In Defense of Daylight Saving Time | Hacker News Reader

In Defense of Daylight Saving Time

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Each year our family braces for the impact of time change on both my wife and I and our kids. It takes weeks to get back to 'normal'. Light/dark/whatever... it's too impactful on sleep, moods, and health.

Set and leave it alone, for the love of the family!

The real problem is something that a Daylight/Standard time shift can't really fix anyway. If you are far enough north (and it's really only north, because there isn't that much population in comparable latitudes south), you're going to have a wild differential between the length of the day in winter and in summer. In a month, I'll be down to about eight hours of daylight, and in June, I have sixteen hours. That's tough, and there isn't really any way around it, short of bagging the rigid clock-bound schedule that the modern world runs on and reverting, and I don't hold out any hope of that ever happening.

So you just have to trudge along and stock up on Vitamin D supplements.

How do deal with traveling across different time zones, this is basically the same thing?

I've found that traveling is distinctly different (within the United States) because the sun is still coming up at approximately the same local hour. Of course this can vary by more than an hour if you travel between opposite edges of a time zone, but somehow traveling is also less jarring to me than the DST shift.

Make the switch to DST permanent. Much better having longer days in the summer, which also helps not having to fight against light telling your body to not go to bed. This switch messes people up so bad for days or weeks

This will make 12:00 not Noon, but an hour off noon. I think I like to keep it as close to a noon point at given location, but I am probably in minority on that one.

How does it make the day longer?

Unless you can also convince businesses and schools to open later in the winter, permanent DST is terrible then at higher latitudes.

In the Seattle area, for instance, under permanent DST sunrise could be as late as a few minutes before 9 AM. That puts a lot of people out traveling as much as 2 hours before sunrise.

Better for the sun to rise after 8 than set before 5.

No. For our circadian rhythm, it's more important that the sun rises early enough in the morning. The moment when it sets has less impact.

Human society has historically been active after dark for social activities, like sitting around camp fires etc. Not so much early in the morning before the dark ends. We should adapt to what is natural for us humans, which is getting up around sunrise and possibly staying up after sunset. "Daylight Saving Time" is a move in the wrong direction. Let's at least stick to standard time.

I think people just have different set schedules. I have no problem being up before sunrise, and hate having no daylight in the evening. It seems many people feel similarly.

Well, it's the conclusion I got from the things sleep researchers write.

How is that any worse than what you have now, where no one gets to see the sun after work until March?

Morning tends to be more concentrated. You've got people going to work, kids walking or biking to school, people taking their dogs out for the first walk of the day, deliveries starting, people heading out to shop for things they'll need that day, and things like that.

Evening isn't as concentrated, because there is much more variation in when people come back than in when they go out.

If we only can do one of them in the light, morning probably makes the most sense because of it having more traffic volume and more traffic diversity.

Is it actually true that 6:30am is more concentrated than 5:30pm?

If those same folks leave work at six in the evening, they’re travelling two hours after sunset. Same difference. Fact of the matter is, there isn’t eight hours of daylight in winter in Seattle. You’ll spend time in the dark before or after work one way or another.

Days and nights will be the same length, regardless of which time zone you choose.

I'm ambivalent about DST as a concept (see e.g. here: https://leancrew.com/all-this/2013/03/why-i-like-dst/), but I feel like proponents of this scheme haven't really thought it through.

"Permanent daylight time" is no different from just getting rid of time changes and shifting one time zone to the East. And of course the whole point of having time zones is so that can be somewhat close to the middle of the day at noon (and that "midnight" isn't too much before or after the middle of the night).

The end result of this is that instead of saying "Oh my god I can't believe it's getting dark and it's only 4:30!", we'll quickly adapt and find ourselves saying "Oh my god I can't believe it's getting dark and it's only 5:30!".

This would also mean waking up before dawn throughout most of the winter for most people in moderately northern latitudes with conventional schedules, which is likely to be terrible for sleep health.

And yes, it's possible to adjust work and school schedules to be better in line with people's natural sleep rhythms, but then why not just do that and leave our timezones alone?

>I have no doubt that some Americans legitimately dislike DST—not just the change of clocks, but the redistribution of sunlight from morning to afternoon.

I don't really feel like most people complain about the specific time the sun sets, as much as they are complaining about the disruption to their circadian cycle. I dislike the short days during winter, but changing the time the sun sets an hour forward or backward isn't ultimately going to create more hours of sunlight during the day.

What i will say however, after a year of living in a country now that doesn't observe DST, is i greatly appreciate not having a disruption to my sleep cycles in either direction. My dog also appreciate not having the disruption to his daily routine either. I adjusted to just waking up when the sun rises, wanting to go to sleep within a few hours of the sun setting, and when it's cold outside and the days are shorter i find myself wanting to spend more time inside sleeping anyways.

"two states eventually opted out: Hawaii and Arizona. Hawaii abandoned the law in 1967 because, well, it just didn’t make sense. One of the benefits of Daylight Saving Time is that there’s more daylight in the evening. But in Hawaii, the sun rises and sets at about the same time every day, TIME reports"

Arguments about the merits of sunshine earlier in the morning or sunshine later into the afternoon are a distraction. Some like one, the rest like the other. They will never agree, but some will adjust their own schedule to their own needs. As a society, we could make jobs accommodate different needs.

The essence of DST is polititians drunk on the power to legislate sunrise and sunset, primal forces of the universe. Why do we extend them that power? When will we take it away?

It started with the introduction of time zones, which are really quite a reasonable idea and have more advantages than disadvantages. And they need to be regulated somehow, and politics is how we do that. No need to take that power away. We should however make our system such that politicians work for the advantage of the people, not for other interests.

How ironic that this article (which was actually written in the spring and goes to great lengths to explain why people are mistaking DST for standard time) was posted here in the fall just after the switch to winter time; some master level trolling posting this here now.

As a bike commuter, I'm pretty happy to be back on standard time. Light is much more valuable to me on my morning commute as it also makes things warmer.

What about commuting home in the dark? That’s what I have to do and it sucks.

you would still be commuting home in the dark regardless i think

Not if you work 9-5

If there isn't enough daylight during part of the year to allow for both morning and evening commutes to be in the light, it probably makes more sense to give the light to the morning commute.

The morning commute is not only adults going to work. It's also kids heading to school, many on foot or bike.

The evening commute, on the other hand, is mostly adults coming home from work. School days are significantly shorter than adult work days, so the school kids are home by around 2-4 PM, before the evening commute starts.

Thus, if you only have enough daylight for one of them, you'll benefit more people by using that light for the morning commute.

dawn is also a lot colder than dusk

Over 40% of kids do extra-ciriculars. We also need to factor in errands, hangouts, etc, that are done after school.

Similarly, there are more adults than children and Adults/parents commute at more dangerous busy times. "Think of the children" should only go so far.

I'm more concerned with the cold. Morning dark is a lot colder than evening dark

As an outdoor sporter, I really appreciate longer evenings in the summer. Windsurfing and kitesurfing in the dark isn't as good as when it's light.

>The media’s inability to articulate the proposition’s purpose may have led to voter bewilderment, as illustrated in the CBS article, which features a California resident who asserts: “I don’t like Daylight Saving Time. It disrupts me every fall.” Given that DST begins in the spring, this Californian probably meant to assail Standard Time but inadvertently contributed to anti-DST fervor.

There's nothing incorrect here, as the existence of a time switch to Daylight Savings Time necessitates a jump back to Standard Time. The individual is basically saying "I don't like [the switch to] Daylight Saving Time."

The rest of the article ignores that store hours etc. are changeable, and that those hours do not change infrequently. Some places have both summer and winter hours already.

Going daylight savings time all year round because we're too lazy to bother with changing store hours is absurd. Why in god's name would we decide that noon, when the sun is at its highest point, is not 12PM? To highlight the absurdity, imagine explaining this to kids 100 years from now: "well, 13:00 corresponds to solar noon because a century ago people in the United States decided it made more sense to shift all our time zones one over rather than change work hours. That's why our time zone has the word 'Daylight' in instead of just being called Pacific Time."

(A note: I am aware that solar noon does not exactly correspond to 12:00 PM due to the peculiarities of Earth's orbit, but being off by up to 16 minutes isn't that bad, particularly as the variation is centered around 12:00 PM. And yes, as you move closer to the edge of a time zone the offset between solar noon and 12:00 PM grows, but there is generally an attempt made to correspond with solar noon.)

Why are you so hung up on aligning solar noon with with 12:00 PM? People care more about when the sun rises and when the sun sets. Nobody, besides you, cares about when the sun is at the highest position in the sky.

The times when the sun rises and sets change every season. The sun being in the highest position is the mid point. That's the significance of this.

Having the sunrise always at 8 and the sunset at 20 in the summer and 16 in the winter makes things harder than having sunrise at 6 and sunset at 18 in the summer and sunrise at 8 and sunset at 16. We split the difference of sunlight per season.

Why should I care about when the Sun is at its highest point in the sky? The Sun being at its highest point in the sky has no biological significance that I know of.

The arrival of morning light, on the other hand, is used to regulate our circadian rhythms. Thus, it makes a lot more sense to anchor our schedules for most activities to when the Sun rises, not when it peaks.

The choice of what 12:00 signifies has no bearing on where wake/sleep is anchored. If California decided to switch to Eastern time, people would just end up setting the average work day in the state from 11:00 - 19:00 (Eastern time), and people would wake up at 10:00 (Eastern time).

Indeed, all of China runs on Beijing time. Out west, the sun comes up at 10 AM, in summer. In Winter, at 2 PM.

12:00 PM is not solar noon for most people, regardless of DST. Even if time zones didn't follow political boundaries, it would still not align except for those who are in the center of a given time zone.

So this part of your argument is meaningless.

I noted this at the end of my comment, but I'll elaborate:

Time zones do tend to be chosen such that inhabitants are within +/- 1 hour of solar time. If you look at the map at http://blog.poormansmath.net/images/SolarTimeVsStandardTimeV... , a switch to permanent DST in North America would make the continent a very bright red.

Yeah, you added that endnote after I commented. Sheesh.

My mistake, I thought I'd put it in there originally! Usually I throw an "EDIT:" in, but it's possible I made the edit so quickly after posting that I didn't think anyone had started replying yet. No offence or subterfuge intended. :-)

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