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Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time

scientificamerican.com

71–80 of 282 posts

Re: Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time

#71

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.

It matters in which direction you go.

Going west, you'll be sleepy very early in the evening, but then no one is really stoping you from going to bed at 7 PM and staying in it for twelve hours straight until 7AM (you probably will wake up around 2-3 AM, but there's nothing else to do at that time, so you'll probably stay in bed just out of boredom). As the result you adapt pretty quickly.

Going east is much harder: you can't fall asleep at night, and then during the day you have things to do, so you end up sleep deprived for quite long.

Re: Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time

#72
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…

You might be interested in a counterpoint from someone who (claims to) study sleep:

https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/dwtr0m/matt...

Re: Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time

#73
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…

Very costly? That would require some serious evidence. And even then, so what?

Re: Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time

#74

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.

> People do what is most important in the morning, because we can focus better.

There's a huge [citation needed] to add here. Also, needs a citation for people still being able to focus better at the morning after their clock is switched.

Re: Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time

#76

What will it take for this to ACTUALLY happen? Every time change, I hear folks talk about how we should move to permanent DST, but nothing changes. I am tired of getting my hopes up.

Indiana had it, but then voted it out. Keeping time change is favored by conservatives and the campaign for it was that its so confusing to have two systems. The irony of that position was painful to witness.

Re: Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time

#77

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?

Because numbers have meanings? So that 9-to-5 stays 9-to-5 the whole year round instead of 8-to-4, 7-to-3, 6-to-2?

Re: Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time

#78
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

in that case, lets just go to universal time and let businesses tell you what time to come in

Re: Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time

#79
I just hope they listen to sleep sientists into which time they keep or the negative health effect this can have on society will easily be worse then the ones from switching twice a year.

(It's also not necessary intuitive which time is better and it's depending on geographical location, theoretically I guess the best would likely be keeping the change but make it gradual over many small steps instead of two large 1h steps, but that's impractical I guess).

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