No... make daylight savings time permanent instead.
As the paper states, the biggest problem is with the transition.
The paper also argues that standard time aligns more naturally with our circadian rhythm... but doesn't bother to compare that with the psychological benefit we get from hanging out with friends in daylight after work in the summer, or the psychological benefit of it not being dark when you go home and have dinner with your family.
I totally get that people who wake up early in the winter prefer standard time... but it really seems that for the population as a whole, permanent DST is the better option. And implementing it is so easy: once we're already in DST in the summer... you just never "fall back" to standard in the fall.
I find it really funny that a lot of people are supporting keeping DST. Basically, we wanted to sleep in so we started to shift our work time from 6 to 7, then to 8 and now we start work at 9. Then we realized that we have no time in the evening so let's shift the clock so that 7 o'clock is actually earlier.
At normal time, on an equinox the night is from 6 in the evening to 6 in the morning and midnight is actually in the middle of the night. With DST it's from 7 to 7 and midnight is at 1. So keeping DST basically means you are shifting to a different "non-natural" time zone.
Let's just stop the DST keeping the natural local time and get up earlier anyway.
> but it really seems that for the population as a whole
Our society is calibrated with the assumption that you will wake up early. Early bird gets the worm and all that, but everything is essentially rigged toward it. From the time/daylight, to school start time, going by quiet hours (hope you enjoy jack hammers starting at 7am stats, because by most city's ordinance, that's not only allowed, it's NORMAL. And to start at 7, the trucks and crew have to start getting ready long before that).
I assume a large part of it is the emphasis on family and kids, and generally for people with young children, early morning isn't really early.
But for a lot of people...ouch.
Considering all the literature around the issues related to sleep deprivation, and how so many people are sleep deprived (likely related to a lot of mental issues, stress, and various other health problems), we really need to work and optimize around making it possible for people to sleep enough. As things are, if you can, it's just dumb luck.
People here must think of time very differently than I do, because this sounds like a strange idea to me. Consider if daylight saving time did not exist and you wanted to do things earlier or later. Wouldn't you suggest they be done earlier or later? You would not suggest moving the hours of the day ... right?
I'm torn on this one. At the latitude where I live (northern Illinois), I both appreciate it staying light past 5pm in the winter, and would appreciate it staying dark past 5am in the summer.
But I also spend some time further north, in northern Michigan, and there I'd sure be annoyed if the sun were still up at 10pm in the summer. And might be willing to accept a 4pm winter sunset in order to have the sun up before 8am - that far north, you won't be out much in the evening in the middle of winter, anyway, and shoveling the sidewalk before sunrise is just depressing.
Then I realize that this is all kind of beating around the bush, and what I'd really like is an end to the USA's ridiculous culture of 9 hour work days and eating at one's desk, so that I could take a long lunch and use that to get my sunlight in winter.
So, meh, I think that I really don't care between permanent standard and permanent daylight time, I just want to get rid of the changing.
If we want to win this fight and keep DST year round, we need to get rid of the confusing "DST" moniker. Most people are entirely unaware of which is which, and they are focused on the time change aspect.
We should phrase the battle as "Keep summer daylight" and "abolish winter early sunset".
In the winter, though, in more northern latitudes that would mean going to work or school while it is still very dark out.
If you can only have one of morning and evening in light, morning is probably more important for a couple reasons even ignoring the circadian rhythm considerations.
1. We are more synchronized in morning. In morning you have adults going to work and kids going to school. We are much less synchronized in the evening--young kids come home earliest, then middle and high school kids, then adults. Furthermore, more people stay late at work than go in early to work, so you get further spreading out of the commute home.
With the morning getting heavier, more concentrated traffic, it makes sense to prioritize giving it the light.
2. The morning before the sun comes up tends to be the coldest time of the day. You are much more likely to have icy roads during a predawn commute than during a postdusk commute, further bolstering the case for prioritizing standard time over daylight savings time during winter.
You want to look at Indiana. Until recently they were on standard permanent time. Parts of the state were on central time and parts on Eastern.
If you want to compare the effect of permanent daylight vs permanent standard then just look at cities near the boundary. Drive a few miles away and voila you're 1 hour ahead or behind - throughout the year.
If one is better than the other, it will show up there.
Summery from what I posted in a long top level comment:
- Permanent summer time would have negative biological consequences for everyone having social yet lack, i.e. everyone who frequently stands up earlier then their inner clock indicated. I.e. people who tend to stand up late.
- This is soundly researched.
- The exact degree of how bad the consequences of permanent summer time are unknown and hard to say as they are long term effect, BUT only <2% of people (in Germany) have a negative yet lack while much more have a positive yet lack because of this it's generally better to opt for permanent winter time then summer time
> As the paper states, the biggest problem is with the transition.
It does? I only read the abstract because trying to download the PDF says it's embargoed.
The abstract says that (1) the transition creates "significant" risks and (2) "remaining in daylight saving time year-round ... could result in circadian misalignment ... [and] increased cardiovascular disease risk, metabolic syndrome and other health risks".
I don't see anything in there that says 1 or 2 is a bigger or smaller problem.
When I go camping my body almost immediately reverts to a more primitive cycle of waking up immediately at dawn and going to sleep at sunset. Takes about 3-4 days.
It's just so much better psychologically and physiologically but it's also amazingly practical. I don't need a flashlight and the BEST time to hike and be active is dawn and dusk when it's cooler.
I'll even start taking naps in the middle of the day the same way other large animals do (bears, deer, etc).
"but doesn't bother to compare that with the psychological benefit we get from hanging out with friends in daylight after work in the summer, or the psychological benefit of it not being dark when you go home and have dinner with your family."
We have lights. We use them on warm autumn days with friends and family and when folks are sitting around outside playing cards late into the evening. I'm not convinced daylight is needed to enjoy time with friends and family. Sure, you might enjoy it, but it isn't exactly a deal-breaker.
And no, I don't get that "not being dark when I go home". I'm in Noway, and if you work first shift - or heck, even business hours - you'll only see sun in December on your lunch break. Again, though, we have lights, and they are a pretty wonderful thing. Outdoor heating and blankets extend outside time too.
Not just that, but folks with a later rhythm are going to suffer more. I'm going to guess especially teenagers (in general) will suffer, as doctors already complain that school is too early: Permanent summer time pushes it an hour earlier.
I don't want children to have to travel to or from school in the dark. It's dangerous by bicycle (a lot of children cycle), and unpleasant in any case. If you're at a reasonably high latitude that means you need the middle of the school day to be around local noon in the winter. Round here, in the UK, school days typically run from a bit before 09:00 to a bit after 15:00. So something close to astronomical local time would be a good choice of time zone.
You could move the time zone three hours and at the same time change school hours by three hours, but what would be the point of that?
School hours is the main thing that isn't flexible. Office hours vary. Shops can easily be flexible. There's the stock exchange, I suppose, but most people don't interact with that.
So the obvious thing to do is to abolish summer time and leave winter time as it is.
Most people seem to have missed that this association of experts in _sleep_ are saying it is better for us to have solar noon and official noon more closely aligned. It's not a popular position, but overall I think it would be better for us to move to standard time permanently and shift our society to accommodate the _sun_ rather than pretending it isn't there.
At my previous job we were discussing this, I think because it was up for a vote in California. My friend's argument was that children would be walking to school in the dark and more would end up getting hit by cars. It was really funny to me that we won't consider that our school schedules are stupid, or that our driving requirements or vehicles are somehow inadequate, but no, in fact it is time that is wrong.
Just wanted to say that here in the EU we have voted to abolish time changing, with the countries deciding if they want to stick with the summer time or winter time. https://ec.europa.eu/transport/themes/summertime_en
> On 26 March 2019, the European Parliament adopted its position on the Commission proposal, supporting a stop to the seasonal clock changes by 2021. The Council has not yet finalised its position.
It’s not done yet. The process was handled a bit amateurishly unfortunately, which resulted in delays and push back.
I don't think we did. The European Commission held a non-representative (e.g. Germans were overrepresented) poll that said people prefer abolishing it.
Which is fine: not every decision needs to be voted on. But we shouldn't fool ourselves that it was a democratic process either.
It was a crappy Internet poll (brigaded like all Internet polls), with extremely closed and loaded questions on top of that.
Cherry on the cake, the EU server crashed when I tried to validate my answers and comment, so they never got my opinion... Not like they cared anyway, since they had put the answer they wanted to get, in the question.
I'm not holding my breath for the implementation of this decision. After the public poll, politicians quickly claimed to want to implement this right away. Just to descend into the usual inability to decide upon anything (who wants which time zone, how do we align neighbouring timezones, do we want a timezone-difference between France and Germany (that geographically should be there, etc) that is characteristic for the EU.
My prediction is that the abolition will be delayed for another 7 or 8 years, after which they will just decide to drop the matter since "it's already a decade old".
The natural change in daylight hours is pretty sudden, actually. Either sunrise or noon (or both) have to move. DST is a compromise to keep them from moving too much. But sunrise is a more important time than noon.
So I've proposed something I call Sunrise Standard Time. It abolishes DST and splits the 24 primary longitudinal time zones into as many as 120 zones by cutting at the tropics and polar circles. Clocks adjust gradually each day to keep sunrise near 6am. The tropics would follow sunrise at the equator, and the temperate zones (between the tropics and polar circles) would follow sunrise at ~ 30deg N or S. That adjustment is about 1 minute per day.
To refine things slightly, sunrise can be fixed at the latitude which divides the population in half in each zone (with the constraint that the N and S zones are mirrored). Those latitudes are approximately: 13.5deg for the tropical zone, 34.5deg for the temperate zones, and 68.5deg for all 2 million people living in the polar zones.
A further refinement is to split the per-capita sunrise aberration instead. This pushes the boundaries to slightly higher latitudes. For the temperate zones, the minimum per-capita offset of sunrise from 6am on the solstice is achieved by following sunrise at 37.5deg. That's pretty close to Washington DC (39deg), Beijing (40deg), and Tokyo (36deg).
I suggest the tropics use the equator for simplicity.
SST will improve sun tracking for the vast majority of the world's population with no sudden changes. It will also be easier to understand than DST. There are no dates to remember and, because the N and S zones are mirrors, it's easy for someone in e.g. New York to understand what's going on in Sydney.
I would rather just not use clocks than do this. Yes, it would be "better" if we shifted clocks every day, but that's not practical for mechanical clocks.
You may could get away with monthly realignment, but even with that I hate setting my watch even twice a year and I imagine others would too.
Many (most?) people can remember a few time zone offsets (ie, EST -> PST = 3). From a practical and business standpoint, I don't see the current system changing, at least not by more than a small amount.
> just let people figure out sleep patterns that work the best for them, do we really need a national law around this?
We do. It's already essentially dictated (at the city level)
Every city I've lived in have quiet hours of 11pm to 7am. If your neighbors are assholes, unless they're REALLY pushing it, there's fuck all you can do until 11 (and even by 11, good luck having anyone to anything about it). If there's construction in your area, it will start at 7 on the dot (and often earlier, because again, good luck getting someone to enforce this strictly).
If you need 8 hours of sleep (and that's in the middle. Teens can need even more), you have to be in bed precisely at 11 (when the loud music stops) and be ready to go at precisely 7am (when the jack hammers start). Hope your cycle matches that, you fall asleep instantly, and you're not on the upper bound of sleep requirements. Else move in the wood or get fucked.
If that's not an issue for you, you're quite lucky and privileged to either have great neighbors, or have been blessed by mother nature. Alternatively you're in sleep withdrawal and running at a fraction of your full potential and think its normal.
I wonder what the logistical challenges would be to adding an hour of actual daylight to a medium-sized U.S. city around dusk by means of orbital mirrors?
Sunlight irradiance is about 1000 watts per square meter if the sun is straight up. We'll say that a city center is about 10 square km, and that 300 watts per square meter is an acceptable afternoon-evening light level. So, if I did the math right, that's 3 billion watts if we wanted to illuminate electrically with 100% efficient bulbs, or 3 million kwhs to provide one evening of light, which would be $300,000 per night at 10 cents per kwh.
On the other hand, a giant sheet of mylar in space, correctly positioned, might have a similar effect with no recurring energy cost. I imagine the orbital mechanics and optics situation would be challenging, but could at least be fun and interesting to talk about.
I don't see a mention of the spike in accidents directly attributable to DST anywhere in this post on HN. I recently read "Why we sleep"[0] and there's a fascinating section on the spike in accidents following the shift in timings. I can't quite find the exact article but this[1] study showed a 6.3% increase in number of _fatal_ accidents in the 6-day period after DST kicks in compared to (presumably) other days. And this was consistent over a 10-year period!
I'm generally in favor of keeping DST permanent, as others have said.
But if you wanted to make it more consistent and strike a balance, would it make more sense to flip the adjustments? Pull back on the nighttime daylight during summer, and add to it during winter.
In NYC during summer it would get dark around 7pm, and in winter around 5:30pm... instead of 8pm and 4:30pm like we have now.
I don't care which we pick but I personally find a centrally managed shift in everyone's daily rhythm twice a year highly draconian, i have the somewhat luxury that I don't really need to shift my sleeping pattern immediately but it's highly disruptive to have to shift my daily routines.
- Have clocks at home which automatically sync the clock.
I wonder if we can just split the one large change of 1h to 6 smaller changes of each 10 minutes spaced apart by a week or two.
I guess people with traditional wristband clocks or similar would be really annoyed by it.
But then if you forget you are only 10min late/early ;)
(which yes might be fatal if you miss a train or so).
Anyway research shows that permanent summer time would have bad biological consequences especially for people with a social jet lack, i.e. people which need to stand up before their inner clock likes it.
Ironically this tend to also be the people which often favor permanent summer time as it allows them to better use the reduced sunlight time in winter. Except that this has a very good chance of making their social yet lack worse. Which can have all kind of negative health effect from reduced mental capacity over mode swings to overweight (or at least correlates with such negative effect, and I know correlation is not causation).
My point is kind of off-topic, but as a financial analyst, I really want every country to stop using DST.
It is such a hustle to cope with financial tick data taking DST into consideration...
If you focus on only one country, it is not a major problem. However, when you start looking at various markets (e.g. London, U.S., Japan etc) at the same time, things get crazy...
I would love to see a new standard of time that talks about sunrise+1hr instead of artificially moving our antiquated wall clocks around. We have enough technology to make it happen and what we really care about is when the Sun comes up on a particular part of the globe anyway.
The whole time zone + offset is such an antique way of looking at things.
Like many others, I agree with summer time year-round; but oppose staying on wintertime year-round. This is a trade-off between time at work/school versus free time, socialization time, outdoor leisure activities, etc., and how the two categories split the limited resource of daylight.
Can we just all go UTC and be done with this nonsense? Let organizations change their hours throughout the year. People would get used to the cycle fast enough, you know, after they're done killing people like me who think this is a good idea.
Right on. We live in Arizona where daylight savings time is not implemented. Much nicer and there is not time transition twice a year.
Off topic, but monitoring your sleep can serve as a training resource for improving sleep. My wife and I allow our AppleWatches to share sleep data with our iPhones (data never leaves the watch/phone, never goes to the cloud). My sleep is so much better now because I have learned habits that improve my sleep metrics. Recommended.
Next: make the actual time where you are located closer to the actual solar time instead of being several hours off (plus or minus) versus the actual solar time.
[+] [-] crazygringo|5 years ago|reply
As the paper states, the biggest problem is with the transition.
The paper also argues that standard time aligns more naturally with our circadian rhythm... but doesn't bother to compare that with the psychological benefit we get from hanging out with friends in daylight after work in the summer, or the psychological benefit of it not being dark when you go home and have dinner with your family.
I totally get that people who wake up early in the winter prefer standard time... but it really seems that for the population as a whole, permanent DST is the better option. And implementing it is so easy: once we're already in DST in the summer... you just never "fall back" to standard in the fall.
[+] [-] prerok|5 years ago|reply
At normal time, on an equinox the night is from 6 in the evening to 6 in the morning and midnight is actually in the middle of the night. With DST it's from 7 to 7 and midnight is at 1. So keeping DST basically means you are shifting to a different "non-natural" time zone.
Let's just stop the DST keeping the natural local time and get up earlier anyway.
[+] [-] shados|5 years ago|reply
Our society is calibrated with the assumption that you will wake up early. Early bird gets the worm and all that, but everything is essentially rigged toward it. From the time/daylight, to school start time, going by quiet hours (hope you enjoy jack hammers starting at 7am stats, because by most city's ordinance, that's not only allowed, it's NORMAL. And to start at 7, the trucks and crew have to start getting ready long before that).
I assume a large part of it is the emphasis on family and kids, and generally for people with young children, early morning isn't really early.
But for a lot of people...ouch.
Considering all the literature around the issues related to sleep deprivation, and how so many people are sleep deprived (likely related to a lot of mental issues, stress, and various other health problems), we really need to work and optimize around making it possible for people to sleep enough. As things are, if you can, it's just dumb luck.
[+] [-] amunir|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mumblemumble|5 years ago|reply
But I also spend some time further north, in northern Michigan, and there I'd sure be annoyed if the sun were still up at 10pm in the summer. And might be willing to accept a 4pm winter sunset in order to have the sun up before 8am - that far north, you won't be out much in the evening in the middle of winter, anyway, and shoveling the sidewalk before sunrise is just depressing.
Then I realize that this is all kind of beating around the bush, and what I'd really like is an end to the USA's ridiculous culture of 9 hour work days and eating at one's desk, so that I could take a long lunch and use that to get my sunlight in winter.
So, meh, I think that I really don't care between permanent standard and permanent daylight time, I just want to get rid of the changing.
[+] [-] echelon|5 years ago|reply
We should phrase the battle as "Keep summer daylight" and "abolish winter early sunset".
It's imperative that we spin it this way.
[+] [-] tzs|5 years ago|reply
If you can only have one of morning and evening in light, morning is probably more important for a couple reasons even ignoring the circadian rhythm considerations.
1. We are more synchronized in morning. In morning you have adults going to work and kids going to school. We are much less synchronized in the evening--young kids come home earliest, then middle and high school kids, then adults. Furthermore, more people stay late at work than go in early to work, so you get further spreading out of the commute home.
With the morning getting heavier, more concentrated traffic, it makes sense to prioritize giving it the light.
2. The morning before the sun comes up tends to be the coldest time of the day. You are much more likely to have icy roads during a predawn commute than during a postdusk commute, further bolstering the case for prioritizing standard time over daylight savings time during winter.
[+] [-] buzzy_hacker|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mjevans|5 years ago|reply
Shifting IS the worst. Heck even the orbital tilt changing the length of daylight in semi-northern latitudes is icky.
[+] [-] BeetleB|5 years ago|reply
If you want to compare the effect of permanent daylight vs permanent standard then just look at cities near the boundary. Drive a few miles away and voila you're 1 hour ahead or behind - throughout the year.
If one is better than the other, it will show up there.
[+] [-] dathinab|5 years ago|reply
- Permanent summer time would have negative biological consequences for everyone having social yet lack, i.e. everyone who frequently stands up earlier then their inner clock indicated. I.e. people who tend to stand up late.
- This is soundly researched.
- The exact degree of how bad the consequences of permanent summer time are unknown and hard to say as they are long term effect, BUT only <2% of people (in Germany) have a negative yet lack while much more have a positive yet lack because of this it's generally better to opt for permanent winter time then summer time
[+] [-] adrianmonk|5 years ago|reply
It does? I only read the abstract because trying to download the PDF says it's embargoed.
The abstract says that (1) the transition creates "significant" risks and (2) "remaining in daylight saving time year-round ... could result in circadian misalignment ... [and] increased cardiovascular disease risk, metabolic syndrome and other health risks".
I don't see anything in there that says 1 or 2 is a bigger or smaller problem.
[+] [-] burtonator|5 years ago|reply
It's just so much better psychologically and physiologically but it's also amazingly practical. I don't need a flashlight and the BEST time to hike and be active is dawn and dusk when it's cooler.
I'll even start taking naps in the middle of the day the same way other large animals do (bears, deer, etc).
[+] [-] Broken_Hippo|5 years ago|reply
We have lights. We use them on warm autumn days with friends and family and when folks are sitting around outside playing cards late into the evening. I'm not convinced daylight is needed to enjoy time with friends and family. Sure, you might enjoy it, but it isn't exactly a deal-breaker.
And no, I don't get that "not being dark when I go home". I'm in Noway, and if you work first shift - or heck, even business hours - you'll only see sun in December on your lunch break. Again, though, we have lights, and they are a pretty wonderful thing. Outdoor heating and blankets extend outside time too.
Not just that, but folks with a later rhythm are going to suffer more. I'm going to guess especially teenagers (in general) will suffer, as doctors already complain that school is too early: Permanent summer time pushes it an hour earlier.
[+] [-] bloak|5 years ago|reply
You could move the time zone three hours and at the same time change school hours by three hours, but what would be the point of that?
School hours is the main thing that isn't flexible. Office hours vary. Shops can easily be flexible. There's the stock exchange, I suppose, but most people don't interact with that.
So the obvious thing to do is to abolish summer time and leave winter time as it is.
[+] [-] pc2g4d|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] carom|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] monadic2|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrg2k8|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dgellow|5 years ago|reply
It’s not done yet. The process was handled a bit amateurishly unfortunately, which resulted in delays and push back.
[+] [-] Vinnl|5 years ago|reply
Which is fine: not every decision needs to be voted on. But we shouldn't fool ourselves that it was a democratic process either.
[+] [-] wott|5 years ago|reply
No we didn't.
It was a crappy Internet poll (brigaded like all Internet polls), with extremely closed and loaded questions on top of that.
Cherry on the cake, the EU server crashed when I tried to validate my answers and comment, so they never got my opinion... Not like they cared anyway, since they had put the answer they wanted to get, in the question.
[+] [-] corty|5 years ago|reply
My prediction is that the abolition will be delayed for another 7 or 8 years, after which they will just decide to drop the matter since "it's already a decade old".
[+] [-] tobyhinloopen|5 years ago|reply
Also most votes were from a small set of countries. I was never given notice of a vote.
[+] [-] ginko|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dudeinjapan|5 years ago|reply
Imagine all the people... using UTC.
You--ooh--ooh-ooh-ooh
You may say I'm dreamer. Because I set my alarm wrong. I hope someday you will join us. And the world will live as one.
[+] [-] idbehold|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ifdefdebug|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beefman|5 years ago|reply
So I've proposed something I call Sunrise Standard Time. It abolishes DST and splits the 24 primary longitudinal time zones into as many as 120 zones by cutting at the tropics and polar circles. Clocks adjust gradually each day to keep sunrise near 6am. The tropics would follow sunrise at the equator, and the temperate zones (between the tropics and polar circles) would follow sunrise at ~ 30deg N or S. That adjustment is about 1 minute per day.
To refine things slightly, sunrise can be fixed at the latitude which divides the population in half in each zone (with the constraint that the N and S zones are mirrored). Those latitudes are approximately: 13.5deg for the tropical zone, 34.5deg for the temperate zones, and 68.5deg for all 2 million people living in the polar zones.
A further refinement is to split the per-capita sunrise aberration instead. This pushes the boundaries to slightly higher latitudes. For the temperate zones, the minimum per-capita offset of sunrise from 6am on the solstice is achieved by following sunrise at 37.5deg. That's pretty close to Washington DC (39deg), Beijing (40deg), and Tokyo (36deg).
I suggest the tropics use the equator for simplicity.
SST will improve sun tracking for the vast majority of the world's population with no sudden changes. It will also be easier to understand than DST. There are no dates to remember and, because the N and S zones are mirrors, it's easy for someone in e.g. New York to understand what's going on in Sydney.
Supporting links:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e1/Hours_of...
http://world.andersen.im/
[+] [-] thdrdt|5 years ago|reply
While your idea might be very good, this is the reason why it won't be used. Nobody is going to be happy to adjust their analog clock every day.
[+] [-] wjsetzer|5 years ago|reply
You may could get away with monthly realignment, but even with that I hate setting my watch even twice a year and I imagine others would too.
[+] [-] jhardy54|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beezle|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] idoh|5 years ago|reply
A - with kids it was super annoying having to deal with this
B - noon is defined as when the sun is at the highest point in the sky (with allowance for timezones), simple
C - just let people figure out sleep patterns that work the best for them, do we really need a national law around this?
[+] [-] shados|5 years ago|reply
We do. It's already essentially dictated (at the city level)
Every city I've lived in have quiet hours of 11pm to 7am. If your neighbors are assholes, unless they're REALLY pushing it, there's fuck all you can do until 11 (and even by 11, good luck having anyone to anything about it). If there's construction in your area, it will start at 7 on the dot (and often earlier, because again, good luck getting someone to enforce this strictly).
If you need 8 hours of sleep (and that's in the middle. Teens can need even more), you have to be in bed precisely at 11 (when the loud music stops) and be ready to go at precisely 7am (when the jack hammers start). Hope your cycle matches that, you fall asleep instantly, and you're not on the upper bound of sleep requirements. Else move in the wood or get fucked.
If that's not an issue for you, you're quite lucky and privileged to either have great neighbors, or have been blessed by mother nature. Alternatively you're in sleep withdrawal and running at a fraction of your full potential and think its normal.
[+] [-] tkzed49|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elihu|5 years ago|reply
Sunlight irradiance is about 1000 watts per square meter if the sun is straight up. We'll say that a city center is about 10 square km, and that 300 watts per square meter is an acceptable afternoon-evening light level. So, if I did the math right, that's 3 billion watts if we wanted to illuminate electrically with 100% efficient bulbs, or 3 million kwhs to provide one evening of light, which would be $300,000 per night at 10 cents per kwh.
On the other hand, a giant sheet of mylar in space, correctly positioned, might have a similar effect with no recurring energy cost. I imagine the orbital mechanics and optics situation would be challenging, but could at least be fun and interesting to talk about.
[+] [-] vmurthy|5 years ago|reply
So... given the pros and cons(especially around health and safety) .. what would be your answer? :) [0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34466963-why-we-sleep
[1] https://cars.usnews.com/cars-trucks/does-daylight-saving-tim...
[+] [-] jlos|5 years ago|reply
I don't care which we pick, I just don't want to flip my (and my kids) schedule every 6 months
[+] [-] robbiemitchell|5 years ago|reply
But if you wanted to make it more consistent and strike a balance, would it make more sense to flip the adjustments? Pull back on the nighttime daylight during summer, and add to it during winter.
In NYC during summer it would get dark around 7pm, and in winter around 5:30pm... instead of 8pm and 4:30pm like we have now.
[+] [-] Guthur|5 years ago|reply
So yes please let's all stop this archaic ritual.
[+] [-] vyrotek|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dathinab|5 years ago|reply
- Use smartphones as a primary (or major) clock
- Have clocks at home which automatically sync the clock.
I wonder if we can just split the one large change of 1h to 6 smaller changes of each 10 minutes spaced apart by a week or two.
I guess people with traditional wristband clocks or similar would be really annoyed by it.
But then if you forget you are only 10min late/early ;) (which yes might be fatal if you miss a train or so).
Anyway research shows that permanent summer time would have bad biological consequences especially for people with a social jet lack, i.e. people which need to stand up before their inner clock likes it.
Ironically this tend to also be the people which often favor permanent summer time as it allows them to better use the reduced sunlight time in winter. Except that this has a very good chance of making their social yet lack worse. Which can have all kind of negative health effect from reduced mental capacity over mode swings to overweight (or at least correlates with such negative effect, and I know correlation is not causation).
[+] [-] warabe|5 years ago|reply
It is such a hustle to cope with financial tick data taking DST into consideration... If you focus on only one country, it is not a major problem. However, when you start looking at various markets (e.g. London, U.S., Japan etc) at the same time, things get crazy...
[+] [-] imoverclocked|5 years ago|reply
The whole time zone + offset is such an antique way of looking at things.
[+] [-] kylecordes|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jader201|5 years ago|reply
Repeat for all 365 days.
[+] [-] dexterdog|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mark_l_watson|5 years ago|reply
Off topic, but monitoring your sleep can serve as a training resource for improving sleep. My wife and I allow our AppleWatches to share sleep data with our iPhones (data never leaves the watch/phone, never goes to the cloud). My sleep is so much better now because I have learned habits that improve my sleep metrics. Recommended.
[+] [-] ekianjo|5 years ago|reply