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.
> 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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
[+] [-] zeroimpl|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gutitout|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mdavis6890|4 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] metadat|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] notreallyserio|4 years ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] Wowfunhappy|4 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] eyelidlessness|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ouid|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] area51org|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thawaya3113|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] pc2g4d|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] culopatin|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rdtwo|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qball|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] area51org|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ehutch79|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aeternum|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jamesliudotcc|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tryptophan|4 years ago|reply
Wouldn't even need to check the time to see if it is open or not, you can just look outside.
Plus...we have the super advanced technology needed to figure out when sundown is on our smartphones!
[+] [-] notjustanymike|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mbg721|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] badrabbit|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JoeAltmaier|4 years ago|reply
It's the old tired refrain "We already tried that!* (*under different circumstances, at a different time, with a different generation)
[+] [-] Wowfunhappy|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] cafard|4 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] sschueller|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WorldMaker|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tedunangst|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] silisili|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scruffyherder|4 years ago|reply
Let it die already, trust me not having it is great.
[+] [-] randcraw|4 years ago|reply
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.)
Now THIS is news I can’t use.
[+] [-] interestica|4 years ago|reply
There would be no difference here if the article said: "The US Tried Permanent Daylight Saving Time in the ’70s. People Loved It"
Both imply (some) people. Both would (technically) be correct. A story could be squeezed out of either. Bad writing.