Read the whole reply. If you want permanent standard time, then one path would be to adopt permanent daylight savings and then change your local time zone to compensate.
It would take more effort up front but eliminates the need to change clocks twice a year
I think it is disputed among public health experts which is better:
1. Permanent Standard Time > Permanent DST > Switching
5. Permanent Standard Time > Switching > Permanent DST
That is it is some believe that the sleep deprivation imposed by permanent DST is so bad that even with all the downsides and health detriments of switching, it is still preferable over permanent DST. I don’t know how wide spread this is though and I think most public health experts agree that permanent standard time is always the preferred option.
Having lived in Permanent DST and switching timezones (but never in permanent standard) I definitely prefer permanent DST. However I do not have fond memories of permanent DST and I wished policy makers would listen to experts and move to permanent standard.
Do you have any sources for those claims by "health experts"?
Timezones and DST were largely instituted in the era of 7-15h work hours (still remaining in plenty of govt institutions), and we are more in the 9-17h realm today, so society has already "timezone-switched" in the last ~100 years (quite a bit simplified, ofc).
I'd be surprised at how come one gets sleep deprived from having a pre-set timezone that doesn't jump around ever for a location? If you go to sleep at 9pm (way past dark time in the worst morning-case) and the sun only comes out at 8am, you'd be sleep deprived if you wake up at 7am (10h of sleep) because it's dark outside?
As for the 09:00-17:00 era. That is largely untrue in most of America. School still starts at 08:00 in most places, industrial and production workers often start at 07:00 and work until 16:00. The largest employer in my town is a production facility and operates between 06:00-15:00 or even 05:30 and 14:30. It is only true of white collar jobs like ours that the 09:00-17:00 is the dominant hours.
School starts at 08:00 because work starts at 09:00 and parents want to drop the kids at school on the way to work.
> The largest employer in my town is a production facility and operates between 06:00-15:00 or even 05:30 and 14:30. It is only true of white collar jobs like ours that the 09:00-17:00 is the dominant hours.
As far as I know where jobs have regulated opening hours (e.g. government agencies, banks) those hours are generally 09:00-17:00. A facility that's already operating e.g. 05:30-14:30 is much more likely to be able to adjust its hours.
I don’t think it is that simple for an industrial or production facility to simply change their operating hours. They are often dependent on supplying logistics, worker availability, commuting options etc. A production facility in SODO might operate between 06:00 and 15:00 because they need to get their production onto a freight that leaves at 16:30. An industry might start at 07:00 because they work with perishable product that arrives with a lorry at 06:30 and it is really important that the lorry doesn’t get stuck in rush hour traffic.
The workers might see this as a benefit because they most often commute by car and they get to beat rush hour. And then you have a worker culture which is really hard to change.
> A production facility in SODO might operate between 06:00 and 15:00 because they need to get their production onto a freight that leaves at 16:30. An industry might start at 07:00 because they work with perishable product that arrives with a lorry at 06:30 and it is really important that the lorry doesn’t get stuck in rush hour traffic.
> The workers might see this as a benefit because they most often commute by car and they get to beat rush hour. And then you have a worker culture which is really hard to change.
Well in that case it doesn't make any difference to them whether we're talking about changing clocks so 09:00 is 1 hour earlier, or other companies changing their starting time to 08:00. So I don't see how this is an argument for one or the other. If your position is that other companies shouldn't be allowed to change their start time (one way or another) because it might affect this production company, surely that's the tail wagging the dog.
I wonder where the preference for DST then comes from? I've replied to that thread with a question of what the population distribution is in regards to West/East sides of timezones, and I also wonder does this apply if we move the timezones even further (another 1h or 2h?). Basically, it would indicate that the modern rhythm is out of whack, though it'd be harder to test that.
> I wonder where the preference for DST then comes from?
For me, I simply want more daylight in the evening.
I don't give a shit about waking up with the sun. I'm going to sleep until 10 or 11 AM on the weekends anyways, so I want the daylight to be shifted later so I have more daylight to do things.
Somewhere else in this thread, someone put forth the idea of a fixed dawn at 7 AM. I'd rather have a fixed dusk at 9 PM. That would mean that the sun might not rise until after noon during the shortest days of the year, but that's fine by me. Obviously, such a system is not feasible (We'd have to change our clocks every day!), but if it was, it'd be my preference.
The way I heard the story—and that story is almost certainly fictional—preference from DST comes from legislators—at a time when they were all upper-middle to upper class white men—that only knew cushy 9-17 jobs and valued their own ability to go home and have a barbecue over everybody else’s ability to wake up with the sun. I bet HN’s demographic aligns pretty overwhelmingly with the preference for an after work barbecue.
But that's not in line with those studies: I'd expect people in Eastern sides of timezones to prefer DST, which certainly includes cities like Boston or New York or Washington D.C. And vice versa, those in Western parts to prefer standard time.
Still, even if we allow for 9-17 employees having these preferences, they'd be waking up in the dark hour (somebody mentioned Sun rising at 8:30 in SF in late December with DST, and 7:30 without, which still precludes most of non-white-collar jobs too, and depending on the commute, some white collar jobs too).
Not questioning you, ofc, just wondering why none of the stuff adds up? :)
As for HN demographics, I am not sure that's true: while they are mostly white collar workers, they also get a lot of flexibility so they could probably just get up a few hours earlier to start working for more afternoon daylight.
I'd definitely choose #3. I don't mind switching, but it's what I'm used to. I'd be OK with dropping it, but if we did, I'd want standard time.
Permanent DST makes no sense to me. Maybe it's my astronomy background, but "noon" means something, something that involves the position of the sun and the earth. We quantize that to timezones for coordination, but it doesn't mean it's meaningless.
If we stop switching, fine, but don't mess with noon. Just change your schedule to 8-4 or whatever. Permanent DST seems like wanting everyone to be above average. Or deciding that everyone would be happier if they're taller, so we're shrinking the foot by 10%.
Most people don't have the privilege of deciding their work hours.
> Permanent DST seems like wanting everyone to be above average.
Not at all. I'd simply rather have more daylight in the evening when I'm awake. To me, any daylight before 10 AM is mostly wasted, as on the weekends, I don't even wake up until 10 or 11 AM. Granted, I do acknowledge how much of an outlier I am.
Simple fact is, most people would rather have the extra daylight in the evening, even if that means that "noon" no longer has the special meaning of "The halfway point between sunrise and sunset" or "The time when the sun is highest in the sky". I'd rather that time be 1 PM.
Can you clarify for me? I genuinely can't see a benefit to switching. All I see is that switching complicates things for everyone. As someone that lives in a place that didn't observe DST to begin with, I'm confused as to why anyone would want to switch.
While the timezone system is really designed with noon as the fixed point at 12PM, what some folks actually want is a fixed dawn at 7AM. A timezone system with fixed 7AM dawn, combined with a work schedule that uses a fixed amount of time, would guarantee these two nice properties:
* You don't have to commute in darkness (assuming it takes you less than 2 hours to get to work, and work starts at 9AM).
* You have as much daylight as possible when you actually get off from work at about 5. Assuming your day never gets shorter than about ten hours. If you're far enough north or south, this whole exercise gets futile very quickly.
There are cultures that actually did this, but DST is a gross hack on top of a civil time system that isn't designed to work this way, and causes more problems than it solves. I support just getting rid of it.
But a timezone system with a fixed dawn isn't even being proposed so that doesn't seem to be one of the options you mentioned as being preferred. That does sound nice but that doesn't seem like anything similar to any of the things being mentioned or suggested.
Of course not, but that's what DST is intended to approximate. It just does a bad job of it due to insufficient granularity. If we did a twelve minute clock shift, with ten evenly-spaced switch days, the jet lag would be a lot less bad.
Since that would also require a lot more work, it doesn't happen, but it's also more obvious what DST is actually doing when you think of it like that.
> what some folks actually want is a fixed dawn at 7AM.
Heh...I'd rather have a fixed dusk at 9 PM. Yes, I recognize that this would mean that the sun wouldn't come up until noon on the Winter Solstice. I'm fine with that.
