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.
In the summer the suns up at 5 am. But at 5am I am asleep. I could get up earlier but that's pointless since school and work doesn't start until 8.30.
So in stead of having an hour of sunlight before school and work we all change our clocks to have an hour of extra sunlight in the evening in stead, which fits our cultural preference for social activities.
We could also, as you say, change every single sign, post and display of opening hours for every school, business and organisation at the same time to achieve the same effect.
But in the real world changing the clock is simpler.
> Sunrises would be 9am-10am for about three months.
At least you'd get some sun after work. Here in Norway, the only way to get sunlight during a workday in winter is to go out during lunch break. While I do acknowledge that getting sunlight in the morning is more important than in the afternoon, I feel like subjectively I'd have more use for a little bit more sunlight after work than before work.
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.
Some jobs should run every day at 8 am (e.g. torn on the temporary speed limit on front of the school), vs tasks that should actually run every 24h (e.g. feed the bacteria in exact time intervals)
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...
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.
To be clear if I showed up to a company running their own company NTP server that they desync twice a year to make timings work - I would absolutely try to migrate them away from that. Now if they are doing that there is probably bigger fish to fry... but it would be on the list.
Between this and the "Sunset time and the economic effects of social jetlag: evidence from US time zone borders" paper [0], it seems like the issue is the size of the discontinuous jump in time, not necessarily that we change the clocks. So why not "smear" the DST<=> ST transitions by having four half hour transitions, once each quarter?
> So why not "smear" the DST<=> ST transitions by having four half hour transitions, once each quarter?
Very easy answer: Because it's already painful twice a year, and that would be making it even worse.
That answer is similar to the one for questions like "why do we have wide time zones that are somewhat inaccurate, rather than setting every clock based on the exact position of that clock?".
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.
(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.
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 of early sunlight is wasted for me. Plus with DST, the sun sets an hour later, at 9:11pm, a time I am actually awake, and I can actually go outside and use the extra sun.
And, with permanent DST (which is what many people are advocating for), then in winter sunrise is at 9am in Seattle, which is far too late. I do not want to drive to work in the dark, before sunrise. So I want standard time in winter, pushing sunrise an hour earlier to a more reasonable 8am.
In both situations (summer and winter), modifying the time via DST benefits me and gives me better use of sunlight.
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 in Beijing with the sun showing up at 4 AM was quaint back then, but I'm definitely glad we have DST in the states.
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.
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.
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.
> 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).
Even that isn't very hard and fast, states can set their own school hours, but in nearly every case there is only an earliest time and an overall yearly hours of instruction. They can start at different times or change it everyday if they wanted, that is controlled by either the school or possibly the local government.
Schools choose to use similar times because they think that is what parents want.
I agree with everything you say, except the first. It’s still the government setting the hours for public schools (in the US meaning of public school).
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.
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).
> The same change could be affected by e.g. schools and businesses agreeing to open at 8am instead of 9am.
School starts at 8am everywhere that I know of in northern New England and always has? Does school start at 9am where you live?
And as noted, an 8am start to the working day is long established in certain parts of Vermont and New Hampshire. It has not been "widely unpopular." It's nice to get a few minutes of sunlight and twilight after work in winter.
Yeah, it’s insane. Along with that, any permanent gains in the morning will be lost as soon as it becomes normal. Businesses will just open that much earlier. And this study assumed bedtimes of 10pm, which is not the average anywhere on the planet from what I remember the last time I looked into this. The average is like past midnight.
I'm an outlier because I have to be at work at 6:30 AM daily (so I get up around 5:15), so staying up past 10 PM is a rarity and I see midnight maybe two or three times a year. I don't think I've slept past 8 AM in the past decade, even on vacation. But I haven't even frequently stayed up past midnight since my mid-twenties, and even then didn't do so every night. I'd have been too sleep-deprived.
This just seems like a backwards justification. There is nothing wrong with a 9am sunrise or a 4:11am sunrise. People in Anchorage deal with both just fine.
> I am not awake at 4am, I have no use for sunlight at 4am
Most people aren’t awake at 5am either. Your use for the sun when there is an excess of it that goes well past your bedtime if you get up at 5am is irrelevant.
In the meanwhile I know enough people who wake up super early to walk their dogs, or to work out, or you know, to go to their work which opens at 6:30. Do they not count?
I can see the DST argument for people where the shift kinda sorta works out, but many places (like Anchorage!) it's completely unnecessary. I live in Sweden and it's just the twice annually "ah shit the clock moved overnight."
You realize that you can change your own sleep patterns seasonally if you want to? Heck, you could do that even gradually instead of those abrupt 1 hour changes. That is your choice, we don't need to fiddle with clocks for the whole society for that.
Appealing to population is a stupid argument. DST as a policy is designed for places at higher latitudes, and the the majority of the planet do not live at higher latitudes. DST exists to maintain a more consistent time of sunrise across seasons.
DST is moronic in any part of the world close to the equator. There is not enough seasonal adjustment in the time of sunrise to justify adjusting the clocks. And in places of the world such as the middle east, they have an active policy of avoiding the sun and a policy of DST (which maximizes sunlight while awake) is antithetical to how society functions.
Please name some of these countries. Europe is stuck with this nonsense and there is no hope in sight despite yearly polls showing majority people being against it.
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.
> The intent of DST is to normalize variations in the time of sunrise between summer and winter.
The intent of DST was to conserve energy by moving daylight into the evening hours. However, it turned out that people need light in the morning, too, and that DST had no effect on overall energy usage.
So, why not end this failed experiment and return to how it was before?
And please let's go with standard time, i.e. where the sun is at its highest point around the 12:00 o'clock mark.
Office hours are a lame excuse as most modern jobs - especially those of people on this site - surely allow flexible time. And even if not, every company is free to adjust office hours during the year - as it's already done in e.g. Turkey since they got rid of DST. Same with school hours, store opening hours, etc. - I'm pretty sure they will adjust where needed.
If you like disturbing your sleep cycle twice a year so much, feel free to change the wakeup time on your alarm clock whenever you wish.
(If it weren’t such a hassle with date changes, I'd vote for world-wide UTC, btw. And I'd love some unified decimal date/time system even more.)
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.
Abolishing DST for permanent summer hours don't address the winter sunrise issue.
Under permanent DST, the sun rises around 9 AM in December in Seattle. That's far too late. I, and millions of other people, do not want to wake up 2 hours before sunrise and drive to work in the dark.
Under the current system (DST reverts back during winter), sunrise is shifted an hour earlier to around 8AM, which is manageable. I don't have to drive to work in the dark.
If the morning commute is the only issue, then it is likely that in the relatively near future (all things being equal) work life may revert back to its pre-automobile mode where your work was either at home or fairly close to your home. That may end DST.
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.
Well, you certainly got a combative tone. I don't care if it's 8:45 or 9:45, it is what it is. You don't get more or fewer hours of sun, it's dark when you go to work, it's dark when you get home from work. With DST. Noon at noon is pretty much what the time zones are aiming for, yes.
Technically correct but false in practice. DST shifts sunlight hours to when people tend to be awake, giving the average person more hours of sun per day.
The topic always feels like a typical propaganda push to me; the constant sensationalist articles, people constantly bemoaning it when in reality having to change your clocks by an hour twice a year is the most trivial, irrelevant thing to spend any energy/attention caring about, but I can't for the life of me figure out what the propaganda angle actually is. How does some group benefit from getting rid of it? Or is the negative messaging, creating an us-vs-them argument about even the most random of issues, increasing conflict/division in society, the angle, and they don't even care about getting rid of it?
Even in Southern Europe the winter day is 2+2 hours less than the summer. Not only I am PRO-DST but I advocate for a full two hour change. It's not 20th century any more. Most jobs start later, people want to enjoy after job and LEDs offer bright light if needed. Tell the Spaniards where the sun sets later that the Dutch.
Some researchers found heart attacks rose a little after clocks were set forward and fell a little after clocks were set back. Other researchers found no significant change.
No, that’s describing permanent DST, which was tried and failed, not lack of DST. Most people in the world live without DST and it’s fine. (The article also mentions this.)
Except it's not like Chesterton's fence, it was created at the edge of living memory for known reasons. If anything it's an example of the opposite effect, something like Chesterton's field, do we really need to build a wall here, it's been a field for a damn long time...
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 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 at the time. And DST that doesn't exist doesn't bother you in the slightest. Every day ends and flows into the next like the last. But the stress of a clock change twice a year doesn't have to happen, it's a choice.
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.
Honestly, I hate daylight savings time because I don't get enough night. I like being awake at night, but I also like going to bed pretty early. Winter is fine, but summer is bad enough without layering DST on top of it.
Are you Yanks seriously not going to get this sorted out before winter? BC has moved - can at least the rest of Cascadia get their asses in gear? Come on, California, I do not want to be dealing with a north-south time zone difference with my coworkers
Yes, we won't. It turns out that we're way too terrible at being rational way too much of the time.
For DST in particular: Even discussions where the participants manage to form something resembling a quorum to stop changing the clocks twice every year somehow manage to unilaterally get sucked into a seemingly-inescapable quagmire of differing opinions, wherein: The decision of whether to use standard time and stick with it or to stick with DST instead becomes an intractable impasse.
Accordingly, nothing ever gets done.
I have every expectation that I will be dead and buried before this issue is resolved.
My controversial idea: midnight should be where current 4AM is because 04:00 is the lowest point of human circadian rhythm. Currently we have nonsense like "1AM is technically a part of the next day but for all practical purposes it's still the previous day". Also, 24h clock should be the standard so that we can avoid discussions "is 12AM noon or midnight".
In Japan, if you get on a 1 hour train just before midnight, the printed ticket will say something like "23:05" for the embarkment time, and "24:05" for the disarmament. Same date for both - the clocks can just go beyond 24 hours.
Spend enough time out late in Japan, and you'll see hour 24, 25, even 26.
I live in a hot desert climate where most of the daytime during summer is inhospitable to human activities.
We also do not observe DST at all, and that makes us a red-headed stepchild in America.
I have longed for a system here where summertime means a 12-hour DST: everyone sleeps all day and then goes to work/school in the coolness and darkness of nighttime. I absolutely love chilling outside in the dark when the lows are in the 70s, 80s.
Time zones were invented because of railroads, and all of the time/date related troubles we have today is because modern urban technology is 100% fake artifice that denies the contours of the natural world, not to mention globalism that denies contours of local culture and seeks to cram everyone and everything into rigidly defined boxes.
> I live in a hot desert climate where most of the daytime during summer is inhospitable to human activities.
I live in a hot/humid subtropical where most of the daytime in summer is likewise inhospitable to human activities. I too long to be nocturnal in summer, though here it doesn't cool down as much at night.
That doesn't fix anything, the reason DST exists is because at higher latitudes, the sun rises too early in the summer, and too late in the winter. DST exists to make the time of sunrise more consistent across seasons. DST only functions if hours are shifted seasonally, once for summer, and again for winter.
I really don't want the sunrise time to be 5:00 in the morning and still not have any daylight to do errands after work. I don't care what the reasons are, but if seasons change the sunset time, what's so wrong with changing it a bit more?
One of my errands is usually spend an hour in the park. I don't really need daylight for that. But I without DST I would have the daylight available but allocated incorrectly. Who wants incorrectly allocated daylight?
> the researchers estimate that permanent standard time would result in some 300,000 fewer people having suffered from a stroke and result in 2.6 million fewer people having obesity
That 2.6 million people are obese because of a 1h shorter change night in one Sunday a year is an extraordinary claim. I would love to understand how they got to this result.
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.
I live in the Netherlands.
In the summer the suns up at 5 am. But at 5am I am asleep. I could get up earlier but that's pointless since school and work doesn't start until 8.30.
So in stead of having an hour of sunlight before school and work we all change our clocks to have an hour of extra sunlight in the evening in stead, which fits our cultural preference for social activities.
We could also, as you say, change every single sign, post and display of opening hours for every school, business and organisation at the same time to achieve the same effect.
But in the real world changing the clock is simpler.
So change it... just permanently. GMT+2 will always be there for you.
Then you will have the opposite problem in winter. Sunrises would be 9am-10am for about three months.
> Sunrises would be 9am-10am for about three months.
At least you'd get some sun after work. Here in Norway, the only way to get sunlight during a workday in winter is to go out during lunch break. While I do acknowledge that getting sunlight in the morning is more important than in the afternoon, I feel like subjectively I'd have more use for a little bit more sunlight after work than before work.
That means waking up for work 2-3 hours before sunrise, and starting work before dawn.
I'd very gladly have a more natural sleep schedule than some sun in the afternoon.
Maybe we should go back to sundials.
Then sun rises at 9am in the winter, which is too late.
Our daylight moves with the seaons. So therefor our clock does as well.
I understand some countries that are much closer to the equator might question it now but for us it just makes sense.
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.
Well, it's not that obvious.
Some jobs should run every day at 8 am (e.g. torn on the temporary speed limit on front of the school), vs tasks that should actually run every 24h (e.g. feed the bacteria in exact time intervals)
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.
Use UTC, and stop faffing about with changing localtime twice every year so the offset is a constant?
Thee golfing industry is one of the big proponents of keeping DST and lovbbies hard for it.
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...
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.
To be clear if I showed up to a company running their own company NTP server that they desync twice a year to make timings work - I would absolutely try to migrate them away from that. Now if they are doing that there is probably bigger fish to fry... but it would be on the list.
Everybody's "Blatantly Obvious To A Casual Observer" (BOTACO) solution is somebody else's "Scam Amounting to Large Amounts of Dollars" (SALAD).
Between this and the "Sunset time and the economic effects of social jetlag: evidence from US time zone borders" paper [0], it seems like the issue is the size of the discontinuous jump in time, not necessarily that we change the clocks. So why not "smear" the DST<=> ST transitions by having four half hour transitions, once each quarter?
[0]https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31030116/
> So why not "smear" the DST<=> ST transitions by having four half hour transitions, once each quarter?
Very easy answer: Because it's already painful twice a year, and that would be making it even worse.
That answer is similar to the one for questions like "why do we have wide time zones that are somewhat inaccurate, rather than setting every clock based on the exact position of that clock?".
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).
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. :)
If you present this as the alternative, I think there's a chance people might actually just get rid of it :)
I like where this is heading.
To that end, I'd like to propose 12 transitions. These should happen on the 16th day of every month, at precisely 05:14:33.
Let's take our seasonality more seriously.
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 of early sunlight is wasted for me. Plus with DST, the sun sets an hour later, at 9:11pm, a time I am actually awake, and I can actually go outside and use the extra sun.
And, with permanent DST (which is what many people are advocating for), then in winter sunrise is at 9am in Seattle, which is far too late. I do not want to drive to work in the dark, before sunrise. So I want standard time in winter, pushing sunrise an hour earlier to a more reasonable 8am.
In both situations (summer and winter), modifying the time via DST benefits me and gives me better use of sunlight.
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 in Beijing with the sun showing up at 4 AM was quaint back then, but I'm definitely glad we have DST in the states.
> Then we should have timezones based not just on longitude, but also latitude
Of course. In Australia the southern states do summer time, and the northern states don't.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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Businesses don’t care how much sun you get
The government doesn't set the opening hours of businesses though either.
The government? Or your government?
Because there are countries where national or state governments do.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shopping_hours#Germany
They do with DST.
That doesn't set the opening hours.
The bar near me has different opening hours to the library, and that has nothing to do with DST.
> 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).
The government sets the hours of the schools, which in turn drives the schedules of a fair chunk of society.
Even that isn't very hard and fast, states can set their own school hours, but in nearly every case there is only an earliest time and an overall yearly hours of instruction. They can start at different times or change it everyday if they wanted, that is controlled by either the school or possibly the local government.
Schools choose to use similar times because they think that is what parents want.
I agree with everything you say, except the first. It’s still the government setting the hours for public schools (in the US meaning of public school).
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.
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).
> The same change could be affected by e.g. schools and businesses agreeing to open at 8am instead of 9am.
School starts at 8am everywhere that I know of in northern New England and always has? Does school start at 9am where you live?
And as noted, an 8am start to the working day is long established in certain parts of Vermont and New Hampshire. It has not been "widely unpopular." It's nice to get a few minutes of sunlight and twilight after work in winter.
People may adjust their eating times or leisure activities, but work is 9 to 5. It's amazing to have almost 5 hours of sunlight after work
Yeah, it’s insane. Along with that, any permanent gains in the morning will be lost as soon as it becomes normal. Businesses will just open that much earlier. And this study assumed bedtimes of 10pm, which is not the average anywhere on the planet from what I remember the last time I looked into this. The average is like past midnight.
More tyranny inflicted upon the rest of us by morning people
> The average is like past midnight
Jesus, for what age group?
I'm an outlier because I have to be at work at 6:30 AM daily (so I get up around 5:15), so staying up past 10 PM is a rarity and I see midnight maybe two or three times a year. I don't think I've slept past 8 AM in the past decade, even on vacation. But I haven't even frequently stayed up past midnight since my mid-twenties, and even then didn't do so every night. I'd have been too sleep-deprived.
Hol up, don't fix time, there's a few guys in Seattle without curtains. Sorry everyone.
Curtains would make the sun set later in summer and rise earlier in winter?
This just seems like a backwards justification. There is nothing wrong with a 9am sunrise or a 4:11am sunrise. People in Anchorage deal with both just fine.
> I am not awake at 4am, I have no use for sunlight at 4am
Most people aren’t awake at 5am either. Your use for the sun when there is an excess of it that goes well past your bedtime if you get up at 5am is irrelevant.
My work starts at 9am, therefore I wake up around 7am. My work start time does not adjust based on the seasons. Any sun before 7am is wasted for me.
Under DST, at summer solstice, the sun rises around 5am, giving me 2 hours of wasted sunlight.
Without DST, at summer solstice, the sun rises around 4am, giving me 3 hours of wasted sunlight.
I enjoy having additional hours of sunlight when I am awake, so for me I actually prefer having DST vs without it.
Similarly, in the wintertime, under permanent DST, sunrise is around 9am, and I don't want to drive to work in the dark.
You can still wake up earlier and enjoy your sunrise even if your working hours are fixed.
Are you seriously suggesting I wake naturally at sunrise (4 AM), then start work 5 hours(!) later? I can't change my work start time.
That's an unproductive use of my time.
Everything you said is me, me, me.
In the meanwhile I know enough people who wake up super early to walk their dogs, or to work out, or you know, to go to their work which opens at 6:30. Do they not count?
Get out of bed earlier then and go to bed earlier. You’re inventing a fake problem.
I still don't understand why you don't just wake up earlier.
It's not like without DST you have to work so late that you don't have enough hours for sleep, right?
4am sunrise seems ludicrously early to me, but then again, even a 5am sunrise is awfully early.
Ever lived at high latitude? It's normal.
I live at a higher latitude than Seattle and the earliest sunrise is 5:45 or so.
I can see the DST argument for people where the shift kinda sorta works out, but many places (like Anchorage!) it's completely unnecessary. I live in Sweden and it's just the twice annually "ah shit the clock moved overnight."
You realize that you can change your own sleep patterns seasonally if you want to? Heck, you could do that even gradually instead of those abrupt 1 hour changes. That is your choice, we don't need to fiddle with clocks for the whole society for that.
> Do the anti-DST people understand what they're advocating for?
They do, which is why only 45 countries observe DST.
25 observe it partially.
And the rest, roughly ~125 countries do not.
Historically, ~140 countries did.
To put this into perspective, only about 1.2B people out of 8.3B observe it today. Which puts you into a very small <15% minority.
Appealing to population is a stupid argument. DST as a policy is designed for places at higher latitudes, and the the majority of the planet do not live at higher latitudes. DST exists to maintain a more consistent time of sunrise across seasons.
DST is moronic in any part of the world close to the equator. There is not enough seasonal adjustment in the time of sunrise to justify adjusting the clocks. And in places of the world such as the middle east, they have an active policy of avoiding the sun and a policy of DST (which maximizes sunlight while awake) is antithetical to how society functions.
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You can have your own household clock.
This isn’t going to get fixed in my lifetime, and that’s sad. Countries have lost the ability to act.
Plenty of countries have moved away from DST. Over half who previously used it IIRC.
Please name some of these countries. Europe is stuck with this nonsense and there is no hope in sight despite yearly polls showing majority people being against it.
> Please name some of these countries
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time_by_countr... since 2000:
At first glance, seems most of those are closer to the Equator than Western Europe. The exceptions I see are Russia and Kazakhstan.
Most countries are closer to the equator than European countries.
And Spain is on the same latitude as Turkmenistan.
Yeah, which is why DST matters more in Europe. Spain might not need it though.
British Columbia is far from the equator and just removed DST (permanent summer time).
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.
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.
> The intent of DST is to normalize variations in the time of sunrise between summer and winter.
The intent of DST was to conserve energy by moving daylight into the evening hours. However, it turned out that people need light in the morning, too, and that DST had no effect on overall energy usage.
So, why not end this failed experiment and return to how it was before?
And please let's go with standard time, i.e. where the sun is at its highest point around the 12:00 o'clock mark.
Office hours are a lame excuse as most modern jobs - especially those of people on this site - surely allow flexible time. And even if not, every company is free to adjust office hours during the year - as it's already done in e.g. Turkey since they got rid of DST. Same with school hours, store opening hours, etc. - I'm pretty sure they will adjust where needed.
If you like disturbing your sleep cycle twice a year so much, feel free to change the wakeup time on your alarm clock whenever you wish.
(If it weren’t such a hassle with date changes, I'd vote for world-wide UTC, btw. And I'd love some unified decimal date/time system even more.)
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.
Abolishing DST for permanent summer hours don't address the winter sunrise issue.
Under permanent DST, the sun rises around 9 AM in December in Seattle. That's far too late. I, and millions of other people, do not want to wake up 2 hours before sunrise and drive to work in the dark.
Under the current system (DST reverts back during winter), sunrise is shifted an hour earlier to around 8AM, which is manageable. I don't have to drive to work in the dark.
https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/seattle
If the morning commute is the only issue, then it is likely that in the relatively near future (all things being equal) work life may revert back to its pre-automobile mode where your work was either at home or fairly close to your home. That may end DST.
I guess you're fine commuting home in the dark? But regardless, you can navigate without light an hour before sunrise.
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.
Cape York is also 10 degrees west of Brisbane. That alone gets sunset 40 minutes later even if you stay at the same latitude.
I feel like its.. much longer than 40 minutes.
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.
Well, you certainly got a combative tone. I don't care if it's 8:45 or 9:45, it is what it is. You don't get more or fewer hours of sun, it's dark when you go to work, it's dark when you get home from work. With DST. Noon at noon is pretty much what the time zones are aiming for, yes.
> You don't get more or fewer hours of sun
Technically correct but false in practice. DST shifts sunlight hours to when people tend to be awake, giving the average person more hours of sun per day.
Sun received while asleep is not useful.
The topic always feels like a typical propaganda push to me; the constant sensationalist articles, people constantly bemoaning it when in reality having to change your clocks by an hour twice a year is the most trivial, irrelevant thing to spend any energy/attention caring about, but I can't for the life of me figure out what the propaganda angle actually is. How does some group benefit from getting rid of it? Or is the negative messaging, creating an us-vs-them argument about even the most random of issues, increasing conflict/division in society, the angle, and they don't even care about getting rid of it?
Even in Southern Europe the winter day is 2+2 hours less than the summer. Not only I am PRO-DST but I advocate for a full two hour change. It's not 20th century any more. Most jobs start later, people want to enjoy after job and LEDs offer bright light if needed. Tell the Spaniards where the sun sets later that the Dutch.
Of all the things that cause obesity and sleep loss, is an hour change twice a year really a major issue?
I don’t know, maybe someone should do a study on it.
There are measurably more heart attacks and traffic accidents after the switch.
Some researchers found heart attacks rose a little after clocks were set forward and fell a little after clocks were set back. Other researchers found no significant change.
Which switch? 1918?
“This stupid thing we do that is worse for society than the perceived upsides is only twice a year. Why not keep doing it anyway?”
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?
I really wonder about the methodology. The article didn't mention it.
Did they get several cities to participate?
It was tried 52 years ago, and no one actually liked it, so we went back to DST again:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanent_time_observation_in_...
Possibly another example of the old Chesterton's Fence.
No, that’s describing permanent DST, which was tried and failed, not lack of DST. Most people in the world live without DST and it’s fine. (The article also mentions this.)
The majority of the planet do not live at higher latitudes, where implementing adjusted summer/winter hours actually makes sense.
Except it's not like Chesterton's fence, it was created at the edge of living memory for known reasons. If anything it's an example of the opposite effect, something like Chesterton's field, do we really need to build a wall here, it's been a field for a damn long time...
Every few years these studies are published. Nothing changes. Unfortunately policy isn’t dictated by science, facts, or optimal outcomes for all.
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.
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 at the time. And DST that doesn't exist doesn't bother you in the slightest. Every day ends and flows into the next like the last. But the stress of a clock change twice a year doesn't have to happen, it's a choice.
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.
Honestly, I hate daylight savings time because I don't get enough night. I like being awake at night, but I also like going to bed pretty early. Winter is fine, but summer is bad enough without layering DST on top of it.
This is so much effort for next to no gains.
Are you Yanks seriously not going to get this sorted out before winter? BC has moved - can at least the rest of Cascadia get their asses in gear? Come on, California, I do not want to be dealing with a north-south time zone difference with my coworkers
Yes, we won't. It turns out that we're way too terrible at being rational way too much of the time.
For DST in particular: Even discussions where the participants manage to form something resembling a quorum to stop changing the clocks twice every year somehow manage to unilaterally get sucked into a seemingly-inescapable quagmire of differing opinions, wherein: The decision of whether to use standard time and stick with it or to stick with DST instead becomes an intractable impasse.
Accordingly, nothing ever gets done.
I have every expectation that I will be dead and buried before this issue is resolved.
I think US states aren't allowed to switch unless the feds decide to allow it
US States aren't allowed to have permanent DST, but they can have permanent standard time.
Arizona doesn’t have it
Then get BC to change it back
Hell no. Never going back.
We don’t really get much of anything sorted these days.
Tough shit. I live on the eastern edge of Central Time, I don't want to be dealing with 3PM sunsets in December.
Who gives a shit what time it happens at? It's not like you're actually making the day shorter or longer, man.
Because my schedule depends on my workday and everyone elses work day which doesn't shift around at all depending on the time of the year.
My controversial idea: midnight should be where current 4AM is because 04:00 is the lowest point of human circadian rhythm. Currently we have nonsense like "1AM is technically a part of the next day but for all practical purposes it's still the previous day". Also, 24h clock should be the standard so that we can avoid discussions "is 12AM noon or midnight".
In Japan, if you get on a 1 hour train just before midnight, the printed ticket will say something like "23:05" for the embarkment time, and "24:05" for the disarmament. Same date for both - the clocks can just go beyond 24 hours.
Spend enough time out late in Japan, and you'll see hour 24, 25, even 26.
I live in a hot desert climate where most of the daytime during summer is inhospitable to human activities.
We also do not observe DST at all, and that makes us a red-headed stepchild in America.
I have longed for a system here where summertime means a 12-hour DST: everyone sleeps all day and then goes to work/school in the coolness and darkness of nighttime. I absolutely love chilling outside in the dark when the lows are in the 70s, 80s.
https://m.xkcd.com/2594/
Time zones were invented because of railroads, and all of the time/date related troubles we have today is because modern urban technology is 100% fake artifice that denies the contours of the natural world, not to mention globalism that denies contours of local culture and seeks to cram everyone and everything into rigidly defined boxes.
> I live in a hot desert climate where most of the daytime during summer is inhospitable to human activities.
I live in a hot/humid subtropical where most of the daytime in summer is likewise inhospitable to human activities. I too long to be nocturnal in summer, though here it doesn't cool down as much at night.
I don't understand how Arizona lives during the day for like 5 months. It's too darn hot there, and because it's dry, nighttime is way cooler.
Oh my God, just move it by half an hour permanently!
That doesn't fix anything, the reason DST exists is because at higher latitudes, the sun rises too early in the summer, and too late in the winter. DST exists to make the time of sunrise more consistent across seasons. DST only functions if hours are shifted seasonally, once for summer, and again for winter.
Have a look at a sun graph to understand why https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/seattle
I really don't want the sunrise time to be 5:00 in the morning and still not have any daylight to do errands after work. I don't care what the reasons are, but if seasons change the sunset time, what's so wrong with changing it a bit more?
Why do you need daylight to do errands?
And why do you ask stupid questions?
One of my errands is usually spend an hour in the park. I don't really need daylight for that. But I without DST I would have the daylight available but allocated incorrectly. Who wants incorrectly allocated daylight?
Assuming they don't get hit by a car walking to school.
> the researchers estimate that permanent standard time would result in some 300,000 fewer people having suffered from a stroke and result in 2.6 million fewer people having obesity
That 2.6 million people are obese because of a 1h shorter change night in one Sunday a year is an extraordinary claim. I would love to understand how they got to this result.
"Study by people who hate daylight savings time and have great bias against it, suggests that..."