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The Waste of Daylight

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Re: The Waste of Daylight

#131

Post by watwut »

mantas wrote: post #105
derefr wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 just went through house construction. Pretty much all contractors insisted on coming in super early. Like 7:00 early. Apparently these days fancy lightning is cheaper than sitting in traffic. On top of that, I was able to come over to make arrangements before my work hours.

7:00 is not super early, not by traditional standards. And yes, having to sit additional hour in traffic wastes additional hour of your life. Of course they want to avoid that - that does not mean they would be super happy about having to push start toward even more dark hours in the morning.

Re: The Waste of Daylight

#132

Post by mantas »

watwut wrote: post #131
mantas wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just went through house construction. Pretty much all contractors insisted on coming in super early. Like 7:00 early. Apparently these days fancy lightning is cheaper than sitting in traffic. On top of that, I was able to come over to make arrangements before my work hours.

7:00 is not super early, not by traditional standards. And yes, having to sit additional hour in traffic wastes additional hour of your life. Of course they want to avoid that - that does not mean they would be super happy about having to push start toward even more dark hours in the morning.

Maybe depends from culture to culture, from country to country. Here 7:00 is considered rather early.

We've short days in winter so one less dark hour in the morning is one dark hour more in the evening. Around Christmas it gets dark at 15:30. While sun raises at 10:00.

Re: The Waste of Daylight

#133

Post by watwut »

chillwaves wrote: post #30
tptacek wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The opposing case is stronger: you can't just change the school schedule, because school is part of the fabric of child care; change its schedule, and you change the schedules of parents, which means now you have a coordination problem. That problem ripples, so that by the time you've really addressed it, you've essentially recapitulated daylight savings time. Accidents aside, there's a lot to be said for not having…

Let the children start later. Let the parents start later and have a shorter work day. Problem solved.

> Let the children start later. Let the parents start later and have a shorter work day. Problem solved.

What would actually happened would that that women and some guys would be penalized in the workplace and ... that would be it.

Re: The Waste of Daylight

#134

Post by watwut »

shmerl wrote: post #66
Thorrez wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>schedule shifts anyway in relation to astronomical cycles That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about calling into work saying you need a schedule change to work around your kid's new school schedule. Calling your daycare provider to setup a new schedule. If you take public transport, finding how the timetables will work with your new schedule. If you plan doctor's appointments in the future, you now need t…

All this is a mess due to DST anyway (like system bugs and so on). So it's much better without the switch.

It is not. You can reliably know that school/work starts at this or that hour. You dont have to negotiate different hours.

You dont have to go through the "is it changing this week or next week, should I appoint at 8:00 or 9:00 that week" issues.

Re: The Waste of Daylight

#135

Post by arethuza »

ZoomZoomZoom wrote: post #130
dahart wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d love to hear more about why this issue is more important to you than any other reason to vote. Is the time shift causing you serious problems, or do you have a business that is hurt by it, or anything like that?

Sunlight affects the quality of life directly: 1 hour of more/less natural light can be felt immediately. Moreover, our society structured in a way where most of the social life happens after work or school, the transition from light to dark falls on personal time in most cases. This is why people have such strong opinions on the matter. Speaking for myself, having lived through summer time/winter time schedule aroun…

"I vastly prefer more light in the evenings"

Strong agreement - the clocks going forward in the spring pretty much marks the time here in Scotland where you can start doing things outdoors in the evenings during the week - also helps that the weather usually starts being less miserable about this time as well.

Re: The Waste of Daylight

#136

Post by BlargMcLarg »

cameldrv wrote: post #95
quicklime wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 u…

DST wouldn't be so bad if everything didn't need to be heavily synchronized alongside a 9-to-5 mentality. Time is useful for synchronization, but just the fact many people chastise night owls while applauding early birds, as well as emphasizing the "when" instead of the "how many hours did you do N" (or better: "how much N did you achieve"), puts many people who are dependent on more light to start their day in a weird spot.

That's what DST does. It forcefully yanks those people already struggling to adapt to society's wishes, forcing a pretty radical change. We have several solutions (group people based on chronotype, respect chronotypes more, limit the need for synchronized events in early mornings / late nights), but those still aren't being applied as widely as they could be.

Just the fact people are expected to drink coffee to wake up and participate in a relatively dangerous activity while still groggy (driving) indicates how little we actually think of all this.

Re: The Waste of Daylight

#137

Post by tragomaskhalos »

tzs wrote: post #92
mumblemumble wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I once jury-rigged blackout curtains by attempting to dye regular white curtains with a navy dye; the colour only partially took, and turned out to be at precisely the right spot on the em spectrum to act as an irresistible magnet for bees, which would consistently wake me on summer mornings coming though the open window and buzzing against the botched curtains, rather obviating the purpose!

Re: The Waste of Daylight

#138

Post by toyg »

vishnugupta wrote: post #109
mantas wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Turning clocks back is terrible for kids. A week of schooling is next to lost. Source: wife is a teacher. Effect on adults is less pronounced, but it still puts a strain on us to shift our schedule by an hour. ... yet for what? Original reasons why this practice was started barely apply today. Light bulbs are efficient and we waste much more electricity in other ways. Let alone that many offices are lit up all day an…

> Turning clocks back is terrible for kids. A week of schooling is next to lost. FWIW, my kids (~8yo, ~5yo) didn't even notice the time shift in the Netherlands let alone be affected by it. For adults, (me and my wife), it was a mild surprise. We first suspected that clock had gone bonkers only for me to realise the DST change. We were moving to a DST country from a non-DST one so the net effect for us was amusing, a…

Preteens are bombproof, they will adapt to anything.

The problem is teenagers and up.

Re: The Waste of Daylight

#139

Post by mns »

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…

Officially there is no Wintertime, that's the real time. Summertime is the anomaly here and it drives me crazy that people want to stick to that forever.

Re: The Waste of Daylight

#140

Post by toyg »

ogre_codes wrote: post #81
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.

> I don't think most people really care about sunrise. Humans don't seem to naturally rise with the sun. I do regular trips in the back of beyond. The first day everyone is up until 10-11 O'Clock in front of the camp fire hanging around with a beer. By the third day, everyone is up at dawn and asleep at 8 O'Clock. Humans absolutely rise with the sun naturally. We've just isolated ourselves from the natural environmen…

I wish society would let me rise with the sun in winter... fat chance. Employers want their 8 hours, no matter what happens outside.
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