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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

#391

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?

I'm too dumb to know what modalities means but simply, a lot of people end up with 1 hour less sleep because they're not tired at the normal time and over a population of 300+ million, more mistakes are made driving and people with poor health experience elevated stress due to lack of sleep. A non-zero amount of people pass away the day of from these issues.

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

#392

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 After experiencing a single winter, that dropped to close to 40%, and it was repealed.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_...

It wasn't repealed. That was a time-limited experiment.

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

#393

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…

Shifting the time 2x a year is a bad idea all around and has measurable negative health impacts [1]

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7302868/

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

#394

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.

I think it's not so much post 8am sunrises as pairing it up with pre 5pm sunsets that drive people insane.

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

#395

This is excellent. With the rise of air conditioning, daylight savings has considerably less electricity savings than it used to. It will also make timekeeping more consistent. I have lived in Arizona for the past few years and it is pleasant to know that you will always be at UTC-7:00.

Arizona only goes by Mountain Standard time (UTC -7:00). If Daylight savings time becomes permanent will Arizona always be an hour off from the rest of Mountain time zone?

Arizona is rough because even though the state is officially MST, some (not all) of the Native American tribes do DST. In some areas it's kind of mess if you let your phone choose its timezone based off of the strongest cell tower.

Arizona the state is in MST, there's Navajo reservations in MDT, and there's even a Hopi reservation that's totally encircled by a Navajo reservation that doesn't do DST.

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

#396

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…

Huh. These days most systems I work with just use a shim into the system timezone tables (I just checked the Qt docs, as that's my preferred way to develop cross-platform apps).

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

#397
The whole world going to the same time zone, usually proposed in these discussions, doesn't work - sun-time dissociates with clock-time, making words like "night" and "noon" confusing.

However, I would like to see a North American Standard time (NAT): Set the clock at half-way between US Mountain and Central times and apply it to all of North America (with maybe a few extreme exceptions, such as western Alaska and Hawaii). The coasts would be off ~30 minutes more than DST, which I hope isn't too far, and nobody in North America would have to think about time zones again.

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

#399

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.

Standard Time would make more sense than DST since that would mean noon is at 12pm (give or take a few minutes depending on latitude) not 1pm.

DST makes more sense simply because we are already on DST for 8 months of the year, vs. 4 months for "standard" time.

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

#400

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

Yes mortality increases on that day, but does not increase over the week.

Does it increase by 1-hour's worth of death? If so, may be bad statistics.
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