org/advocacy/daylight-saving-time-presskit/ https://srbr.org/advocacy/daylight-saving-time-presskit/ https://esrs.eu/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/To_the_EU_Commission_on_DST.pdf https://esrs.eu/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/To_the_EU_Commiss... https://www.ama-assn.org/press-center/press-releases/ama-calls-permanent-standard-time https://www.ama-assn.org/press-center/press-releases/ama-cal... https://jcsm.aasm.org/doi/10.5664/jcsm.10898 https://jcsm.aasm.org/doi/10.5664/jcsm.10898 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jsr.14352 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jsr.14352 https://www.chronobiocanada.com/official-statements https://www.chronobiocanada.com/official-statements But I think the scientists have made a mistake in their communication: They focused too much arguing against the clock-shifts, and didn't put enough effort to communicate why also permanent DST is a bad choice.
dleslie 7mo ago
I'm in favour of PDT from a forward-thinking perspective. With climate change causing extreme heat events to be more frequent, having the sun rise later in the day will defend the work hours of those who find themselves labouring outside without having to adjust the hours that they work.
Yizahi 7mo ago
There is no significance to the number 12 on the analog clock outside it being painted on top of the clock face. And even that is completely absent in the digital clock, where hour 11:00 is the same as 12:00 or 13:00 in significance. So there is zero astronomic reason to fixate noon to a particular number if doesn't suit us, humans. I'm just saying that astronomic argument is kinda meaningless for the DST discussion, the only thing that matters is manual allocation of light time for the most people as possible, so that a majority of population would receive highly beneficial natural light as much as possible. When the solar high point would happen in that scheme should be entirely irrelevant.
billnad 7mo ago
Also in BC and I agree completel;y. The one hour offset seems strange. The trouble with any time change is that I still wake up a couple hours before the sun in the morning in the Winter in Vernon and in the Summer I couldn't get up early enough for a sunrise. I try to get out as much as often during the day in the Winter as I am sure I am starved for the Sun in the Winter. Was much tougher in Calgary
dade_ 7mo ago
Great, wake up at 5 in the morning.

matthewdgreen 7mo ago

I'm a relatively early riser, but: if you steal an hour of my summer evening time, I think that would call for civil unrest.

singpolyma3 7mo ago
What time the clock says shouldn't affect this

zetanor 7mo ago

I've seen arguments about kids going to school in the darkness being thrown around a lot, but I've never understood why that (against fresh drivers) is always taken to be worse than kids coming home in the darkness (against exhausted drivers).

bryanlarsen 7mo ago
Average school start/end times in BC are 8:30 AM and 3 PM. Standard time in Vancouver puts sunrise/sunset at 8AM/415PM at winter solstice for standard time. That's 30 minutes of daylight before school and 75 minutes after school. IOW, kids are more likely to be walking in the dark in the morning, even with standard time. Switching to daylight time will switch sunrise/sunset to 9AM/515PM, guaranteeing kids will be walking in the dark in the morning.
- deleted 7mo ago
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- bryanlarsen 7mo ago
  P.S. Switching to daylight time makes more sense in Eastern BC than it does in Western BC. But Eastern BC is relatively unpopulated. The population of Penticton is 40,000 vs 3,000,000 in metro Vancouver. Second largest metro (Victoria) is west of Vancouver. Penticton experiences sunrise/sunset about 25 minutes before Vancouver, so their kids experience approximately equal amounts of sun before & after school on the winter solstice.
  - sefrost 7mo ago
    I know exactly what you mean with your comment, but interesting fact, Vancouver is in the East of BC! BC is huge in both directions.
    - bryanlarsen 7mo ago
      Even more so when you consider that most of metro Vancouver lives east of Vancouver city.
  - deleted 7mo ago
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  - __turbobrew__ 7mo ago
    Penticton is also in a valley so in reality the sun goes behind the mountains in the west around 3:30PM.
- throw0101c 7mo ago
  * https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/canada/vancouver?month=12&year=2025 https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/canada/vancouver?month=12&ye...
- amatecha 7mo ago
  yeah the 4:15 PM sunset actually means it's getting dark at 3:30 PM. Pretty ridiculous. For everyone like "the kids have to walk to school in the dark!" it seems like they aren't considering that kids generally don't care at all what the morning is like because their day is about to be consumed by an obligation they never agreed to (school). When they're finally free for the day, it's effectively dark outside. The perspective among my peer group when I was a kid was that daylight savings system is totally clueless, has never made sense, and we should permanently switch to the schedule that allows more daylight after school (aka DST).
tzs 7mo ago
In addition to the reason already given (kids get home before the evening traffic picks up), another reason is that generally driving conditions are worse in the morning than they are in the evening so if there isn't enough light for both the morning and evening drives to be in light it is safer to give the light to the morning drive.
- 1718627440 7mo ago
  > kids get home before the evening traffic picks up When we change the general time, this applies to school days as well as office hours, so the kids go home to evening traffic relation will stay constant.
- crazygringo 7mo ago
  > another reason is that generally driving conditions are worse in the morning than they are in the evening Wait, why? Where? I've never heard this. Which driving conditions are you talking about? Rain? Snow?
  - gosub100 7mo ago
    It's coldest at night, so morning ice would be worse than evening, when daily highs are reaches and roads have been driven on more.
  - tzs 7mo ago
    Generally the coldest part of the day is just after sunrise. The warmest part of the day is typically in the early afternoon, around 1-4 pm. This makes a few driving hazards more likely or more intense in mornings, including fog, sleet, and ice. Also tires have less traction when they are colder. In the morning it is less likely for snowplows or earlier traffic to have cleared paths on secondary roads. Driver assist systems tend to have more trouble with sensor fogging, frosting, or icing in the morning. That's not to say evening is a piece of cake. Evening tends to have denser traffic which increases the risk of accidents. Places that are in shadow for much of the day might maintain ice while most of the morning ice melts, or might start developing new evening ice earlier than places the heated up more in the day which could be particularly bad--if most of the road is ice free in the evening people might let down their guard.
jbm 7mo ago
I agree with you. I also need to shout at the clouds on this because the experts who make the argument for time changes drive me crazy. I live in Calgary. At a previous grade school my daughter went to, school started early enough that she left in pitch black conditions in winter, regardless of "experts" and their precious daylight savings time. 'You need sunshine when you wake up' is really a ridiculous argument, there is no sunshine even with DST. Get rid of it. Maybe egg the houses of the "experts" too. (As for my kids, thankfully, they did remote school during Covid (hence late mornings) and then I moved to a place where the school starting time was later than 8.)
- bena 7mo ago
  Yes, a lot of griping about "standard time" is really griping about winter. There are fewer hours of daylight in the winter. That's just the way it is. You can't fool time.
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
  - bombcar 7mo ago
    You can also just change the hours when things start without changing the clock for the entire country. Anyone in the north has seen “winter hours” and “summer hours”.
dddddaviddddd 7mo ago
> I've seen arguments about kids going to school in the darkness being thrown around a lot I’m sure there’s some correlation with the time zone, but it feels like a “think of the children!” argument that ignores much more significant factors (e.g. traffic speed and volume).
loloquwowndueo 7mo ago
> kids coming home in the darkness (against exhausted drivers). If you’re exhausted you shouldn’t be driving. Period. You’re the danger to kids, not light or darkness. (Your headlights are in working order, right?)
- denkmoon 7mo ago
  Nice sentiment, sadly we live in the real world
- Mawr 7mo ago
  Correct. Alas, we've designed our society around the expectation of everyone always getting everywhere via driving. And once you've driven to work, you probably don't have any other real option than to drive back.
  - loloquwowndueo 7mo ago
    Im so glad I don’t live in the same society as you.
dylan604 7mo ago
> (against fresh drivers) How many people roll out of bed, rush out the door and jump in the car before they're actually awake? In my circles, that would be a larger percentage that of those that get up with plenty of time to wake up. I'm not sure any time of the day is safer regarding attentive drivers. Especially if we're going to consider idiots on their phones while driving.
- 1718627440 7mo ago
  There is still a typical morning routine of an hour. How long do people need to wake up? If they are chronically tired is this going to get better through out the day?
  - dylan604 7mo ago
    Personally, I need multiple hours. I'm not the type to open my eyes, jump out of bed, and hit the floor running. I'm more the type of "fuck, why am I awake?" but then at the end of the day if there's stuff to do, I can be up for a while. So I'm much better at night than in the morning. Even if I'm my keyboard at 10am, I'm still not up to speed. My best comes later in the day. I think part of that is I've worked for places for so long that I was in meetings all day, and never got to do my actual job until late in the day when everyone else was winding down.
    - duskdozer 7mo ago
      You could just have a different chronotype but are forced to conform to societal expectations around when you should do work.
cyberax 7mo ago
I grew up in an area outside the US, and quite a bit more to the north. I still remember how for several weeks each year I had to walk to school in the dark, sometimes having issues with seeing where I was walking. The DST changes abruptly made everything visible again. Around that time we were also getting a permanent snow cover. And the whiteness of the snow significantly improved visibility for the rest of the winter. So I don't think that the concerns are completely unfounded, but they are probably not as dire either.
- BeetleB 7mo ago
  Am I missing something? DST will make walking to school in the darkness more likely, not less. DST means a later sunrise.
  - cyberax 7mo ago
    I mean, the change from the DST ("summer") time to the standard ("winter") time.
macintux 7mo ago
One difference between morning and evening: in the mornings, some or even many students must wait outdoors for their bus to arrive, because they live too far away from the bus stop to run out when the bus pulls up. That means they are standing around in the darkness and the cold. In the evenings, they can go straight home from the bus.

scythe 7mo ago

Thankfully, this is a situation we don't need to speculate about without evidence. Spain is on de facto permanent DST, serving as a natural experiment. I bet the results support you.

shagie 7mo ago
That's partly because it's in the same timezone as Poland. Madrid is further west that London, but London is an hour behind. Moving Spain to permanent DST puts it on the same effective timezone as London. http://blog.poormansmath.net/images/SolarTimeVsStandardTime.png http://blog.poormansmath.net/images/SolarTimeVsStandardTime.... Without the DST offset, Spain much more "red" than England. It's not so much a "permeant DST" but rather a "we want to change to GMT without moving out of the CET timezone."
- 1718627440 7mo ago
  That map is interesting, so most of the world prefers "red" to "green"? Why is that?
  - shagie 7mo ago
    Most of the world tends to prefer to not be too far from the center of the timezone (where solar noon matches solar time in standard time). Geographic and political boundaries make it so that often it's more red. The extremes of north and south tend not to care as much because it doesn't matter as much. https://andywoodruff.com/blog/where-to-hate-daylight-saving-time-and-where-to-love-it/ https://andywoodruff.com/blog/where-to-hate-daylight-saving-...
    - 1718627440 7mo ago
      I don't think that explains it. The "red" offenders are basically Russia, China?, Sudan, Argentina and Alaska. The only "green" offender is Greenland, which is still large enough to enough red to justify it. I get China, it aligns with the population density. Sudan likely wants to have the same time as Somalia and Ethiopia. Why Argentina? Why Alaska? And why does Russia basically have zones that range from +2 to the +1 offset? They don't even have the excuse of avoiding 2 hour jumps like between Alaska and Canada, because they still have that.

throw0101c 7mo ago

> I'm in BC. The astro-nerd in me would have preferred to see permanent Standard Time instead of a permanent +1 offset. So would the folks who study circadian rhythms: > Over much of the highly-populated areas of Canada, the sun would not rise until about 9 am in winter under DST, and the daylight will linger an hour later in summer evenings than under Standard Time. As a Northern country, Canada includes higher latitudes where the effects of late winter dawns and late summer dusks under DST would be felt more profoundly. What long-term effects on health can we expect from year-round DST? As predicted from our understanding of the human biological clock, our brain clock will try to synchronize to dawn and push us to go to bed later. However, our social clock will force us to wake an hour earlier in the morning. Will this have any health effects? > We have good evidence for the negative impact of being an hour off of biological time, and this comes from studies on the health of populations living on the edges of time zones. We have arbitrarily divided the earth into one-hour time zones, so that people on the east side of a time zone see the sun rise an hour earlier (according to their social clocks) than people on the west side of the same time zone. Researchers have analyzed the health records and economic status of those two populations, and have found poorer health outcomes on the west side: increased rates of obesity and diabetes, heart disease, and cancer (Gu et al., 2017). Moreover, people on the west sides of time zones earned 3% less in per capita income (Giuntella and Mazzonna, 2019). What could account for this? As predicted, people on the west sides of time zones go to bed later than people on the east sides, but then have to get up at the same time in the morning because of fixed work and school schedules. Therefore they lose sleep: about 20 minutes per weeknight, which adds up to a significant sleep debt over the week. We know from other research that sleep deprivation negatively impacts health and workplace performance. We can already see the negative impacts of a one-hour difference across a time zone, and year-round DST would put our social clocks another hour out of alignment with our biological clocks. * https://www.chronobiocanada.com/official-statements https://www.chronobiocanada.com/official-statements * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronobiology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronobiology

Aerroon 7mo ago
I guess northern Europe must be an unpopulated wasteland where everybody's health just instantly declines. I find these explanations to these studies so bizarre. We know that there are large populations living significantly further north, who don't get sunlight in the morning in winter, no matter whether there's DST or not. We also know that they get almost perpetual light during summer. If these explanations were true then you would expect a country like Sweden to have an impact on life expectancy and illness from this. But it's not. It's about as rich as Canada and has about the same life expectancy.

lunatuna 7mo ago

I don't get why we just don't cut it down the middle. Go +0.5 offset and get a little bit of both. Love the idea of no one being able to do the math when talking to people outside the province. I can't tell you what time it is in mountain time, NFLD, or Saskatchewan. Nothing bad comes of it.

tmp10423288442 7mo ago
No one wants another Indian time zone in the world - one is already enough of a hassle to deal with.
anon84873628 7mo ago
Or just have schools change their hours as needed. Time changes are just a hack to make every business change their effective office hours back when the sign on the door - and coordination - mattered. Today brick and mortar is way less relevant. Way more people are working from home or going to work at random hours. The time change doesn't affect going to grocery store or restaurants or the gym. It's basically just schools, banks, and the DMV. Why not have a given entity change its hours through the year, if the relation to the sun actually matters? (And no, I don't buy that there needs to be time coordination between schools, since they are all already slightly different anyway. Different kids have different after school programs different days. Different parents are already going to work different hours. There's no way to coordinate for everyone to be happy, ever.)

deleted 7mo ago

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cluoma 7mo ago

I live in the Yukon so will now be in sync with BC time again after this change. The concerns about commuting to school in the dark seem almost comical, given the experiences of everybody here with the winter darkness. For other reasons, I also wish we were closer to solar noon though. High noon is actually closer to 2pm here and seems to push the whole day back in the summer. The best (warmest) parts of the day get pushed too late into the afternoon.

singpolyma3 7mo ago

Can't you just get up at a different time if you prefer different sunlight?

ImJamal 7mo ago
Will all jobs, schools, stores, etc also change their working hours?
- singpolyma3 7mo ago
  Usually there are several hours of reasonable buffer in the morning. We're only talking about moving wakeup time by one hour here.
  - ImJamal 7mo ago
    That massively depends on where you live. The northern most city of British Columbia is Atlin and during some parts of the year the sun doesn't rise until 9:54 AM. If you take into account places further north than British Columbia it gets even more extreme. Barrows Alaska has the sunrise after 1 PM some days. Do you think businesses, schools, etc are going to start at 1 PM on those days?
    - singpolyma3 7mo ago
      I think if you live where the sun doesn't rise until after noon (or never rises, etc) the DST change wasn't helping or hurting you either way here.
  - duskdozer 7mo ago
    Unless the required morning start time is already too early for you on either ST/DST

pwg 7mo ago

> Oh well, I am in the minority it seems. Given it one winter season across the solstice and I'd bet a lot of your fellow residents will come around to your viewpoint.

tempestn 7mo ago
I'm really curious how people will feel about it after experiencing a year of continuous PDT. I expect I'll personally like it, but the polling will be interesting for sure.

jorvi 7mo ago

> Instinctively, I think morning light is important to our biology for a daily reset I'd bet people would happily trade away the inkling of light they get during their winter commute before locking themselves into their office for some extra daylight when they leave that office. Daylight is most enjoyable if you can actually make use of it.

allknowingfrog 7mo ago
Well, I'm not one of those people. I like waking up with the sun and driving to work in the daylight. The idea that DST solves anything absolutely blows my mind. If you want the ability to start your work day earlier and end it earlier, that seems like a worker protection bill that needs to be passed. DST is the kludgiest kludge that ever kludged.
- davidw 7mo ago
  > If you want the ability to start your work day earlier and end it earlier, that seems like a worker protection bill that needs to be passed. I don't think that's very realistic though is it? School times are fixed and that anchors a lot of families to those specific times, and businesses tend to have set hours. Changing the time to give people more light in the evening frees up a bunch of people to enjoy some sunlight without making it a whole fight to have different hours at work.
  - whycome 7mo ago
    School and the workday already awkwardly don't work together. Schools often end an hour or two after the traditional work day. It wouldn't be crazy to have an effective 'DST' via just adjusting the school start/end times -- start at 10am for part of the year dammit.
- alpinisme 7mo ago
  Where I live June sunrise (with DST) is 5:11am and sunset is 8:21pm (a city on the American east coast). I just can’t imagine a majority of people would want 4:11 rising and 7:21 setting.

kmm 7mo ago

Everytime people extoll the virtues of high noon, I ask the same question: why does it matter if the sun reaches it highest point near 12 o' clock? You're awake for 4-6 hours before 12, and you remain awake for 10-12 hours after it. Noon isn't the middle of the day for nearly anyone in the western world. I understand the argument for having an early sunset, clearly having sunlight when you're awake has an effect. But who cares about having an early high noon, when there's still two thirds of the day left at best?

__turbobrew__ 7mo ago
100%. Almost nobody goes to bed at 8pm and wakes up at 4am, so high noon is a pointless exercise.
wyre 7mo ago
this might be controversial and a sign of growing up in America, but i think its a lot like people preferring Celsius over Fahrenheit. I don't care if water boils and freezes at exactly 100 and 0 degrees, it's easy to know its state by looking at it. But its very easy to understand what temp differences will feel like between 90, 70, 50 degrees F etc compared to 31, 22, and 4 degrees C.
- sparrc 7mo ago
  As someone who grew up in America but lived abroad a few years, you just start using different markers but it's the same idea. Something like 0, 10, 15, 20, 30, 40 gives you the full range from freezing to pleasant to very hot.
- lucumo 7mo ago
  So because we're used to it? I know perfectly how those C numbers will feel. Haven't got a clue about the F numbers. Anyway, I doubt that that analogy goes for noon. I eat lunch by the clock, not when the sun's highest. I expect most people do. Especially the ones that are cooped up in an office during the daytime.
- stephen_g 7mo ago
  In the same way, I have absolutely zero idea of what 90, 70 or 50 degrees Fahrenheit feels like - literally no intuition, those numbers seem foreign and disconnected from my experience, having always known and used Celsius. Celsius temperatures just make sense to me. It's literally just about growing up with it.

GuB-42 7mo ago

About 50% of people want permanent standard time, 50% want permanent DST, 50% want to keep time changes. Doesn't add up? That's the point. Everyone finds arguments that suits them. Some will quote "sleep experts", others will mention economic reasons, others will talk about road safety, each one with studies proving their point, peer-reviewed for the most sophisticated. My take is that we are all different, and whatever you choose, some people will be better off, others will be worse off. There is a high chance that that variety is an evolutionary advantage, at least it was for our ancestors, as a group where everyone is sleeping at the same time is more vulnerable. Not great for office hours though.

tempestn 7mo ago

In the winter I can see arguments both ways (though I'm personally in the evening light is better camp). But in the summer, it already gets light earlier than almost anyone would want to be awake. An extra hour of sunlight at 4am is little benefit to anyone, and likely just makes it harder to sleep. Light evenings in the summer are wonderful though. I think part of the health argument against DST is that those light evenings make it harder to get to sleep at night, which is fair, but I still wouldn't want to give them up!

mapt 7mo ago

If you have a problem with school start times, you could also just change school start times.

dzhiurgis 7mo ago

> Kids walking, biking, and being driven to school in mornings in darkness. It's not 1900s anymore. Cars have fancy headlights and sensor suites for AEB. And generally street lighting is available around schools.

apparent 7mo ago
Some kids walk and bike for a mile or more. Lighting around schools only helps with the very last bit.

Affric 7mo ago

100% with you. And every argument I hear from the pro DST group is really just an argument for ending adult work at 15.30 rather than 17.00 and maintaining a 9.00 start time. It blows my mind that we are all meant to wrap our lives around bullshit jobs.

fragmede 7mo ago

just move it by .5 permanently

gerdesj 7mo ago

I live a bit north of Whistler. BC is rather larger than the UK but it is very roughly the same in north/south extent. Yeovil (Somerset) is about the same lat as Calgary, next door to you. Unfortunately we live on an oblate spheroid what spins around the sun and its a bit tricky when the sun comes on and is switched off. It doesn't help that the basted planet is tilted to the ecliptic too so we end up with daylight/nighttime procession and all that equinox/solstice bollocks. I live quite close to both Glastonbury and Stonehenge. People have some pretty odd ideas about reality, let alone time in these parts 8) The "perfect" solution is of course moving the clock continuously and keeping 12:00 fixed to peak daylight. Sadly that wont work too well when the time changes every 50 miles or so! No one will ever be happy when it comes to fiddling with clocks - that is the way of life. There is no right answer for everyone and never will be. I might accept an arguement based on road fatality statistics but not much else and then you'll get some sort of economic based falacy in response.

dlenski 7mo ago

Same, also in BC. I agree with everything you write, and in principle I'd prefer just to stay on standard time forever. However for my selfish individual interests: I work with a lot of people in Europe, and this change to permanent DST will make the time difference once hour less for 4 months a year… until the rest of the world goes this way too, at least.

confidantlake 7mo ago

Seems dumb that we change the time to an offset rather than changing from 9 to 5 to 8 to 4.

CalChris 7mo ago

+0 vs +1 boils down to dropping kids off vs shopping.

francislavoie 7mo ago

Hell noooo. 4:30pm sunsets are ultra depressing in the winter. Less light in the morning is not at all a problem in comparison.

eru 7mo ago

> Instinctively, I think morning light is important to our biology for a daily reset and the solar cue of "high noon" is also a real thing. You know, you can just set your watch to whatever you feel like? > I'm sure I've read that sleep health experts have historically supported a change to permanent Standard Time, not DST. What difference does it make? If people want to get up later or especially earlier, they can, no matter what the 'official' time is. For an example: Spaniards and Poles are officially in the same timezone, but the Spaniards do everything 'late'. At least when you only look at the clocks; not so much when you look at the sun.

duskdozer 7mo ago
They "can" if they don't have jobs that demand they stick to arbitrary hours.
- eru 7mo ago
  Sure, social coordination is always a thing. In any case, most people can get up earlier, if they want to.

14 7mo ago

I agree and would have preferred that as well. But what I really thought they would do was split the two and just meet in the middle.

zenoprax 7mo ago

As a fellow astro-nerd you are much calmer about this than me! DST is just a way to uniformly enforce "summer" and "winter" hours of operation on everyone. If all the evidence supports starting our activities later in the day during winter why don't we just... change the start time of our activities rather than all our clocks? Why stop at one hour ahead? Let's add three hours to standard time... I'm still livid :D

MitchSchwartz 7mo ago

The obvious stupid answer is half way between.

Reason077 7mo ago

> ”Kids walking, biking, and being driven to school in mornings in darkness ... that's also what permanent DST gives us.” Can’t schools just open 60 (or 30) minutes later if this is a problem? ie: school has winter hours where class starts at 9AM instead of 8:30AM?

rkomorn 7mo ago
I don't get how having "random" things change opening hours is any better than changing clocks. I'm not a parent, but I can imagine that if some of my schedule had to change by 30 minutes some months out of the year, I'd find it more inconvenient. What if school starts/ends at a different time but my job does not? What if I have a standing appointment at a business that keeps its hours year round that now conflicts with one that changed to winter hours? It seems more like a different set of problems than a solution.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- mongol 7mo ago
  It is completely obvious to me. There is only one uniform time, and thousands of arguments for what is a good time to do this or that. Reschedule things to work better. Don't force everything else according to some most important thing
  - rkomorn 7mo ago
    How is "rescheduling some things" a solution and not a different problem?
throwaway613746 7mo ago
[dead]

alexhans 7mo ago

Don't get discouraged by being in the minority in one particular forum, specially when specific angles dominate. People put different weights to different arguments. For the Spain argument below. I actually think it's quite uncomfortable to be +1 and +2 in daily life because people leaving office at 5pm are actually leaving at 3pm under scorching sun. The difference of having light until 23 instead of 22 is negligible in a country that is still up at night in winter. I can't cite anything at the moment but from what I can recall, economic benefits of switching during the year have not been as tauted and the cost of changing every year has been harmful in many ways (operational being one), but I think here the discussion is where should countries land. I hope that a country like UK doesn't decide to switch to +1 and the same for Europe, further separating themselves from the American continent countries with the focus on summer sunlight where summer already has a huge window of sun and people often tend to want to escape that heat.

sillyfluke 7mo ago
Yes, once you look at the daylight times it's clear that UK time naturally fits Spain better.

sillyfluke 7mo ago

>Kids walking, biking, and being driven to school in mornings in darkness ... that's also what permanent DST gives us. I think this is the worst thing about it frankly, the kids. And you can't just push the school time back cause it interferes with the parents getting to work.

dheera 7mo ago

Times are just numbers, just shift your work hours accordingly. The only real problem is that the people seeing you leave at 4pm and grumble are the same sort of people who don't acknowledge you starting work at 7am. As long as you don't have those sorts of people around you're fine.

theshrike79 7mo ago

This has to be done in two steps 1) Do ANYTHING you can to stop the clocks being fucked with twice a year. 2) After that is done and stabilised, everything has been updated to non-wobbly time. Now's the time you can start arguing what the exact time zone should be. Never try to argue both at the same time. This is what prevents the EU from stopping the DST madness.

vbarrielle 7mo ago
I'm in strong agreement with this. Even though I'd prefer winter time all year round, I would rather enjoy permanent summer time over switching twice a year. And I'm living in France, so my "winter time" is actually already a DST compared to the standard time (France's timezone should be UTC like the UK, but WW2 changed that to UTC+1 and we never switched back), so the "summer time" is actually a "double DST".
Wowfunhappy 7mo ago
I actually prefer changing the clocks twice a year to permanent DST. Changing the clocks is annoying a couple weeks each year. Permanent DST will suck all winter.

dmos62 7mo ago

Speaking of, I've recently started using a daylight therapy lamp 10k lumens @ 10-30cm for at least 20 minutes within 1 hour of waking up: the first few days, the effect is dramatic. Later, when the body is readjusted you don't feel it as vividly, but if I don't do it for a few days I can feel my mood and energy drop. I recommend everyone who doesn't get much light (bright enough to make you squint) in the morning try it.

wolvoleo 7mo ago

I personally love the DST option because I'd have some useful daylight after work in winter. The mornings are just wasted daylight anyway because I'm just on the way to work.

tgv 7mo ago

I don't know what time the sun rises in BC, but during the summer the sun rises here at 5 o'clock in DST. That would be 04:00 without. That means people (not everyone can darken their room sufficiently) waking up really early, and that can't be healthy.

dalmo3 7mo ago
Eyemasks are extremely cheap and effective.
- tgv 7mo ago
  That's admitting it's bad for your sleep. So why would sleep experts say otherwise? Why do they think an early sun rise is better? Perhaps it's situation dependent.

vhodges 7mo ago

It's purely personal, but my body really seems to prefer daylight savings. I always have very rough and fluctuating sleep schedules during the winter. They seem to go away after the spring ahead (it could just be the longer daylight hours that become more apparent during spring). Greetings from Mission!

Wowfunhappy 7mo ago
Yeah, I would argue strongly it's just because you have more sunlight during daylight savings. Having the sun rise later in winter would just make your sleep worse. If you wanted to test this, try setting your alarm one hour earlier for a few weeks in winter and see if it makes you feel better.
roysting 7mo ago
I would prefer you simply adjust your personal schedule (yes, it’s far more likely the shorter daylight and probably insufficient Vitamin D) than that we permanently turn the one hour offset from high noon of the sun…the very basis for time itself coupled to the natural phenomenon of earth’s rotation … into the standard now. “Daddy, why is the sun at its highest point at 1300 and not noon like since the beginning of time?” … “because right before humans destroyed themselves they became idiots and lost their mind and started being confused about their genitals, time itself, whether they should be alive or not, and even tried convincing themselves that the Big Arch burger was not disgusting food-product slop; that’s why, my AI robot son, that’s why!”

sampo 7mo ago

> I'm sure I've read that sleep health experts have historically supported a change to permanent Standard Time, not DST. Yes, science is very clear: Permanent standard time is best for health. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0748730419854197 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/07487304198541... https://srbr.org/advocacy/daylight-saving-time-presskit/ https://srbr.org/advocacy/daylight-saving-time-presskit/ https://esrs.eu/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/To_the_EU_Commission_on_DST.pdf https://esrs.eu/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/To_the_EU_Commiss... https://www.ama-assn.org/press-center/press-releases/ama-calls-permanent-standard-time https://www.ama-assn.org/press-center/press-releases/ama-cal... https://jcsm.aasm.org/doi/10.5664/jcsm.10898 https://jcsm.aasm.org/doi/10.5664/jcsm.10898 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jsr.14352 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jsr.14352 https://www.chronobiocanada.com/official-statements https://www.chronobiocanada.com/official-statements But I think the scientists have made a mistake in their communication: They focused too much arguing against the clock-shifts, and didn't put enough effort to communicate why also permanent DST is a bad choice.

dleslie 7mo ago

I'm in favour of PDT from a forward-thinking perspective. With climate change causing extreme heat events to be more frequent, having the sun rise later in the day will defend the work hours of those who find themselves labouring outside without having to adjust the hours that they work.

Yizahi 7mo ago

There is no significance to the number 12 on the analog clock outside it being painted on top of the clock face. And even that is completely absent in the digital clock, where hour 11:00 is the same as 12:00 or 13:00 in significance. So there is zero astronomic reason to fixate noon to a particular number if doesn't suit us, humans. I'm just saying that astronomic argument is kinda meaningless for the DST discussion, the only thing that matters is manual allocation of light time for the most people as possible, so that a majority of population would receive highly beneficial natural light as much as possible. When the solar high point would happen in that scheme should be entirely irrelevant.

billnad 7mo ago

Also in BC and I agree completel;y. The one hour offset seems strange. The trouble with any time change is that I still wake up a couple hours before the sun in the morning in the Winter in Vernon and in the Summer I couldn't get up early enough for a sunrise. I try to get out as much as often during the day in the Winter as I am sure I am starved for the Sun in the Winter. Was much tougher in Calgary

dade_ 7mo ago

Great, wake up at 5 in the morning.