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Study suggests most Americans would be healthier without daylight saving time (2025)
- kgwxd 4mo agoAssuming they don't get hit by a car walking to school.
- _ZeD_ 4mo agoAnd the rest of the world people? would it be healthier? the doubt is striking me
- plugger 4mo agoI live in Western Australia. for 3 years we trialed DST from 2006 to 2009. It was a nightmare personally, I was a sysadmin at the time and enterprise management tools were expensive and crap so we had to roll out DST file changes across our fleet manually. And because the change to allow DST for our region was a rushed job we then had to roll back after the 3 year unsuccessful trial. Honestly, it was super stressful at the time. And DST that doesn't exist doesn't bother you in the slightest. Every day ends and flows into the next like the last. But the stress of a clock change twice a year doesn't have to happen, it's a choice.
- ssl-3 4mo agoThe US extended DST by 4 weeks in 2007. We managed that well-enough. We can manage a similarly-sweeping change again. (Sorry about your nightmare. It was easy on the systems I took care of at that time.)
- plugger 4mo agoObviously I would have forgotten most of this given the change was 20 years ago but IIRC DST config on Solaris at the time was statically coded. You could modify the timezone config as a hacky fix on Solaris 8 but the permanent fix involved recompiling zic.
- mikestorrent 4mo agoAre you Yanks seriously not going to get this sorted out before winter? BC has moved - can at least the rest of Cascadia get their asses in gear? Come on, California, I do not want to be dealing with a north-south time zone difference with my coworkers
- frollogaston 4mo agoThen get BC to change it back
- mikestorrent 4mo agoHell no. Never going back.
- ssl-3 4mo agoYes, we won't. It turns out that we're way too terrible at being rational way too much of the time. For DST in particular: Even discussions where the participants manage to form something resembling a quorum to stop changing the clocks twice every year somehow manage to unilaterally get sucked into a seemingly-inescapable quagmire of differing opinions, wherein: The decision of whether to use standard time and stick with it or to stick with DST instead becomes an intractable impasse. Accordingly, nothing ever gets done. I have every expectation that I will be dead and buried before this issue is resolved.
- evilfred 4mo agoI think US states aren't allowed to switch unless the feds decide to allow it
- kuboble 4mo agoI really wonder about the methodology. The article didn't mention it. Did they get several cities to participate?
- sixothree 4mo agoI really don't want the sunrise time to be 5:00 in the morning and still not have any daylight to do errands after work. I don't care what the reasons are, but if seasons change the sunset time, what's so wrong with changing it a bit more?
- NoGravitas 4mo agoWhy do you need daylight to do errands?
- sixothree 4mo agoAnd why do you ask stupid questions? One of my errands is usually spend an hour in the park. I don't really need daylight for that. But I without DST I would have the daylight available but allocated incorrectly. Who wants incorrectly allocated daylight?
- kubb 4mo agoThis isn’t going to get fixed in my lifetime, and that’s sad. Countries have lost the ability to act.
- JauntyHatAngle 4mo agoPlenty of countries have moved away from DST. Over half who previously used it IIRC.
- lnsru 4mo agoPlease name some of these countries. Europe is stuck with this nonsense and there is no hope in sight despite yearly polls showing majority people being against it.
- worthless-trash 4mo agoQueensland Australia, a single state moved away from it. It is glorious.
- tristanj 4mo agohttps://www.timeanddate.com/sun/australia/brisbane https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/australia/brisbane Queensland Australia is relatively close to the equator, and the length of day does not change dramatically between summer and winter. DST is intended for places at higher latitudes.
- toxik 4mo agoNo, it is intended for a small band of places where the latitude is big enough to make winter and summer daytime length significantly different, but not so different that DST does nothing. In Sweden, with DST, the sunrise is at 4am in summer and 8am in winter. Just set it so noon is actually noon.
- 4mo ago
- keiferski 4mo agoOf all the things that cause obesity and sleep loss, is an hour change twice a year really a major issue?
- MisterBastahrd 4mo agoIt's an extra hour of potential outdoors activity before nightfall. Yes.
- keiferski 4mo agoDo you think the average person is already spending the maximum amount of time outdoors to begin with?
- pimlottc 4mo agoI don’t know, maybe someone should do a study on it.
- kortilla 4mo ago“This stupid thing we do that is worse for society than the perceived upsides is only twice a year. Why not keep doing it anyway?”
- scns 4mo agoThere are measurably more heart attacks and traffic accidents after the switch.
- keiferski 4mo agoWhich switch? 1918?
- pseudalopex 4mo agoSome researchers found heart attacks rose a little after clocks were set forward and fell a little after clocks were set back. Other researchers found no significant change.
- b112 4mo ago"Study by people who hate daylight savings time and have great bias against it, suggests that..."
- andrepd 4mo ago> the researchers estimate that permanent standard time would result in some 300,000 fewer people having suffered from a stroke and result in 2.6 million fewer people having obesity That 2.6 million people are obese because of a 1h shorter change night in one Sunday a year is an extraordinary claim. I would love to understand how they got to this result.
- userbinator 4mo agoIt was tried 52 years ago, and no one actually liked it, so we went back to DST again: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanent_time_observation_in_the_United_States#Legal_history_of_permanent_time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanent_time_observation_in_... Possibly another example of the old Chesterton's Fence.
- tumult 4mo agoNo, that’s describing permanent DST, which was tried and failed, not lack of DST. Most people in the world live without DST and it’s fine. (The article also mentions this.)
- tristanj 4mo agoThe majority of the planet do not live at higher latitudes, where implementing adjusted summer/winter hours actually makes sense.
- reedf1 4mo agoExcept it's not like Chesterton's fence, it was created at the edge of living memory for known reasons. If anything it's an example of the opposite effect, something like Chesterton's field, do we really need to build a wall here, it's been a field for a damn long time...
- tristanj 4mo agoDo the anti-DST people understand what they're advocating for? Have a look at the sunset/sunrise graph for northern parts of the US https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/seattle https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/seattle In Seattle, without DST, sunrise happens at 4:11am. Because of DST, it's pushed back an hour later to a more reasonable 5:11am. I am not awake at 4am, I have no use for sunlight at 4am, and I don't want the sun appearing that early. That hour of early sunlight is wasted for me. Plus with DST, the sun sets an hour later, at 9:11pm, a time I am actually awake, and I can actually go outside and use the extra sun. And, with permanent DST (which is what many people are advocating for), then in winter sunrise is at 9am in Seattle, which is far too late. I do not want to drive to work in the dark, before sunrise. So I want standard time in winter, pushing sunrise an hour earlier to a more reasonable 8am. In both situations (summer and winter), modifying the time via DST benefits me and gives me better use of sunlight.
- snowe2010 4mo agoYeah, it’s insane. Along with that, any permanent gains in the morning will be lost as soon as it becomes normal. Businesses will just open that much earlier. And this study assumed bedtimes of 10pm, which is not the average anywhere on the planet from what I remember the last time I looked into this. The average is like past midnight.
- wpm 4mo agoMore tyranny inflicted upon the rest of us by morning people
- devilbunny 4mo ago> The average is like past midnight Jesus, for what age group? I'm an outlier because I have to be at work at 6:30 AM daily (so I get up around 5:15), so staying up past 10 PM is a rarity and I see midnight maybe two or three times a year. I don't think I've slept past 8 AM in the past decade, even on vacation. But I haven't even frequently stayed up past midnight since my mid-twenties, and even then didn't do so every night. I'd have been too sleep-deprived.
- 4mo ago
- YossarianFrPrez 4mo agoBetween this and the "Sunset time and the economic effects of social jetlag: evidence from US time zone borders" paper [0], it seems like the issue is the size of the discontinuous jump in time, not necessarily that we change the clocks. So why not "smear" the DST<=> ST transitions by having four half hour transitions, once each quarter? [0]https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31030116/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31030116/
- raz32dust 4mo agoIf you present this as the alternative, I think there's a chance people might actually just get rid of it :)
- ssl-3 4mo agoI like where this is heading. To that end, I'd like to propose 12 transitions. These should happen on the 16th day of every month, at precisely 05:14:33. Let's take our seasonality more seriously.
- JoshTriplett 4mo ago> So why not "smear" the DST<=> ST transitions by having four half hour transitions, once each quarter? Very easy answer: Because it's already painful twice a year, and that would be making it even worse. That answer is similar to the one for questions like "why do we have wide time zones that are somewhat inaccurate, rather than setting every clock based on the exact position of that clock?".
- nerdsniper 4mo agoI’d be okay with every day having a different # of seconds. That way we slowly adjust with no discontinuity, but the nominal start time of school/work stays the same. While this feels would be a disaster for other reasons like: “How many seconds are in an hour?” -> “Depends, no one knows.” … that’s already the case with our existing leap seconds.
- 4mo ago
- sharts 4mo agoEvery few years these studies are published. Nothing changes. Unfortunately policy isn’t dictated by science, facts, or optimal outcomes for all.
- anal_reactor 4mo agoMy controversial idea: midnight should be where current 4AM is because 04:00 is the lowest point of human circadian rhythm. Currently we have nonsense like "1AM is technically a part of the next day but for all practical purposes it's still the previous day". Also, 24h clock should be the standard so that we can avoid discussions "is 12AM noon or midnight".
- ButlerianJihad 4mo agoI live in a hot desert climate where most of the daytime during summer is inhospitable to human activities. We also do not observe DST at all, and that makes us a red-headed stepchild in America. I have longed for a system here where summertime means a 12-hour DST: everyone sleeps all day and then goes to work/school in the coolness and darkness of nighttime. I absolutely love chilling outside in the dark when the lows are in the 70s, 80s. https://m.xkcd.com/2594/ https://m.xkcd.com/2594/ Time zones were invented because of railroads, and all of the time/date related troubles we have today is because modern urban technology is 100% fake artifice that denies the contours of the natural world, not to mention globalism that denies contours of local culture and seeks to cram everyone and everything into rigidly defined boxes.
- NoGravitas 4mo ago> I live in a hot desert climate where most of the daytime during summer is inhospitable to human activities. I live in a hot/humid subtropical where most of the daytime in summer is likewise inhospitable to human activities. I too long to be nocturnal in summer, though here it doesn't cool down as much at night.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- frollogaston 4mo agoI don't understand how Arizona lives during the day for like 5 months. It's too darn hot there, and because it's dry, nighttime is way cooler.
- reedf1 4mo agoIt's pretty astounding to me the number of pro-DST advocates in this forum. If you had hundreds of daily jobs on your platform and you happen to have some regular requirement to change them in unison, if a junior engineer said "let's just change the system clock to adjust for when we want the jobs to run", you would say no, because while it might be easy compared to changing the config for each of the jobs, the risk of ongoing errors, side effects, introduction of jobs that need to fixed in absolute time that you have to make the inverse change... It's a system nightmare.
- artisinal 4mo agoThat is why you run your jobs on GMT/UTC and not display time.
- edoceo 4mo agoThe jobs need to run at midnight, local time. Which shifts from UTC. How to handle?
- ssl-3 4mo agoUse UTC, and stop faffing about with changing localtime twice every year so the offset is a constant?
- defrost 4mo agoWhy does it need to run at that time? * If it's being run to scrap data from a source that's available at some time, adjust the job if the source changes its time. * If it's being run "when its dark and no one is around" then it'll run at some part of the dark bit regardless of DST changes.
- Retric 4mo agoSometimes you minimize downtime by running something while some other system you don’t control is down.
- 4mo ago
- tanin 4mo agoWith DST, there are actually 2 new concepts: ambiguous time (if the clock rolls back) and invalid time (if the clock jumps forward). Java and Ruby work differently. Java would simply round the invalid time to the closest valid time IIRC. Ruby would accurately raise the InvalidTime exception. Same behaviors for an ambiguous time. Chile is actually the country that will cause tricky issue in a system because they adjust DST at midnight... so there is one day a year where its midnight is considered invalid time. If we are building a system that depends on a day's boundary, then we will encounter this nightmarish issue where one of the days must start at 1am instead of midnight. I really hope DST is going away soon.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- Fizz43 4mo agoThis is so much effort for next to no gains.
- fragmede 4mo agoOh my God, just move it by half an hour permanently!
- tristanj 4mo agoThat doesn't fix anything, the reason DST exists is because at higher latitudes, the sun rises too early in the summer, and too late in the winter. DST exists to make the time of sunrise more consistent across seasons. DST only functions if hours are shifted seasonally, once for summer, and again for winter. Have a look at a sun graph to understand why https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/seattle https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/seattle
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- NoGravitas 4mo agoHonestly, I hate daylight savings time because I don't get enough night. I like being awake at night, but I also like going to bed pretty early. Winter is fine, but summer is bad enough without layering DST on top of it.
- thegrim33 4mo agoThe topic always feels like a typical propaganda push to me; the constant sensationalist articles, people constantly bemoaning it when in reality having to change your clocks by an hour twice a year is the most trivial, irrelevant thing to spend any energy/attention caring about, but I can't for the life of me figure out what the propaganda angle actually is. How does some group benefit from getting rid of it? Or is the negative messaging, creating an us-vs-them argument about even the most random of issues, increasing conflict/division in society, the angle, and they don't even care about getting rid of it?
- tsoukase 4mo agoEven in Southern Europe the winter day is 2+2 hours less than the summer. Not only I am PRO-DST but I advocate for a full two hour change. It's not 20th century any more. Most jobs start later, people want to enjoy after job and LEDs offer bright light if needed. Tell the Spaniards where the sun sets later that the Dutch.
- SAI_Peregrinus 4mo agoDST is bad because it changes the clocks in huge jumps. Very poor for people's health. Noticeably increases excess deaths. Fixed clocks are bad because they don't track the sunlight. We should change the clocks by 10 minutes, every month. Keep dawn at roughly the same time every day, say 06:30. Add enough time zones so that dawn will always be within 10 minutes of 06:30 at the equator for a given longitude.