[ironrabbit]

I always assumed we'd keep the summer hours year round. I don't even think about DST during the summer, it's during the fall where we suddenly lose an hour of evening sunlight that I complain. Unless I'm misreading, your comment is just pointing out that keeping the winter hours year-round is sub-optimal (I agree) but not arguing in favour of switching the clocks twice per year.

[snek_case]

I would also much prefer we stay on DST (sun rises/sets later) year round. However, if DST were to end, it's not guaranteed that it would go that way. I think that unfortunately many people see the winter time (sun rises/sets earlier) as the default.

IMO, having the sun set later is better because it means I get to enjoy a bit more sunlight in the evening, after the work day. But I'm also really not a morning person.

[throw0101a]

> I think that unfortunately many people see the winter time (sun rises/sets earlier) as the default.

It is the default. That's why it is called Atlantic/Eastern/Central/Mountain/Pacific Standard Time in North America.

[jsdalton]

It’s also the time that most closely aligns solar noon to clock noon. People who advocate for “summer time all the time” basically just want to wake up earlier but want clocks to trick them into doing it.

(The more legitimate argument is for western regions to align to summer time to be closer in clock time to their eastern neighbors.)

[function_seven]

I want to wake up earlier and want the clocks to trick everyone else into also doing so, which is the only way I'll be able to get away with it.

Gotta coordinate things like this, otherwise it won't happen.

[harg]

Not quite. If your workday ends at 6pm then being on DST means you get usable daylight for more of the year after work. Even if you were prepared to get up and go to bed earlier many jobs have a fixed set of hours.

[kixiQu]

I mean, okay, let's change which hours they're fixed to! Let's not break the entire concept of noon because America sucks at collective action problems.

[KptMarchewa]

What you call "the entire concept of noon" is extremely minor concept in timekeeping for most humans. What's important, is when they work, when places are open, and when other humans are awake.

[Jansen312]

Work hours adapt to human behavior. Some industries end "work" around 3pm. Some ends at noon. DST is basically a communism way to force everyone to adopt a standardized time that a leader there envision. What happens if the day turn darker at 3pm when dark storms last for 3+ hrs till night and repeatitively across days or weeks? Micro-DST for weather as well? Messing with times via DST +/-1hr won't get much other than confusions. Time is zero sum game however you rearrange it.

[icedchai]

How is it the default when we are actually on daylight time most of the time now (mid March through early November)? Daylight is the norm, "standard" is actually the exception. What's the point of switching to "standard" time for 4 months?

[cactus2093]

> But I'm also really not a morning person.

I think this is really the crux of it, it's just a matter of personal preference and there's no one right answer. When I was younger I used to wake up later and I thought permanent DST was a no-brainer for the extra hour of light in the evenings. Now in my 30's for whatever reason my body clock has shifted a lot and I pretty much always wake up by 6:30 am. The last few weeks with the sun not rising until 7:30 in northern CA have been kind of depressing and I can't wait for DST to end, I'd now rather have that extra hour of light in the morning than the evening.

[ASalazarMX]

There's also the problem of lumping together cities at different latitudes. The summer time is aligned ideally with one region, at the cost of other regions following suit and having to wake up at night.

Ideally, each region would have their summer time adapted to their latitude, but that would be more chaotic than simply scrapping it.

[alwillis]

Being a morning person or a night person isn’t only a personal preference; it’s also genetic.

I’ve learned a huge amount of sleep lately and every cell in our bodies is regulated by our circadian rhythms.

A great place to start: https://pca.st/episode/f062bb8c-6609-4dca-8666-177a17678117

[LeoPanthera]

Keeping DST year round just seems so crazy. If "midday" and "midnight" no longer approximate the middle of the day and night then what is even the point of time zones?

The reason we don't all use UTC is because it is useful to be able to figure out roughly what time of day it is somewhere else on the planet. If we collectively agree that is no longer necessary then we are giving up a fundamental part of timekeeping.

If you want an example of how crazy this is, just look to China, which only has a single time zone. It is so large that in some parts of the country the sun doesn't set until "midnight".

Time actually means something, don't mess with it.

[i_am_proteus]

Madrid's solar noon is around 1 PM during standard time and 2 PM during summer time, the rest of Spain is a bit off from this, and I noted when I lived there that the Spanish custom seems to be to keep later hours.

[nerdawson]

Spain should be on GMT. It was a political decision by Franco to align timezones with Germany during WWII.

[kgwgk]

Interestingly the UK also changed to GMT+1 during the war.

And during the Spanish Civil war Republicans had already moved to GMT+1 in 1938, a change that was undone after the war before switching again to GMT+1 in 1940.

[TuringTest]

If "midday" didn't get changing twice a year and always coincided with noon (i.e. the sun being highest), we could build a schedule based on working when there is light on the sky and still have some left after work.

> Time actually means something, don't mess with it.

That would be great advice for not changing the clock every six months.

[LeoPanthera]

To be clear, I am fully on board with abolishing daylight saving. We should standardize on the aptly named standard time.

[chrismcb]

There is a huge difference between keeping the same time all year versus keeping the same time over huge swaths of the globe. We only keep "regular" time just over four months a year now.

[mdp2021]

> we'd keep the summer hours year round

Not clear. Those you call «winter hours» are supposed to be the actual, real hours: noon equals zenith, midnight equals nadir. You can have some reasonable exception, but to call "midnight" all year what is not midnight makes no sense. It amounts to "falsehood", where it would be just social agreement to just wake, work, dine sooner or later.

[labster]

Actually, winter time is zero-indexed, and summer time has an index of one. “Real hours” depends on whether you like C or SQL more.

[mdp2021]

Watchmakers took their stance, setting 12 at the zenith.

[stormbrew]

The entire concept of time is a "social agreement". Including when noon is. Solar noon is never at clock noon where I live or for that matter in most places, it's off by an amount dictated by political decisions and boundaries as well as by the fact that it literally drifts a bit over the course of the year.

[mdp2021]

In a way, but it is not "anarchic performance art": it tends to adhere to the actual objective time - it makes sense to create a system that applies reasonable compromises, but attached with a rubber band to the real thing. Approximate flexibly but do not lose the anchor.

People in Paris know they have a pretty severe offset, ~50m (those in Vigo even ~95m). If you added a sticky +1h, the offset against solar time would increase to ~110m and ~155m.

[gpt5]

That's not what happened in the two states that alleviated DST (Arizona and Hawaii). They are always on winter time.

[hnburnsy]

>Federal law allows a state to exempt itself from observing daylight saving time, upon action by the state legislature, but does not allow the permanent observance of DST.

https://www.ncsl.org/research/transportation/daylight-saving...

[throwawayboise]

I grew up in Indiana when they were on standard time year-round. It was light until well after 8:00pm in the summer, that's enough.

[jetpackjoe]

Is that due to being so far West in the Eastern Timezone?

[throwawayboise]

Maybe? Yes? I'm not opposed to the idea of more, narrower time zones, though I think that in practice anything less than one-hour differences would be more complicated than it's worth.

Chicago has the opposite problem, where it's dark at 4:30pm in the winter.

[fsckboy]

you want the timezones to be 30 minutes apart? (i assume you aren't proposing 15) that sounds so much worse than the status quo

[logfromblammo]

At the expense of standing at the school bus stop in complete darkness for most mornings of the school year.

13 years of rising hours before dawn and walking and waiting in darkness is enough.

I would suggest that the government of any state or nation not be allowed to ever say what [civil] time it is, and require that they take technical timekeeping information--for TAI, UTC, UT1, and the like--from non-political scientific bodies.

[throwawayboise]

Or start school later?

I don't really remember waiting for the bus in the dark until I was in high school, when they started earlier and due to the need to use the same bus for later runs to elementary schools, we arrived at school 30 minutes before class started. I'm thinking my elementary school started at 8:30 or 9:00am? But I can't really remember.

[marc_abonce]

In the case of Arizona, an early sunset actually makes sense because that means you get to enjoy the evenings outdoors at 30-ish ˚C (around 90 ˚F) instead of the >40˚C (>100˚F) you would have if the sun was still up.