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The Waste of Daylight

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Re: The Waste of Daylight

#141

Post by maccard »

philwelch wrote: post #80
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 don't know anyone who plans their day based on when the sun rose. Probably everyone you know habitually uses artificial lighting.

For anyone living north of san Francisco it's pretty much a requirement. If I didn't use artificial light my winter days would be 6 hours long and my summer days would be 18 hours longm

Re: The Waste of Daylight

#142

Post by arethuza »

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…

"Humans absolutely rise with the sun naturally."

That might be the case somewhere that doesn't have wide variations in day/night lengths throughout the year - but I definitely do not rise naturally at 4am in summer and 9am in winter. I've spent plenty of time outdoors as well.

Re: The Waste of Daylight

#143

Post by iso1631 »

_ph_ wrote: post #127
shmerl wrote: post #2

> The country follows the same DST schedule as most of Europe, setting the clocks forward one hour on the last Sunday in March and back again one hour on the last Sunday in October. Didn't EU plan to cancel DST? It's long overdue to cancel this erratic switch everywhere.

Yes, the EU parliament passed a resolution to end DST 2021. Unfortunately, they didn't mandate a return to standard time along with it, leaving it open for countries to stay on permanent DST. But of course, a decision about this was never made - looking at the EU timezones, permanent DST basically has no place in the schema. The only non-chaotic alternative to DST would be standard time, but no such resolution has be…

> Unfortunately, they didn't mandate a return to standard time along with it

It's arbitary anyway -- Spain and North Macedonia are on the same time zone, but in A Coruña in winter the sun rises at 9am, while in Bitola it comes up at 7am, despite being on about the same latitude.

What makes "standard time" standard? Sun at the highest between 1130 and 1230?

Timezones have a rough connection to solar mean, but on standard time the middle of the day in Brest is at 1326, in Białystok it's 1136.

Re: The Waste of Daylight

#144

Post by arethuza »

maccard wrote: post #141
philwelch wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Probably everyone you know habitually uses artificial lighting.

For anyone living north of san Francisco it's pretty much a requirement. If I didn't use artificial light my winter days would be 6 hours long and my summer days would be 18 hours longm

I remember being quite surprised when I noticed (while I was actually in San Francisco) that its about the same latitude as Lisbon in Portugal. So you are talking about almost all of Europe.

Re: The Waste of Daylight

#145

Post by 8fingerlouie »

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…

a thousand years ago in Scandinavia the new day would start at 6pm, effectively at sunset, which is also why Christmas in Scandinavia is on the evening of the 24th instead of the 25th in the morning.

Or so the legend goes. I'm pretty sure that the ancient winter solstice feast had something to do with it as well. In Scandinavia the word for christmas is still some variation of the ancient "Yule" meaning wheel in old norse.

Re: The Waste of Daylight

#146

Post by kortilla »

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.

7:00 is absolutely early for a business meeting.

Re: The Waste of Daylight

#147

Post by watwut »

kortilla wrote: post #146
watwut wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

7:00 is absolutely early for a business meeting.

But not for start of work for blue collar professions, including various services.

Re: The Waste of Daylight

#148

Post by K2L8M11N2 »

strbean wrote: post #53
riffic wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the clock is effectively a human construct. It would make little difference one way or another if there was no twice-a-year time change. You can not change the number of hours a point on the earth receives daylight over a 24 hour period, and you can not change the fact that axial tilt means the amount of time you do receive daylight changes over the course of the year.

Can we short-circuit all this BS and just eliminate timezones completely? It'll take a week to get used to thinking in UTC, and then we can forget the nightmare of timezones forever.

https://qntm.org/abolish

Re: The Waste of Daylight

#150

Post by Broken_Hippo »

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.

Lights exist, though. I'm in Norway: Winter days are short where I*m at. As in, sun up around 10 and down before 3pm. (The sun sets for a few hours in the summer, but I can read outside at night in June).

They do construction in the winter here.

And honestly, construction companies in Indiana used to close during the darkest months - I knew many that would get unemployment for that time period.

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