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US Senate votes unanimously to make daylight savings time permanent

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Re: US Senate votes unanimously to make daylight savings time permanent

#371

Watching Americans freak out about post-8AM sunrises is surreal to me. The sun doesn't rise until 8:45 during the darkest times of the year here in the Netherlands and its really not much of an issue. Whether standard time or summer time is the better choice here is something I hold no opinion on, but the sheer hysteria some people here express is very overblown.

That just means that the problem gets worse as the latitude gets farther away from the equator. It may be pretty unavoidable in such places, but why make it pointlessly worse?

Re: US Senate votes unanimously to make daylight savings time permanent

#372

More info here: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-senate-approves-bill-tha... Important note: "Senator Marco Rubio said after input from airlines and broadcasters that supporters agreed that the change would not take place until November 2023."

That’s pretty soon. It makes sense to take some time to prep.

I see what you did there.

I wonder how many bugs will pop out because of this. Time is already pretty complex… and it might force some old systems to need updates.

Re: US Senate votes unanimously to make daylight savings time permanent

#374
post #67

Such a terrible idea compared to permanent standard time. There is plenty of light during the summer, so there's no need to optimize for that. The winter is when daylight is scarce, so that's what should be optimized for.

The amount of sunlight stays the same. The question is whether you want more of it in the morning or the evening, and there isn't a "correct" answer there. Going by general public sentiment I'm willing to bet it's more towards the latter though.

> The question is whether you want more of it in the morning or the evening, and there isn't a "correct" answer there.

The folks at various chronobiology and sleep study societies say otherwise:

> The choice of DST is political and therefore can be changed. If we want to improve human health, we should not fight against our body clock, and therefore, we should abandon DST and return to Standard Time (which is when the sun clock time most closely matches the social clock time) throughout the year. This solution would fix both the acute and the chronic problems of DST. We therefore strongly support removing DST changes or removing permanent DST and having governing organizations choose permanent Standard Time for the health and safety of their citizens.

* https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/07487304198541...

Lots of footnotes here in this paper if you want to get into the details:

* https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2019.0094...

The position papers of various societies:

* https://srbr.org/advocacy/daylight-saving-time-presskit/

* https://old.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/dq2nv3/

* http://www.chronobiology.ch/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/JBR-D...

* https://www.chronobiology.com/impact-daylight-saving-time-ci...

* https://esrs.eu/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/To_the_EU_Commiss...

There seems to be a consensus on what's "best", and it doesn't appear to by Year-round DST.

I'd be curious to know what hearings, if any, were held on this topic, and with whom.

Re: US Senate votes unanimously to make daylight savings time permanent

#375

We did this before, about 50 years ago. Going in, close to 80% of people supported permanent Daylight Saving Time. After experiencing a single winter, that dropped to close to 40%, and it was repealed. Looks like we may be doomed to repeat the experience. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanent_time_observation_in_...

I don’t get this at all. Why would people want the sun to go down in the afternoon? In my time zone it sets at 4:30 part of the year! That’s awful, and sunrise is at around 7:00am. We have way more sun in the morning.

Re: US Senate votes unanimously to make daylight savings time permanent

#376

As long as they eliminate the constant inane switching back and forth. Sleep disruption is harmful in many ways and all this practice seems to actually do, old wives' tales about farmers and circumstantial localized benefits aside, is induce it. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5449130/

The point of that 'switching back and forth' between standard time and DST is to let the clock approximate a constant time for dawn, which in turn should lead to the most efficient use of daylight. Permanent DST just ensures very dark mornings around the Winter Solstice period - December and January especially, Nov and Feb to a lesser extent - which in turn means more stress (since it's a lot harder to wake up with n…

But standard time in the winter means darkness by 4:30 PM around the winter solstice period, which in turn means lots of car accidents as people commute to work. It's a pretty bad idea all around, right?

Re: US Senate votes unanimously to make daylight savings time permanent

#377

Back in '08 when the US dates of DST changed, I was working on a Java-based enterprise software product with a relatively large install base. It suddenly became known to a lot of customers that timezone tables are part of the JRE, and simply updating the OS wasn't enough to get proper time calculations in Java. It was a very stressful time getting customers with many different versions of Java across dozens of platfo…

Ooof, I remember that. At the time I was writing shipping logistics optimization software for LTL shipping, and many clients were using ancient warehouse inventory systems (lots of data uploads over ftp, etc) that couldn't easily be modified to account for the time change, uh, change. Very painful.

Re: US Senate votes unanimously to make daylight savings time permanent

#378

I am an idiot. Would this mean that the time stays as it is right now (after the change from this past weekend)? Because I would love that so much.

>time stays as it is right now Correct. We still have a couple of years/cycles before this goes into effect. So starting March 2024 we will "Spring forward" permanently

Re: US Senate votes unanimously to make daylight savings time permanent

#379

This is a great idea! Instead of just working from 8 to 4 to leave an hour of daylight after work, let's instead tilt all the clocks so that noon is at 11am. Why stop with the clocks? Today I announce my genius proposal Wallet Saving Prices. Everyone wants more money left over after they buy something, so the obvious way to achieve that is just slide all the numbering systems left by one. Henceforth all prices shall…

So you are saying it’s better to alternate Wallet Saving Prices twice a year?

Re: US Senate votes unanimously to make daylight savings time permanent

#380

People literally die more because of these changes. Statistically measurable increase in mortality on these days. Save lives, stop changing the clocks.

What are the modalities of these deaths? Are they a result of the time change, or are they coincident to the time change?

Presumably, being late to work or more tired leads to more car crashes. Super anecdotal but I saw two horrible wrecks yesterday, when I normally see 0.
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