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by kixiQu 1691 days ago
https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/emres/longhourstraining/light.html

> The light/dark cycle of the sun has a powerful effect on the circadian clock, sleep, and alertness. If you understand these effects, you can manipulate light exposure to help yourself sleep better at night and be more alert during the day. Keep in mind your circadian clock uses light and dark signals to predict what to do in the future: when to prepare you to be active and when to prepare you to sleep.

Noon corresponds to light. Traditional time keeping has been built around light forever for reasons that are still relevant even though we now have plenty of artificial light. There is no reason why we cannot adjust when we work, keep places open, and share waking hours around the sun, but we cannot adjust the sun.
2 comments
function_seven 1691 days ago
> There is no reason why we cannot adjust when we work, keep places open, and share waking hours around the sun

This is the entire point of DST. To adjust when we work, keep places open, and share waking hours around the sun.

> but we cannot adjust the sun.

Of course, but we can adjust the angle of the hour hand on a clock. So we do that.

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kixiQu 1691 days ago
> This is the entire point of DST. To adjust when we work, keep places open, and share waking hours around the sun.

Perspective may vary here, but it seems to me it's to avoid having to adjust when we work by having the government enforce an artificial aberration on top of the normal social construct of time, a construct that at least hinges on the objective reality of Where The Sun Is. It's to avoid moving "a 9-to-5" to "an 8-to-4", to avoid it by pretending that noon isn't noon and making all of us mess with our clocks to keep up that pretense.

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function_seven 1691 days ago
> It's to avoid moving "a 9-to-5" to "an 8-to-4", to avoid it by pretending that noon isn't noon and making all of us mess with our clocks to keep up that pretense.

Exactly. In our modern lives, noon itself is not very significant. Sunrise and sunset are much more so. So when the sun starts to set "too early", we fight back by pushing the clocks forward an hour. Some people don't like it because maybe they want the sun to rise earlier. Or maybe they hate the lost hour of sleep. Or they're a distributed database programmer :)

But there's no solution that pleases everyone, so we all get on these long threads about DST twice a year and yell at each other. My preferred timekeeping would have me join the "America/Phoenix" time zone (I'm in California). But 2nd-best is the current system.

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pnutjam 1690 days ago
Tradition is just peer pressure from dead people. We can do what we want.
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