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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)

#81
post #61

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…

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

That was before I had kids, my point is that I’m familiar with life without DST even at a lower latitude can get weird.

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

#82
post #80
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sometimes you minimize downtime by running something while some other system you don’t control is down.

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

#83
post #66
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

Obviously I would have forgotten most of this given the change was 20 years ago but IIRC DST config on Solaris at the time was statically coded. You could modify the timezone config as a hacky fix on Solaris 8 but the permanent fix involved recompiling zic.

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

#84
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 simples…

[deleted]

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

#85
post #76
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

No. But the Earth has sped up a bit, so they're less necessary than at some times in the past. And we're on schedule to change them to be some kind of bigger, yet-undecided adjustment (perhaps a whole minute) before the year 2035 comes to a close.

If we move to leap-minutes, the Earth will do whatever it does, and it is expected that we'll be able to run on atomic time for a period of decades or perhaps even a century before we need to make another adjustment like we've done with leap seconds in the past.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_second#Phase-out_and_futu...

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edit: Yeah, I see that your edit covered this adequately. No worries. :)

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

#86
post #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 tr…

Permanent DST is just a synonym for "let's all agree to wake up an hour earlier." The same change could be affected by e.g. schools and businesses agreeing to open at 8am instead of 9am. (Of course that would be wildly unpopular so permanent DST is just way to trick people into swallowing the pill.)

But would behavior change in the long run? Countries like Spain where solar noon differs wildly from clock noon just end up aligning their rituals accordingly (e.g. eating dinner at 9pm).

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

#87
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…

Imagine having a solution that already works with changing system clock but then some very big very important very senior very developer shows up and launches a multi-year project to redesign this, potentially opening pandora box of endless bugs. PhD in Job Security, typical shit I see in corporate.

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

#88
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…

Thee golfing industry is one of the big proponents of keeping DST and lovbbies hard for it.

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

#89
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 simples…

What people usually mean by abolishing DST is permanent summer hours. If your problem was sunrise timing, then problem solved - DST actually moves that earlier than you require twice a year for normal working hours (i.e. less sun in the evenings). Source: my own high latitude life.

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

#90
With DST, there are actually 2 new concepts: ambiguous time (if the clock rolls back) and invalid time (if the clock jumps forward).

Java and Ruby work differently. Java would simply round the invalid time to the closest valid time IIRC. Ruby would accurately raise the InvalidTime exception. Same behaviors for an ambiguous time.

Chile is actually the country that will cause tricky issue in a system because they adjust DST at midnight... so there is one day a year where its midnight is considered invalid time. If we are building a system that depends on a day's boundary, then we will encounter this nightmarish issue where one of the days must start at 1am instead of midnight.

I really hope DST is going away soon.

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