We did this before, about 50 years ago. Going in, close to 80% of people supported permanent Daylight Saving Time. After experiencing a single winter, that dropped to close to 40%, and it was repealed. Looks like we may be doomed to repeat the experience.
Its so strange how people on this thread are complaining about the issues you mentioned, but twice every year I see articles on hackernews/other areas about how bad the effects of changing time to DST and back and how detrimental it is for everyone's health. People can't have it both ways.
My gut suspicion is why this passed is people are more angrier and stressed out/depressed than they have been in a very long time and its an appeasement so they don't take their anger out at the polls come November, that and it is an easy thing to change that requires next to no stimulus. I expect more of these appeasement bills to start passing as gas heads to the moon along with inflation.
Both permanent DST and twice-annual clock switching are bad. There is a third, and in my opinion, superior way: permanent standard time.
The majority currently in favor of permanent DST will become a minority come winter, mark my words. And I hope it gets repealed just like it did in the 70's. Permanent standard time or bust.
It kinda feels like a lot of people are unaware of just how far sunrise/sunset shifts over the course of the year in some areas. The only solution would be to decouple all of society from clocks, and that's just not going to happen, so there has to be a trade-off somewhere.
With permanent DST it's gonna rise at like 8:30 am on average at the latest in winter. That sounds way worse then it rising at 4:30 in the summer to me.
Honestly I used to work early and I enjoy going into work before the sun is up. I don't understand why you need the sun up when you're going to work unless you work outside. And if you do your hours would just change anyway no matter what is done.
The problem for outdoor work is that your hours change and no one else’s does, so effectively you’re forced to work 10-6 for safety reasons. So blue collar folks get disproportionately less family time.
I was always against switching the time twice per year, as it tends to mess up the day rythm. But I am even more against permanent DST, as it is a big illusion. People live by the motion of the sun much more than they recognize. Winters are hell with permanent DST. This is why this is a bad idea. Permanent DST only will cause all time shedules to shift over time.
If permanent standard time is not an option, the time shift two times a year is actually a working hack. The shift is messy, but the time is shifted in the part of the year when the sun is up at raising time. That is why it "works".
To me it does matter as it messes up my biological clock. My body will tell me close to a week that I should or should not be sleeping, waking up, lunch or have dinner. The lost sleep and disorientation is real for me.
Besides that, I hate people fidgeting with the clock. Stop DST permanently, please!
While I would prefer standard time year round, I have no problem with the twice annual switch. It is one timezone and not a big deal; it isn't even close to doing the same for say a business trip/vacation given the long duration of the change.
And with fewer and fewer non-automatic clocks to change even that excuse is really tired.
I see it too (work to elect Dems). Especially if gas is over $5 past august. Seeing signs it will cool down though?
Subsidizing gas seems like obvious on paper but fraught with problems especially with inflation (and opposite of what's needed for climate change).
Would love to see federal legalization, or at least decriminalization of marijuana. IDK if only decriminalization would hold up with reconciliation but I think regulating it legalized commerce would.
And sad to say but assuming Roe is gutted/thrown to the states that could galvanize turnout on both sides, hopefully to our benefit. We'll see what games are played with Jackson's nomination too
For sure. I'm talking about direct payments to lower income families.
When you count in the externalities of pollution and climate change the amount we pay is cheap (it's still cheap per mile driven and just in general terms we drive giant cars long distances it's crazy...)
We're already spending billions on health effects, lost working lives, and even more on existing damage from climate change.
Biggest missed opportunity is the failed climate bill. I'm not optimistic about the future.
Yes I know. That's why am I saying if it gets above $5 nationwide that's a symbolic number (despite gas still being cheaper per mile driven but whatever).
I'm saying that could mean a decent chance of Dems subsidizing fuel temporarily, maybe similar to child tax credit mailed out to families under $50k monthly.
I doubt would get R support unless they put into it vast deregulation as well.
And with inflation might not even be a great idea.
We're going to lose anyways unless something unexpected happens.
Isn't California gasoline generally more expensive because it requires a more stringent formulation of gasoline and so only a handful of refineries produce that?[1][2]
I imagine if the whole country used the California standard then gas prices in California would go down.
I don't know how much it would go up in the rest of the country though.
Really we should just ditch gas. The political drama from the last 50+ years over oil alone seems like a no-brainer for anything but gasoline, even if it costs more.
I don’t particularly like any of those, but I honestly think we should bury the hatchet with Venezuela. MBS is the worst and honestly, this is unpopular, but I think Saudi Arabia is more problematic than Iran.
i agree. given those choices i would choose venezuala too. especially if we can get some concessions for democracy/corruption. it is close to our backyard.
I don’t get this at all. Why would people want the sun to go down in the afternoon? In my time zone it sets at 4:30 part of the year! That’s awful, and sunrise is at around 7:00am. We have way more sun in the morning.
There is a whole body of research, comparing the areas on both sides of time zone boundaries. The results unanimously show that living too far west of your time zone's center line, has negative effects on health and economy. In light of this research, permanent winter time would be good for health and economy. Permanent summer time will be worse.
Permanent winter time would suck here, I like taking my kid to the playground after school, I can't do that in the winter because it is long dark by the time I pick him up. Who cares if the sun is up and bright at 6AM in the morning while I'm still sleeping.
When I lived in Beijing, they are on standard time year round , and it was really horrible having the sun rise at 4AM in the morning during summer. Like really? How can that be healthy?
Permanent standard / solar time proponent here: I'm reminded of that quote about people believing you could get a longer blanket if you were to cut a foot off top and sew it onto the bottom.
While true, it doesn't really disprove what the poster above is saying, since they lived in Beijing, the place that China's timezone is roughly centered on.
That's definitely true for Urumuqi where stores open later (11AM instead of 9:30 or 10AM in the rest of the country). But Beijing is pretty far east where the time zone is mainly meant for.
That's what the research supports. People go out more and spend money more when the sun is up after the working day. Kids play more. People exercise more.
Ahh, I think I read the comment I was replying to backwards (which is par for the course when it comes to TZ/DST-type things with me, "is it an hour earlier? or later").
No, you read it correctly the first time around. E.g. from the first link in the dump above:
> we find that an extra hour of natural light in the evening
reduces sleep duration by an average of 19 minutes and increases the likelihood of reporting insufficient sleep.
The health benefits of people staying out longer and spending more money (?) are disputed I believe. The reduced sleep of day starting before sun-up are pretty universally recognized as bad for public health (particularly among teenagers).
Also note that if staying out longer was a goal to strive for, there are number of alternatives to encourage that. Including shorter worker ours, more public spaces, public events, etc. Conversely getting people to sleep longer is much harder with the clock set 1+ hour after the sun clock.
> Also note that if staying out longer was a goal to strive for, there are number of alternatives to encourage that. Including shorter worker ours, more public spaces, public events, etc. Conversely getting people to sleep longer is much harder with the clock set 1+ hour after the sun clock.
This are fantastic points I don't see in discussions around the topic. Goes to show that the solution space for a problem is often constrained by our perceptions of both the problem and what our expectations of a reasonable solution are.
My kid doesn't go to sleep earlier just because the sun sets at 5PM. In fact, he has gotten used to spending most of his evenings in darkness, not being able to go to the park after school to let off some energy makes him go to bed later rather than earlier.
Then might I suggest you ask your local government to invest in better lighting at you local park so your kid can still play at it even when it stars getting dark. Or if natural lighting is a must, you can ask your school district to have shorter school hours during the 2 weeks around winter solstice. If that is impossible you can ask for more outdoors school activities during mid-winter.
But what I gathered is that what matters most for healthy sleep is not going to bed early, but rather to sleep longer in the morning and wake up with the sun. So if we move to permanent DST this behavior of staying up late might become more of a problem because of the early rising.
> But what I gathered is that what matters most for healthy sleep is not going to bed early, but rather to sleep longer in the morning and wake up with the sun. So if we move to permanent DST this behavior of staying up late might become more of a problem because of the early rising.
Permanent DST is the one where the sun rises later, which would mean easier to get more sleep rather than being woken up because the sun is rising too early.
I don't think you understand where we live at all. Since nights get cold quickly here, even in the summer, people are not out at night playing as much as they are in more temperate climates.
Farmers don't care about the clock, neither do the cows. Work traditionally started when the sun came up, and cows got fed then too... since cows still can't read the clock, they still get up and want food at sunrise, DST or not.
Haha! I worked on a dairy farm in my youth. Cows also don't care about what days off your government says you should have. Kids have a recital in the afternoon? Better have someone there to milk the cows. Woke up with a tooth ache? better have someone there to milk the cows.
Almost all 'blue collar' work starts at 7:00 AM. It isn't about farmers. I was a farmer once, my day started at 4:30 AM.
But I worked blue collar after that, my job 7:30 to 5:00, or 7:30 to 8:00 on long days.
Even in my current white collar job, that habit has stuck, and I have been working 7:30 AM to 4:30 AM for the last thirty five years, mostly to avoid the bulk of the commute.
So yes, there are millions of jobs across this country where people arrive at work, and punch in on a clock, at 7:00 AM every morning.
I worked a blue color job where I was at work at 5:30 AM, sometimes 4:30 AM. The fact that it was never light out when I went to work, even when standard time was in effect, didn't bother me much.
> Sounds like you work in an all indoor environment where the sun matters not to your livelihood, unlike farmers.
My (late) grandparent were farmers: they only cared about the time on Sundays to make sure they weren't late for Church services. Otherwise the the cows needed milking when they needed milking (which I helped with when I visited them).
They care even more about Year-round Standard Time:
> We therefore strongly support removing DST changes or removing permanent DST and having governing organizations choose permanent Standard Time for the health and safety of their citizens.
> Who cares if the sun is up and bright at 6AM in the morning while I'm still sleeping.
Good for you that you're still sleeping at 6AM. But some of us wake up at 6AM (or earlier) and would like to have it be brighter to help kick start our circadian rhythm.
And people who work night shifts would be delighted if every locale instantly adopted a +12 hour time offset.
Any change whatsoever to a status quo will delight some and upset others on an individual basis. I assume your point isn't that we should all adopt your preferences. So if not, what is it?
Why can't you take your kid to the playground after dark? In December we get sunrise at 8 but it's not light until 9 or so. Sunset is at 15 but it's quite dark at 14 already. Kids are happily playing with their parents in the snow no matter how dark it is, you can't stay indoors just because you have 5-6 hours of daylight. You just get a flashlight for your head and can play or go skiing in the forest.
Mostly it is just that there are no other kids to play with: yes, we might do it, but if we are the only ones it isn't great for him. But the real big problem is that sunshine in a Seattle winter is a precious commodity: 7/10 even with daylight we wouldn't get to the park because of rain, or its just not pleasant out. The problem with standard time is that 7/10 turns into not going 10/10, it wastes the precious sunlight we do have.
For us that hour does no difference at all, it's still dark when going to school/work and it's dark again when coming home. We have 4 hours and 20 minutes of daylight on the worst days, Seattle seems to have about 8 hours so there the DST hour actually does a difference I guess.
But one hour less in the night has been shown to give a higher death rate that week every year so it's been discussed to get rid of it here too.
> In light of this research, permanent winter time would be good for health and economy. Permanent summer time will be worse.
Only one of these papers (the researchgate one) actually asserts a hypothesis for the root cause of the correlation observed that might (but see below) make this true--later time of sunrise. The others all assert the hypothesis that being further out of sync with the rest of your time zone (which determines what one paper calls "social time") is the root cause. The way to fix that is not permanent winter time but narrower time zones--for example, a good chunk of what is now the Eastern time zone in the US is closer to the Central time zone meridian and should really be in that time zone. But that fix is orthogonal to the permanent summer time question.
Unfortunately for your argument, the one remaining paper (the researchgate one) is looking at variation with latitude, not variation with longitude. Latitude variation is going to be there regardless of what we do with daylight savings time. The fix for anyone bothered by the researchgate paper's findings is to move further south.
> 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. Four peer reviewers provided expert critiques of the initial submission, and the SRBR Executive Board approved the revised manuscript as a Position Paper to help educate the public in their evaluation of current legislative actions to end DST. […] The choice of DST is political and therefore can be changed. If we want to improve human health, we should not fight against our body clock, and therefore, we should abandon DST and return to Standard Time (which is when the sun clock time most closely matches the social clock time) throughout the year. This solution would fix both the acute and the chronic problems of DST. We therefore strongly support removing DST changes or removing permanent DST and having governing organizations choose permanent Standard Time for the health and safety of their citizens.
The researchers may be completely correct, but this is still bikeshedding. It would be a grave mistake to stick with DST/ST switching just because permanent ST is better than permanent DST.
> If we want to improve human health, we should not fight against our body clock
You know what is really fighting against the body's clock? Suddenly shifting your normal wakeup time in any direction by an hour. No matter what your baseline sleep quality is, no matter if your body prefers getting up when it's light or dark, shifting that wakeup time by an hour with no prep will negatively affect your sleep quality.
The effort to abandon DST and move to ST (as positive as it may be) should be separated from the effort to abandon DST/ST switching. If this bill gets rejected in the House because people are so caught up in the DST/ST debate that they ignore the almost unanimous research conclusion that sudden sleep-schedule shifts are bad for most people -- that would just be a complete failure of policy.
This is like arguing over whether jogging or biking is better for your joints when the status quo is sitting on a couch. For most people, regardless of whether ST is better than DST for them, forcibly breaking their sleep schedule is the worst outcome.
I live in Alberta, Canada, and enough people want to get rid of the time zone switching that it came to a vote last fall. I couldn't believe the question on the ballot was do you want to go to permanent DST, instead of asking if we wanted to go to permanent standard time. It was snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
The people voted against the change, but I really think they would've voted for permanent standard time if it had been an option.
On the upside, local or state governments might be able to alter their time zone to essentially observe permanent Standard Time.
>Seasonal observation of DST was first enacted in the US during World Wars I and II, as an attempt to conserve fuel. The practice was unpopular and promptly repealed after each war; however, lobbyists from the petroleum industry lobbied to restore DST, as they had noticed it actually increased fuel consumption. Petroleum lobbyists joined with lobbyists from golf and candy corporations in the 1980s to form the National Daylight Saving Time Coalition, and they have twice since succeeded in extending the length of DST's observation from six months to seven in 1986, and again to eight months in 2005. The observation of DST has also been found to increase residential energy costs and pollution costs by several million dollars per year.
The big cities in Alberta look to be fairly far west in a timezone so that may have something to do with it. The further east you are the better DST looks on average. And that far north, I can see getting at least somewhat light mornings earlier in the year being a plus.
I admit I haven't read all of these links, but just thinking this through logically, whether we are on DST or ST permanently shouldn't matter one way or another. I can get how shifting back and forth twice a year can have an impact, but just not following the logic on why ST > DST.
The delta is only which number shows on the clock each hour. Whether we choose to start school/work/whatever commitment at 7am, 8am, 9am, etc. shouldn't be coupled to ST or DST.
That is, if we want to start work when the sun rises (on average), there's nothing stopping us from doing that, particularly if it's proven to be more healthy.
That alone makes me question, a bit, the validity of these studies.
But again, maybe there's more context that I'm missing -- which is why I'm posting here, in case there's context that would explain this.
The reason that ST > DST is that bedtime is largely influenced by the sun, yet wake time is largely influenced by work / school. When sunset is pushed back an hour, people get less sleep, and for kids this is massively detrimental to their education. India is doing this experiment in real time because they only have one time zone. Kids in the western half, where the sun sets later, have much worse educational outcomes, and as you move east the education outcomes get better.
The sun sets where I am at ~430pm during the winter in standard time. I don't really see how having the sun set at 530pm instead would have a substantial effect on bedtime. There is so little sunlight in the winter that work/social life are what drive wakeup and bedtime. I imagine this isn't as true in India. Is there any research that accounts for the actual length of daylight available?
Seeking to understand the research is still a valid endeavor. We shouldn't blindly accept research without understanding it's implications and trying to suss out the reason for the observed results.
> We shouldn't blindly accept research without understanding it's implications and trying to suss out the reason for the observed results.
You're not wrong, but (e.g.) this paper has several dozen references, stating at the end:
> In summary, the scientific literature strongly argues against the switching between DST and Standard Time and even more so against adopting DST permanently. The latter would exaggerate all the effects described above beyond the simple extension of DST from approximately 8 months/year to 12 months/year (depending on country) since body clocks are generally even later during winter than during the long photoperiods of summer (with DST) (Kantermann et al., 2007; Hadlow et al., 2014, 2018; Hashizaki et al., 2018). Perennial DST increases SJL prevalence even more, as described above.
If you want to fact check the folks who have this as their careers, you're welcome to pick up studying circadian rhythms as a hobby. But most of us ain't got time for that, so I'm willing to trust the experts and move on with my life.
We just spent two years having to put up with folks being arm chair epidemiologist with COVID, do we have to do it all over again with chronobiologists?
> We just spent two years having to put up with folks being arm chair epidemiologist with COVID, do we have to do it all over again with chronobiologists?
If COVID taught me anything, it's to question the experts. Only in the past half a year or so have the "experts" come around to what the layperson had been saying in 2020.
Presumably because opening/working hours remain the same by the clock when we switch (or when you are on the edge of a zone as in some of the studies) rather than adjust, and they are currently more optimal for one of those.
At any rate, I also strongly suspect it doesn't matter which one is picked but only as long as everything else is adjusted around it.
Would this be due to lack of light in the morning when waking up?
If so, that's a solved problem these days. There's hundreds of ways to have lights that turn on in the morning. Having some kind of wakeup-light (simply two bright Philips Hue bulbs in the bedroom ceiling lamps these days) and taking vitamin D has solved the issues I've had with living far north, where it's dark most hours in the morning in mid-winter.
I wonder how much of the population in US (and worldwide) lives in Eastern/Western part of timezones and whether people's preference is correlated with what part of the timezone they live in. I'd also like to see research if moving an extra hour or two would continue to see gains (not sure how one would do that, perhaps recruiting people with different life schedules).
Eg. I prefer having DST on all the time, but I am at the almost Eastern end of the timezone, so perhaps my preference is affected by my experience too: eg. I already get 1h of earlier sunrise than Western-most parts of the TZ for the same wall clock time, but it's already dark outside at 4pm in winter months so way before work is done, which is what makes me unhappy.
If it turns out majority of the population would prefer DST only because majority of the population lives in Eastern parts of the timezones, that'd be pretty unfair to those living in Western parts of the timezones, which is why I wonder what's the population distribution across timezones.
I'm happy to believe that sleeping for 19 minutes less makes you less productive and less healthy, but does that effect outweigh having an extra 19 minutes of presumably leisure time? E.g. your paper says 3% lower salary, but 19 minutes is probably much more than 3% of a typical person's free time.
> Why would people want the sun to go down in the afternoon?
They don't. They want it to come up in the morning. In many places there isn't enough sunlight in the middle of winter to have it up both in the morning and the afternoon, so they need to pick one.
From a safety point of view, probably sunlight in the morning in more useful because sunlight drives temperature. That means mornings tend to be colder than afternoons, and so are more likely to have hazards such as ice on the roads.
When you go with dark mornings, you are combining the worst road conditions with the worst visibility. When you choose light mornings over light afternoons, then morning is combining the best visibility with the worst road conditions and afternoon is combining the best road conditions with the worst visibility.
Another factor is that commutes tend to fall into a narrower time range in the mornings. The commutes back home after work tend to be more spread out. This tends to make the morning commute more dangerous, which further argues against placing the morning commute in darkness.
You also have the issue with kids who take the bus to school. With dark mornings, kids sit by the road and wait for the bus. So they walk in the dark to the bus stop, then wait there for some indeterminate amount of time in the dark.
Getting darker earlier at night, there are two advantages for schoolkids. One is that school tends to get out before the sun goes down even on the shortest days for most areas. So, many kids who'd have to wait in the dark in the morning don't have to deal with the dark at all in the afternoon. The other is that even when it's getting dark by the time the kid gets home, they don't have to wait next to the road for an indeterminate amount of time until the bus gets there.
I'd argue that evening darkness is somewhat safer than morning darkness when I'm considering winter weather. The temperature of the roads are higher after ten hours of daylight than they are after ten hours of darkness. The coldest and iciest conditions are often found right before dawn.
Another important thing is, that people might be tired in the morning as they are not fully awake yet. This gets worse, the earlier they have to rise vs. the sun raise.
My point is that given equal lighting morning is probably going to be worse for driving because of road conditions.
If we then have to add darkness to one of those, adding it to evening will probably be less damaging because evening has a larger safety margin due to better road conditions.
Adding darkness to morning is taking what is already the hardest case and making it even worse.
Do you have kids? Do you have to wake those kids up for school in the dark and wrestle with your own ability to wake up in the dark? Have you been to school board meetings and listened to other parents who are extremely opinionated about every aspect of their children's schedules.
The simple answer is that while lots of people "want" the sun in the evening, there is a sizable group of people that "need" the sun in the morning.
But that shifts work schedules to later in the morning, which pushes lunch and dinner schedules, and bedtime schedules, and then you're right back where you started.
If your desire is to make sure that kids have light on both ends of the school commute, then adjust your time zone such that winter is optimal. Then just keep that time zone year round. Why bother moving the clocks?
Daylight savings effectively shifts school 1 hour earlier relative to sunrise, which is the exact opposite of what is good for kids (who need more sleep than adults).
School just starts way too damn early. I remember school at like 8:30 in elementary school. My son starts at 7:20. He has to get up at like 6:00 because it takes so long to get him up.
Morning vs Evening Light Treatment of Patients With Winter Depression
"These results should help establish the importance of circadian (morning or evening) time of light exposure in the treatment of winter depression. We recommend that bright-light exposure be scheduled immediately on awakening in the treatment of most patients with seasonal affective disorder."
It really doesn't matter whether we're on daylight time or standard time, schedules will adjust to whatever makes sense for that particular locale. Just stop changing the damn clocks back and forth.
What I can't get past is that we are literally changing the numbers on our clocks. That can't be a less invasive or easier to coordinate solution than a schedule shift for a business would be. If we can pass a law mandating daylight savings time, is that less invasive than passing a law saying that some businesses should shift their hours in the winter?
Even without a law -- businesses can voluntarily have summer hours and winter hours, because they already do, we just change the clocks to pretend that's not what we're doing. Businesses can already ignore or set their own hours voluntarily regardless of DST, and the majority have completely voluntarily decided that in the winter they'll shift their opening and closing times by an hour.
I just feel like -- couldn't they do literally the exact same thing they're doing right now, except without us all having to pretend that time itself has changed? Is it a mental thing, are we just relying on CEOs not understanding how DST works, so we have to trick them into having seasonal hours?
It's a mass coordination problem. Businesses have customers. OK, segments of the business that don't interact with customers could choose to switch working hours. But if I'm retail say, my customers probably expect that I'll be open at 10am for a random store.
Even if we take the perspective that we need complete coordination across the board, it still seems weird to me that our solution to that isn't to regulate that business hours should shift in the winter, it's to regulate that time itself bend to our whims.
It seems like a solution where retail businesses were required to shift hours in the winter would still be preferable to what we have. Because what we have is kind of that already, except also it makes a lot of date math harder and affects non-retail workers too.
If the problem is that we need businesses to shift hours, we can do that through either regulation or social behavior or through other incentives -- we don't have to on top of that also change clocks, do we? Even just shifting public school hours and public transportation schedules alone would probably be a large incentive for many businesses to follow along.
> Even if we take the perspective that we need complete coordination across the board, it still seems weird to me that our solution to that isn't to regulate that business hours should shift in the winter, it's to regulate that time itself bend to our whims.
that's how it works, though. We have a calendar with 365 days, turns out that's not quite how reality works. We could reallocate our calendar to fit reality, but it's easier to make reality fit our calendar.
My counterpoint to that comparison is that people don't have increased heart attacks and crash their cars on leap days.
Our measurement of time is fuzzy, you're right, and we have fuzzy systems to deal with it. But not all fuzzy logic and corrections are equally severe; adding an extra day every 4 years is a much smaller intervention than making a day last 23/25 hours twice a year, and that twice-a-year intervention comes with much larger effects than an extra day in February.
Our calendar/hour system for days/time is a map, and the map is not the territory. However, some maps are still more accurate than other maps.
It's also worth asking whether these interventions are making time easier or harder to reason about: 24 hours a day, 365 days a year is a nice set of numbers to work with, and it's a system that is standardized across most of the entire world if not the entire world at this point. The alternative would be very difficult to reason about or to do math with (if we were even capable of changing it at all), so we introduce some fuzzy corrections so that most of the time the math is easier, and that comes with almost no cost to society.
In contrast, DST/standard shifts make calendar math in the US harder, not easier, and they aren't standardized across the majority of the world, which makes it even harder to coordinate with people in other countries. And the intervention not only doesn't make the math easier, it also comes with large costs to society in the form of sleep-deprived people killing themselves and others every single March.
- We could pass regulations at at a federal level, state level, or even at a municipal level. Lower down would be my preference, federal changes to the clock are both too much of an intervention and also too clumsy of a brush, not every state needs this. But, whatever floats your boat.
- States/municipalities could regulate businesses directly, or they could regulate time shifts for public services, since a lot of businesses already set their hours based on those public services like schools/transportation/etc. Shifting local public school times in the winter/spring would probably cause a shift in local business hours for some segments of the market.
- Or, maybe you don't even need regulation at all, after all many private businesses today could choose not to respect DST/standard time in regards to worker hours. You could already have a business that says that when DST happens we're all going to come in 10-6 instead of 9-5. Most businesses either don't do that or they have flexible hours, which indicates that local pressures and worker preference might be enough to influence business hours even without government intervention. Businesses in this regard tend to make group decisions; I am doubtful that if office businesses all shifted their hours to accommodate worker availability with schools/transportation that retail shops would not shift their hours as well to accommodate shopper availability.
----
The trick here is to realize that federally mandated time shifts are effectively a regulation on business hours; they affect public services, they affect any local regulations that already exist around business hours. If you're opposed to federal regulations on business hours or incentives for seasonal business hours, you are opposed to DST/standard time, even if you don't realize it yet. If you're not opposed to federal regulations on business hours, then there's no real issue with regulating this stuff directly rather than indirectly.
We have a system right now where the federal government shifts clocks by an hour twice a year. That has a profound impact on business hours and on people's schedules. If you're OK with the government having that power, then we can get rid of DST/standard switching and just have the government exercise that power directly. If you're not OK with the government having that power, then you probably shouldn't be OK with it changing everyone's clocks twice a year.
Personally, I think that to the degree that we should be regulating something like this, it probably makes more sense on a local level than on a federal level. I also kind of think we probably shouldn't be shifting hours so much in the first place. However, regardless of whether or not we keep shifting hours, and regardless of whether it gets regulated federally, or locally, or not at all, we don't need to change clocks. If we're OK with the government shifting public services and hour regulations by an hour twice a year, then they can keep doing that. But we don't need to all collectively pretend that they're not doing that and that actually time changed.
This seems like a laughable reason given that traditional business hours are literally the exact same as traditional work hours, so by this argument all the supposed customers are at work anyway and thus not at your store.
Aren't the health detriments the same whether you shift your working hours / schedule or shift the clock?
Aren't they effectively exactly the same thing, especially if they're coordinated? And if they're not coordinated, isn't it a bigger mess in terms of knowing when things are supposed to change?
> Aren't the health detriments the same whether you shift your working hours / schedule or shift the clock?
Yes. I don't personally advise that we do shift working hours, I think that breaking people's internal clocks and wakeup time is harmful. But, if for some reason people really want to do that, we don't need daylight/standard time changes to do it.
> Aren't they effectively exactly the same thing, especially if they're coordinated?
Yes, and that's actually a really good summation of my point. We aren't doing anything magical with time shifts, we are just coordinating business/school times. But we are doing it in a way that is a lot more complicated than it needs to be, and that is in some ways a lot less granular and useful than it could be.
Not every part of the US needs time shifts in order to make sure it's bright in the evenings/mornings. There could be some municipalities/states where having seasonal work times might make sense (again, I don't think that's the case, but I can see the argument for it). Other parts of the US might not need that at all. The time shifts are a really clumsy system for handling winter sunrise times given just how large the US is and how much daytime variety there is across the country.
> And if they're not coordinated, isn't it a bigger mess in terms of knowing when things are supposed to change?
Personally, I don't think we need that much coordination and I don't think the current system really requires that much coordination or that it's desirable for everything to be synced up that way. I don't think anything would fall apart if we all stuck with DST permanently but in one state there was a local regulation that made retail shops open an hour later in the winter, or where school hours were different in the winter than in a few Northern states. I think that would probably be fine? I already have to check local store hours if I get up early and I'm visiting an unfamiliar neighborhood.
To go a step further, I also kind of feel like even that would be a mistake for many businesses (at least non-retail ones), I think forcing people to suddenly get up an hour earlier probably does more damage than seasonal depression for most people, and I would rather buy the remaining people with really bad seasonal depression sun lamps.
However, my point is -- the system is just obfuscating what we're really doing, which is shifting business/school hours. Even if you disagree with me about everything in the previous two paragraphs, even if you think this does need to be perfectly coordinated, and we do need to keep shifting business hours -- even in that scenario, we don't need DST/standard shifts to do that.
The time shift is just an illusion, what's really happening is the government is saying everyone should get up an hour earlier/later. Well, if we're OK with the government saying that, and if (for some reason) we want the government to say that -- then the government can just say that, it doesn't have to also force everyone to pretend that clocks are different. I don't necessarily think we should shift business hours at all, I'm just saying that we don't need to pretend that we have altered the timestream if we do want to shift business hours.
Shifts, etc, are all basically negotiated business by business, school system by school system, etc. The night shift, restaurant workers, school kids, etc, are really pushed around by logistics to match rush hours for office workers.
A split between organizations changing their winter and summer hours and ones choosing an hour earlier or later permanently is not necessarily harmful because it ends up spreading the traffic across more time. Everyone moving in sync causes a very precise traffic jam.
But isn’t it the case that the jobs that are directly concerned with whether the sun is up would also just do the job based on solar time with no regard for standard time? There’s obviously some need for accommodating those people so they can get their kids to school or have some time to go to the bank or whatever, but I find it hard to believe that applying standard time offsets twice a year is the most efficient way to make these accommodations.
How is 8am so much better? If you start work at 8am, you need to be up 1-2 hours earlier to get ready, commute, etc. The only people who wake up with the sun in the winter are folks that roll into work at 10am.
Because it make zero sense for everyone to have to get up an hour earlier. And it makes no sense for kids to stand around in the dark at freezing cold bus stops every morning.
I get the feeling that it's fairly common in US schools to have kids in before 8am, possibly even before 7am!
Is this because of the widespread school transport and the need to stagger the bus usage? In the UK it's quite rare to have school transport, with most kids at high school taking public transport, and at primary school either walking or being driven
I got the feeling from German textbooks at school that early starts were common in Europe too.
Early school hours are often a result of teachers' desires to get out of work early. Many teachers' unions include school hours in their bargaining/contracts.
Yeah, and that is because being a teacher is not just an incredibly mentally taxing job (made worse by the fact that class sizes are way too large) but also involves an awful lot of invisible after-school work: preparing and correcting exams, preparing class material, dealing with IEPs, following up with parents (particularly in financially or otherwise challenged families), organizing after-school and extra-curricular activities, dealing with other bureaucratic bullshit because the administration is understaffed...
Yes, it is commonplace for bussing to be staggered -- they often pick up a route for one school (maybe a high school), then run another route for another school (maybe an elementary school).
"And it makes no sense for kids to stand around in the dark at freezing cold bus stops every morning."
I mean, coats exist. We could make sure everyone has winter wear appropriate for the weather, and then it just won't be an issue. Kids here are out in it and are from a young age here (Norway).
It's easy to focus on abductions and forget all of the other relevant crime, which makes up the majority of it.
Yes abductions are low, but in many many areas crime as a whole is high, and children are often involved or impacted, and likely more so when they are stuck standing around in the dark.
I'm from the US - the midwest. It wasn't a big deal catching the bus when it was cold/dark there, either. We had lights at the bus stops, and half the time it was in front of the house. No big deal. We had coats, too. There are multiple programs to make sure kids have coats in the US, though they don't go far enough.
Most places in the US are pretty safe, by the way, though folks will swear they aren't.
When I was in school, there were absolutely kids who lacked basic necessities, including quality clothing. Clothing was also more expensive back then... but universal schooling means that we're also catering to the poorest of the poor.
Kids shouldn't be forced to start that early anyway. It's borderline child abuse imo. Maybe permanent DST will lead to school schedules that benefit children not adults.
It's actually the exact opposite. Permanent DST means that kids will be starting 1 hour earlier relative to sunrise, which is terrible for educational outcomes.
It's already bad. The issue isn't when you sleep up relative to the sun, but relative to your responsibilities. Some kids have to wake up before 6am not to keep up, which severely limits their options in the evenings and their phyiscal development.
We'd have to change work timing too, then, to facilitate dropoffs and parents who want to watch their kids at the bus stops. And at that point, we are back where we started. Better to just not mess with the time, and stick with standard time.
If you change what time people go to work from 8 am to 9 am then you will also be changing when they get home from 5pm to 6pm. Then you have lost that extra daylight in the evening, which was the entire point of the time change!
> And at that point, we are back where we started.
Except only for people at latitudes where it's worth doing. Those people are precisely where they started, and everyone else has a much simpler year-round standard time.
Because the hours of sunlight are limited, and many people prefer having the sun set in the afternoon over having it rise after the day's routine is well under way. Many people prefer it the other way around. There are some inconveniences both ways, but we'll make it work one way or the other.
Even those of us who prefer DST in general don't like the change in general. (OK, I remember in college extending the party by one hour was pretty cool but the other end wasn't so great.)
>OK, I remember in college extending the party by one hour was pretty cool but the other end wasn't so great.
The magic really goes away when you hit bar-going age and realize that even though the time-change lines up with last-call perfectly, they don't stay open an extra hour.
Historically, the changing of clocks was
established by law in 1918 as a fuel
saving measure during World War I.
However, there is a common myth that DST was
established to extend the daylight hours for
farmers. This is not true. Farmers were
extremely opposed to having to turn their
clocks forward and back twice a year.
Changing hours is actually a disruption for
the farmer. Imagine telling a dairy cow
accustomed to being milked at 5:00 a.m. that
their milking time needs to be moved an hour
because the truck is coming to pick up their
milk at a different time! For the farmer,
plants and animals, it is the sun and
seasons which determines their activity.
The 1918 law lasted only seven months. It
proved unpopular with farmers and other
folks. However, after repeal in 1919, some
state and localities continued the
observance.
It took another war, World War II, to
introduce a law by President Franklin D.
Roosevelt, establishing year-round DST. This
“War Time” law lasted from February 9, 1942
to September 30, 1945.
From 1945 to 1966, observance of DST was
quite inconsistent across the states.
There were no uniform rules. This caused
massive confusion in the transportation
and broadcasting industry which pushed for
standardization. Farmers continued to
oppose it.
To address this confusion, permanent DST was
introduced by President Lyndon B. Johnson on
April 12, 1966 and signed into law as the
Uniform Time Act. This established a system
of uniformity within each time zone.
Daylight saving time was the law throughout
the United States and its territories.
However, states were allowed to opt out of
the law, and some did.
All I'm going to say is that - after experiencing about a decade of living in AZ and not worrying about toggling time - I'd still be in that camp that support permanently choosing a time.
I live in Arizona as well, and agree. I'd rather everyone else just pick a time and stick with it. Preferably DST so I can be 3 hours back of the East Coast and get 3 hours at the end of the work day there for solid working while no one else is around. And I like having sporting events on at the end of a work day.
You conveniently skipped the last line of that paragraph
> However, critics argue that anecdotes of deaths in the dark could be equally applied to darker evenings, and that the elimination of Permanent DST was politically motivated.
I had the same questions myself. I tried to follow the citation on wikipedia, but that links to a newspaper article that doesn't seem to mention it at all.
Edit: on the other hand, the claim "meta-analysis by Rutgers researchers found that Permanent DST would eliminate 171 pedestrian fatalities (a 13% reduction) per year.", does actually link to a paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00014...
North America does seem to like their cars, and is quite hellbent on finding any explanation for deaths caused by automobiles that absolves the system from having to take any responsibility or do anything (e.g. build infrastructure, regulate cars, etc.).
Of course, that's not to say that six school children being killed by motorists didn't happen after the time _didn't_ switch, but to pretend that the preceding week or two were materially different in terms of light / dark levels to the degree that driving was significantly more dangerous would mean we have to accept that certain hours at certain times of year are always more dangerous (and we should then enforce more restrictions on when one may drive).
If the idea that not switching to driving an hour later causes more dead children sounds preposterous, then DST seems to be a straw-man being propped up. More likely: there was general unhappiness about the change, and people were motivated to find a reason to repeal the law (and cars and bad car-centric planning came in to save the day). It's very easy to take the wind out of a political movement for change, but not necessarily to put them back in. I've been meaning to read Jessie Singer's new book [1], and this seems similar in that regard. Rather than acknowledge that our society has built things (e.g. bad infrastructure) that cause harm (six children died) we instead point at the problem and any attempt to make change anywhere in the system is looked down upon because that would be interacting with the problem, which makes you responsible for any effect of it down the line [2].
Overall, I think my take-away is that we know that shifting the clocks twice a year causes some non-zero amount of suffering (and doesn't have a large justification for _why_). Rather than "Chesterton's fence" ourselves into inaction, we shouldn't let past reasons dictate our choices here. There's surely a lot of overhead with regard to making this change (my heart goes to anyone who has to work with international date / time APIs), but even with knowing that I still don't think it's a bad idea. A unanimous vote by the US Senate surely says that there's some will towards doing this, since it's rare for anything to be this bi-partisan nowadays...
No, 50 years ago people had different lifestyles, jobs, and hobbies. Technology as we know it today did not exist. It's a very different world today and the chances of a different outcome are large enough to warrant repeating this.
I think they should just make a one time half-hour adjustment and split the difference. Not sure how much of a technical challenge that would present to implement.
Well, as far as technical challenges go, we would all have to change our clocks (or the clocks would have to receive some kind of signal to adjust their time accordingly).
But as others have said, Arizona (sans some reservations and jurisdictions) have been fine so maybe history won't repeat itself. And of course there are plenty of countries worldwide that don't have DST anyways.
I've always hated how DST makes me get up too early. Even after getting over the initial shock, it never felt right. Hope the USA will do the right thing eventually.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanent_time_observation_in_...