Why Daylight Saving Time Should Be Abolished
blogs.scientificamerican.com
blogs.scientificamerican.com
It was occasionally confusing to visitors that clocks were not at the time they expected. Otherwise, I didn't have many problems with scheduling; I work with people in many timezones anyway so having to adjust times is standard practice. If I forgot to make an adjustment, I'd arrive early. Restaurants were occasionally annoying when I wanted lunch and they were still finishing late breakfast service, but they tend to have some crossover time anyway, and I don't mind a 1 pm lunch either.
I'm planning to do it again this winter.
BTW, tech-wise, it's easy enough to configure a personal time zone, at least on Linux. Just set TZ=JEST+4. (And be happy not changing the remaining dumb clocks. The only clock I had to manually adjust was on my android phone.)
Measured time exists only for interaction with others, so wouldn't it make more sense to continue to use society's time standard, and just shift your personal activities accordingly?
“Every fall and every spring we are swearing at this system,” Medvedev said. “Our biorhythms are damaged. We are all angry. We either oversleep and turn up late for work or wake up too early and don’t know what to do with this free time. Let alone poor cows and other animals that can’t understand why they should have their meals or be milked earlier or later.”
Here is a story on it: http://rt.com/news/daylight-saving-time-abolished/
I don't think it's a coincidence that Anders Celsius lived further north than Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit. :-)
Additionally, weather reports will usually qualify the temperatures (with things like "warm and sunny" or "hot" or whatever), which is needed regardless of measurement - 25 degrees C in humid conditions is a very different "feel" from 25 degrees C in dry conditions. Add in wind chill/warm factors and temperature by itself is not actually that useful by itself to determine the weather practically.
You can see some graphs here: http://www.gids.nl/sydney/weather/ - notice how it fluctuates between about 25 and 100% humidity, particularly on the month-by-month graph.
What's more annoying, my Garmin Edge cycling computer still shows the wrong time, because it determines your time zone based on GPS and there's no way to change the timezone or time manually.
Some web sites (like http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=time+in+Moscow) still don't know that the timezones in Russia have been changed.
Today the sun rises at 07.52 in the morning and sets at 16.14 at the afternoon. It's going to be getting worse for two more months and that means it's 4 months before it's any better than today. For a six month period most of my life is walking through these orange tunnels that appear when sodium lights illuminate wet asphalt and concrete. The first symptoms of limited sunlight exposure are starting to show around this time of the year and supplemental vitamin d has to be taken or wild mood swings start to appear.
When I used to live at a student campus, I had a period of "hibernation" every winter. I lived an ascetic lifestyle in the one square mile around the campus and the uni. I only left to go home for xmas. I re-emerged when the catkins started appearing on the willows.
In these latitudes, it would make sense to be in permanent daylight saving time ("summer time"). During the summer and the winter there's really no difference since the sun is practically constantly up or down. It's the fall and the spring that make the difference.
And if anyone knows of good software engineering career options a little closer to the equator, drop me a line :)
The problem is that the spread of timezones throughout the world throws up some awfully odd things. There's very few places in the world where noon is actually true noon (ie, sun at highest point of day).
Where I live, we have no summer DST. In the height of summer it is bright at 4 am, and dark at 7pm. However, the timezone is so ridiculously wide that any change to create a later summer evening means that for some people, it would be blazingly hot at 7pm and not dark until closer to 9pm.
Society adopted timezones as a measure of co-ordination for things like rail timetables and telephone calls. Prior to that, everyone set noon to 'true noon'.
In reality, more timezones should be introduced, possibly sliced down to the 30 minutes. Because society is a lot more computerised, dealing with multiple timezones is a lot less hassle than it once was. I can get the exact local time for any place on earth in a nanosecond on the internet. Scheduling software automatically calculates it for me.
Personally, I want daylight savings so I can claw back some of that unused daylight that gets wasted early in the morning. But I don't want to force someone who lives 600 miles away from me to deal with the consequences of that. But a more fractured set of timezones would help immensely.
In reading up on this subject, just a few minutes is all that is needed, the point is not a tan, just exposure to UV and brightness.
I don't think that these miracle cures for darkness have an overall positive effect. One study may show that they help with the symptoms of limited sunlight exposure but other studies show that they cause harm as well. These cures seem to attack the problem by fixing one aspect of the problem, usually by bombing you with photons in the visible light spectrum. I don't believe there is a replacement for full-spectrum sunlight.
I don't know if it's related, but my domestic cats live largely in a light cycle dominated by my daily business, which is not related to time of year changes in any way. Yet they shed their fur every fall and every spring. I think the amount and period of daily sunlight through the small windows of my appartment is the key factor inducing these changes in the animals (and even more so with my indoor plants).
I prefer getting my daily intake of photons the good old nuclear fusion way.
Nor is it a miracle cure, from my understanding it isn't even a cure, just a symptom reducer, because you know, proper levels of vitamin D that are actually activated are not achievable via supplement. It actually takes UV to do that.
Put it this way - I would get more UV collecting my mail in summer than you would on a tanning bed for a couple of minutes. And I haven't dropped dead. But a bright sunny day does make my mood brighter.
Vitamin D deficiency and depression are much bigger issues than UV over exposure.
I know it is tricky, but there are situations where there is no such thing as 0 risk, you have to optimize for minimal. Making 0 risk of one thing frequently increases risk for others. In this case, improper active vitamin D levels increase risk for lots of ailments, far more than a few minutes of UV exposure does for skin cancer.
There is no visible contact info in your profile. (Not that I know of any jobs for you. Just sayin' -- assuming you are at all serious.)
(winter, not so much - cold isn't the only dreadful thing, I'd rather have snow and dry cold than our humid cold. People actually perceive it as colder).
(low being U$ 1.500 after taxes plus free socialist-style healthcare)
All in all, it's a really cool idea, and I owned a watch for many years that reported beat time, but it was essentially useless. This is perhaps the most gigantic of chicken-and-egg problems, the mere fact that it is currently useless ensures that it will forever be useless.
Talk about useless trivia.
I think it will take colonising other planets before the world is ready for a new unit of time and at that point the whole concept of 'day' is kind of out the window.
This Wikipedia artile about timekeeping on Mars is fun reading. The Mars rover operation teams used work schedules (and watches!) based on Martian time because they need to be available when the rover had daylight.
Also, with no timezones you lose the language to speak about time. Now "he usually gets up before 2pm" means one thing, and "gets up before 4am" means another. If you abolish timezones those statements become strongly location bound, to the extent where I imagine people would start to develop language based on local time, such as "he sleeps into the early afternoon".
The majority of people live each individual day inside one (perhaps two adjacent) timezone. The system should support that by far most common usecase.
Your missing the point. The fact that there are no timezones would mean everyone is on the same time, so it's much easier to schedule said hour. It makes coordination much easier.
mseebach 56 minutes ago | link
No, there will always be timezones, even if we call them something else. Even on swatch time, I still have to keep track of which one-hour window I can schedule a multi-continent conference call in, because my colleagues in New York aren't going to be in the office three hours before sunrise, no matter what their clocks say.
> Now "he usually gets up before 2pm" means one thing, and "gets up before 4am" means another.
It's still highly arbitrary. The only thing that would change is that the sun position per hour would change depending on where you are. I don't see the problem, honestly. The advantages of much easier global coordination would far outweigh this.
No, everybody would not be on the same hour. I would still have to apply location knowledge to know when colleagues in other time zones get to the office, are likely to be out for lunch and leave in the evening.
Example: It is now 13:00 in London. Let's pretend it's not Saturday, it's a perfectly good time for a catch-up chat, so I call my colleague in Silicon Valley, but he doesn't pick up. The fact that we might have decided that his watch should say 13:00 does not change the fact that he's probably just getting out of bed, as it's one hour and 40 minutes to sunrise there (or 6:00 with time zones applied).
> It's still highly arbitrary. The only thing that would change is that the sun position per hour would change depending on where you are.
But sun position is roughly how we organise our days. It's not like 2/3 of the worlds population is going to start sleeping through a significant portion of daylight hours to make global coordination easier.
Time is an abstraction of sun position to make coordination easier. Changing the abstraction doesn't change the thing it's an abstraction of - so in computer science terms, you could say you're making the abstraction leaky.
Yes they would. That's the whole point, which you still seem to miss completely. With a global coordinated time, you will no longer have to care whether someone is in New York, Tokyo, Berlin or Moscow (or has, for example, an irregular sleep schedule). The only information you need is "when is this person available", and that time will not change no matter where you are.
>It's not like 2/3 of the worlds population is going to start sleeping through a significant portion of daylight hours to make global coordination easier.
Where did I say that people would need to adjust their sleep schedule? I've said that "the sun rises at 6, peaks at 12 and sets at 19 hours" is completely arbitrary. We could just as well say that sunrise is at 0, noon at 6 and evening at 11. Or any other numbers, really. It doesn't matter.
>Time is an abstraction of sun position to make coordination easier.
It's not an abstraction over sun position, it's an abstraction over the availability of a person. The sun position is merely the means which we used to anchor that abstraction. This made sense in a period where the world of most people extended from between the next three towns to maybe their neighboring countries at the utter maximum. In a globalized world with near-instantaneous communication, this anchoring no longer makes sense, so we should choose another (still arbitrary) anchoring, but one that's the same for every single person on this planet.
Pretty much every argument I've ever heard against this is a status quo bias or an appeal to tradition, and your post is sadly no exception.
Status quo bias and appeal to tradition are only fallacious arguments if they stand on their own ("you proposal is bad because it's something new replacing something old"). I'm arguing that the benefit of the proposed change is in no way proportional to the suggested change, and since change has a cost, status quo is better.
Re. cost: Solar-anchored (roughly) 24 hour/day time is one of the few thing the entire world actually agrees on. And the vast, vast, vast majority of the people in this world have no cross-time zone dealings in their everyday lives. The sheer number of people who'd flat out refuse to adopt global time would alone make this project still-born.
> The only information you need is "when is this person available"
And that's the only information I need as it is today, and I have no trouble getting that information and keeping track of it. Yes, there is a single extra integer addition modulo 24 involved, but I just about deal with that.
Also, if your organisation is of a kind where even this is unacceptable, you're of course free to adopt a single time zone. The military ("Zulu time" = UTC+0) and airlines (they also run everything on UTC) does this.
Mind you, I'm entirely behind getting rid of DST. Had fun and games this week discovering which meetings are anchored in Europe and which in the US.
> I've said that "the sun rises at 6, peaks at 12 and sets at 19 hours" is completely arbitrary. We could just as well say that sunrise is at 0, noon at 6 and evening at 11. Or any other numbers, really. It doesn't matter.
It's not arbitrary, and it does matter - it's how it's been done since the beginning of time (put intended).
Without timezones, the only information needed is the given time. Each party knows their local context, so everyone just deals with the absolute times.
The latter is only problematic if you're “cold calling”, a situation which in reality would probably not be that big of an issue (you might know that your colleagues in LA are likely to be out for lunch at around 7500 beats just as you might know they're out around 12 local time which is N your time).
…
The swatch time is neat; I at some point also made a quick http://decimalti.me (the difference is that it's 0'd on UTC and it's divided into 100 000 units, rather than the 1000 beats).
As far as energy usage is concerned I could see the argument being true if we could pick when the time changed each year to correspond with temperature fluctuations. But since weather tends to vary from year to year and we change the time on a set day the effort seems moot.
If people like Daylight Savings Time better than not, the real solution should just be to change normal work hours from "9 to 5" to "8 to 4". But that would be difficult to pull off as a culture without guidance, and the idea makes way too much sense for Congress to pull off. So we'll muddle along. At least we have the technology now that work schedules are likely going to be more flexible in the future, instead of less flexible.
If you ask me, though, we should just declare Daylight Savings permanent, then add another layer on top of it every year, until the entire country is using GMT. :)
If everyone has to shift their schedules earlier you might as well just change the time, that way you save people from having to scrape off and repaint their store hours on their glass front doors.
Anyone who wants an informed opinion about DST should read David Prerau's book "sieze the daylight" / "saving the daylight" (its US and UK publishers gave it different titles).
http://www.seizethedaylight.com/ http://www.savingthedaylight.com/
I think most people on hacker news would agree DST is insanity.
People who live close to the equator or in the middle of time zones tend not to see much point in DST. The day length doesn't vary much at the equator, and if you are in the middle of a time zone then the offset doesn't vary too much.
If you are closer to a pole or at the edge of a time zone, the offset is not ideal around the solstices. So, DST is welcome for many.
I've heard the arguments from people close to the equator that the curtains will fade and the men will get their morning erections while they are on the bus, etc. Of course it is different there in the sub-tropics.
If you accept that time should not be completely local (i.e. the local church tower clock is set to noon, as it used to be) and not completely global (i.e. we all run on UTC and Tuesday begins at 00:00:01 which happens to be late afternoon in location X) and so that we arbitrarily assign time zones according to the rotation of our planet, surely we can also adjust the time zones depending on the path of our planet around the sun.
Well, if it works for the locals, that is. Insanity seems like a strong word.
> If you are closer to a pole or at the edge of a time zone, the offset is not ideal around the solstices. So, DST is welcome for many.
I'm not quite sure what your argument is.
I can tell you that here, above 60˚, it's light enough the entire summer anyway (as in, it's only dark for about 2 hours a day), and in the winter the added light is too early in the morning but it gets darker earlier in the afternoon. Today, for example, the sun was up at 7:52 and down at 16:14 (4:14pm).
I suspect it's most useful for people around 35-45˚.
I also live above 60˚ north - today I had 2 minutes less daylight than you :(
I think some of the negativity towards DST here is due to failure to consider the local needs of other people. I guess that's my argument. The day is important, and you know the importance of things more when they are gone.
If your noon is true noon, then shifting the clock forwards will balance the daylight hours towards the afternoon and away from the morning.
If your noon is badly skewed from a wide timezone, then you'll get the problems you describe (too much light in the morning). Your problem is longitudinal, not latitudinal.
If you scroll down to the "Politics" section, DST was implemented as a way to save coal during WWII.
Don't underestimate the impact of how a single hour of time can impact the brain. Two timezone differences to the human body can be huge.
Also, sleeping in on Sundays doesn't help. By definition if you don't use the new time to control when you wake up on Sunday morning then your sleep schedule will not be adapted to the new schedule at all. All that will be different is you will have a stronger incentive to go to bed an hour earlier due to the time on the clock, though your body will still be set to fall asleep and wake up an hour later.
The crux of my conversation with him is that it matters where you are just as much when you are. The fact that America is two weeks off from the rest of the world caused no end of annoyances these past two weeks. It also ended up with lots of debates about how "wall clock time" has little do with the actual time especially when talking about past or future.
(Think 4pm in London 5 moths from now, what time will that be in NY? What about Brazil? Is that the same time of the day if it's 6 months from now?)
Too many internal systems have an incomplete vision of what time means to them and it rarely holds up. I could go on, but I leave it with this. If you can help it, store points in time in a unix timestamp (or at least UTC) and avoid having to write scheduling software.
As for the proposal of permanent DST, I would like that personally but I think that too many people would have a problem with kids going to school in pitch darkness in the winter and whatnot.
The theoretical ideal would be that standard business hours continuously adjust so that they always start soon after dawn. That maximizes the amount of after-work sunlight, without sacrificing daytime sunlight. Despite the existence of people who prefer early morning daylight, I think that maximizes social efficiency.
Of course it's not (currently) practical to continuously adjust, so DST is a coarse approximation.
I do appreciate the ridiculousness of changing the clocks instead of changing our schedules. But I think it's impossible to coordinate the change in schedules. You'd have too many defectors and the whole thing would fall apart. Think about the massive interdependence: work schedules, daycare, trains, social activities, etc etc. It really has to happen all together en masse or it doesn't work.
Whether it's worth the hassle (and, yes, the real cost in lost productivity and sleep disruption) is of course still debatable but I think those declaring it pure insanity haven't fully thought it through.
PS: Interesting exception that proves the rule: Arizona opts out of DST because it gets so hot in the afternoon and evening that people actually prefer the early morning daylight.
I'd think that if all government agencies including schools switched their schedules at the DST point, most companies would quickly fall in line. And ideally lots of companies who currently have fixed hours would realize they don't actually need them.
At the very least, stop mucking with the changeover date every few years and breaking millions of software installations.
(Yeah, imagining that collective groan has brought me back from the brink of changing my mind! It could never happen without the clock-shift hack.)
I agree about not changing the changeover date; that seriously compounds the hassle of it. Any clock that auto-adjusts on the old schedule has to be manually adjusted 4 times per year!
I want more morning light. Can't stand getting up when it's night, don't care when it gets dark later in the day.
How about we just agree that "noon" means "sun straight overhead" (within a half hour for time zone position) and each get up as each sees fit, with no thrashing over forcing strangers to adhere to an unwanted deviation at arbitrary dates.
As of this morning I hate DST 10x more than ever.
Flexible working arrangements allow workers to adjust their lives to match their circadian rhythms and other biological needs. Productivity increases due to workers shifting their workloads to the optimal times of day.
Perhaps some workers perform better over the span of a day if they take a 4 hour break in the middle for a main meal, quick sleep and some social activity? Perhaps others perform better if conducting their work in one contiguous block?
Some people like ordered, repeatable and structured schedules. Others prefer a flexible schedule where the order of their day may be completely different each day of the week depending on what commitments they have planned and what opportunities suddenly become available.
Daylight savings and fixed 9-5 working hours are deprecated concepts in a modern "high-tech" society.
It will no longer have time adjustments twice a year. Last one was in Spring 2011.
1. "hey let's store times in the local time zone in the DB" 2. "oh the user wants their local time, I'll just use an offset"
This comment just brought back the memories...
And no, I'm no longer at that company.
This would solve more problems than it causes.
Timezones aren't a human construction. Humans have only offered a series of approximations that are accurate enough.
Cognitive dissonance: What time is the business day of Shanghai? What time should I arrive in New York to get there in the morning? What time will my American guildmates be online? People would still have to memorise the major timezone offsets, and this would negate any purported advantages. If we're still going to have to memorise timezone offsets, why bother?
Rather than asking "what's the time in New York?," I'll be asking "what part of the day is it in New York?" The latter will be asked in place of the other, but it would also be harder to answer due to no localised New York time.
"What's the time in New York?" can be answered by knowing that American EST is GMT-5. My local timezone is GMT+10, and it's currently 1300. Hence, I now know that it's 12 PM in New York, which means it's dark, which means that businesses there are shut and it's a bad time to call friends there.
I'll admit that DST makes things harder, but I can still calculate a good approximation on the fly. 11 or 12 PM - it doesn't really matter. If it does, well, I know that the northern hemisphere will be at the end of Autumn, so NY-local DST is probably over.
With one global timezone, how do I answer "what part of the day is it in New York?" Well, I still have to remember that New York's "timezone" is -4 GMT, and I still have to remember that my local "timezone" is +10 GMT. I still have to do a calculation, but I have to have a mapping of times to the state of the day in my head to know where New York is in relation.
It's so much more complicated.
It also makes it hard to know "when" a certain place is. Say I arrive in London, and it's overcast. I'd actually have to calculate what part of the day it is, by working off my home time->day-state mapping. That's so wrong.
Except that the current time zones dont really tell you that, sice most of them are decided politically, not by mapping to sunrise/sunset as closely as possible. The world time zone map is a irrational mess, including time jumps of 2-3 hours when crossing a land border, or time zones changing backwards becuse of convulted political borders.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ad/Standard_...
The time known as 7 AM is early morning everywhere. 11 AM is late morning everywhere. 2 PM is early afternoon everywhere. 8 PM is mid evening everywhere.
By their definition, timezones are 100% accurate for telling the "part of the day".
They're inaccurate in the sense of telling where the sun is in the sky - not too big of a deal, really. But even then, they're close enough for casual purposes.
If we all used UTC, for instance, I'd only have to work approximately what time do people work and have their meals in different parts of the world, and arranging a call, for instance, would always be trivial. When talking about a time all parties would know it they can make it or not straight away.
Time zones are a relic from the 20th century as far as I'm concerned, but they might as well stick forever.
And, one more number made up on the spot... call that 2% of the world population. And that's being generous. Time zones work for 98% of the world, the 2% will just have to do a little more thinking.
How do you judge whether an airline flight that arrives at X time UTC in Tokyo, Seattle, or Moscow is arriving in the morning or evening? What do you do to plan your arrival? Do you check into a hotel and immediately fall asleep? Do you get breakfast? Do you need to get a friend to pick you up because it's so early in the morning that the local public transit isn't running? Similarly, how do you decide when to schedule a meeting during normal business hours with someone in another part of the world? There are a million more things, of course.
The point is that you need to keep track of this sort of thing. Which means you need to have some sort of system to do so. And if you don't have time zones then you need some other method of keeping track of similar data so that people can make use of it and computers can use it to help implement their business logic. In the end you end up duplicating the idea of time zones except in a half-assed, non-standardized, non-straightforward to implement way. Whereas if you just have the idea of time zones and "local time" you can deal with problems that depend on relative time of day.
If you switched to UTC only, then if it is Monday one meter west of the prime meridian, is it really Tuesday two meters to the East? And what time does Tuesday start in Los Angeles - 4pm? Crikey.
A day is based on the period of the Earth's rotation, and for most life forms it's linked to the time the Earth faces the Sun. Time zones are a granular way of knowing what time it is in other longitudes consistently. Changing the granularity from 20-odd to one, or a thousand, makes it much worse, not better.
The idea that removing time zones "solves more problems than it causes" - I don't buy it either.
http://www.usno.navy.mil/USNO/astronomical-applications/astr...
That said, I did just miss a meeting this morning because the EU switches to winter time at the end of October whereas the US switches early in November. Makes it even more confusing.
http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/astronomy.html?n=224&#...
Tangential, but "Zulu time" is just another name for UTC.
There also used to be differences with some measurements of GMT starting the numbering at noon instead of midnight (madness!)
I am the creator and maintainer of http://the.endoftimezones.com and an amateur time historian.
The article that it points to, where it's said that energy consumption is reduced by a mere 0.2-0.5% is talking about total consumption - in my understanding the most pronounced effect of DST is a reduction in peak consumption.
In peak hours (around 6-7pm, when everyone is getting home), the extra energy is provided by coal plants, which are expensive and polluting. A 5% reduction in peak consumption might mean that dozens of coal plants are kept shut during that time.
And even a 0.5% reduction is huge when you talk about a whole country...
DST sucks on embedded systems, especially when the change dates are changed. Not knowing the local DST standard, or not being able to update fielded systems when legislation changes the DST dates, means a system may be on the "wrong" time for days, weeks or months. Many are opting to abandon automatic time changes for "hour+1" user settings, or ignoring DST altogether.
Could be amusing to compute how much worldwide total storage and CPU time is devoted to handling DST.
Or, more specifically, Sir Sandford Fleming.
13 months, 28 days each = 364 days Plus 1 or 2 special days at the beginning of the year. Much easier to figure out the day of the week for your next meeting.
We could name the 13th month Jobsuary, or you pick.
I didn't leave my timezone until after I had graduated college... and almost all of those times were to go to PAX .. which is now also on the east coast so I haven't even done that in 2 years.
The argument about gaining or losing sleep has always struck me as a bit meaningless. What time do I go to bed? Between 11 PM and 7 AM ... depends on the day. What time do I wake up? Oh between 8 AM and 2 PM.
Am I some 18 year old without a job who doesn't need to perform? Nope, I do programming and go to the office 5 days a week, lead meetings, conduct interviews all that stuff. I don't take any drugs and am right around 30.
This is not just me too. I, and I think everyone I've ever talked to about this have no real substantial long term issues with 10 hours of sleep one night, 6 the next, 8 after that, etc. and having it occur at widely varied times.
But, traveling across timezones is not mandatory, while DST is. Choosing to experience stress, additional radiation, and a government fondling is one thing, having it forced on you in your own home would be another.
Also, when I travel to California, I'm happy to get up at 6 am local, and go to bed at 11 pm, which leaves my body clock mostly alone. (Europe is much harder.)
There are many disruptions that would not affect me, but do strongly affect others.