I would vote for any Presidential Candidate and House Representative regardless of party on the promise of leaving the clocks on DST all year around. That's all they would have to do to get my vote....nothing else.
> […] the promise of leaving the clocks on DST all year around.
Which goes against the current scientific/medical consensus on the issue:
> As an international organization of scientists dedicated to studying circadian and other biological rhythms, the Society for Research on Biological Rhythms (SRBR) engaged experts in the field to write a Position Paper on the consequences of choosing to live on DST or Standard Time (ST). The authors take the position that, based on comparisons of large populations living in DST or ST or on western versus eastern edges of time zones, the advantages of permanent ST outweigh switching to DST annually or permanently.
American Academy of Sleep Medicine (with 36 footnotes if you want to dig further):
> It is the position of the AASM that the U.S. should eliminate seasonal time changes in favor of a national, fixed, year-round time. Current evidence best supports the adoption of year-round standard time, which aligns best with human circadian biology and provides distinct benefits for public health and safety.
I’d love to hear more about why this issue is more important to you than any other reason to vote. Is the time shift causing you serious problems, or do you have a business that is hurt by it, or anything like that?
Washington state has passed this, pending federal approval. For years, not knowing it had any real momentum, I made the case for it because our days get so short in the winter.
Having experienced a few life changes that have me more consistently waking earlier (most specifically having a puppy who wakes on a schedule of her own, and having developed sleep habit around that), I’m not so sure anymore. It was very very hard to get through the darkest months of this winter where my first couple waking hours felt more like bedtime than bedtime did.
I’m still open to the idea, but I’m a lot more sympathetic to the morning difficulties than I was before.
An issue with year around DST is that at latitudes were there isn't enough daylight to have both the morning commute and the evening commute in daylight it is generally better to have the morning commute be the one that gets the light based upon both weather and volume.
First, weather. In the cold months, when you have to worry about icy roads and fog, the worst time for those is in the morning. The coldest time of day is usually right around sunrise. A morning commute in darkness, or even shortly after sunrise, is before the ice has melted and the fog has cleared.
The evening commute comes after a day where the sun has been warming things. It is much more likely that the road conditions will be better by then.
Second, volume. People tend to head out to work or school or their first outside of the day during a narrower range of hours than when they come home.
A morning darkness commute then ends up combining the worst road conditions of the day with the most people on the roads. The evening commute usually has better road conditions and is spread out over more hours so traffic isn't as dense.
That's a really low bar for a political candidate to win your vote.
The cynic in me thinks that perhaps you don't deserve to vote after all.
I'm sure I will get downvoted by some / many HNers, but seriously... Do you honestly think that this is the right approach to use your right to vote, considering that many people in the past gave their life to give it to you?
Moving around what we call the hours of the day is a really stupid way to change habits.
Why not do this for other unit's of measurement? People travel at 70mph on highways, have accidents and die. Lets make 1 mile only 1200m instead of 1600m, now when the speed limit is 70mph, people will really be travelling at 84kph instead of 112kph, so less will die. It's utterly absurd. Just post a 50mph limit.
If you want people to start the day earlier at certain times of year, you just legislate that things start earlier at a certain time of year. For example schools and shops should be obliged to change their opening hours on that day.
I try to keep my sleep schedule so I wake up shortly after daybreak for exactly this reason. I love natural light and loath sleeping through it. I've considered writing an app that sets an alarm to sunset and a reminder 9 hours prior to sunset so I can always wake with the sun and have plenty of sleep. Should be pretty simple I just haven't gotten around to it.
(Though personally, I'd prefer it were a personal choice and not the random, sleep disrupting change that DST ends up being)
Same here, and I've also thought about writing the same app.
I've always wondered why our system of time is built around the point of "midnight", when what we really care about is "sunrise". DST is an ugly hack that we use on top of our midnight-based time system to roughly approximate a constant sunrise time.
Imagine if 00:00 was defined as the time that the sun rises. You could set your alarm to 00:00 and start work around 01:30 or 02:00 every day.
There'd be no need to worry about kids going to school in the dark, and the shift between summer and winter time would be continuous instead of an abrupt shift (so no more DST-induced heart attacks or traffic accidents). We now have computers that could do timezone conversions quickly and easily, and places like Iceland that go for months without seeing the sun could use an arbitrary point in time to represent sunrise.
Ancient societies have used systems of time that are based around the time of sunrise, e.g. the ancient Jews: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_hour. For whatever reason, we ended up with our midnight-based time system instead.
My single biggest frustration with excessive use of outdoor illumination at night is that it means I have to use blackout curtains to have a dark bedroom at night.
Without that, there would be absolutely no reason to even think about a technological solution for waking up with the sun.
I was gifted some Philips Hue lights a few years ago. I set one up on my nightstand to turn on at sunrise (actually earlier in the winter, sunrise is the latest I want it set to). It's a much more pleasant way to wake up (with it fading in over 10 minutes or so) than an actual alarm clock. Of course, it can't travel with you but it's not a bad option for the home.
I built a watch face for my Garmin that emphasizes the time relative to the next solar event, so right now it reads
(last solar event in small font) Sunset 19:17
(current date/time small) Mon 15 19:26
(relative time to next solar event in large) Dusk in 17
It tracks dawn, sunrise, solar noon, sunset, and dusk. It's pretty simple but has changed how I go about my day. I don't use an alarm to wake up, but I've learned that when it's 8 hours to dawn I should be getting in bed.
The problem is stores need to open at some specific time, and thus need employees to start work at that specific time. Adjusting either of those based on the sunrise every day wouldn't be very practical.
Isn’t it weird to think That the Vast majority Of people are so powerless over their own schedules that they need nationwide legislation to do what they want and enjoy their evenings?
I don’t have a point. It’s just kind of a funny thing to think about.
Society has dictated the majority of people’s lives for most of human history. Being able to control one’s schedule is the exception. In fact, even having eight hours of leisure wasn’t always a given in the US [0][1].
It is weird and a little funny to think about, and it's kind of true that many people are powerless in a way because of their job. But I'm not sure it's fair to paint this as people being completely powerless nor as some kind of issue where people believe in legislation over personal freedoms. I choose to keep my job, and I want my job to be happening at the same time that other people are working.
Our industrialized economies live on schedules. Business and work and school and even just social gatherings of any kind all need to agree on what time things will start and stop. Communication and transportation all depend on wide agreement about when people expect to be working.
There's legislation because society and the economy depends on when the workday happens, and because it's important that many businesses are on the same schedule, not because legislators care what you do with your evenings.
On those lines – if we as a society are going to accept this twice-yearly glitch in the matrix, it should be done in a humane way so as to enable humans to cope with a sudden change to their schedules. I'm thinking things like:
- Highway warning signs for 1 week before and after the sudden time change
- Speed limits are lowered on expressways for 2 weeks after the time change
- Businesses are not allowed to penalize workers for any lateness-related reason for up to 1 hour for 2 weeks after the time change
- Maybe even an extra Monday's holiday for Spring Forward! Holidays are notoriously scarce around this time of the year anyway.
...and so forth.
That's what I think is missing. I think most people can agree that it's a pretty fundamental change to circadian rhythm, essentially forcing everyone to go through a minor version of jet lag. What seems to be missing is the acknowledgement that this can be a big deal for some folks, and helping them adapt as a society.
> Isn’t it weird to think That the Vast majority Of people are so powerless over their own schedules that they need nationwide legislation to do what they want and enjoy their evenings?
Workplace democracy is not one of the values our country holds, unfortunately.
As I see it, in the summer there's plenty of daylight so it doesn't matter very much how you set your clock, but in the winter it does matter: children would be cycling to school in the dark if you moved the clocks forward (and they'd be cycling back from school in the dark if you moved the clocks back). Therefore, if you want to abolish the clock changes, which seems like an excellent idea to me, the safe and conservative way to do that is to use today's winter time all year round.
> Critics however claim that if adopted all year round, this would result in darker winter mornings which would be more dangerous for children going to school
This drives me bananas. If you're worried about this, the right answer is not to force everyone to change their clocks, it's to change the school schedule to start an hour later.
> The country follows the same DST schedule as most of Europe, setting the clocks forward one hour on the last Sunday in March and back again one hour on the last Sunday in October.
Didn't EU plan to cancel DST? It's long overdue to cancel this erratic switch everywhere.
Yeah, 2021 was planned to be the last time that clocks would be put forwards in March in Europe. Countries would then stay on Summer Time in October if that was their preference, not putting the clocks back. If a country had planned to stay on Winter Time they would put clocks back for the last time in October 2021. From then on no changes would be made in March/October.
Shame it's not happening now. Due to the pandemic the negotiations were not completed, so we'll still be doing the DST shuffle this year and again in 2022 at least. There's a danger this will fall off the political map and for Europe to continue the DST changes forever. There are several members that are against removing the clock changes too, others who cannot decide if summer or winter time is better (so may want to keep the status quo, rather than make a choice that half of the population won't like) so it isn't clear-cut.
How about this: we get rid of the time change, but have schools start an hour earlier march through october than november through february. Change the eraly bird parking hours at bart similarly.
Yes, the EU parliament passed a resolution to end DST 2021. Unfortunately, they didn't mandate a return to standard time along with it, leaving it open for countries to stay on permanent DST. But of course, a decision about this was never made - looking at the EU timezones, permanent DST basically has no place in the schema. The only non-chaotic alternative to DST would be standard time, but no such resolution has been made. Of course, Corona has made all of this even less of a priority. In this situation, the EU is doing something unexpected practical: ignore that resolution so far :)
Interestingly, the caption on the sundial is wrong! It seems the caption writer misread "IX" upside-down as "XI"; the sundial actually runs from 3am to 9pm (0300 to 2100), not 3am to 11pm (0300 to 2300) as claimed.
For those that want to make a permanent change, let's stop talking about "DST". That's too confusing for a lot of people, and results in many favoring the wrong outcome.
We should instead ask people if they want "summertime" or "wintertime" sunrise and sunset.
Wintertime proponents use the animosity against the time change to argue against DST, but they seldom mention this means an earlier sunset.
This comes down to whether you want to enjoy your time before work or after work. Early risers might prefer early sunrise, but business and leisure activities after work benefit from a later sunset.
> We should instead ask people if they want "summertime" or "wintertime" sunrise and sunset.
As a near Seattlite, this question makes it even more confusing. It doesn't matter what you do to the clock in winter, the sun is up for 8.5 hours, you can't have it up when you leave for work and when you get home for work; and if your commute is long enough, you won't see it from home at all; anyway, it's going to be cloudy so tough. In the summer, the sun is up for 16 hours; again you can do whatever you want with the clock, and the sun will be up.
I agree that 'daylight saving' time is misleading. DST status quo enjoyers say that of course they love the extra time in summer... when its obvious that you get that extra light in summer vs winter regardless of any clock changes. Long days in summer is what you get for free. The question is what we do with winter.
Do we intervene to increase the chance of an hour of light at the start or the end? I think there's a general agreement that starting and ending your day in the dark is rough. We can shift it either way.
It would be great to see some data about when people are more active (from fitbit and others). I suspect that many more people are active outside in the afternoon, including all kids sports, than would be using the morning light outdoors. A permanent DST would give people more chances to get out and exercise if nothing else and should be the norm.
I live near Seattle. It is NOT uncommon in the summer for the sun to still be relatively bright out relatively late at night; though the problem seems to mostly be summer, and DST is useless.
And there is a compromise to be had here... a one-time 30 minute change, and we’re done. There is strong consensus to eliminate the time change, but which time to choose as permanent seems quite divided. Compromise and let’s move on.
At this point, my time zone is pretty much entirely determined by my phone and computer. Why don’t we just line it up to be more natural? Over the month of March, spring two minutes forward each night at midnight. By the end of the month we’d be an hour different and nobody would even notice.
Maybe not exactly that, but it seems like a great opportunity for technology to enable standards to adapt to people’s needs rather than the other way around.
[+] [-] hourislate|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throw0101a|5 years ago|reply
Which goes against the current scientific/medical consensus on the issue:
> As an international organization of scientists dedicated to studying circadian and other biological rhythms, the Society for Research on Biological Rhythms (SRBR) engaged experts in the field to write a Position Paper on the consequences of choosing to live on DST or Standard Time (ST). The authors take the position that, based on comparisons of large populations living in DST or ST or on western versus eastern edges of time zones, the advantages of permanent ST outweigh switching to DST annually or permanently.
* https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/07487304198541...
American Academy of Sleep Medicine (with 36 footnotes if you want to dig further):
> It is the position of the AASM that the U.S. should eliminate seasonal time changes in favor of a national, fixed, year-round time. Current evidence best supports the adoption of year-round standard time, which aligns best with human circadian biology and provides distinct benefits for public health and safety.
* https://jcsm.aasm.org/doi/10.5664/jcsm.8780
* https://doi.org/10.5664/jcsm.8780
See my comment from a few days ago for more references:
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26416581
[+] [-] User23|5 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/us-tried-year-round-daylight...
[+] [-] dahart|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] philwelch|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eyelidlessness|5 years ago|reply
Having experienced a few life changes that have me more consistently waking earlier (most specifically having a puppy who wakes on a schedule of her own, and having developed sleep habit around that), I’m not so sure anymore. It was very very hard to get through the darkest months of this winter where my first couple waking hours felt more like bedtime than bedtime did.
I’m still open to the idea, but I’m a lot more sympathetic to the morning difficulties than I was before.
[+] [-] tzs|5 years ago|reply
First, weather. In the cold months, when you have to worry about icy roads and fog, the worst time for those is in the morning. The coldest time of day is usually right around sunrise. A morning commute in darkness, or even shortly after sunrise, is before the ice has melted and the fog has cleared.
The evening commute comes after a day where the sun has been warming things. It is much more likely that the road conditions will be better by then.
Second, volume. People tend to head out to work or school or their first outside of the day during a narrower range of hours than when they come home.
A morning darkness commute then ends up combining the worst road conditions of the day with the most people on the roads. The evening commute usually has better road conditions and is spread out over more hours so traffic isn't as dense.
[+] [-] simonebrunozzi|5 years ago|reply
That's a really low bar for a political candidate to win your vote.
The cynic in me thinks that perhaps you don't deserve to vote after all.
I'm sure I will get downvoted by some / many HNers, but seriously... Do you honestly think that this is the right approach to use your right to vote, considering that many people in the past gave their life to give it to you?
[+] [-] rjmunro|5 years ago|reply
Why not do this for other unit's of measurement? People travel at 70mph on highways, have accidents and die. Lets make 1 mile only 1200m instead of 1600m, now when the speed limit is 70mph, people will really be travelling at 84kph instead of 112kph, so less will die. It's utterly absurd. Just post a 50mph limit.
If you want people to start the day earlier at certain times of year, you just legislate that things start earlier at a certain time of year. For example schools and shops should be obliged to change their opening hours on that day.
[+] [-] thepete2|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asoneth|5 years ago|reply
Between the two, changing wall clocks seems like the simpler of the two options, but either is fine.
[+] [-] 6gvONxR4sf7o|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ogre_codes|5 years ago|reply
(Though personally, I'd prefer it were a personal choice and not the random, sleep disrupting change that DST ends up being)
[+] [-] quicklime|5 years ago|reply
I've always wondered why our system of time is built around the point of "midnight", when what we really care about is "sunrise". DST is an ugly hack that we use on top of our midnight-based time system to roughly approximate a constant sunrise time.
Imagine if 00:00 was defined as the time that the sun rises. You could set your alarm to 00:00 and start work around 01:30 or 02:00 every day.
There'd be no need to worry about kids going to school in the dark, and the shift between summer and winter time would be continuous instead of an abrupt shift (so no more DST-induced heart attacks or traffic accidents). We now have computers that could do timezone conversions quickly and easily, and places like Iceland that go for months without seeing the sun could use an arbitrary point in time to represent sunrise.
Ancient societies have used systems of time that are based around the time of sunrise, e.g. the ancient Jews: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_hour. For whatever reason, we ended up with our midnight-based time system instead.
[+] [-] mumblemumble|5 years ago|reply
Without that, there would be absolutely no reason to even think about a technological solution for waking up with the sun.
[+] [-] Jtsummers|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] willlma|5 years ago|reply
(last solar event in small font) Sunset 19:17
(current date/time small) Mon 15 19:26
(relative time to next solar event in large) Dusk in 17
It tracks dawn, sunrise, solar noon, sunset, and dusk. It's pretty simple but has changed how I go about my day. I don't use an alarm to wake up, but I've learned that when it's 8 hours to dawn I should be getting in bed.
[+] [-] Thorrez|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wikibob|5 years ago|reply
Would buy for $4.99.
[+] [-] mrfusion|5 years ago|reply
Isn’t it weird to think That the Vast majority Of people are so powerless over their own schedules that they need nationwide legislation to do what they want and enjoy their evenings?
I don’t have a point. It’s just kind of a funny thing to think about.
[+] [-] faitswulff|5 years ago|reply
[0]: http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/6645/
[1]: https://www.paunions.com/may-day-eight-hours-for-work-eight-...
[+] [-] cptskippy|5 years ago|reply
Imagine if businesses, trains, fairies, parks, etc all had summer and winter hours.
A simple glitch in the Matrix twice a year is preferable.
[+] [-] dahart|5 years ago|reply
Our industrialized economies live on schedules. Business and work and school and even just social gatherings of any kind all need to agree on what time things will start and stop. Communication and transportation all depend on wide agreement about when people expect to be working.
There's legislation because society and the economy depends on when the workday happens, and because it's important that many businesses are on the same schedule, not because legislators care what you do with your evenings.
[+] [-] quadrifoliate|5 years ago|reply
- Highway warning signs for 1 week before and after the sudden time change
- Speed limits are lowered on expressways for 2 weeks after the time change
- Businesses are not allowed to penalize workers for any lateness-related reason for up to 1 hour for 2 weeks after the time change
- Maybe even an extra Monday's holiday for Spring Forward! Holidays are notoriously scarce around this time of the year anyway.
...and so forth.
That's what I think is missing. I think most people can agree that it's a pretty fundamental change to circadian rhythm, essentially forcing everyone to go through a minor version of jet lag. What seems to be missing is the acknowledgement that this can be a big deal for some folks, and helping them adapt as a society.
[+] [-] heavyset_go|5 years ago|reply
Workplace democracy is not one of the values our country holds, unfortunately.
[+] [-] bloak|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lisper|5 years ago|reply
This drives me bananas. If you're worried about this, the right answer is not to force everyone to change their clocks, it's to change the school schedule to start an hour later.
[+] [-] shmerl|5 years ago|reply
Didn't EU plan to cancel DST? It's long overdue to cancel this erratic switch everywhere.
[+] [-] CannisterFlux|5 years ago|reply
Shame it's not happening now. Due to the pandemic the negotiations were not completed, so we'll still be doing the DST shuffle this year and again in 2022 at least. There's a danger this will fall off the political map and for Europe to continue the DST changes forever. There are several members that are against removing the clock changes too, others who cannot decide if summer or winter time is better (so may want to keep the status quo, rather than make a choice that half of the population won't like) so it isn't clear-cut.
[+] [-] gweinberg|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kshacker|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _ph_|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kleiba|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] exmadscientist|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] echelon|5 years ago|reply
We should instead ask people if they want "summertime" or "wintertime" sunrise and sunset.
Wintertime proponents use the animosity against the time change to argue against DST, but they seldom mention this means an earlier sunset.
This comes down to whether you want to enjoy your time before work or after work. Early risers might prefer early sunrise, but business and leisure activities after work benefit from a later sunset.
[+] [-] toast0|5 years ago|reply
As a near Seattlite, this question makes it even more confusing. It doesn't matter what you do to the clock in winter, the sun is up for 8.5 hours, you can't have it up when you leave for work and when you get home for work; and if your commute is long enough, you won't see it from home at all; anyway, it's going to be cloudy so tough. In the summer, the sun is up for 16 hours; again you can do whatever you want with the clock, and the sun will be up.
[+] [-] over_bridge|5 years ago|reply
Do we intervene to increase the chance of an hour of light at the start or the end? I think there's a general agreement that starting and ending your day in the dark is rough. We can shift it either way.
It would be great to see some data about when people are more active (from fitbit and others). I suspect that many more people are active outside in the afternoon, including all kids sports, than would be using the morning light outdoors. A permanent DST would give people more chances to get out and exercise if nothing else and should be the norm.
[+] [-] mjevans|5 years ago|reply
This website has a nice interactive graph that shows how obscene summer days are. https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/seattle
[+] [-] chrishas35|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eucryphia|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 6gvONxR4sf7o|5 years ago|reply
Maybe not exactly that, but it seems like a great opportunity for technology to enable standards to adapt to people’s needs rather than the other way around.