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Comment by gh123man | Hacker News Reader

DST has become my favorite "holiday" as an adult. Seasonal depression evaporates when I can see the sun after I finish working for the day. I can go work in my yard, or wash my car after work instead of having to cram it in the middle of the day. I feel more motivated to go do other things in the evening instead of feeling like its time for bed at 5pm.

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The same could be achieved by having different work hours in different seasons, no need to change the underlying metric of time to achieve this.

It's as if we redefined the density of water in winter so when you measure a frozen container of it the different volume yields the same weight.

It might have made sense when there was a single clock in a whole village!

But now with the planet probably containing 10x as many clocks as humans this is just complete lunacy.

Honestly, you're absolutely right. But we don't get to decide between a permanent DST and a unified switchover of business hours across the nation, we get to decide between a permanent DST and the crappy situation we have now. I, for one, would be measurably happier if I had more daytime after 5, because getting one bill passed is a whole lot easier than convincing every single scheduling body that has power over me to switch on a seasonal basis.

> It's as if we redefined the density of water in winter so when you measure a frozen container of it the different volume yields the same weight.

Oddly, this is exactly how the US "bushel" was defined -- it measures a mass of a specific type of grain at a particular moisture content, the idea being that the "quantity" of grain shouldn't change as it is dried.

The density of water is also temperature-dependent :)

My point is that the chain of determining the measurement of a natural value should start at the value, not at what we want it to be to then bend the value over backwards to be that then.

So the example doesn't fall apart with a temperature-/moisture-dependent constant:

The point is that the constant should not be arbitrarily changed to achieve a desired value. The constant should be measured/defined and stay as such.

>The same could be achieved by having different work hours in different seasons, no need to change the underlying metric of time to achieve this.

This is a mere pipe dream. Business aren't going to change their hours to different seasons. It would be much easier to just stay on DST then try and coerce business to change their employee hours based off the season.

The shock to our circadian rhythm, which would occur equally regardless of whether due to seasonal DST or due to seasonal 1-hour modifications to business hours, is responsible for loss of productivity/profitability/etc.

But businesses can elect to smear their seasonal modifications with any granularity they want, avoiding severe shock to circadian rhythm, thus avoiding the financial hit!

I guess DST could theoretically smear as well, but that is way more difficult for people to wrap their heads around.

Why are business hours so unchangeable? People seem to just take this as a given, like the God Of Business carved 9-5 on a stone tablet.

Imagine the most uncooperative, petty boss/manager you've ever worked for. Imagine trying to convince them to change business hours. Multiply by tens of thousands.

Businesses interact with other businesses and government agencies. Workers interact with schools and transit. It's about coordination not specific numbers.

Not to mention that business hours are already not all the same. I’m not sure how so many people are missing that extremely obvious fact.

> The same could be achieved by having different work hours in different seasons, no need to change the underlying metric of time to achieve this.

Sure, but that’s just like saying that any two people could arrange things to do something at the same time and place by communicating a precise astronomical phenomenon at that place, like the azimuth of the Sun, then both people can work out when that will be relative to their personal schedules.

Of course, the point of widely-used regional standards for timekeeping is simply to avoid the need to communicate and calculate precise phenomena to represent a local time.

The Sun is the original clock. It used to be that “noon” in any given town was when the Sun was directly overhead, so redefining our fake time to give humans more sunlight doesn’t feel weird to me at all. We only invented time zones so our trains would stop running into each other lol

Lol. So I'm not the only one!

I tell people, Daylight Savings in March is my favorite day of the year.

I hate that in the part of year we need daylight the most we give up more daylight?!?!?

We now have electricity and few of us need to milk cows or plow fields.

The 8-5 for us is stationary.

It is never enjoyable to leave the inside of a building (factory or office) in darkness. Unless you just finished the night shift, I guess ..

I'll let the politicians decide what they want to do, but I know I'll never fully understand why we take away evening sunlight with our stationary 8-5.

The switch to DST for me is something along the lines of: "I've been noticing how it's getting measurably lighter in the evenings and now it's really light."

(Of course, ST is the opposite effect.) I care less about light in the morning as I tend not to be a particular early bird and where I live it's pretty dark first thing in the morning even with ST.

I grew up around farms and farmers. I never understood how DST was supposed to benefit them. The farm animals can't read a clock, they just follow their circadian rhythms and the farmers follow suit.

It did not. That was a marketing excuse that was fed to the city dwellers.

The farm animals do not understand the "time of day" on a human clock, so the farm work occurs around the animals rhythms, not the "clock on the wall". Moving the time of day backwards or forwards just changes what number is on the clock face when the cows are ready to be milked.

> Moving the time of day backwards or forwards just changes what number is on the clock face when the cows are ready to be milked.

Which changes whether the children are there to do the milking, or at school instead, right?

From my experience, cows need to be milked pretty early in the morning (e.g. 5:00am for my friends); early enough that it will always be before school regardless.

No, the cows need to be milked on the cows schedule, and the cows don't know what human time it is when they need to be milked. Moving the clock does not make the cows change their schedule.

Right, as I said, the cows' schedule does not change based on what the clock says, but whether the children are there or at school does change.

I always assumed it was so the children could perform their unpaid farm labor before going to school, but that’s a guess based on no evidence whatsoever.

Just wait until it's permanent and the sun doesn't rise until nearly 9 in the morning all winter. Not sure we can say how spending your whole morning in the dark will effect your SAD. Personally, sunlight greatly helps me wake up, and darkness helps me go to sleep.

DST drives me nuts. Just as spring morning light finally brightens the start of my day, it gets plunged back into darkness. Light persists into evening when dusk should be persuading all to bed.

And coding embedded systems to handle DST edge cases just gets obnoxious when unnecessary.

You want to shift your hours? Adjust your own schedule, don’t demand imposing a change that disrupts mine.

I agree with this. DST also ruins the summer evenings, because you have to wait too long until the sky turns into that beautiful dark blue before getting entirely dark.

As someone who struggles with seasonal depression as well, but who also wakes up early and starts his day early, DST is my enemy for all of the reasons you love it. I'd prefer no DST.

I think we can't "win" with time-related legislation. Is this apple cart something our govt really needs to be upsetting right now?

Counterintuitively, I believe increased sunshine is more associated with depression and suicide than decreasing amounts of it. Suicides are higher in the spring and early summer than in the fall and winter. It's speculated that the increasing light may screw with sleep patterns more than decreasing amounts of light. Not claiming to understand it, but studies in multiple countries across the hemispheres seem to show the same pattern.

the way I've had this rationalized to me was two-fold: - some people commit suicide when the change of seasons doesn't fix their depressive episode - others were so lethargic that the added sunlight gives them the necessary evidence/cognitive fuel to plan and execute

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