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Daylight Savings Time (2020)

theory.stanford.edu

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Re: Daylight Savings Time (2020)

#51

Post by evandijk70 »

echelon wrote: post #27
Uehreka wrote: post #7

I care more about sunset than sunrise, so if people are proposing to get rid of DST instead of making permanent DST I will fight them tooth and nail. I get that it's subjective, but my subjective view is that having sunlight after work is more important, and I stand by that.

Hard agree. I think that most people would want to switch to permanent daylight saving time. This moves the sunset "later" in the day so that you get more sunlight after work. This is good for restaurants and leisure activities. Arguments against this typically come in a few flavors every time this subject comes up: > But the sun should be overhead at noon. This doesn't work geographically in practice anyway. It does…

I think most people have difficulty waking up in time and difficulty falling asleep early enough. To fix this, doesn't it make sense to have daylight in the morning and darkness in the evening?

Re: Daylight Savings Time (2020)

#52

Post by kvgr »

mac01021 wrote: post #40
kvgr wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where i live the sunset will change next week from 17:44 to 16:42. absolute depression switch.

Can you just start waking up, going to work, going home, and going to sleep, an hour earlier (as measured by the new clock)? Maybe your boss (if you have one) would let you do it.

I don't have boss. But I am not going to go to sleep at 10pm, just to wake up at 6, because I do things later in the day. Like going out with friends and going to sauna later in the evening and 10-6 schedule would be disturbed a lot.

Re: Daylight Savings Time (2020)

#53

Post by joegahona »

toyg wrote: post #15
tptacek wrote: post #6

The US tried a 2-year experiment of eliminating Daylight Savings Time back in the 1970s, and it was so reviled in practice that it was cancelled after 7 months.

People tend to hate change in general, so these things are hard to shift once put in place. That doesn't take away the fact that humanity managed to thrive without DST for thousands of years, so clearly it can be done.

Semantics gymnastics: Isn't "change" what would be getting removed, if we got rid of DST? We change our clocks twice per year.

Re: Daylight Savings Time (2020)

#54

Post by kvgr »

avgcorrection wrote: post #44
justinlink wrote: post #16

We absolutely need Daylight Savings Time, you can argue about Standard Time not being necessary. Without DST, in my hometown, it will get dark at 6pm every day from Sept 23rd to March 4th. That's depressing for the 9-5ers with commutes. I wouldn't see the sun past 7pm outside of May 1st -> August 16th. If we're getting rid of DST, we need to switch the working day from 9-5 to 8-4 or 7-3.

Pff. People live farther north than you yet they don’t die. If scientists say that getting rid of DST will lower diabetes/cardiovascular risks/etc. then I’m all for it.

They don't die but they drink a lot ;) and then die.

Re: Daylight Savings Time (2020)

#56

Post by tzs »

toyg wrote: post #15
tptacek wrote: post #6

The US tried a 2-year experiment of eliminating Daylight Savings Time back in the 1970s, and it was so reviled in practice that it was cancelled after 7 months.

People tend to hate change in general, so these things are hard to shift once put in place. That doesn't take away the fact that humanity managed to thrive without DST for thousands of years, so clearly it can be done.

> That doesn't take away the fact that humanity managed to thrive without DST for thousands of years, so clearly it can be done.

They effectively did have DST. They just didn't implement at as a two segment step function like we do. They implemented it as a 365 segment step function (366 segments in leap years). I.e., they synchronized their activities to sunrise.

Re: Daylight Savings Time (2020)

#57

Post by ASalazarMX »

justinlink wrote: post #25
mac01021 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if we kept standard time year round but you were allowed to change your work schedule from month to month as the seasons changed?

What about schools? What about retail business hours? What time do restaurants open and close? Does each of those change every month? It's much easier to change our clocks twice a year.

It's better for society to adapt to people's biological clocks than to force DST on populations at different latitudes for commercial reasons. In reality, schedules would change every six or three months, not every month.

The logistics problem seems overstated, because countries that have different time zones manage fine.

Re: Daylight Savings Time (2020)

#58

Post by frankus »

The whole point of time zones is to make it somewhat close to noon when the sun is at its peak, and do make midnight somewhat close to the middle of the night. Otherwise we should all just use UTC.

That's my main objection to permanent DST: it's really just shifting everyone one timezone to the east.

What I learned from this post is that one of the big reasons that permanent DST is appealing is that a lot of areas in the current timezones really ought to be one timezone to the east. For example (see https://observablehq.com/@awoodruff/daylight-saving-time-gri...) Nevada ought to be in the Mountain timezone and Alabama ought to be in the Eastern timezone. And a lot of the states that split into multiple timezones probably shouldn't (at least if you focus only on optimizing sunrise and sunset times).

Re: Daylight Savings Time (2020)

#59

Post by frankus »

seanalltogether wrote: post #26

The older I've gotten, the more I'm convinced that people don't care what the clock on the wall says, what they care about is minimizing the effects of sunrise/sunset. No one wants to be awake or get their kids awake before sunrise, and many jobs can't continue after sunset. Lifestyles will adjust forwards or backwards to match the hours in between

I totally agree, but as someone who has a lot of flexibility to set my own schedule I probably don't have as much awareness of the pain points of the current system.

The reality is that days get too damn short in the winter and any system of time zone switching is going to run into that limitation somewhere.

If I were dictator I would switch us to permanent standard time and normalize the concept of seasonal hours (which should be—but frustratingly often isn't—a lot less painful in the era of the internet).

You could even extend the concept of seasonal hours to making work days shorter in the winter and longer in the summer (not a new idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_clock).

Re: Daylight Savings Time (2020)

#60

Post by SamBam »

riemannzeta wrote: post #41
seanalltogether wrote: post #26

The older I've gotten, the more I'm convinced that people don't care what the clock on the wall says, what they care about is minimizing the effects of sunrise/sunset. No one wants to be awake or get their kids awake before sunrise, and many jobs can't continue after sunset. Lifestyles will adjust forwards or backwards to match the hours in between

Exactly. Whenever I have this conversation with folks, I point out that the purpose of clocks is to keep human behavior in synch, and all that daylight saving time does is make that harder in an age in which people don't rely upon the position of the sun in the sky anymore to determine when it's time to do things. Yes, we are diurnal animals. Yes, sunlight matters to how we sleep. But why do we care whether the hands…

> or worry about whether whomever we had to collaborate with in a different part of the world was doing the same.

How would having a single universal time solve knowing whether your collaborators were asleep or having dinner or whatever? You could have some kind of lookup table -- "Australians usually wake up around 18:00 UTC" -- but then what have you solved?

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