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The Waste of Daylight

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Re: The Waste of Daylight

#201

Post by faitswulff »

ianai wrote: post #196
faitswulff wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Society has dictated the majority of people’s lives for most of human history. Being able to control one’s schedule is the exception. In fact, even having eight hours of leisure wasn’t always a given in the US [0][1]. [0]: http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/6645/ [1]: https://www.paunions.com/may-day-eight-hours-for-work-eight-...

That doesn’t make it right nor correct. Just “normative.” Hunter gatherers didn’t/don’t have these problems. (Though they definitely have plenty of other problems.)

Pretty much as soon as your civilization becomes agricultural you encounter these kinds of societal benefits to synchronizing schedules - perhaps at the cost of individual liberties. I’m just pointing out that the GP might be coming at it from a point of view that is a historical exception; I’m not making a value statement about it.

Re: The Waste of Daylight

#202

Post by dahart »

Philadelphia wrote: post #187
dahart wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 oth…

Sleep experts who have education in the area and study for a living seem to overwhelmingly disagree with what you're saying. There is extensive discussion of the issues in the linked article, with inline links to sources.

Half of the “sleep experts” you’re referring to are the group known as SRBR. Their position paper comes up every time Daylight Savings is discussed on Hacker News. About a year ago, I was curious and read the position paper and followed up on a bunch of the references in the paper, reading the sources too.

I found pretty conclusive evidence of exactly what @strbean said: the “evidence” here is using scientific data about other health problems and just assuming that they apply to DST. I don’t know if they’re wrong or right, but they are absolutely overstating their claims. This group has an agenda, and they have allowed their agenda to compromise their scientific integrity.

In fact, reading the sources of SRBR’s position paper is where I learned about “social jet lag”. One of the first citations in the paper talks about how severe social jet lag (time changes by more than 2 hours per week) is associated with higher rates of diabetes. The SRBR paper cites this as conclusive evidence that the DST time change is harmful, without discussion.

A single populist news article referencing people with an agenda does not amount to overwhelming consensus, so don’t get suckered by people who’s argument sounds good to you, it may be specious. Note that several of the papers in the article are written by overlapping authors. This article gave you a lot of scientific sounding links to read, but the number of groups it represents is smaller than the number of links, the links are not all independent bits of evidence.

Please don’t take my word for it, please go through the same exercise I did and follow up on SRBR’s references and ask yourself the same question - do their citations support the claims they are making? Maybe you’ll come to a different conclusion, but it looks clear to me that people are painting a picture of scientific authority to support a strong conclusion that the research does not actually back up with data.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24314134

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24951983

Re: The Waste of Daylight

#203

Post by bena »

mrfusion wrote: post #186
bloak wrote: post #151

As I see it, in the summer there's plenty of daylight so it doesn't matter very much how you set your clock, but in the winter it does matter: children would be cycling to school in the dark if you moved the clocks forward (and they'd be cycling back from school in the dark if you moved the clocks back). Therefore, if you want to abolish the clock changes, which seems like an excellent idea to me, the safe and conser…

It seems like the children going to school in the dark is the main counterargument. Could schools just start later in the winter or have reduced hours? Or could we add street lighting?

Or, you know, change the school year so that it occurs in the time of year with the most light.

Re: The Waste of Daylight

#204

Post by iggldiggl »

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.

Unless you happen to be part of the privileged part of the world living nearish the meridian, good luck to having the calendar date changing in the middle of your waking hours and all the confusion that that would entail.

For the unlucky rest of the world it also means that things like public holidays and suchlike either weirdly start and end in the middle of the (solar) day, or alternatively you'd have to specify that all holidays etc. actually start and end not at midnight (UTC), but whatever time actually corresponds to some time in the middle of night, which basically means reintroducing time zones through the back door.

Also the link K2L8M11N2 posted.

Re: The Waste of Daylight

#205

Post by tzs »

calvano915 wrote: post #190
tzs wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Or just use an eye mask?

In my case my blackout curtains are not to help with sleep. They are in my living room, where the only good spot for my TV is opposite a window that can get a lot of sunlight.

When watching TV the bright reflections in the screen from that window can be quite annoying, especially during darker scenes. During parts of some days you can actually see a reflection of the sun itself in the TV screen, making it hard to see even bright scenes.

Re: The Waste of Daylight

#206

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: The Waste of Daylight

#207

Post by another-dave »

eru wrote: post #166
throwaway8451 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 distu…

> The only bad thing about time changes is adapting to different sleeping hours. Cross time zone collaboration is made harder. Mostly, I am aware of the DST shenanigans in my local jurisdiction, but keeping track of other people's DST is an extra hassle. Just not mucking with the clocks is easier. > It's not different from the jetlag that they subject themselves to willfully. Just because you are willing to indulge i…

Wouldn't cross TZ collaboration be even harder of each individual business was possibly changing their operating hours though, especially if they ended up choosing different start/end dates

Re: The Waste of Daylight

#208

Post by Philadelphia »

dahart wrote: post #202
Philadelphia wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sleep experts who have education in the area and study for a living seem to overwhelmingly disagree with what you're saying. There is extensive discussion of the issues in the linked article, with inline links to sources.

Half of the “sleep experts” you’re referring to are the group known as SRBR. Their position paper comes up every time Daylight Savings is discussed on Hacker News. About a year ago, I was curious and read the position paper and followed up on a bunch of the references in the paper, reading the sources too. I found pretty conclusive evidence of exactly what @strbean said: the “evidence” here is using scientific data a…

What sort of agenda are you accusing the Society for Research on Biological Rhythms, which appears to be a well-regarded professional organization that publishes a high-impact academic journal, of having?

Re: The Waste of Daylight

#209

Post by da_big_ghey »

BlargMcLarg wrote: post #136
cameldrv wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wei…

Please stop the whine for people who are late stay ups. It am social okay for scheduling event at late night. Dinner am late night. Nightclub am late night. All these things are being late night and social okay. No such for early morning, we are expect for stay up late to make these thing, late sleep people only have awaken for 9:00 o clock morning zoom connect.

Re: The Waste of Daylight

#210

Post by da_big_ghey »

arethuza wrote: post #142
ogre_codes wrote: post #81

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 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.

Man are evolving from fertile cresent where make more hours in day light the same for summer and winter.
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