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Comment by as-j | Hacker News Reader

> Changing our clocks twice a year has little benefit, economic or otherwise

I've lived in 2 different places in the world that did not do DST, and I have to respectfully disagree for many cases. In the summer the sun would rise before 5am and set by 6:30 or 7pm. This does curtain outside activities. Sitting outside at a restaurant, maybe having a drink, is much easier to do while the sun is up, the bugs are at a bay, etc. Or maybe a BBQ in the backyard etc, all are much easier to do when there's natural sunlight. (then let's talk about sports games, no major leagues but kids sports, etc, etc)

So yes we could all start getting up earlier and say going to work earlier...Say starting work at 7am and leaving at 4pm...but this is what DST does for us.

Caveat:

It greatly depends on where you are in the timezone, and how far north you are. Growing up in northern Canada the sun set at 11pm and rose at 4am, so it did make little difference.

2nd Caveat:

Yes full time DST could be right for some places. But! That's damn confusing if someone has a different time through the year. When I lived in Indiana they didn't do DST, so the time didn't change. And it felt like half the phone calls outside the start started with "what time is it now." So there's something to be said for consistency. :/

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DST as we have it seems suited to a world that still has a third of the population working outside in the fields. A world where work start time and sunrise were inextricably linked.

Most people would be far better served by our timezones sticking with summer time year round so we can have brighter evenings. I'm far enough north that one of my commutes will be in darkness, by skewing it to the morning one when it's around the equinox I am guaranteed no daylight in personal time: I'm either commuting, in a permanently illuminated office, or at home -- in winter darkness.

I would be far happier with more evening light.

Why don't you go to work an hour earlier?

Now, of course not everybody gets to choose their working hours; but chances are, with the loss of productivity in the early and dark winter mornings, those that don't get to choose get their shifts moved an hour later, negating any supposed benefit.

Some people take for granted that they can wake up and function in pitch black just as well, despite never having tried that. Where I'm from, if it were permanent DST year around, at the end of this month the sun wouldn't rise until 10 in the morning - and I'm as close to the equator you can get in this country! (Now of course it's not pitch black right until the sunrise, but if the sun rises at 10, it is pitch black at 8).

> Why don't you go to work an hour earlier?

Because I can't. The companies I've worked for have all scheduled required hours according to common business hours.

> Now, of course not everybody gets to choose their working hours

Only a tiny fraction of the population gets to set their own hours.

>Only a tiny fraction of the population gets to set their own hours.

Well, yes. I was thinking more of flextime. From what I've seen, relatively few people come in as early as possible, even though statistically speaking they should be 50-50 on the DST issue (and favour more daylight after working hours).

K-12 school start times don’t flex. Before-care and dropping off early at daycare cost money.

But common business hours are set, as the name says, by the common business. And many things in our day to day life in the end are determined by the sun. So if there is a permanent offset in the wall clock, business hours are going to shift to compensate. So changing the time zone might have a short-term impact, but long-term, will be compensated away. Most people have difficulties to raise in the dark, so the day to day schedule will be adjusted so that they have to raise in the dark only for a short part in the year, like 2 months. A time setting which would mean to get up in the dark for 4+ months is going to trigger a compensation.

And of course, as a consequence, French people do many things "later" than in Germany, be it work, lunch or dinner times.

When I get the opportunity I have done exactly that. Despite being a natural night owl with dislike of mornings, I'd get in very early - 6:30-7:30 to get an early finish.

When I'm stuck with "traditional" business hours there's essentially no daylight outside of work hours, for a month or so either side of the equinox.

Because our society requires time coordination for most things... stores need to be open so people can go to them, businesses need to be open at the same time so deals can be made, coworkers need to work together, schools need to be open when parents are working, etc.

It's pretty unhealthy to wake up in the dark. And schools generally let out in the early afternoon, so summer time would just send kids to school in the dark for the winter.

If you're at far enough north latitudes you don't have much of a choice; daylight isn't long enough in winter and there's not enough of it to go around to all times when you'd want it. Optimizing for daylight in the morning when the earliest risers are waking, at the expense of having it go dark soon after lunchtime, isn't a great trade-off.

To put some concrete numbers around that, by meaningless cosmic coincidence, it happens that around the 45 latitude line, the summer/winter oscillation occurs at nearly exactly 1/3rd and 2/3rds, that is, in winter you get 8 hours of daylight and 16 of darkness, and in summer you get 16 hours of daylight and 8 hours of darkness.

The 45th runs through the northern United States, putting nearly all of Canada in an even more extreme environment, and runs through the middle of Western Europe and the southern part of Eastern Europe. So it's a very significant portion of the northern hemisphere that is subject to these conditions, both by geography and by population centers.

So, it's not just a few stragglers at the poles or something; it's a major chunk of civilization.

As it happens, not much of the land mass of the southern hemisphere is south of 45S. See https://www.mapsofindia.com/worldmap/latitude-longitude.html , for instance.

Combined population of Europe and Canada is under 600 million. While it’s certainly a large part of this website’s audience, I think it is a stretch to call it a “major chunk of civilization”.

It's closer to 800 million, and "major" doesn't mean "majority".

> earliest risers are waking

I don't think there's any reason to turn this into an us vs them thing. Where I live, at only about 45 degrees, permanent DST would have the sun rising at 8:50 in the dead of winter. I don't think I've ever known anyone who wakes later than that.

At some point places far enough north are just going to have to adjust hourly schedules by the season anyway. Daylight vs standard time doesn't fix it.

Isn’t that because you live very far west in your time zone (eg. Bordeaux)? In the true center of a time zone at the 45th parallel I’d expect 0800-1600 daylight on the winter solstice.

> I don't think I've ever known anyone who wakes later than that.

There are a lot of us. And considering all of the ways society makes life harder for night owls (including being incredulous that we even exist, as shown here), I'm surprised permanent DST is even on the table. But I'll take it.

Ayep, somehow you're lazy if you prefer sleeping at 2AM and waking at 10AM, and hardworking if you prefer sleeping at 10PM and waking at 6AM.

I am a night owl, and permanent DST is worse. I would not like that. Usually for us, night owls, it is hard to switch from standard time to dst as we need to wake up one hour earlier. The early riser society is already against us. On winter time, because of all the darkness at north (I live in Finland), it would be hard to get up as the sun is not helping. Standard time during winters at least helps a bit as you can wake up with some sun light. Sure the downside is that it is dark after work. But for me it would be dark, no matter what. I am not leaving my work at 2pm to enjoy the light, which is gone at 4pm. On summer it is never dark, so you can jog at 2am just fine.

To be fair, humans are wired to generally get up when the sun comes up. There’s nothing wrong with staying up late and getting up late, but society has kind of settled on “things happen early in the morning”, and considering biology, I don’t think that’s unreasonable.

From what I heard, that's not true. Due to some ancient group of people being "on guard duty", while others not, the night owls seems just to derive from that group of people that was on guard duty. Guaranteed this is a just a voice I heard, it explains why my grandfather, my mother, me and my daughter all wake up late and prefer going to bed late.

And to be clear, we adapted to the sleep time of my daughter, not the opposite (it's the only way to get sleep as a parent)

You do not have to be that far north. In Italy, which is pretty much the optimal latitude for DST and also very close to the "right" longitude for its time zone, the sun rises around 8am in the winter, which would be 9am with year-round DST. Schools start between 8am and 8:30am (the latter for elementary school), which would be dark.

Not to try to take this conversation off-topic, but there are some reasonable arguments for starting schools later too; it's not like the time schools starts is immutable and we have to design our time system around that

IIRC the flip side is we waste a lot of energy by allocating the hour of sunlight to the morning where many people are still asleep vs. the afternoon when almost everyone is awake and thus needs to turn on lights and heat.

Maybe a long time ago when lights actually used a lot of energy. For me, it's all about the heat. And if my family gets up in the dark, when it's coldest, and the heat pump turns on, that's probably my biggest energy draw of the day. If I can wait just an hour for the sun to come up and the air to become even a few degrees warmer, my heat pump just became a lot more efficient.

The heating system is on all day, is it not? Why does the clock make a difference? I guess if you have no pets you might turn it down while you're not home but it still has to stay on some to keep the pipes from freezing.

During the night, most people are under blankets, and so the temperature doesn't need to be as high. If people wake up earlier in the morning, it is colder when they get out of bed. They then turn up the thermostat in the morning, and never turn it back down as the day goes on. When Indiana implemented DST in 2006, power consumption increased by ~1%.

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/does-daylight-sav...

I think the point is few places need heat as much during the day as they do at night. Do they?

Just look at the daily high/low. The low is at night.

This would be a neat graphic. What does this do to the average temperature morning and evening.

> This would be a neat graphic.

my utility company actually provides a graph of low/avg/high temperature and power consumption for each day of the billing period. it's a great way to see how your heating/cooling schedule affects your bill.

I think most people sleep better when the ambient temperature is a few degrees cooler than they want their house during the day. so an extra hour in bed during the coldest part of the day could save some energy, probably marginal though.

Weather Underground (wunderground.com) shows a line graph of temperature (and many other options as well) and the low is almost always around sunrise. Lack of sun means decline, sun shining means increase.

Common architectural pattern in northern Europe is externally insulated masonry buildings that have significant amount of mass inside the thermal envelope. In such buildings there is enough time-delay in temperature changes that the time of heating does not matter much. And while heat-pumps have a higher coefficient of performance when temperature difference is smaller, this is overwhelmed by pricing difference of peak vs off-peak energy.

Programmable thermostat set to a lower temperature at night. It saves a ton of energy.

Back in communist time people used to work 7-15h, or even 6-14h. Why not just return to that? Then you have the whole afternoon again. Here 8-16h is still considered the norm, but looks like we're importing the american 9-5pm, not sure why.

It’s more about when school opens and closes and not business hours.

Either way. Personally, I find it silly that we should change out time keeping because we do things at x o'clock.

If the causes of our schedule don't change, over time we will drift back to the same thing only with a different digit on the clock. Then, I guess we can repeat the shifting excercise.

And schools open at the earliest time they can expect the pupils to be awake. And that is mostly determined by sunrise.

if only.

where I live, school opens at the earliest time teachers and parents can be awake due to schools not being big enough to accommodate the amount of pupils, children be damned.

My primary school had morning and afternoon shifts rotating every week.

Well, I believe the way it is commonly done in some places is that the openings are staggered so they can run the buses three times. So whether the sun is up depends on which grade you are in.

Lots of we Americans do the same, not 9-5. I've worked several places where I did 7AM to 3PM, and did just fine. As you said, the advantage is freeing up some time in the afternoon and evening. Some companies are nasty about 9-5 butts-in-seats, but the better ones are usually flexible (particularly if you make meetings you need to and show yourself to be competent).

> DST as we have it seems suited to a world that still has a third of the population working outside in the fields. A world where work start time and sunrise were inextricably linked.

I think this origin of DST has been debunked, and it doesn't even make sense. If it were to suit those who worked in the fields, then we would have DST in winter when the sun sets early (4pm here)!

Where I live (heavy farming community), the sun sets at 9pm in summer. Without daylight time it would set at 8pm. A lot of restaurants/businesses close at 9pm. Working the fields till sunset means you don't get to go enjoy your time anywhere after work.

Furthermore, if your work is linked to sunrise and sunset, then having daylight or not is relatively irrelevant. You'll follow the sun no matter what your watch is telling you the time is.

Cattle don't care about DST. The only thing it dies for farmers is screw up their delivery schedule.

Around the equinox sunrise is probably around 8:30-9am here, sunset around 3:30-4pm. Twilight I guess an hour each way.

That makes sense when you need daylight to work - which is back when far more worked outside. Core business hours and timezones seem to fit around that minimum daylight. It makes a lot less sense to tie daylight hours, when they are in short supply, to the time now most of us are in permanently illuminated offices and factories.

> Around the equinox

Solstice, surely? At the equinox the sun should rise and set at the same hour (on a 12-hour clock).

Working the fields till sunset means you don't get to go enjoy your time anywhere after work.

By design. Farmers worked hard all summer because they'd be largely shut in during the winter. That was the time for rest, repair, and preparation for next summer.

It's only recently, with the large-scale mechanization of farming that the notion of a farmer working sunup to sundown became strange.

> when it's around the equinox I am guaranteed no daylight in personal time

Do you not get a weekend?

Do we really need the HN pedantry of specifying every nth detail like "on working days" in a sentence when I am talking of working practice? That should be enough to imply work days. :)

"DST as we have it seems suited to a world that still has a third of the population working outside in the fields. A world where work start time and sunrise were inextricably linked."

I don't get it. If sunrise is what matters, DST is irrelevant. As someone said, the cows don't consult the clock when they need milking.

For every person who enjoys the extra hour of sun in the summer, there's a person who detests an extra hour of darkness in the morning in winter.

And I'll also find you one who doesn't like late sunsets. Some people do not eat dinner prior to sunset.

Living in northern climates, we have the sun setting at 9pm in summer. No one here is going to be impacted if it sets at 8pm.

Personally, the only people I know who like permanent daylight time are those who live in a system where the clock changes. I've lived in and interacted with people in countries where they have permanent standard time, and they never expressed a desire to switch their clocks by one hour permanently. I think those who advocate permanent daylight time are the ones seeking an unnatural solution.

Let's simply acknowledge that everyone has a preference, and there's no objective winner here. Switching to permanent daylight means your location will be out of whack with the concept of time zones. Most of the world either switches their clock or has permanent standard time. Having your locale be permanent daylight will make for really weird global time zone maps, and will break the notion of "if you travel east beyond a certain point, the time zone will shift by one hour."

Global time zone maps are already really weird. There are plenty of places where traveling east doesn’t change the time zone for thousands of miles, or changes it by something other than one hour.

Living in the EU I can say that the opinion of most people is: stop this madness but if possible align with neighbor countries and perhaps prefer a bit more sun after work, in this order.

AFAIK France decided to keep permanent DST from 2021. I hope my country (Italy) does the same. We don't center our day around 12:00, it's more like 13:00 or later.

Which would be odd, if true (haven't heard anything like that from my French colleagues). As France is in the same time zone as Germany, even outside of DST, it is basically in a zone of permanent DST. When in DST, it is shifted 2 hours versus the sun position. Actually the true noon for the non-DST middle European time zone is at the eastern border of Germany. So whole Germany and France are "ahead" of the time even without DST.

> "there's no objective winner here"

To a large degree I agree with what you're saying (you know what they say about opinions), but the last couple years I've put a lot more effort into improving my sleep habits after reading Matthew Walker's book "Why We Sleep". Tons of science and data-driven conclusions.

But what I found incredible, there are studies to back this up, is that in spring, when we "lose" an hour of sleep, the next day after changing the clocks, heart attacks increase by about 24%.[0] Of course on the flip side, apparently there is a ~21% reduction in heart attacks when we set the clocks back in the fall, so maybe it's a wash.

Suicide rates also jump in spring on the day immediately after the clocks have been pushed forward.

[0] https://www.sciencealert.com/daylight-savings-time-change-ki...

I lived in China for several years, and I had to travel around the country for work. Having one big timezone with no DST makes everything easier on everyone all the time and the fact that the sun sets a bit earlier or later on the peripheries had no negative consequences at all - it's just the normal thing and everyone's used to it. Moving back to Canada and having to feel like a zombie for three weeks every spring is painful.

I'd also point out that, growing up slightly farther north, I grew up going to school in the dark for about four months of the year anyway, even with DST.

It really isn’t that simple though. Urumqi is heavily time distorted with store openings delayed two hours later than Beijing. Yes, the time is the same, but the schedules are different. What happens is that two times start floating around anyways (local time and Beijing time).

«the time is the same, but the schedules are different»

I fail to see how this would be worse than China having multiple timezones. A single timezone still makes many things much easier such as alleviating the mental load and software complexity in everything that revolves around cross-country logistics, meetings, travel, etc.

In my personal life, I lost count of the number of times a meeting was delayed or cancelled because of confusion around differing timezones.

Instead of setting your watch right (or having your phone automatically adjust), you instead have to just “remember” that all the standard store openings and work times are displaced by a couple of hours and continuously do the math in your head. How is that better? We’ve gone from one problem technology can fix to one that it definitely can’t.

Obligatory link: https://qntm.org/abolish

I’m tired of seeing this article on HN. Humans care where the sun is more than they care about what time it is. How am I supposed to know when someone in Europe is awake if it’s 10 PM for me in the US and the sun has already set? Timezones don’t just go away because you’ve switched to UTC everywhere. Sure, my meeting is at 14:00, but can my Brazilian, Russian, and Australian colleagues attend?

You have to check when they start work, but you dont have to deal with the fact that different countries switch clocks at a different date. And when you talk to them, it's clear to all what time 16:00 is

But instead you get a terrible confusion what day it is precisely because for somewhat more than half of the world the calendar date suddenly changes somewhere in the middle of the solar day instead of conveniently somewhere in the middle of the night when most people would be asleep (or at least not caring about the date) anyway.

> Instead of setting your watch right

What is right? What is your reference? Work start time? School start? Shop opening? Pub closing? Now try coordinating a conference with your supplier a few hundred km away based on their local supper time.

I don't know where you live, but if you go to say Spain, Holland, Italy and Czech republic, also comparing small towns / cities to large ones, the schedules will be quite different and I believe all of them are in the same time zone.

Urumqi is a small (by Chinese standards) city of 3 and a half million. There are a bunch of cities in northern xinjiang as well, it has a total population of 23.5 million (and is heavily urbanized in its north). Imagine if a province with more people than many European countries had a different schedule from the rest of the country. And it gets even worse in kashgar, but that’s a much smaller place than Urumqi (only 800k, might as well be a village).

Tibet has similar problems for sure, but there aren’t many people there and you are unlikely to experience it without a special travel permit.

It's not that it is incompatible, it's just different, mostly offset by an hour or two.

Somewhere people tend to start at 6,7,8,9 (say 20%, 30%, 40%, 10%), other place most people start at 9. Somewhere shops are open before 8, somewhere only after 10. In some shops close at about 18, in others most are open till 20 even 21-22. Some places have a siesta around noon.

Ok, maybe a bit much, but most things only affect you if you are there and you quickly find out, and others are just a 1-2h offset, so other companies may not be open during start or end of shifts. Not more of an inconvenience than standard flex time.

This kind of thing creates tension that leads to civil unrest. It is by far the biggest problems the Uighurs have with the central Chinese government, but the inability to have their own time be official (even though it exists and is widely used) definitely does the parties no favors.

In what surreal world do you live where all stores open at the same time? You need to either memorize or look up opening hours online anyway.

I was walking around in Urumqi one morning and just expected a department store to be open already...except it was 10 and it didn’t open until 11 on a Monday. It really isn’t a weird expectation in China for stores to have consistent hours.

This happens anyway even in the US. As an example many may have experienced, office hours are often a couple hours earlier on the east coast versus west coast in their local time zones. Consequently, scheduling meetings across time zones becomes more complicated because a 3-hour time zone difference can become closer to a 5-hour time zone when adjusted for local office hours.

Huh? Office hours are 9-5 in Seattle as they are in Miami. The only thing a bit different is the mall will open and close at 9:30 instead of 9.

I was always scheduled meetings from Beijing to Redmond or Beijing to Cambridge anyways, you could do either or, but there was little chance of a conference between both!

Office hours in places like Washington DC and NYC frequently start at 7am, some parts of the US are culturally early risers.

This works out brilliantly when I am in London, not so much when I am in Seattle.

One big time zone sucks. Either one part of the country has a thrown off sleep pattern (because they're sleeping during daylight and coming home at night) or the timezone still exists but its just "unofficial" now because work starts at 5am rather than 8am and ends at 2pm instead of 5pm.

Having work start at 5 am doesn't make time unofficial, does it?

It would seem like it would make starting work at 8 am non-standard, but I don't see any logistical or biological reason that people have to go to work when a clock says "8:00". In fact breaking from the "8:00 means go to work" custom seems like less of a strain on transit systems (among other things).

Or are you saying that "start work at 8:00" is so ingrained that people create another unofficial time zone to deal with it?

This, a thousand times this.the current system where you assume the whole world starts at 9 am, but dont know what time it is anywhere is a work of mad genius psycho. We dont need to move time itself.

One big time zone sucks only if everyone incorrectly assumes everyone else in that zone has the same sleep/work schedule, rather than letting knowledge of the other person's location better inform that assumption. This tactic scales all the way up to the whole world just using UTC without clocks being set differently anywhere. Instead of a time zone meaning "a zone where clocks are offset by X amount" it's replaced by "a zone where the typical start of work is X o'clock." Of course, then we have to decide if "noon" and "midnight" need to be redefined not to mean precisely 12:00 and 0:00 respectively, but instead to be used as vague ideas the way we use the vague "midday" and so forth.

Edit: Or not vague per se, but calculated and looked up exactly how we do sunrise/sunset.

> Having one big timezone with no DST makes everything easier on everyone all the time and the fact that the sun sets a bit earlier or later on the peripheries had no negative consequences at all

This is not true, at all. There was a good study recently [1] on how health is significantly impacted based on what side of a timezone you live on - I'd assume that the impact would be even more pronounced for one huge timezone.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/04/19/how-livin...

Isn’t the solution then to just keep the clocks moved back? There is no need to change them twice a year

No, because I like doing things outside in the summer after 6:30pm.

You mean in the sunlight? Because...keeping the clocks moved means that extra hour of sunlight in the evening without blinding light at 4 AM.

It also means no light until 9am in the morning in places where the winter sun would rise at 8. That's depressing, thanks but no thanks. :-)

But you get that hour in the evening. In the morning you're home and then you go to work or at work (at least for most people), so you don't really even use that hour of sunlight. If you're at work like most people you might not even see it.

In the evening you can enjoy that hour and be less depressed.

No you don’t use that hour of sunlight. Some people like it.

Personally, my day is so much better when I wake up to the sun vs to cloud/fog/darkness. I just wake up happier, and I have no control over the sun.

So no I wouldn’t agree to trade my happiness throughout the day in exchange for eating dinner outside or whatever else people claim they need sunlight for at night.

No, I don't use that hour in the evening. I work 9-6 and cannot start working earlier because I have to take my son to school and come back home. Sometimes even 9-7 if I take a break to go running or whatever (which in the winter I must do when the sun is very high). That would be after the sun has set (5pm) even with year-round DST. Then I start cooking dinner.

In fact, working from home means that I do not go out at all after the sun has set.

Then just adjust the time you do it instead of forcing everybody to deal with DST.

A lot of people in places far enough away from the equator to have significant changes in sunlight hours want the increased daylight hours in summer to happen after work rather than before work, and/or do not want them to happen while they are still asleep or trying to sleep in the morning.

Yes, we could leave the clocks alone, and change the clock times at which we do things.

We could have businesses open at, say, 9 AM in the winter and 8 AM in the summer. We could have schools start an hour earlier in the summer.

People tend to want to arrange their sleep schedule so that they pretty much just prepare for work and/or school after waking and then leave, so that their non-work time is all after work. That way they get their non-work time in one block, instead of split into two smaller blocks with work in between.

That means we'd be changing our wake up times by an hour in the summer to accommodated business/school opening hours. (Which means those who rely on alarm clocks to wake on time would be changing their alarm time...so much for escaping fiddling with clocks!).

Much of what we do is tied to our sleep or work schedules, such as when we get hungry and when we need transit.

So...we end up with pretty much everything that operates on a regular schedule having a separate winter and summer schedule. Every place we print schedules has to have two schedules that get swapped between summer and winter. Every place that has an alarm or an alert tied to work or sleep needs to have alarm times swapped between summer and winter.

Dealing with all that will involve making more changes twice a year--some to things that can be a hassle to change like signage.

Or we can just change the clocks--which are designed to be easy to change, and nowadays most of them can even do it automatically.

I live in a country with DST, I currently have 3 devices in my house showing incorrect time. On my way to th city centre I came across 2 public clocks, one at a bus stop, one at a metro stop showing incorrect time. I walk into the KFC and time on the checkout counter is wrong.

Which part of this mess is "designed to be easy to change"??

Excellent reasons to have, every year,

1) two hours of time which use the same time notation (think about trains and flights arriving at those times), and

2) one hour which doesn't exist, leading to e.g. time interval between 1am and 3am being 1 hour.

You don't like "doing things outside in the summer after 6:30pm".

You like doing things outside in the summer when the sun is at a certain point.

You can do that regardless of whether that point is called 5:30pm, 6:30pm, or 7:30pm....

Perhaps he also has to work until 6pm and cannot choose to start one hour earlier. Perhaps he wants to do things outside just before going out for dinner; in some places restaurants do not open before 7:30pm. And so on.

Daylight savings time is only useful in a reduced range of latitudes, I grant that. But where it makes sense, it is way worth one hour of sleep once a year.

>Perhaps he also has to work until 6pm and cannot choose to start one hour earlier. Perhaps he wants to do things outside just before going out for dinner; in some places restaurants do not open before 7:30pm. And so on.

If enough people in a country want to do things "when the sun is at a certain point" and that point coincides with a working hour, they can move the 9-5 to 8-4 or whatever.

Coordination does not have to correspond to renaming the hours...

You can't just move the time at which society operates. The dependency chain of one thing needing to open with another and so on is too complex for a single entity to control.

That's exactly what you do by moving the time. He is suggesting we stop foing it the stupid way, and move the workhours themselves. The current system is like dragging the carpet to move a chair sitting on top. Leave the carpet alone and move the fucking chair directly.

Wouldn't that cause exactly the same disruption to sleep? If schools and everything else suddenly starts at 7 in March after having started at 8 for 5-6 months. And who would enforce it? What if schools move and working hours don't?

I'm starting to think that 30 minute off time zone offsets are the way to go.

The cost is more than one hour of sleep once a year; for many people it's up to three weeks of arriving drowsy and with a headache at work.

the way we name the hours of the day is arbitrary, but the system serves to coordinate human activity. unless you do mostly asynchronous activities that don't involve coordinating with other people, you can't just decide when to start your day. there's not much point in opening your coffee shop after everyone is already at work.

when people talk about renumbering the hours of the day, they are really talking about recoordinating the hours that everyone else expects to interact with each other. changing the numbers themselves is just a hack to shift everyone's schedule at once. it's easier to shift 9am to 8am than it is to get every business to change their posted hours.

And the article goes into that:

> All the processes happening in our bodies are co-ordinated by our biological clocks, located in our brains and all other organs. The argument in favour of permanent DST is that there would be more light in the evening. While this is true, we can’t change the number of hours of light in the day. More evening light means less morning light. But importantly, it’s the light in the morning that is most important in resetting our biological clocks. [...] The problem is that we live in societies that force us to get up and go to work or school at times that we don’t get to choose.

> Chronobiologists, the name given to scientists who study biological timing, call this situation “social jet lag,” when the body clock doesn’t match the social clock.

The article is based on physiology and health effects.

I've lived in 2 different places in the world that did not do DST, and I have to respectfully disagree for many cases.

It's nice to hear from someone who's experienced both. These kinds of discussions are almost universally one-sided people moaning about Daylight Savings.

If we didn't have Daylight Savings, they'd moan about not having Daylight Savings, or the inconveniences caused by the shift in sunlight that you, someone who actually knows what he's talking about, detail.

Honestly, people just like to moan about things, and since the internet now makes it easier for small people to complain to large groups of people, it's all just imaginarily aggrieved people trying to make their voices heard above the rest of the rabble.

Complaining about Daylight Savings is like complaining about traffic, or daily weather — it's an easy target because it's abstract.

Indiana is a pretty good example.

They have a surprisingly lengthy DST history: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Indiana

https://github.com/eggert/tz/blob/master/northamerica is also a fun read.

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