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.
Do children not need more sleep in winter, like adults?
Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time
101–110 of 282 posts
Re: Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time
#102The article is mostly suitably modest about mechanisms, focusing on the epidemiology of the observed effects, and it's more or less obvious to me that the transitions are disruptive to everyone, and especially so to sensitive individuals. But there's also a bit in the answer to the fourth question (about long-term vs short-term impacts) that mentions effects of "chronic circadian misalignment". I've seen this a few t…
15 degrees is the the size a timezone "should" be, since 360°/24h = 15 degrees per hour.
The Western European time zone ia about 33 degrees wide, from Spain to Poland. Spain is about 2 hours off their natural time..
Re: Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time
#103What 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.
It's already starting to happen in the EU.
>Last year the European Parliament voted to abolish the time shifts, but the member states of the European Union have yet to agree on how to implement the decision.
Re: Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time
#104I think permanent DST makes more sense. The best hours of the day are in the evening. Folks are off from work, kids are home, the heat of the day is gone. It’s a great time to get out to a park or a stroll.
Set your alarm one hour earlier then. No need to inflict your choice on everyone.
Re: Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time
#105Good! 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...
> the negative affects that DST has on society
The last time a DST thread came up a couple of months ago, I dug into all the research being cited, and I found it being wildly overstated and sometimes outright misleading. There seems to be a group of people with an agenda to abolish DST for some reason, but I’ve become even more skeptical about these claims of measurable negative effects.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24314134
The tl;dr is that a bunch of papers are being cited that studied long term sleep deprivation, that did not study DST at all. The idea that long term serious sleep loss is bad for you is being applied to (short term, temporary) DST without any evidence that DST is causing any widespread long term lack of sleep.
I do believe strongly in sleep being healthy. But one reason I’m skeptical about supposed negative health claims of DST specifically is that a huge number of people have weekly changes in sleeping habits that are larger than the twice yearly one hour shift. What matters is getting enough sleep long term, and most people adapt to DST fast enough that it doesn’t affect long term sleep — even the article admitted that a few weeks is rare.
Re: Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time
#106In the 2016 election, I would have voted for anyone who promised to stop screwing with the clocks.
Re: Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time
#107I think permanent DST makes more sense. The best hours of the day are in the evening. Folks are off from work, kids are home, the heat of the day is gone. It’s a great time to get out to a park or a stroll.
I too hate the idea of losing an hour off summer evenings. Of course, the rational solution is for society to adjust its schedule, but that will never happen.
But you'll be gaining an hour of summer nights.
With DST, the sun goes down way too late, around 10pm in summer. With the climate as it currently is, summers have become unbearably hot and this will probably get worse in the future.
When I get home from work on a summer day, around 18:00-ish. being outside is unbearable. It doesn't get comfortable outside until the sun goes down. By moving the clock forward, you're reducing the number of hours you can actually spend outside.
Summer nights are great, summer evenings aren't. Either keep the standard time or move the clock backward during summer to maximise the number of hours you can actually spend outside, instead of the amount of sunlight.
Re: Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time
#108What 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.
EU voted to end it in 2019 (pretty decisively, 410 in favour and 192 against), and 2021 was supposed to be the final year.
Unfortunately, it was postponed once again because of the pandemic. The implementation plan is for every country to choose which timezone to stay in (summer or winter), and I guess now is not the time for nations to figure out between themselves which timezone to stay in.
Re: Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time
#109We should all just be on GMT. In software development on Pacific time, I always feel bad for the guys offshore that have to stay up late at night to make our morning meetings. It sure would make things a lot more easy from a coding perspective.
But to the point DST only adds complexity to the already complex task of converting time to GMT and back so that you can synchronize events in different time-zones, I fully support this effort.
Re: Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time
#110Social 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…
That won't go away, software will still be needed for when states inevitably change their timezones.
Right. OP's is more an argument against time zones than Daylight Saving Time.
Honestly though, this should only be a problem for the small subset of embedded software without access to the Internet. If major OSes time zone databases are not able to be updated independently of the rest of the OS, that's kind of on them. We know time zone boundaries have been changing arbitrarily for decades, so shouldn't this be a solved problem?