If we can’t agree on permanent DST vs permanent standard time, I propose we divide the continent in half and have permanent DST on the West and permanent standard time on the East, leaving a 2 hour time gap between the coasts. Over time the morning people will flock to one side and the evening people the other, and all will be harmonious.
TimeZones and DST are for humans and physical realities, such as the tilt of the earth and circadian rhythms. And they serve to address these things in a universal, coordinated way rather than asking each of us to change our schedules individually.
During DST, we all agree to start our days, open our business, and adjust our schedules one hour earlier, but without changing our individual clock times.
With DST all year long, can we choose to send our children to school at 9:30 instead of 8:30 during the winter? Should the school have a different winter schedule than a summer one? Or should we just wake up our young children well before dawn and drag them off?
People in Hawaii and Arizona seem to be doing just fine. Hell, have you heard about how the daylight cycles work in Alaska? They generally somehow don't complain about it much.
The time change is super inconvenient, both as a regular person who doesn't like futzing with the oven clock, and as a programmer for whom it is pure madness to try and comprehend all the rules and edge case when converting between time zones.
p.s. mdavis6890, I find myself wanting to leave spiteful words in response to your post. Upon inspecting this, I accept that these feelings are on me. You haven't really done anything. I think it stems from feeling like trash due to the hour time shift, combined with my own deeply seated desire to live in a slightly less nonsensical and insane version of reality. In this present version we seem to be forever saddled by the bullshit of y'ore.
See also: Texas and as of today also Idaho regarding abortion rights rollbacks. Combine that with the highly suspicious conflict of interest of our newly appointed supreme court justices ( https://www.npr.org/2022/03/14/1086535100/wife-of-justice-th... ) and we're in full-on regression insanity mode.
All I want at the moment is to stop being subjected to time zone shift fatigue without the benefit of getting to travel somewhere.
Not everyone is a morning person, I'd rather have my daylight in the afternoon where it's actually useful to me. I suspect that most people agree with me.
It's the night people and delayed-cycle teenagers attending school who suffer most under permanent DST.
In the Winter, permanent DST means everyone has to get up an hour earlier for work or school, relative to the sun which regulates their body rhythm.
Night people already struggle with getting up early enough for these expectations. An hour earlier is going to be harder for them.
Research suggests that overall, health will suffer, sleep will be shorter, and educational attainment will reduce. But there will be more shopping so that's ok!
Well, actually, none of that is true and it's the division of time and systemization of behaviors around those divisions which certain social functions are, generally, arbitrarily centered around that will ultimately determine outcomes. Which is why there are proposals to do things like starting high schoolers later or moving to a 4 day workweek, which was proposed on the order of a century ago alongside drastic declines in labor hours necessary to produce ends meet. Instead we've got digitized time locks that track to the second and the maintenance of the status quo of a bygone era, and children shored up in living graves to make their dues in time far removed from agency.
Time is perhaps one of the most egregious facilitators of harm in the human domain. Both in manifest physical harm and as the root of a gamut of genuinely harmful behaviors without a real justifying rationale to back it. Haste makes waste. Rush drug trials and find out that thalidomide causes birth defects, that PFAs can't be ejected from the body, that tetraethyl lead is actually harmful... Rush to work and get in a car accident, rush the work and destroy the product... Rush the revolution and forget the human costs...Rush through life to get to the end... All so the trains can run on time.
Anyways, the point is that we can do better — we can be more humane. You could set the clock to whatever hour you please and in a decent society you'd be given free agency over your time or due compensation for the sacrifice of it.
Fair enough. I certainly skipped many first periods even with time changes, though I think there are other solutions to that one.
I think the "not having a change" matters much much more than the absolute value, we can campaign to have realistic hours for school or whatever else, that's a separate topic. Permanent DST lines up with my life better right now.
That doesn't work out so neatly for people affected by the sun's cycle.
The sun affects not just when people prefer to sleep, but also quality of sleep, duration, how refreshed they are, and during the daytime the profile of energy levels, hormones, brain function through the day. Just going to bed earlier doesn't compensate for that.
> Or should we just wake up our young children well before dawn and drag them off?
This is the norm for much of America, and has been for a long time (and will continue to be if we move away from changing clocks). If you want to play the "think of the children" card let's talk about moving their school start times later regardless of DST. 8:30 would be a great start, 9:30 would be phenomenal!
It’s changing, slowly. All the research supports starting at 9 or 10 is much better for childhood and teenage development especially, and many private schools and even some public school districts have started pushing start times back to 9 am or even later in some cases. Give it another decade
Aren't you basically still replicating the clock change? Everyone who goes to, works inside, or drops children off at the school will be less productive, at greater risk of heart attack, etc.
If we were really accounting for physical realities, we'd change our schedules by a much smaller amount every week or even every day, as the sun gradually shifts over time, instead of by an hour all at once. But nobody wants to coordinate that.
I think the only logical thing to do is have permanent standard time...
I’ve wanted this since I moved to Seattle 20 years ago (whoa)… until this winter. I still want to stop time changes, but now I’d definitely prefer permanent standard time.
What changed? Until about three years ago, I was a night owl with chronic insomnia. Since then, I’ve done some important mental healthy work, and I got a pup. The former helped with my insomnia and helped me adjust to an earlier schedule. The pup, well she used to rise with the sun, but going into her third year she has a much more stable internal clock. Now I understand the dread people feel waking early in wintertime in a way I never did. It feels like waking up in my insomniac days, except that I’d still be able to sleep.
I still understand why others prefer this, and I don’t think there’s a solution that will please everyone. It’s just really strange to (potentially) get something I wanted for almost my entire adult life, just as I’ve had a change of heart.
Is this really all fueled by having to change your clocks?
The primary driver of your circadian rhythm is the hours of daylight. Left to their own devices, (ie literally excluding alarm clocks) humans wake up at sunrise. Daylight savings time is an attempt to make it easy for institutions to have canonical hours while also attempting to account for this essential fact about human physiology. It feels weird because it's optimizing two things simultaneously.
It's fueled by the exhaustion caused by monkeying with what time it is. It's not about circadian rhythms. It's about having to wake up an hour early and pretend that you got enough sleep, and for no good reason.
If the primary driver of our circadian rhythm is sunlight, switching from DST and back leads you to doing stuff an hour off from your body’s natural circadian rhythm.
It’s not about changing your clock. It’s about changing your body’s schedule.
The hour of sunlight is approximately sinusoidal. Changing time is approximating the sinusoid with a square wave. It's not as smooth as it could be, but smoothing it out would cause more accounting problems than it would solve. It is also easier to manage than having schools and businesses change their hours in winter, which is the other way to approach the solution. If you want a smoother transition you are fully in control of that.
Also, it'll give that privilege to everyone else who doesn't work standard 9-5- it helps those who work 8-4, and 7-3. It doesn't help 10-6ers, but those are almost universally office jobs (who generally tend to have the luxury of windows).
It's quite difficult to understand just how much no sun in the morning sucks until you've had to live through it. On Standard time only, you'll go down into the artificial-light-only place in the dark, and you'll come out of it in the dark, for half the year.
Switching permanently to DST means this sector of the population gets an opportunity to see the sun after work before it goes away even when the sun sets at what would normally be 3:30-4 PM. They aren't going to see the sun in the morning no matter what anyway; they're waking up in the dark even if DST is permanent.
Sure, people will complain about the purity of "but 12 means noon", but most of our modern systems of measure have no human-scale base units and everyone loves those, so there's no reason why time should be based on that either.
Permanent DST makes more sense as a lot more people are awake at 6pm vs. 6am.
From an optimization problem / energy conservation point-of-view we should try to place noon as close as possible to the midpoint of the population's wakefulness window.
Sunup and sundown are subjective. At "sunset" it's not pitch black out. Is sundown earlier if I'm in a neighborhood behind a hill?
I don't want to have to guess if a business will still open by the time I get there. I know that it's 6:15, it's a 22 minute drive, and the business closes at 7. I have no idea if "sundown" will have happened by the time I get there.
Many parks do this. It makes a ton of sense. IMO the best system for businesses that need rigid times would be to have separate winter and summer hours or just make the opening time <x> integer hours from sunrise.
Hear me out: Alternating Standard Time (AST). We take an hour from one day, then give it back the next. That way you get the glory of sleeping in every other day, it's perfect!
Unpopular opinion: I like DST switching just the way it is. I hate it when I finish work and it's already dark or it's still dark at like 7AM. It works well with the circadian rythm and all. I don't think the simplicity of permanent DST is worth it. If I had my way every month the time would shift to where 6 AM is the time the sun rises in that time zone. Our bodies and subconscious is tuned to sunlight in many ways.
How do you know people are different now? Shouldn't we learn from history and do something different this time around, like permanent standard time?
We did permanent standard time in the past too, and people didn't seem to have a problem with it. I think we should go with the option that society liked in the past, not the one they disliked.
I hear there was a time that we did some pretty messed up things in the US, and some people didn't seem to have a problem with it at the time. Doesn't sound so catchy right?
Society changes, people adapt. If there was not a strong desire, it wouldn't have passed unanimously.
I hear there were some huge mistakes the populace of Germany made. However, this time is different and the people of the US should accept no learnings from that situation. Is that right framing?
Straw man argument. It seems disingenuous to immediately bring up some of the most extreme and heinous behavior from our national history, in a discussion about time shifts.
The actions of legislators are not, in a practical sense, directly representative of the citizenry. Sure, some things end up going to popular vote, but some things are just proposed and passed with zero citizen input.
> If there was not a strong desire, it wouldn't have passed unanimously.
I don't think this has been thought through properly. Time changes are difficult to reason about, and DST is associated with the part of year when the sun is up for longer anyway. Everyone thinks "yay sunlight" without realizing what that really entails (waking up earlier relative to our internal clocks, which are set by the sunrise).
Hence why we should look at public sentiment at the time we actually implemented this.
Almost all scientists who study sleep say we should be doing permanent standard time, not permanent DST.
The New York Times article on the subject discusses some of the benefits:
> In one 2017 study[1] from Denmark, scientists analyzed a psychiatric database of more than 185,000 people from 1995 to 2012. They found that the fall transition to standard time was associated with an 11 percent increase in depressive episodes, an effect that took 10 weeks to dissipate. The spring switch, by contrast, had no similar effect.
> Retail and leisure industries have argued that more light in the evenings would give consumers more time to spend money, and proponents also argue that lighter evenings would translate to fewer robberies[2] and safer roads[3].
> In one 2017 study[1] from Denmark, scientists analyzed a psychiatric database of more than 185,000 people from 1995 to 2012. They found that the fall transition to standard time was associated with an 11 percent increase in depressive episodes, an effect that took 10 weeks to dissipate. The spring switch, by contrast, had no similar effect.
Yeah, I've seen that before, and I've always found it incredibly unconvincing. The thing about the fall is that there's also less sunlight in general, at any time of day, and DST won't change that. I'd be very curious to see a study conducted before/after temporary all-year DST in the 70s, although it probably doesn't exist.
In the winter of 1973-1974 I was carpooling to college, leaving the house about 6:30 to get to campus before 8. I could have done without the DST. It was imposed with the notion of saving energy after the oil shock. Did it really save energy, though?
It depends on what you are optimizing for and where you are optimizing for. Standard and Daylight times have different meanings in different sides of the time zone. On Eastern edges of a time zone Standard time truly is more "standard" with respect to solar noon. On Western edges of a time zone Daylight time starts to be more preferable and closer to solar noon. Half-hour between the two might favor the "middle" of the time zone perhaps and/or it might just leave all the populations on either side of the time zone unhappy.
Arguably our timezones have grown too wide to accommodate preferences of both edges. Our timezones were optimized for train schedules and full hour-wide zones made some sense based on the speed of train travel. Maybe instead of trying to pick just "Standard" Time or just Daylight Time we should instead be talking about narrowing our time zones (to half-hour wide, perhaps) and better figure out what geography we are best trying to represent versus solar noon, the center of a timezone, one edge or the other.
Historically time zones were the purview of cities. (Often it was the banks and/or churches in a city coordinating time for that city and its relation to solar noon.) It's why the IANA preferred timezone identifiers are cities like America/New_York, America/Mexico_City, Europe/Berlin, etc. Go back far enough in the IANA timezone database (which is used for all sorts of things on the internet and in general computing today) and you'll find all sorts of interesting historic timezone offsets for cities. Some not even to a round offset like 30 minutes, but to single minute or even fractional minute (seconds, milliseconds) offsets from UTC.
I don't know if a return to per-city offsets is the best idea. Software could handle a lot of the messy details for us in ways that the railroads could not have taken advantage of with only so much space for physical clocks. But a return to per-city offsets isn't really the worst idea either if we are looking at what problems Daylight Saving Time was supposed to solve and didn't solve very well.
As someone who has to schedule meetings with people in India, the half hour offset is really confusing and hard to get used to. Half the year is is 11.5 hours and the other 12.5 hours. I never remember which is which.
One negative would be you'd need to get the entire world on board. I mean, there are a handful of off-by-30 time zones in existence, but the rest of the world is in sync in that way.
India and Sri Lanka use a 30 minute offset (+5:30 all year round). So does part of Australia (Northern Territory is +9:30 year round, South Australia is +9:30 standard time and +10:30 daylight saving.) And one Canadian province (the most populated parts of Newfoundland and Labrador are on -3:30 standard time, -2:3 daylight saving.) It doesn't cause any of these places any major difficulty. If the US were to adopt 30 minute timezone offsets, I don't see how that would cause the US any major difficulty either. Probably would break some buggy software which was written for US domestic use only and assumes timezone offsets are hourly, but buggy software can be patched or replaced.
Also Nepal is UTC+5:45, and there is a sparsely populated region of Australia – around the settlement of Eucla, on the border between the states of Western Australia and South Australia – which unofficially observes UTC+8:45, although that is not its legal time zone.
Historically even weirder offsets have been used:
UTC-00:44 – Liberia, 1919–1972
UTC+04:51 – Bombay (now Mumbai), India, prior to 1955
UTC+05:40 – Nepal, 1921–1986
UTC+07:20 – daylight saving time in Malaya (now Malaysia's peninsular region) and Singapore, 1933–1941
But at least all of those were to the minute. In the past, some places have even used offsets to the second:
UTC-00:43:08 – Liberia, prior to 1919
UTC-00:25:21 – Ireland, 1880–1916
UTC+05:41:16 – Nepal, prior to 1920
Most software probably handles minute-based offsets correctly, even weird ones which aren't on the hour/half-hour/quarter-hour mark, but very little software would support seconds-based offsets. Prior to the introduction of standardised time zones, people used mean local solar time – which can be defined to as precise an accuracy as you'd like, down to the second, even the sub-second, provided you have a sufficiently accurate measurement of your location – and some early attempts at time zones just used the capital's local mean solar time down to the nearest second, hence the seconds-based offsets. Most clocks were not very accurate in those days, rendering the seconds-based offset largely theoretical. I doubt anybody is going to do that again.
The most crazy is of course the Netherlands between 1909 and 1937, with an offset of 19 minutes and 32.13 seconds (the tzdb excludes the .13 seconds as that's not supported). Not sure if there's been other timezones with subsecond definitions.
In December 1973, supposedly 80% of Americans favored DST through the winter, but this fell by fully half to 40% only three months later — during the DARKEST three months of the year? How does that make any sense? Americans then would rather that darkness begin at 5, BEFORE they can drive home?
Nonsense. Any statistic that counterintuitive bears much fuller explanation. It reeks of manipulation, such as a PR campaign by some social influencer of the day claiming to “protect our helpless little children brought to death's door by a wicked law obviously invented by Communists”.
However, if a greater context behind the story HAD been provided, it's likely there woyld be no story — just as there WAS no threat to schoolchildren. (Nor would there be any today, since nobody walks to school anymore.)
