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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

#931
This will probably get lost, but anyway.

Socially we need a way to synchronize with each other and we designed our culture around calendars and clocks, synchronized to Earth revolutions - midnight.

Our bodies are designed (evolved if you want) to synchronize with the sun and there the best (healthiest) waking time is at sunrise. When synchronized to midnight, sunrise time varies and that variation depends on latitude.

It is simply preferable to have waking time synchronized with the sunrise. DST is one way to do that and actually quite good: it keeps clocks universally synchronized around the world allows scheduling not to consider sunrise time variations.

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

#932
post #879

I'm surprised at the number of commenters who think permanent DST is favourable to night owls and bad for morning people. I think it's night owls and delayed-cycle teenagers attending school who will suffer most under permanent DST. In the Winter, permanent DST means everyone has to get up an hour earlier for work or school's clock time, relative to the sun which regulates their body rhythm. Someone pointed out virtu…

Norway would be the counter argument to everything you've said. Highly educated, longest living, least depressed. And the sun is out at midnight 76 days per year there. Humans are adaptable. A -permanent- hour change would surely be less harmful than changing said hours twice a year.

> A -permanent- hour change would surely be less harmful than changing said hours twice a year.

If you ask actual scientists who research this topic, you get a different answer:

"The authors take the position that, based on comparisons of large populations living in DST or ST or on western versus eastern edges of time zones, the advantages of permanent ST outweigh switching to DST annually or permanently"

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

So, permanent standard time is better than switching, but switching is better than permanent summer time.

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

#933
If the Sun is at the highest point in the sky at the noon, and the shadows point to the north wouldn't it be logical to abandon daylight savings?

If the problem is that kids go to school too early or that workers go to work while it is dark, wouldn't it be possible to start school and work one hour later?

What effect will this have on international trades (stock markets) and synchronization with transoceanic flights?

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

#934

I'm surprised at the number of commenters who think permanent DST is favourable to night owls and bad for morning people. I think it's night owls and delayed-cycle teenagers attending school who will suffer most under permanent DST. In the Winter, permanent DST means everyone has to get up an hour earlier for work or school's clock time, relative to the sun which regulates their body rhythm. Someone pointed out virtu…

I don't like it when the sun comes up early. Unless you have really dark curtains, then you don't get to choose when to wake up. You wake up when the sun comes up. So if you stayed up late, fuck you, here's some bright sun at 6am. Oh, and you're coming home for the day at 5 or 6p? Fuck you, here's some darkness. I can't understand how anyone would be against DST.

I'm against DST because I think if people are going to wake up at solar 6am and go to work at solar 7am they ought to call it 6am and 7am instead of calling it 7am and 8am.

"Work is defined to start at 8am so lets have everyone call solar 7am '8am' so we can get everyone to go to work an hour earlier."

Now "high noon" will occur at 1pm and the middle of the night will be 1am. In Ohio (or west edge of any time zone) the middle of the day will be 2pm and middle of the night 2am. Sunburn zone in ohio? 12pm-4pm.

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

#935

This will probably get lost, but anyway. Socially we need a way to synchronize with each other and we designed our culture around calendars and clocks, synchronized to Earth revolutions - midnight. Our bodies are designed (evolved if you want) to synchronize with the sun and there the best (healthiest) waking time is at sunrise. When synchronized to midnight, sunrise time varies and that variation depends on latitude…

> It is simply preferable to have waking time synchronized with the sunrise.

This seems like a preference stated like an objective fact, unless I’ve misunderstood. I have been waking up between 11am and noon for years. The only issue I think it causes for me is it can make scheduling things with other people difficult. There was a brief period in my life when I woke up before 6am (about six months in 2016) but at no other time have I woken up at sunrise.

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

#937
post #845

I'd kill for a peek into the parallel universe where it was permanent standard time that was likely to get adopted and see how much effort went into researching the ill effects of that choice to convince people with enough FUD to keep daylight time switching going. Here's the thing: If you're a proponent of permanent standard time, you should be in favour of turning off the switching no matter what. Even if it means…

> If permanent DST really results in the entire country turning into sleep deprived zombies having spontaneous heart attacks as they arrive at work and crashing into children going to school, then there'll be pressure to change it -- but we will have at least already started the process of eliminating the worse thing: changing twice a year. What I don't get is why it's so hard for people to just say "ugh, 5pm is alre…

Because there's a social expectation to be available for meetings until 6PM to have more crossover with my Pacific time coworkers. I will not be able to convince any of them to get up at 4AM just because I like my evening time. They will all remain after 1PM ET so that my CA coworkers have time to drop their kids off at school in the morning.

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

#938

This will probably get lost, but anyway. Socially we need a way to synchronize with each other and we designed our culture around calendars and clocks, synchronized to Earth revolutions - midnight. Our bodies are designed (evolved if you want) to synchronize with the sun and there the best (healthiest) waking time is at sunrise. When synchronized to midnight, sunrise time varies and that variation depends on latitude…

What are you actually suggesting here?

Say that sunrise is at a fixed time every day, for example 6am (to avoid changing the entire system too much).

Well sunrise for me might be quite different to sunrise for my neighbour, especially if I live in the valley and she lives at the top of the hill. Every quarter of a degree around the globe (25km east or west, give or take) would have their clocks shifted by a minute. I guess meetings and phone calls would require a location and a time, and we would need to convert the time from wherever we are right now into the time where the meeting is taking place.

The time between sunrises changes every day, would we add and subtract the extra time every day, or would we have a have an extra hour every now and then?

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

#940
post #879

I'm surprised at the number of commenters who think permanent DST is favourable to night owls and bad for morning people. I think it's night owls and delayed-cycle teenagers attending school who will suffer most under permanent DST. In the Winter, permanent DST means everyone has to get up an hour earlier for work or school's clock time, relative to the sun which regulates their body rhythm. Someone pointed out virtu…

Norway would be the counter argument to everything you've said. Highly educated, longest living, least depressed. And the sun is out at midnight 76 days per year there. Humans are adaptable. A -permanent- hour change would surely be less harmful than changing said hours twice a year.

> least depressed

Compared to what? Anytime I speak to any Norwegian/Swede, they tell me how depression during winter is so widespread basically everybody suffers in one way or another. People in Norway, Sweden, Finland etc go into household lightning overdrive to help this a bit, but real sun is real sun.

Single most important reason why I never moved there, even above short summer.

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