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Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time

scientificamerican.com

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Re: Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time

#111

Post by cheschire »

globular-toast wrote: post #100
throw0101a wrote: post #84

It should be noted that the folks who study this: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronobiology Seem to have come to a consensus that if we're going to get rid of DST, then health-wise it is best to have Standard Time year-round: > 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 fi…

Is this based on the fact that the vast majority of people start work at arbitrary wall clock times, usually on the hour some time between 06:00 and 09:00, depending on profession? I'm all for keeping standard time just it makes slightly more sense for 12:00 to be the time when the Sun is highest in the sky, but surely any choice is completely arbitrary and the only thing that matters is the phase difference between…

You can't have 12:00 be the time when the sun is highest unless you're willing to shift to infinite time zones.

Re: Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time

#114

Post by [deleted] »

loloquwowndueo wrote: post #83
user5994461 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was done to save electricity. More direct sun, less light and heating. Historically in France the saving was equivalent to the whole consumption of the city of Paris over the day (maybe 10-20% of the whole country). It seems people don't care about energy anymore ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

This argument never held, particularly because the brunt of the social cost is borne by regular people but we never see a decrease in our energy bills compared to prior to DST.

[deleted]

Re: Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time

#115

Post by taliesinb »

mjlee wrote: post #68
SahAssar wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Every time I consider this I'm reminded of an incident where 3 Israeli Arabs blew themselves up instead of their target, probably due to daylight savings time. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/clocks-change-kille...

That’s straight out of Tintin and the Broken Ear, where a would-be terrorist blows himself up after a time change: https://imgur.com/gallery/27jxctY

Re: Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time

#116

Post by dheera »

Adutude wrote: post #109

We 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 su…

I run my entire life in UTC and no daylight savings. All of my clocks and phones read UTC.

Re: Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time

#117

Post by user5994461 »

loloquwowndueo wrote: post #83
user5994461 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was done to save electricity. More direct sun, less light and heating. Historically in France the saving was equivalent to the whole consumption of the city of Paris over the day (maybe 10-20% of the whole country). It seems people don't care about energy anymore ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

This argument never held, particularly because the brunt of the social cost is borne by regular people but we never see a decrease in our energy bills compared to prior to DST.

>>> prior to DST.

that means prior to 1916. I don't know about you but I don't have bills going that far. ^^

Re: Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time

#118

Post by dahart »

throw0101a wrote: post #84

It should be noted that the folks who study this: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronobiology Seem to have come to a consensus that if we're going to get rid of DST, then health-wise it is best to have Standard Time year-round: > 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 fi…

Yeah, so I’ve followed the citations from SRBR’s position paper in the past https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24314134

And I found that the research was being quite seriously misrepresented. Based on reading the paper and reading quite a few of the papers they cite, I do not believe there is evidence to justify a claim that there exists any measurable health differences between staying on daylight vs staying on standard. This appears to me to be someone’s agenda, and not something the research we have actually supports.

Re: Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time

#119

Post by ascar »

throw0101a wrote: post #84

It should be noted that the folks who study this: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronobiology Seem to have come to a consensus that if we're going to get rid of DST, then health-wise it is best to have Standard Time year-round: > 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 fi…

For me your snippet was just a bit too short to get a feeling on the context of the conclusion. The other two paragraphs of the summary make it much clearer.

Here they are:

A solution to the problem is shown in Figure 2C, which contains a combination of obliterating DST (in favor of permanent Standard Time) and reassigning countries and regions to their actual sun-clock based time zones. Under such adjustment, social (local) clock time will match sun clock time and therefore body clock time most closely. Critics of such a solution might argue that this would scatter European social times, but there is no evidence that this would be detrimental. First, we already have three different time zones within Europe (WET/GMT, CET, and EET), and secondly, the United States has four different time zones and several United States states even have multiple time zones with no detriment in commerce, travel, or communications.

If DST should be abandoned, as we suggest as scientists, there are still many people who “like their long evenings.” But there is a solution to this problem: DST is simply a work-time arrangement, nothing more than a decision to go to school/work an hour earlier. As such, it is not a decision that should be made by the world, by unions of countries (e.g., the EU), or by individual countries, neither at the federal nor the state level. Work-time arrangements are decisions that a workforce could decide at the company level. Therefore, anyone who wants to spend more time at home in daylight after work should convince his/her company and co-workers to advance their start time during certain months of the year or even better: introduce flexibility for individual workers where possible to accommodate differences in personal biological and social requirements.

Re: Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time

#120

Post by WarOnPrivacy »

jibbit wrote: post #101
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.

Do children not need more sleep in winter, like adults?

Perhaps in places that have winter.

Florida's 4 seasons are summer (13 months), not summer (13 min), wildfire and hurricane. Hurricane is usually the best of the lot.

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