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Comment by kj4ips | Hacker News Reader

I personally disagree. I live on the extreme west end of a time zone, and I greatly enjoy having an more daylight during my after-work leisure time. Without DST, I would have almost no post-work sunlight outside of the actual summer months.

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Day light savings time is the process of switch clocks forward 1 hour in the spring. This transfers 1 hour of sunlight from the morning to the night, hence increasing the hours of daylight. Then in the fall day light savings time ends and we give that hour back to the morning.

If we eliminated day light savings time you would still have post work sunlight in the winter.

In the far west end of many timezones you never have post-work sunlight in the winter and the DST fight is over keep some post-work sunlight in the spring/fall and even parts of the summer.

Western edges of timezones often favor/prefer year-round "daylight time" because that's closer to their natural noon as US timezones especially heavily favor natural noon on the eastern border.

> In the far west end of many timezones you never have post-work sunlight in the winter

So...fix the problem at the source by changing the boundaries so solar noon is clock noon at (approximately) the center of the zone instead of the eastern boundary.

I think a lot of US timezones at least would split roughly in half if we entirely got rid of DST with eastern cities picking standard time and western cities picking daylight time. I think that's a big part of why we continue to debate getting rid of DST and never actually do it because no one wants to redraw the timezone boundaries.

There's the notion of getting rid of multiple timezones altogether.

It's certainly an interesting notion in theory, though I believe in practice it isn't all that likely either.

Before the railways every city and/or county just about was its own time zone and a lot of the historical records are in major computer timezone databases if you feel like exploring them. It's fascinating. (Including sometimes minute and second offsets from UTC; things that programmers sometimes wrongly assume aren't possible with UTC offsets.) I think it also should also be somewhat obvious pretty quickly that it is a communication nightmare for any company with a presence in multiple cities or any person travelling between cities.

I also think "Swatch beats" made it seem pretty obvious to me that no one actually wants to standardize only on a single timezone with no offsets either.

> no one actually wants to standardize only on a single timezone with no offsets either.

You're right. Also no one wants 28 day months either.

At risk of going way off topic, this reminds of the weird debates I've had with people about post-COVID calendars and how all the days kind of seem the same and all the months just weird. I've got friends that got deep into the "What day in March 2020 is this again?" "fandom" (https://whatdayofmarch2020.com/)

My own ridiculous reaction was trying to use the French Revolutionary Calendar with the English month names (either the joke ones or the more serious proposal depending on my mood): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_calendar

It's really hard to use a different calendar, even as a joke. Obviously this effort was not helped that though there is plenty of software calendars that can convert to/from the French Revolutionary Calendar quite obviously none of them were English localized (in either the witty or the serious names), and it isn't really worth the time to do that, especially just as a joke. (Today is 21 Sneezy or 21 Fogarious, if you were curious.)

What if we just stayed on DST year round?

It wouldn't change a thing. The deeper cause of the day rythm is the daylight cycle. We adjust all our times, like start of work day or school start relative to that - mostly so that you get up after or not too long before sunrise and have most of the daylight during work time. If you change the time zone setting, day times are going to adjust accordingly.

Some people with children don't like that because "[their] children will have to go to school in the dark" during the winter. That's what killed legislation to make DST permanent where I live.

More importantly, they might fail in getting their children awake and out of the house in the first place, it is before sunset :p

I have children, and the time change is far worse than going in the dark. Also, kids in Alaska go in the dark all the time and survive just fine.

And if they have an after school activity, they have to come home in the dark anyway.

It's a red herring.

Sounds like last year, when all of the schools were closed, would've been the optimal time to push through any sort of change.

With kids, I would prefer them having sun when they can actually be outside on that sun.

> "[their] children will have to go to school in the dark" during the winter.

Then we move school start times to what's biologically optimal for kids instead of what optimizes budgets.

Why can't the time someone wakes up or works change with the season, but using the same timezone? What is the point to call it 7a when it's actually 6a?

It's the advantage of centralization. Instead of every entity changing their operational hours, they peg it to a common standard, and simply change the standard. It's a layer of indirection.

By doing it this way, we keep things in synch, like business hours matching school hours matching transit timetables and so on. If every one of them changed their hours separately, we'd have a much greater mess than the less-bad current approach to daylight time.

Whether we want the functionality at all (to adjust human activities based on sunlight hours) is a separate question. Given that we do, DST is a useful abstraction compared to going without it.

Just curious, why not just just start and end your job an hour earlier all year round, 7-4 instead of 8-5? Then you gain an extra hour of evening sun all year, instead of just during DST?

This doesn't make sense to me. If you're on the extreme western end of a time zone, the clock time of sunset is later compared to points further east in the same time zone. So you're in better shape for post-work sunlight than anyone else in your time zone. The people who have it worst for post-work sunlight are the ones at the extreme eastern end of a time zone.

Getting rid of DST doesn't have to mean to stay on standard time permanently. BC for instance chooses to stay on DST. Some day. Hopefully. At least the legislation is already there.

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