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Study suggests most Americans would be healthier without daylight saving time (2025)

med.stanford.edu

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Re: Study suggests most Americans would be healthier without daylight saving time (2025)

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should the clock be set to those arbitrary points? If you want sun in the morning, wake up later, it you want sun in the evening, wake up earlier. If your issue is when work is scheduled, well businesses set their own hours, not the government.

Then we should have timezones based not just on longitude, but also latitude. So northerly locales can get some sleep in the spring/summer/fall. > If your issue is when work is scheduled, well businesses set their own hours, not the government. Ah, someone who doesn't have kids in school/camp/some random activity yet. We know how this goes in China (one time zone, no daylight savings time). Coming home from the bar i…

How many school kids are coming back from the bars at 4 AM in Beijing?

Re: Study suggests most Americans would be healthier without daylight saving time (2025)

#62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should the clock be set to those arbitrary points? If you want sun in the morning, wake up later, it you want sun in the evening, wake up earlier. If your issue is when work is scheduled, well businesses set their own hours, not the government.

Then we should have timezones based not just on longitude, but also latitude. So northerly locales can get some sleep in the spring/summer/fall. > If your issue is when work is scheduled, well businesses set their own hours, not the government. Ah, someone who doesn't have kids in school/camp/some random activity yet. We know how this goes in China (one time zone, no daylight savings time). Coming home from the bar i…

Beijing is a bad example, because all of China actually has Beijing time. It gets confusing in Xinjang, which is 2 hours in the "wrong" timezone. But that doesn't mean that people start work at 8:00 in complete darkness, they just start at 10:00 wall time.

I think the talk of daylight savings time is a distraction, in the end it is arbitrary what the clock says. As a society we need to negotiate when (in celestial time) we want to do certain activities. For example, there are a lot of studies that school starts to early (relative to sunrise and the average bed time of teenagers). But the school starting time has to be decided politically. And reduced working hours or later start times have to be negotiated by trade unions, politics etc.. That's a lot more messy than just shifting wall time.

Re: Study suggests most Americans would be healthier without daylight saving time (2025)

#63

Do the anti-DST people understand what they're advocating for? Have a look at the sunset/sunrise graph for northern parts of the US https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/seattle In Seattle, without DST, sunrise happens at 4:11am. Because of DST, it's pushed back an hour later to a more reasonable 5:11am. I am not awake at 4am, I have no use for sunlight at 4am, and I don't want the sun appearing that early. That hour o…

Yeah, as someone who lives in Vermont, you could talk me into permanent DST. That would move the winter sunset from, say, 4:21pm to 5:21pm, which would mean I'd get enough twilight for a short walk after work. And Maine is even further east and north in the same time zone, so they have an even earlier sunset. On the other hand, Vermont's standard time sunrise around 7:20 is reasonable enough.

Parts of Vermont have traditionally coped with this by having an 8-4 workday instead of 9-5.

But the reality is that Vermont gets only about an hour of daylight outside working hours, depending on local customs. People have extremely strong preferences about how that hour gets split up.

Re: Study suggests most Americans would be healthier without daylight saving time (2025)

#64
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/australia/brisbane Queensland Australia is relatively close to the equator, and the length of day does not change dramatically between summer and winter. DST is intended for places at higher latitudes.

No, it is intended for a small band of places where the latitude is big enough to make winter and summer daytime length significantly different, but not so different that DST does nothing. In Sweden, with DST, the sunrise is at 4am in summer and 8am in winter. Just set it so noon is actually noon.

> In Sweden, with DST, the sunrise is at 4am in summer and 8am in winter.

In Sweden, in summer without DST, sunrise in Stockholm would happen ~2:30 AM. In the current system, with DST, sunrise happens around 3:30 AM, an improvement.

In winter, if Sweden kept permanent DST (which is what many advocate for), sunrise in December would happen at around 9:45 AM. In the current system (shifting time back during winter), it happens around 8:45 AM, a more reasonable time.

You realize you're literally proving my point?

> Just set it so noon is actually noon.

Pretty meaningless to advocate for this, then every longitude would have its own timezone, defeating the purpose of timezones.

Re: Study suggests most Americans would be healthier without daylight saving time (2025)

#65
It's pretty astounding to me the number of pro-DST advocates in this forum. If you had hundreds of daily jobs on your platform and you happen to have some regular requirement to change them in unison, if a junior engineer said "let's just change the system clock to adjust for when we want the jobs to run", you would say no, because while it might be easy compared to changing the config for each of the jobs, the risk of ongoing errors, side effects, introduction of jobs that need to fixed in absolute time that you have to make the inverse change... It's a system nightmare.

Re: Study suggests most Americans would be healthier without daylight saving time (2025)

#66
post #31
post #3

And the rest of the world people? would it be healthier? the doubt is striking me

I live in Western Australia. for 3 years we trialed DST from 2006 to 2009. It was a nightmare personally, I was a sysadmin at the time and enterprise management tools were expensive and crap so we had to roll out DST file changes across our fleet manually. And because the change to allow DST for our region was a rushed job we then had to roll back after the 3 year unsuccessful trial. Honestly, it was super stressful…

The US extended DST by 4 weeks in 2007. We managed that well-enough. We can manage a similarly-sweeping change again.

(Sorry about your nightmare. It was easy on the systems I took care of at that time.)

Re: Study suggests most Americans would be healthier without daylight saving time (2025)

#67
post #65

It's pretty astounding to me the number of pro-DST advocates in this forum. If you had hundreds of daily jobs on your platform and you happen to have some regular requirement to change them in unison, if a junior engineer said "let's just change the system clock to adjust for when we want the jobs to run", you would say no, because while it might be easy compared to changing the config for each of the jobs, the risk…

That is why you run your jobs on GMT/UTC and not display time.

Re: Study suggests most Americans would be healthier without daylight saving time (2025)

#68
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Working hours will not change. I will fight tooth and nail against attempts to take one hour of daylight from me in the evenings for half of the year.

"Working hours will not change". Except they have in most countries where they have got rid of DST...

They have? Which countries are those?

Re: Study suggests most Americans would be healthier without daylight saving time (2025)

#69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Queensland Australia, a single state moved away from it. It is glorious.

https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/australia/brisbane Queensland Australia is relatively close to the equator, and the length of day does not change dramatically between summer and winter. DST is intended for places at higher latitudes.

Queensland may be, but Brisbane is not relatively close to the equator. Its 27 degrees. Tip of cape york is 10 degrees, thats a pretty big difference.

It can be dark in Brisbane and still light at my parents house near cape york.

Re: Study suggests most Americans would be healthier without daylight saving time (2025)

#70

Of all the things that cause obesity and sleep loss, is an hour change twice a year really a major issue?

It's an extra hour of potential outdoors activity before nightfall. Yes.

Do you think the average person is already spending the maximum amount of time outdoors to begin with?
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