I've always lived far enough north that the difference in daylight between summer/winter is very significant. In June, the sun is up at 5:30 in the morning, and doesn't set until after 9. In the winter, it's sometimes not light by 9AM when I go to work, and it is pitch black again by 4:30. It doesn't help that it is cold as hell at the same time that it is dark all the time.
My sleep cycle tends to be very sunlight dependent, so I'm seriously dragging all winter, since my body wants to still be asleep when I have to get up, and by the end of the day, I'm already shutting down. Daylight savings time screws things up even more - turning the clocks back in the fall isn't terrible, but those first weeks in the spring are brutal.
Better off just abolishing it. It's also been linked to more car accidents and such. If you want to set summer hours, fine, do that, but it's just silly to play with the clock to do so.
There's no meaningful difference between abolishing DST and making DST permanent. It's really just a question about whether you'd permanently like a little more sun in the morning, or the afternoon.
In the Northern city that I live in, in the winter, a permanent DST would be preferable. We're already in the preferable situation 8 months of the year. No reason not to just extend it the other 4 months, permanently.
If you read the linked article there is a meaningful difference due to the fact that the sunlight later in the day discourages crime due to more visibility during evening commutes.
There's a meaningful difference, it the question of whether your whole timing system is based on a lie. Is midnight in the middle of the night? Is midday in the middle of the day?
> There's a meaningful difference, it the question of whether your whole timing system is based on a lie. Is midnight in the middle of the night? Is midday in the middle of the day?
Solar midday already isn't the middle of the day in much of the world. It happens around 3pm for me in the summer, and before noon in the winter.
Not everyone in the world lives close to the equator. All time is, in a very real sense, just a consensual lie we agree to tell ourselves.
Whether we end up aligned with mountain or Pacific time is a non-trivial difference. You're saying we should end up in a way that isn't grouped with the nearby geographic states.
Also, the reservations DO use DST here, so parts of the state would be permanently 1 hour off from the rest of the state in your construction and would never realign.
So yes, it makes a difference in which direction you align--one way the entire state will be uniform and the same as the other states in its longitude whereas the other it will be strangely divided.
Yeah, maybe we could adopt some permanent offset to match everyone, but that wouldn't be a 'no change' kind of thing.
Yes, people realize that. Usually people must conform to societal norms which require one to do things at a certain time, which may not be synced with the natural time.
> Calling 3:00 pm "Four O'clock" does not magically make the day longer
Right.
> nor would it give you more sun in the afternoon.
Wrong. "Afternoon" as commonly used is based on what hour it is, not what the sun is doing. Shift the clocks an hour, you change how much sun is in the afternoon by an hour.
It's possible that the 2007 DST extension reduced evening crime because sunset was still late enough for the difference to matter. I'm not sure that will remain true all winter. That is, even if DST ran all year, in the depth of winter it might still get dark early enough for the street criminals to come out between 5 and 8 PM.
The link (near the bottom of the article) about how DST causes problems for farmers is baffling. Surely if any enterprise should be run on solar time rather than clock time, it's a farm! Why can't they just adjust their schedules so the DST change is irrelevant??
> Most street crime occurs in the evening around common commuting hours of 5 to 8 PM
Instead of mucking with Time, which we may later find out have some 'unintended' consequences, why not businesses, schools and workplaces change their open and work hours? This will change the timing of the "commuting" hours and spread over longer duration potentially also reducing the rush hour traffic issues.
>Why not businesses, schools and workplaces change their open and work hours?
It's far easier to legislate DST than to to regulate every business, school and workplace. In Indiana, DST and Time Zones are already political sore spots. There would be absolute revolt if they attempted to tell everyone to change the time they operate and everyone certainly wouldn't do it of their own volition.
DST is basically forcing everyone to get up an hour earlier which I'm not a big fan of. If people want to see more daylight in the summer, they should just get up at 5 am voluntarily.
I think he's saying that if you're going to make daylight-savings time permanent, it's become the "standard", so why not call it standard time?
Anyway, what the article is really saying is that people should work 8-4 instead of 9-5, because then they commute home before it gets dark and are at less risk for muggings, robberies, and rapes. Which is true, but it's kinda silly that to get there we should just change the meaning of time rather than the hours we work. Then again, maybe that is the most effective way to effect society-wide change.
Well, (1) it's an easy way to solve the coordination problem, and (2) is MUCH lower cost through having to update every single instance where a person or organization's working hours are mentioned :)
Invariably when I am trying to setup some kind of international conf call I cant help but think that communication would be easier without timezones. Imagine the ease of coordinating world-wide tele-meetings if everyone just understood and used UTC. Yes technology often uses it under the hood, but if used it societally things would be so much simpler.
Japan will be around +10 hours, so it’s 12h – sure, noon.
Remembering which country is where is standard in school, roughly estimating timezones from that is easy (US varies from -8 to -4, most of europe is 0 or +1 or +2, as is most of Africa, Russia is +3, middle east is around +3 and +4, china is +8, just like singapore and japan; australia, new zealand are between +10 and +12; I have no idea what the actual data is, just saying what I remember based on knowing the world map)
As everyone knows GMT, and everyone knows the world map, the issue is solved.
Google calendar is even smart enough to "translate" an event to your timezone. If I get an email with an event in a different timezone and put it on your Google Calendar it actually goes on your calendar in your local time zone. This screwed me up once when I moved to the other side of the world and forgot to update my timezone in Google.
> In 2007, Congress increased the period of daylight saving time (DST henceforth) by four weeks, adding three weeks in the spring and one in the fall. "This produced a useful natural experiment for our paper,"
My knee-jerk reaction to reading this is that their paper's conclusions must be based on a single observation.
Pretty recently there was a post (I think here on HN) that shaded the entire world to show how far off from 12pm they are when the sun is directly overhead. There were some pretty serious gradients on a lot of time zones (where the left edge is far off in one direction and the right edge is far off in the other direction). And there were a lot of time zones where the entire zone was offset in one direction.
Unfortunately I don't remember enough to find that post again.
Time zones still give a close approximation to solar time. In an ideal time zone, you won't be off by more than 30 minutes. Daylight savings time means you can be off by a whole hour, on top of the error introduced by time zones.
Neither, really. It should just be 12m (meridian). "am" means ante (before) meridian, while "pm" is "post" (after) meridian. So, midnight should be both 12am and 12pm ;)
It doesn't, because the numbers of time have an independent meaning that people follow that is unrelated to the sun, which is the entire reason that daylight savings time even works: people don't just ignore it and work 9-5 this week and 8-4 next week even though those are the same natural times.
One interesting consequence of this is that the further west that you look within a timezone, the less sleep people tend to get.
> Examination of ATUS activity logs shows that workers experiencing earlier sunset also go to bed earlier and that this correlation between sunset and bedtime persists even if the worker goes to bed well after dark. Coordinated work start times translate this earlier bedtime into longer sleep.
Time Use and Productivity: The Wage Returns to Sleep, Matthew Gibson and Jeffrey Shrader
Yeah, they do have a meaning in terms of coordinating when we do things with other people. Which seems to be a better reason NOT to mess with it at all, really...
There's no DST where I live. That's a good thing. Now I only have to worry about people who didn't resend Outlook invites after the time change or such.
If it were up to me North America would only have two time zones, and no DST.
I stopped changing my clocks years ago and I've never been happier.
I'm on the west coast and I set all of my devices to "Phoenix, AZ" time zone, which is Mountain Standard Time year round (or Pacific Daylight Time year round). Most calendar software works fine with multiple time zones. Set your appointments in Pacific Time, and they're shown in Mountain Standard Time.
There's really only 3 weeks of the year where mornings are unusually dark. The interesting thing is I naturally wake a little later during the dark mornings, and naturally wake a little earlier as the mornings become lighter. I enjoy it.
I don't have to deal with the shock of losing an hour sleep in the spring, or the shock of the sun suddenly setting at 4:50 PM in the fall.
The only negative is that Colbert is on an hour later than normal for a few months.
How do you communicate with the rest of the world? Do you often make the mistake of setting a meeting up an hour off, and are you ever an hour off from other people's expectations?
For formal appointments, you use your calendar software and enter your appointments in the local time zone. The software will automatically convert a 3:00 PM pacific-time appointment to your preferred time zone (Mountain Standard Time).
For informal appointments, you get used to "7:00 PM your time, 8:00 PM my time" for the 4 months. In rare cases you may get it backwards and you're off by two hours, but those errors are usually caught quickly.
The only time it's a real problem is when someone on the street asks you the time and you don't realize that you've put them off by an hour until you've walked away.
But your solution only works if you have a flexible schedule. You say, "I don't have to deal with the shock of losing an hour sleep in the spring," but that's only because, presumably, there isn't a manager standing at your desk at 9 a.m. wondering why you are showing up to work an hour later than everyone else all of the sudden. People aren't ruled by Daylight Saving Time, they're ruled by schedules.
The actual number doesn't matter at all -- I go to sleep at 11 p.m. in whatever time zone I'm in because it's about 8 hours before I need to wake up and jump into my schedule. Saying "11 p.m." is really "10 p.m." doesn't change the fact that I'm 8 hours away from waking up.
I made an IPython notebook awhile back exploring the advantages and disadvantages of various DST proposals for my lat/long (you could download and plug in your own). (Please forgive the attempts at humor in the notebook, they were sloppy).
Could? Are we playing with statistics again? Yesterday I learned on HN that you're 8x more likely to be killed by a cop than by a terrorist. This also turns out to be the same odds as being killed by your furniture.
Well, if you actually look at the article, they, for example, find a statistically significant 7% drop in robberies (with up to 27% in a specific hour).
Do you think we're permanently changing human behavior and perhaps there are people who are less likely to commit crimes? Thus there will be fewer robbers in the world, for example? These people are emboldened by the darkness and smaller crowds? Were there particular areas where the crimes occurred?
There's no such thing as permanent daylight savings time. The point of daylight savings time is to shift everyone's routines forward during one section of the year, and backwards during another.
If you don't shift, and the new times are fixed, then people will get used to it and just move their routines back 2 hours. People will treat new:6:00 as if it's really old:5:00, because it is. Nothing will change besides the numbers on paper.
I don't follow. How are people moving their routines back 2 hours? Shops aren't changing their hours and my work starts at the same time. I don't do anything according to the sun, I do everything because other people are doing that thing at that time.
I meant 1 hour. But anyway that is the point of daylight savings time. The actual time doesn't change, just the number on the clock. Causing everyone to move their routines back 1 hour, so that they have more sunlight in the afternoon. Daylight savings time would work just as well if everyone decided to go to work from 8-4 during half of the year, and keep the clocks the same.
How do you propose getting all workplaces to change their schedules to 8-4, nevermind the places that don't run those hours? Legislation? This solution keeps coming up and the practicality of it seems nonexistent. Any legislation of business is riddle with exceptions, there would be end to them for such a move as changing working hours.
What are you talking about? I never suggested that was a good idea. I just said it would have the same effect. I was trying to explain the purpose of daylight savings time, because you didn't seem to understand it. My original comment was just saying that "permanent daylight savings time" is nonsensical.
Since you bring it up, I do find it absolutely horrifying that we rely on the government to mandate that people miscalibrate their clocks once a year. Instead of businesses and stuff doing the right thing and moving their schedules back so people can have more afternoon time. But unfortunately that's the world we live in.
Can we just go ahead and put the clocks forward 3 or 4 hours then? Mornings are not worth living anyway, and we could have glorious evenings where the sun sets at 8pm in the winter, and at midnight in the summer. Wouldn't that be lovely? :-)
The article seems to be making a lot of assumptions. For example another explanation could be that crime is just seasonal.
People who are less well off would probably be able to survive on less during summer when they don't have heating costs. Or maybe they're just in a better mood.
"[The increase of the period of daylight saving time by four weeks] produced a useful natural experiment for our paper," authors Jennifer Doleac and Nicholas Sanders write at Brookings, "which helped us isolate the effect of daylight from other seasonal factors that might affect crime."
My sleep cycle tends to be very sunlight dependent, so I'm seriously dragging all winter, since my body wants to still be asleep when I have to get up, and by the end of the day, I'm already shutting down. Daylight savings time screws things up even more - turning the clocks back in the fall isn't terrible, but those first weeks in the spring are brutal.