Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time • Hacker News Board

Re: Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time

#51

Post by rootusrootus » Sat, Oct 31, 2020, 2:18 PM UTC

ReptileMan wrote: post #42

In the article is missing how many percentages of people are bothered. Since the benefits for the rest are quite big. Since 8 hour jet lag requires only a night worst case two of sleep to adapt, why is this 1 hour such a big deal.

> Since 8 hour jet lag requires only a night worst case two of sleep to adapt

Science says it's more like 1 day for every hour of shift. I agree that when I shift 12.5 hours to go to India the worst effects are over after a few days, but I don't get back to a normal pattern until two weeks later as I return home.

Re: Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time

#52

Post by bostonpete » Sat, Oct 31, 2020, 2:19 PM UTC

kingaillas wrote: post #24

laurent92 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is natural that work is shifted towards the morning and people have time after work in the evening for personal matters. People do what is most important in the morning, because we can focus better. Therefore worktimes need to follow the sunrise, especially beyond 45° latitudes where the sunrise shifts by more than 3 hrs between winter and summer.

But why the changing of clock settings? Could have just shown up earlier to follow the sunrise?

Work schedules are often tied to all sorts of other schedules that limit flexibility -- things like school schedules, stock market or customer hours, published hours for retail or government offices, etc. If there's a practical benefit to schedule adjustment (and there is at certain latitudes), it can often only be realized by many if society as a whole shifts.

Re: Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time

#53

Post by palmanis » Sat, Oct 31, 2020, 2:19 PM UTC

with teams split across US and Asia, the time overlap time they get i.e. US morning and Asia evening is very important to keep things going. This becomes very challenging especially in evenings where for developers sitting in Asia either you lose 1 hour of that time or sit late and mostly it is the latter what happens. So even without a country having DST, this is severely disruptive to a very large community of people and their quality of life across the world.

Re: Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time

#54

Post by nogabebop23 » Sat, Oct 31, 2020, 2:23 PM UTC

randomdata wrote: post #41

Jaruzel wrote: post #16

This article has a very city-centric view. Rural communities, and farming very much prefer having DST. Every time removing DST has been postulated in the UK, it is the rural areas that object the most.

As a grain farmer I cannot imagine what kind of farmer is worried about the wall clock. For us, the only thing that determines if we work or not is the weather. Maybe the only advantage I have noticed is that the parts dealership is open an hour later if we have a breakdown. However, we're also not yet done for the year and won't be before we go back to standard time, so that falls apart for our late season work anyw…

>> Only ~2% of the population are farmers, so even if they did all object the 98% wouldn't care and move forward anyway.

In Canada I think it's about 3% but they are a Very vocal political group and punch beyond their absolute numbers.

Re: Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time

#55

Post by lprd » Sat, Oct 31, 2020, 2:25 PM UTC

MauranKilom wrote: post #39

lprd wrote: post #14

Good! Matt Walker has a very interesting Ted talk on sleep and also mentions the negative affects that DST has on society: https://www.ted.com/talks/matt_walker_sleep_is_your_superpow...

Note that Matt Walker has fallen from grace, at least on HN. His book "Why we sleep" used to be widely recommended around here, but there appear to be very serious scientific shortcomings affecting some of the information he presents. See e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21546850 That is not to say he's wrong on every count, but take what he says with a huge grain of "might have been invented/fudged and then…

I wasn't aware of that, thanks for the info!

Re: Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time

#56

Post by SahAssar » Sat, Oct 31, 2020, 2:25 PM UTC

imglorp wrote: post #12

Social issues aside, the software perspective of keeping up with DST is very costly. Every time any government entity anywhere on Earth changes its mind about what zone they're in and when, the IANA needs to reissue the TZDB. Then every OS and platform vendor needs to patch up to a new TZDB. Just for laughs, Java seems to have its own TZDB so in general your OS and application layer might disagree about zones. This i…

The West Bank has (had?) timezones that are based on ethnicity, not geographic location: https://www.972mag.com/the-worlds-only-ethnic-time-zone/

Re: Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time

#57

Post by someguydave » Sat, Oct 31, 2020, 2:26 PM UTC

laurent92 wrote: post #10

varispeed wrote: post #5

I don't know how someone ever could think this is a good idea and also got so many governments to implement this. Whoever is behind it, he or she is a genius of evil. Let's ditch this nonsense now.

It is natural that work is shifted towards the morning and people have time after work in the evening for personal matters. People do what is most important in the morning, because we can focus better. Therefore worktimes need to follow the sunrise, especially beyond 45° latitudes where the sunrise shifts by more than 3 hrs between winter and summer.

I can see this as an argument for year-round DST. Now defend falling back one hour in the winter, when by your own admission a one hour shift will be insufficient to align with sunrise.

Re: Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time

#58

Post by dahart » Sat, Oct 31, 2020, 2:26 PM UTC

varispeed wrote: post #5

I don't know how someone ever could think this is a good idea and also got so many governments to implement this. Whoever is behind it, he or she is a genius of evil. Let's ditch this nonsense now.

> I don’t know how someone ever could think this is a good idea

Why is that? Whether or not it’s still a good idea, lots of people have thought so in the past. You don’t see the fact that governments have implemented it as evidence that there has been consensus and something legitimate there you might have missed?

I honestly don’t care if daylight saving is abolished, but when I was younger, I used to think like you do that daylight savings was nonsense and should be ditched. But since then I’ve looked at the sunrise charts and realized what happens in the summer without daylight savings, and I changed my mind, I like what happens. Without daylight savings, summer nights are short and summer mornings the sun comes up at 4am and I sleep through some of the usable sunlight. Daylight savings is an attempt to normalize sunrise time. What, exactly, is “evil” about that?

Take a look at the annual sunrise times where you live and check out what happens with and without daylight savings https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/san-francisco

Re: Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time

#59

Post by nogabebop23 » Sat, Oct 31, 2020, 2:26 PM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #36

watt wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can decide to start waking up an hour earlier or later without forcing everyone else to change their clocks.

Also don't need to have clocks at all, which was an industrial-age invention. The concept of standardized time and hour-long timezones dates from the mid-1800s, and was a construct of the railways (which needed to publish schedules that'd be valid across long distances). Before then each village or region had its own time. https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/invention-...

Do you think agriculture hasn't moved into a post-industrial age? Modern farms are tightly integrated into a global supply chain from imputs to product and definitely need to work on the same standardized schedule as the rest of the world.

Re: Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time

#60

Post by voisin » Sat, Oct 31, 2020, 2:28 PM UTC

vaccinator wrote: post #37

Pandavonium wrote: post #3

Having young kids, I'd love to see the changing of the clocks go the way of the dinosaurs. I don't care which way, just pick one and stick with it.

why not go halfway? AKA DST - 0:30

It isn’t a negotiation over how much to change. It is a debate as to whether it should change at all. And no one seems to be arguing that it should still change. This is just lack of political will to push the legislation.