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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)

#71

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…

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.

> businesses set their own hours, not the government

In plenty of countries the government decides the opening hours of shops, restaurants and sometimes even offices. Labour laws and nighttime pay are coupled to the hours on the clock. Hours you can make noise is decided by government. Germany has the mid-day resting hour (Mittagsruhe).

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

#72
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.

The jobs need to run at midnight, local time. Which shifts from UTC. How to handle?

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

#73
post #57

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.

You've said this repeatedly, but it is largely not true.

Elaborate.

The intent of DST is to normalize variations in the time of sunrise between summer and winter.

Places closer to the equator have minimal variation in the time of sunrise between seasons. They don't need DST.

Higher latitudes have large variation (i.e. Seattle, where the time of sunrise shifts between 4am in summer to 8am in winter), so they benefit from DST or summer/winter hours.

DST is one of the simplest implementations of seasonal hours on a regional scale.

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

#74
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

They have? Which countries are those?

If you are looking for an example I did some contract work for a company in Turkey that implemented winter hours and summer hours for their office after abolishing DST in 2016. As far as I understand it, it's fairly standard across the country.

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

#75
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…

It's a fairly trivial change. We already have timezones, which exist to deal with the fact that the sun comes up at different times in different parts of the world. We already have to design everything around the assumption that timezones can change, since people sometimes move to different parts of the world. All we do is cause, for an entire timezone, that it becomes a different timezone at one point in the year, and switches back later. This ensures that the sun continues to come up at a consistent time. The main issue it causes is to make the lives of programmers slightly more difficult, which I am sure they can cope with...

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

#76
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d be okay with every day having a different # of seconds. That way we slowly adjust with no discontinuity, but the nominal start time of school/work stays the same. While this feels would be a disaster for other reasons like: “How many seconds are in an hour?” -> “Depends, no one knows.” … that’s already the case with our existing leap seconds.

> that’s already the case with our existing leap seconds. Which we are also in the process of getting rid of.

News to me, but apparently so: https://www.bipm.org/en/-/resolution-cgpm-27-4

(This sounds like kicking the can down the road to me; making the maximum discrepancy a minute could take 50-100 years and then you need a leap-minute or equivalent).

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

#77
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The jobs need to run at midnight, local time. Which shifts from UTC. How to handle?

Use UTC, and stop faffing about with changing localtime twice every year so the offset is a constant?

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

#78
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.

I guess that is what I'm trying to show in the above example. You could technically shift your UTC jobs by running your own NTP server and desyncing it from UTC by the offset you want. It would work, but it would be nightmare fuel. And possibly this is an even better example of what DST is doing.

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

#79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ti…

Urumuqi actually delays store openings/closings (department stores open at 11AM, for example), so it isn't that bad. Beijing time in Beijing should be accurate, but without DST, the sun rises way too early in the morning. But even then the schedules are still fixed, just the Chinese enjoy their night life, so the sun setting at 6-7PM in the summer isn't really a big deal.

Our school schedules are set by weird rules involving when school bus capacity is available. But in general, 9AM is about when school starts (for my son's K-8, its 8AM here for K-5s), or summer camp session starts, or whatever. My schedule is so influenced by my kid these days, it happens to correspond to rush hour, which sucks, because everyone else's schedules are intertwined (so traffic).

I WFH and can definitely set my own work hours. Which is why its 12:30 AM and I still haven't gone to bed yet.

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

#80
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The jobs need to run at midnight, local time. Which shifts from UTC. How to handle?

Why does it need to run at that time?

* If it's being run to scrap data from a source that's available at some time, adjust the job if the source changes its time.

* If it's being run "when its dark and no one is around" then it'll run at some part of the dark bit regardless of DST changes.

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