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The Waste of Daylight

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Re: The Waste of Daylight

#91

Post by throwaway8451 »

hourislate wrote: post #58
User23 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This actually happened in the ‘70s and it sucked so hard it got repealed in less than a year[1]. [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/us-tried-year-round-daylight...

That article was funny. Business owners complaining they have to open up in the predawn? How does SBUX do it? The one down the street opens at 5 am. Construction men working in the dark for an hour? What do they want bankers hours? And schools having to open 30 minutes later, Imagine we give the kids 30 more minutes of sleep in the am. These days they are like factory workers waking up at 6 am to ride the bus and get…

The only bad thing about time changes is adapting to different sleeping hours.

Since the change between standard time and DST does not come as a surprise, I do that slowly over the course of a month. When the change actually happens, I drop the hour of extra time I gained in the morning and be done with it.

This might not apply to people with kids or living in confined living conditions with others who would be disturbed by someone waking earlier. Beside that, it is just a matter of foresight and preparedness.

I felt like shite while I was still treating the time change like a flight between timezones (that is as happening suddenly). This is also why I take arguments about time changes from people who fly frequently not serious. It's not different from the jetlag that they subject themselves to willfully.

Re: The Waste of Daylight

#92

Post by tzs »

mumblemumble wrote: post #26
ogre_codes wrote: post #3

I try to keep my sleep schedule so I wake up shortly after daybreak for exactly this reason. I love natural light and loath sleeping through it. I've considered writing an app that sets an alarm to sunset and a reminder 9 hours prior to sunset so I can always wake with the sun and have plenty of sleep. Should be pretty simple I just haven't gotten around to it. (Though personally, I'd prefer it were a personal choice…

My single biggest frustration with excessive use of outdoor illumination at night is that it means I have to use blackout curtains to have a dark bedroom at night. Without that, there would be absolutely no reason to even think about a technological solution for waking up with the sun.

OT: I have a tip for blackout curtains.

There are expensive ones that do a really good job of blocking light, and inexpensive ones that let some light through.

Walmart's house brand, Mainstays, is the later. They block a decent amount of light, but some will get through.

I found that if you use blackout curtains with grommets, like the Mainstays [1], you can simply double them up. Set one panel on top of another with their grommets aligned, and you have a double blackout curtain. A pair of $10 Mainstay panels doubled work as well as the expensive ones which are way more than 2x$10 per panel.

If you need more than one panel (or pairs of doubled panels) side by side to cover your window, the grommets can help there too. Overlap them side by side by a couple grommets. You've now got effectively one wider panel.

[1] https://www.walmart.com/ip/Mainstays-Blackout-Energy-Efficie...

Re: The Waste of Daylight

#93

Post by theshrike79 »

lisper wrote: post #18

> Critics however claim that if adopted all year round, this would result in darker winter mornings which would be more dangerous for children going to school This drives me bananas. If you're worried about this, the right answer is not to force everyone to change their clocks, it's to change the school schedule to start an hour later.

Or get the kids a damn flashlight.

Up here near the arctic circle, we don't get stuff like "sunrise" and "sunset" for a good part of the year. It's just dark and less dark.

Kids walk/bike to school just fine.

Re: The Waste of Daylight

#94

Post by theshrike79 »

toast0 wrote: post #75
echelon wrote: post #7

For those that want to make a permanent change, let's stop talking about "DST". That's too confusing for a lot of people, and results in many favoring the wrong outcome. We should instead ask people if they want "summertime" or "wintertime" sunrise and sunset. Wintertime proponents use the animosity against the time change to argue against DST, but they seldom mention this means an earlier sunset. This comes down to…

> We should instead ask people if they want "summertime" or "wintertime" sunrise and sunset. As a near Seattlite, this question makes it even more confusing. It doesn't matter what you do to the clock in winter, the sun is up for 8.5 hours, you can't have it up when you leave for work and when you get home for work; and if your commute is long enough, you won't see it from home at all; anyway, it's going to be cloudy…

Yup, same here in Finland.

Timing anything based on sunrise and sunset is completely futile. During winter the sunrise might be at 10 and sundown at three in the afternoon. You won't be seeing the sun no matter how you flip the clocks - humans invented the lightbulb for this exact purpose. Use it.

Again in the summertime the sun will be up most of the day, so you can't plan anything by its movement.

Re: The Waste of Daylight

#95

Post by cameldrv »

quicklime wrote: post #15
ogre_codes wrote: post #3

I try to keep my sleep schedule so I wake up shortly after daybreak for exactly this reason. I love natural light and loath sleeping through it. I've considered writing an app that sets an alarm to sunset and a reminder 9 hours prior to sunset so I can always wake with the sun and have plenty of sleep. Should be pretty simple I just haven't gotten around to it. (Though personally, I'd prefer it were a personal choice…

Same here, and I've also thought about writing the same app. I've always wondered why our system of time is built around the point of "midnight", when what we really care about is "sunrise". DST is an ugly hack that we use on top of our midnight-based time system to roughly approximate a constant sunrise time. Imagine if 00:00 was defined as the time that the sun rises. You could set your alarm to 00:00 and start wor…

I think that DST is not such an ugly hack. Think of it as a mass coordination problem. You want to start work every day 1-2 hours after the sun rises. Fine, but in this time system, it's a different time in every point on earth, and it's complicated to convert between them. If you want to schedule a phone call, you're going to have to use a computer to figure out what two equivalent times are. Times are meaningless unless a precise location is also specified.

A similar (but not as bad) problem cropped up when every town had a clock set by the local solar noon, and the railroad came to town. They would have to do time conversions for train tables for every stop. The conductor couldn't just have a watch to figure out what time to pull out of the station or how long until the next stop -- it involved a bunch of time offsets. The solution was time zones. Then the conductor just has to adjust his watch exactly one hour when they cross a timezone boundary and everything works out.

DST is a very similar solution to a very similar problem. Everyone wants to have certain things happen at approximately a certain time after sunrise. People still want to be able to specify a time that is valid over a large geographical region, and is easily convertible when outside of that region. People want to be able to have watches that don't need to know the user's location in order to say what time it is.

DST gives you the approximation of all of these things, and you only have to think about it twice a year, when you make a big adjustment to the length of the day, instead of making little adjustments to the length of the day every day.

Re: The Waste of Daylight

#96

Post by dahart »

Philadelphia wrote: post #72
strbean wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That articles take the mountains of evidence that changing schedules is terrible for our health, and misrepresents it as evidence that switching to permanent DST would be bad for our health. There are tons of terrible norms in our schedules that are harmful for people's health, but switching the clock around twice a year simply confounds and complicates any attempts to fix them. For example: > To counter chronic slee…

As the article makes very clear, the problem isn’t the change, but DST not aligning with circadian rhythms. DST is fundamentally hostile to human health. The entire second half of the article, starting just before the section labeled “Time Out of Time,” goes into the science on this. Conclusions: “‘It’s not one hour twice a year. It’s a misalignment of our biologic clocks for eight months of the year,’ says Beth Ann…

> It’s a misalignment of our biological clocks for eight months of the year

Hahaha, that’s not a thing. First of all, entrainment happens in a matter of days (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entrainment_(chronobiology)). This is why you can move across the country, or just fly to Europe for a vacation, and be on the new schedule after just a few nights there. Nobody has jet lag for eight months when flying to the other side of the planet twelve time zones away. The idea that a one hour shift stays with you forever is just hyperbole, don’t fall for it.

It’s also silly to say you’re out of sync for the longer duration of the year. You spend more time there, so if being out of sync for months at a time was a thing (and it’s not) then it would be out of sync for four months, not eight, because the longer duration is the baseline because it’s longer.

Our biological clocks and circadian rhythms are driven by light. We’d be rising with the sun if it weren’t for all our iPads and streetlights and other artificial light. The changes to and from DST put us closer to rising with the sun. It’s a blunt tool, however staying on the same time all year would be further away, causing a larger misalignment.

Anyway, many people’s typical weekly bedtimes and wake up times varies by more than 1 hour. There’s a term called “social jet lag” which is the discrepancy between your weekend sleep patterns and your mid-week work sleep patterns. It’s pretty common for that to be two or three hours. The effect of DST one hour twice a year is relatively in the noise.

Re: The Waste of Daylight

#97

Post by e12e »

derefr wrote: post #90
hourislate wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That article was funny. Business owners complaining they have to open up in the predawn? How does SBUX do it? The one down the street opens at 5 am. Construction men working in the dark for an hour? What do they want bankers hours? And schools having to open 30 minutes later, Imagine we give the kids 30 more minutes of sleep in the am. These days they are like factory workers waking up at 6 am to ride the bus and get…

> Construction men working in the dark for an hour? What do they want, bankers hours? Presumably, they want their schedule moved around so they can see what they're doing. There's no reason that the clock itself needs to change for that, though. Just unions forcing employers into a "9-5 in summer, 10-6 in winter" schedule would work fine.

I agree in principle - but assuming that school ends at 5, that means it'd be problematic picking up/being home in time for your kids in winter becomes an issue.

That could be solved by summer/winter schedule being recommended across industries - but then you might end up back with an effective DST anyway - forcing new sleeping patterns in the shift...

Re: The Waste of Daylight

#98

Post by eyelidlessness »

hourislate wrote: post #23

I would vote for any Presidential Candidate and House Representative regardless of party on the promise of leaving the clocks on DST all year around. That's all they would have to do to get my vote....nothing else.

Washington state has passed this, pending federal approval. For years, not knowing it had any real momentum, I made the case for it because our days get so short in the winter.

Having experienced a few life changes that have me more consistently waking earlier (most specifically having a puppy who wakes on a schedule of her own, and having developed sleep habit around that), I’m not so sure anymore. It was very very hard to get through the darkest months of this winter where my first couple waking hours felt more like bedtime than bedtime did.

I’m still open to the idea, but I’m a lot more sympathetic to the morning difficulties than I was before.

Re: The Waste of Daylight

#99

Post by e12e »

dahart wrote: post #86
rhino369 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our system was originally based on noon, not midnight. I don't think most people really care about sunrise. Humans don't seem to naturally rise with the sun. I don't know anyone who plans their day based on when the sun rose. You'd have 3+ hour swings in what time meant from December to June. Seems worse than even daylight savings time.

> Humans don't seem to naturally rise with the sun. Ever been camping for more than a day or two? Rising by the sun happens pretty naturally and quickly. Endless artificial light is a very recent invention. What do you think life was like before electricity?

Well, depends a bit on where. I live at 69 degrees northern latitude, with a 2 month polar night/day in winter/summer - all this talk of DST and schedules following the sun seems a bit silly from up here (and we do have forced DST in Norway - although I hope we'll drop it).

An interesting counter point: in summer it's quite easy to drift into a pattern of following the weather -sometimes day will be overcast/rainy, nights clear and sunny. On vacation/camping you can sometimes flip the day to night in summer.

Re: The Waste of Daylight

#100

Post by dahart »

TheCoelacanth wrote: post #42
gweinberg wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There absolutely is not. Most people agree that extra sunlight in the afternoon is more useful than in the morning.

Polling doesn't back up your opinion[1]. 40% preferred extra sunlight in the morning year-round, 31% preferred it in the evening year-round and 28% preferred switching. [1] https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/14/politics/daylight-saving-time...

Except there is no year-round extra sunlight for most people in the US, at least if the workday is entirely during sunlight hours. The only time we get to choose when we want our extra sunlight is in the summer.

I used to want to abolish the time change, until I looked at the year long plot of sunrise and sunset time, and realized what happens without DST and switching. I changed my mind, because I discovered I like the outcome and I don’t actually want the alternative. https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/san-francisco

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