Hacker News Reader

Comment by mdavis6890 | Hacker News Reader

TimeZones and DST are for humans and physical realities, such as the tilt of the earth and circadian rhythms. And they serve to address these things in a universal, coordinated way rather than asking each of us to change our schedules individually.

During DST, we all agree to start our days, open our business, and adjust our schedules one hour earlier, but without changing our individual clock times.

With DST all year long, can we choose to send our children to school at 9:30 instead of 8:30 during the winter? Should the school have a different winter schedule than a summer one? Or should we just wake up our young children well before dawn and drag them off?

View on HN

People in Hawaii and Arizona seem to be doing just fine. Hell, have you heard about how the daylight cycles work in Alaska? They generally somehow don't complain about it much.

The time change is super inconvenient, both as a regular person who doesn't like futzing with the oven clock, and as a programmer for whom it is pure madness to try and comprehend all the rules and edge case when converting between time zones.

p.s. mdavis6890, I find myself wanting to leave spiteful words in response to your post. Upon inspecting this, I accept that these feelings are on me. You haven't really done anything. I think it stems from feeling like trash due to the hour time shift, combined with my own deeply seated desire to live in a slightly less nonsensical and insane version of reality. In this present version we seem to be forever saddled by the bullshit of y'ore.

See also: Texas and as of today also Idaho regarding abortion rights rollbacks. Combine that with the highly suspicious conflict of interest of our newly appointed supreme court justices ( https://www.npr.org/2022/03/14/1086535100/wife-of-justice-th... ) and we're in full-on regression insanity mode.

All I want at the moment is to stop being subjected to time zone shift fatigue without the benefit of getting to travel somewhere.

Those are some of the most southern states in the US, so they have the least variation in day length between summer and winter.

9am sunrises are going to be very unpleasant for northern states under permanent DST.

Not everyone is a morning person, I'd rather have my daylight in the afternoon where it's actually useful to me. I suspect that most people agree with me.

It's the night people and delayed-cycle teenagers attending school who suffer most under permanent DST.

In the Winter, permanent DST means everyone has to get up an hour earlier for work or school, relative to the sun which regulates their body rhythm.

Night people already struggle with getting up early enough for these expectations. An hour earlier is going to be harder for them.

Research suggests that overall, health will suffer, sleep will be shorter, and educational attainment will reduce. But there will be more shopping so that's ok!

And, with a consistent time, we go to sleep earlier.

That doesn't work out so neatly for people affected by the sun's cycle.

The sun affects not just when people prefer to sleep, but also quality of sleep, duration, how refreshed they are, and during the daytime the profile of energy levels, hormones, brain function through the day. Just going to bed earlier doesn't compensate for that.

Fair enough. I certainly skipped many first periods even with time changes, though I think there are other solutions to that one.

I think the "not having a change" matters much much more than the absolute value, we can campaign to have realistic hours for school or whatever else, that's a separate topic. Permanent DST lines up with my life better right now.

Well, actually, none of that is true and it's the division of time and systemization of behaviors around those divisions which certain social functions are, generally, arbitrarily centered around that will ultimately determine outcomes. Which is why there are proposals to do things like starting high schoolers later or moving to a 4 day workweek, which was proposed on the order of a century ago alongside drastic declines in labor hours necessary to produce ends meet. Instead we've got digitized time locks that track to the second and the maintenance of the status quo of a bygone era, and children shored up in living graves to make their dues in time far removed from agency.

Time is perhaps one of the most egregious facilitators of harm in the human domain. Both in manifest physical harm and as the root of a gamut of genuinely harmful behaviors without a real justifying rationale to back it. Haste makes waste. Rush drug trials and find out that thalidomide causes birth defects, that PFAs can't be ejected from the body, that tetraethyl lead is actually harmful... Rush to work and get in a car accident, rush the work and destroy the product... Rush the revolution and forget the human costs...Rush through life to get to the end... All so the trains can run on time.

Anyways, the point is that we can do better — we can be more humane. You could set the clock to whatever hour you please and in a decent society you'd be given free agency over your time or due compensation for the sacrifice of it.

> I suspect that most people agree with me.

That is certainly speculative.

I agree for sure! Daylight in the morning is useless to me. If I'm even out I'm half asleep trying to stay myself to the office :P

> Or should we just wake up our young children well before dawn and drag them off?

This is the norm for much of America, and has been for a long time (and will continue to be if we move away from changing clocks). If you want to play the "think of the children" card let's talk about moving their school start times later regardless of DST. 8:30 would be a great start, 9:30 would be phenomenal!

It’s changing, slowly. All the research supports starting at 9 or 10 is much better for childhood and teenage development especially, and many private schools and even some public school districts have started pushing start times back to 9 am or even later in some cases. Give it another decade

Aren't you basically still replicating the clock change? Everyone who goes to, works inside, or drops children off at the school will be less productive, at greater risk of heart attack, etc.

If we were really accounting for physical realities, we'd change our schedules by a much smaller amount every week or even every day, as the sun gradually shifts over time, instead of by an hour all at once. But nobody wants to coordinate that.

I think the only logical thing to do is have permanent standard time...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com