[ddlatham]

We did this before, about 50 years ago. Going in, close to 80% of people supported permanent Daylight Saving Time. After experiencing a single winter, that dropped to close to 40%, and it was repealed. Looks like we may be doomed to repeat the experience.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanent_time_observation_in_...

[subsubzero]

Its so strange how people on this thread are complaining about the issues you mentioned, but twice every year I see articles on hackernews/other areas about how bad the effects of changing time to DST and back and how detrimental it is for everyone's health. People can't have it both ways.

My gut suspicion is why this passed is people are more angrier and stressed out/depressed than they have been in a very long time and its an appeasement so they don't take their anger out at the polls come November, that and it is an easy thing to change that requires next to no stimulus. I expect more of these appeasement bills to start passing as gas heads to the moon along with inflation.

[VoodooJuJu]

Both permanent DST and twice-annual clock switching are bad. There is a third, and in my opinion, superior way: permanent standard time.

The majority currently in favor of permanent DST will become a minority come winter, mark my words. And I hope it gets repealed just like it did in the 70's. Permanent standard time or bust.

[bin_bash]

It wasn’t repealed. That law was temporary.

[colinmhayes]

The sun would rise at 4:30 in the summer where I live with permanent standard time. No way I could live like that. Absolute non starter.

[Izkata]

Same here, but 4:15. Way way too early.

It kinda feels like a lot of people are unaware of just how far sunrise/sunset shifts over the course of the year in some areas. The only solution would be to decouple all of society from clocks, and that's just not going to happen, so there has to be a trade-off somewhere.

[Miner49er]

With permanent DST it's gonna rise at like 8:30 am on average at the latest in winter. That sounds way worse then it rising at 4:30 in the summer to me.

[odonnellryan]

Honestly I used to work early and I enjoy going into work before the sun is up. I don't understand why you need the sun up when you're going to work unless you work outside. And if you do your hours would just change anyway no matter what is done.

[davemp]

The problem for outdoor work is that your hours change and no one else’s does, so effectively you’re forced to work 10-6 for safety reasons. So blue collar folks get disproportionately less family time.

[_ph_]

I was always against switching the time twice per year, as it tends to mess up the day rythm. But I am even more against permanent DST, as it is a big illusion. People live by the motion of the sun much more than they recognize. Winters are hell with permanent DST. This is why this is a bad idea. Permanent DST only will cause all time shedules to shift over time.

If permanent standard time is not an option, the time shift two times a year is actually a working hack. The shift is messy, but the time is shifted in the part of the year when the sun is up at raising time. That is why it "works".

[Izikiel43]

I'm not sure I follow, how would they be hell? In standard time in winter, it gets dark at 4pm, with this it would get dark at 5pm.

[graeme]

You lose an hour of sleep once, gain it the other time. I don’t understand the fuss. Mostly balances out

[Daimanta]

To me it does matter as it messes up my biological clock. My body will tell me close to a week that I should or should not be sleeping, waking up, lunch or have dinner. The lost sleep and disorientation is real for me.

Besides that, I hate people fidgeting with the clock. Stop DST permanently, please!

[beezle]

While I would prefer standard time year round, I have no problem with the twice annual switch. It is one timezone and not a big deal; it isn't even close to doing the same for say a business trip/vacation given the long duration of the change.

And with fewer and fewer non-automatic clocks to change even that excuse is really tired.

[nikolay]

Actually, you can't compensate for lack of sleep and oversleeping is not healthy either, so, you get dinged twice.

[graeme]

Most people have some kind of sleep deficit. Catching up on sleep isn’t oversleeping.

Iirc there are more heart attacks the day after the change resulting in less sleep, and less the day after the change resulting in more sleep.

[nikolay]

There were studies showing that there's no such thing as "catching up on sleep".

[balfirevic]

Please link them.

[dillondoyle]

I see it too (work to elect Dems). Especially if gas is over $5 past august. Seeing signs it will cool down though?

Subsidizing gas seems like obvious on paper but fraught with problems especially with inflation (and opposite of what's needed for climate change).

Would love to see federal legalization, or at least decriminalization of marijuana. IDK if only decriminalization would hold up with reconciliation but I think regulating it legalized commerce would.

And sad to say but assuming Roe is gutted/thrown to the states that could galvanize turnout on both sides, hopefully to our benefit. We'll see what games are played with Jackson's nomination too

[lotsofpulp]

> Subsidizing gas seems like obvious on paper but fraught with problems especially with inflation (and opposite of what's needed for climate change).

Gas (fossil fuels in general) is already extremely heavily subsidized.

[dillondoyle]

For sure. I'm talking about direct payments to lower income families.

When you count in the externalities of pollution and climate change the amount we pay is cheap (it's still cheap per mile driven and just in general terms we drive giant cars long distances it's crazy...)

We're already spending billions on health effects, lost working lives, and even more on existing damage from climate change.

Biggest missed opportunity is the failed climate bill. I'm not optimistic about the future.

[exolymph]

Lol at the idea that electing Democrats will help with gas prices. Come to Cali and see how that works in practice.

[dillondoyle]

Yes I know. That's why am I saying if it gets above $5 nationwide that's a symbolic number (despite gas still being cheaper per mile driven but whatever).

I'm saying that could mean a decent chance of Dems subsidizing fuel temporarily, maybe similar to child tax credit mailed out to families under $50k monthly.

I doubt would get R support unless they put into it vast deregulation as well.

And with inflation might not even be a great idea.

We're going to lose anyways unless something unexpected happens.

[alx__]

Gas prices are higher in California due to multiple taxes being added to the base price

[Brybry]

Isn't California gasoline generally more expensive because it requires a more stringent formulation of gasoline and so only a handful of refineries produce that?[1][2]

I imagine if the whole country used the California standard then gas prices in California would go down.

I don't know how much it would go up in the rest of the country though.

Really we should just ditch gas. The political drama from the last 50+ years over oil alone seems like a no-brainer for anything but gasoline, even if it costs more.

[1] https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/our-work/programs/gasoline/about [2] https://www.sacbee.com/news/california/article259190893.html

[Robotbeat]

I am not sure gas will remain that high. I’ve noticed gas starting to reduce slightly already.

I can see populist measures, such as prohibiting or limiting exports of gasoline or whatever, to potentially reduce the gas price in the near term.

[dillondoyle]

The futures price is going down a good amount. There's really not much we can do about it except bribe Venezuela, iran, and MBS.

Which seems like we're trying to do. Which is gross on its own too.

[Robotbeat]

I don’t particularly like any of those, but I honestly think we should bury the hatchet with Venezuela. MBS is the worst and honestly, this is unpopular, but I think Saudi Arabia is more problematic than Iran.

[dillondoyle]

i agree. given those choices i would choose venezuala too. especially if we can get some concessions for democracy/corruption. it is close to our backyard.

[thehappypm]

I don’t get this at all. Why would people want the sun to go down in the afternoon? In my time zone it sets at 4:30 part of the year! That’s awful, and sunrise is at around 7:00am. We have way more sun in the morning.

[sampo]

There is a whole body of research, comparing the areas on both sides of time zone boundaries. The results unanimously show that living too far west of your time zone's center line, has negative effects on health and economy. In light of this research, permanent winter time would be good for health and economy. Permanent summer time will be worse.

Linkdump:

https://www.econ.pitt.edu/sites/default/files/WP%2017-009.up...

http://cebp.aacrjournals.org/content/cebp/26/8/1306.full.pdf

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21231877

https://jcsm.aasm.org/doi/10.5664/jcsm.8780

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29636342

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/276058441_The_incid...

[seanmcdirmid]

Permanent winter time would suck here, I like taking my kid to the playground after school, I can't do that in the winter because it is long dark by the time I pick him up. Who cares if the sun is up and bright at 6AM in the morning while I'm still sleeping.

When I lived in Beijing, they are on standard time year round , and it was really horrible having the sun rise at 4AM in the morning during summer. Like really? How can that be healthy?

[riffic]

China has one time zone for the whole country if I'm not mistaken. the country spans 5 geographic time zones:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_China

Permanent standard / solar time proponent here: I'm reminded of that quote about people believing you could get a longer blanket if you were to cut a foot off top and sew it onto the bottom.

[vaughnegut]

While true, it doesn't really disprove what the poster above is saying, since they lived in Beijing, the place that China's timezone is roughly centered on.

[seanmcdirmid]

That's definitely true for Urumuqi where stores open later (11AM instead of 9:30 or 10AM in the rest of the country). But Beijing is pretty far east where the time zone is mainly meant for.

[billiam]

Try Kashgar. It's dark until 10 or later every day in the winter.

[sampo]

> Who cares if the sun is up and bright at 6AM in the morning while I'm still sleeping.

According to the research results, public health and economy would care.

[joshstrange]

> According to the research results, public health and economy would care.

Well, good thing we've never let that stand in the way of a decision. /s

Personally I'd prefer more light later in the day so that I don't feel like the day is over as soon as I get off work but that's just me.

[d4mi3n]

That's what the research supports. People go out more and spend money more when the sun is up after the working day. Kids play more. People exercise more.

[sampo]

It's an interesting situation. Research shows one thing, but a lot of people seem to have a gut feeling that says the opposite thing.

[stouset]

This is literally what permanent DST accomplishes.

[seanmcdirmid]

Because we are still farmers who need to wake up at 6AM in the morning?

[ajsnigrutin]

Farmers don't care about the clock, neither do the cows. Work traditionally started when the sun came up, and cows got fed then too... since cows still can't read the clock, they still get up and want food at sunrise, DST or not.

[greyhair]

Almost all 'blue collar' work starts at 7:00 AM. It isn't about farmers. I was a farmer once, my day started at 4:30 AM.

But I worked blue collar after that, my job 7:30 to 5:00, or 7:30 to 8:00 on long days.

Even in my current white collar job, that habit has stuck, and I have been working 7:30 AM to 4:30 AM for the last thirty five years, mostly to avoid the bulk of the commute.

So yes, there are millions of jobs across this country where people arrive at work, and punch in on a clock, at 7:00 AM every morning.

[throw0101a]

> Because we are still farmers who need to wake up at 6AM in the morning?

I start work at an office starting around 8:30-9:00 and I wake up at 6AM. Not quite sure what that time has to do with farmers.

[Apocryphon]

Public health also cares about not switching up schedules.

[throw0101a]

They care even more about Year-round Standard Time:

> We therefore strongly support removing DST changes or removing permanent DST and having governing organizations choose permanent Standard Time for the health and safety of their citizens.

* https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/07487304198541...

[stouset]

You two are in violent agreement. Permanent DST gives you an extra hour of sunlight in the afternoon.

[paulmd]

grandparent is advocating permanent standard time/winter time, not permanent DST.

[stouset]

You're correct, my apologies.

[throw0101a]

> Who cares if the sun is up and bright at 6AM in the morning while I'm still sleeping.

Good for you that you're still sleeping at 6AM. But some of us wake up at 6AM (or earlier) and would like to have it be brighter to help kick start our circadian rhythm.

[stouset]

And people who work night shifts would be delighted if every locale instantly adopted a +12 hour time offset.

Any change whatsoever to a status quo will delight some and upset others on an individual basis. I assume your point isn't that we should all adopt your preferences. So if not, what is it?

[Moru]

Why can't you take your kid to the playground after dark? In December we get sunrise at 8 but it's not light until 9 or so. Sunset is at 15 but it's quite dark at 14 already. Kids are happily playing with their parents in the snow no matter how dark it is, you can't stay indoors just because you have 5-6 hours of daylight. You just get a flashlight for your head and can play or go skiing in the forest.

[seanmcdirmid]

Mostly it is just that there are no other kids to play with: yes, we might do it, but if we are the only ones it isn't great for him. But the real big problem is that sunshine in a Seattle winter is a precious commodity: 7/10 even with daylight we wouldn't get to the park because of rain, or its just not pleasant out. The problem with standard time is that 7/10 turns into not going 10/10, it wastes the precious sunlight we do have.

[Moru]

For us that hour does no difference at all, it's still dark when going to school/work and it's dark again when coming home. We have 4 hours and 20 minutes of daylight on the worst days, Seattle seems to have about 8 hours so there the DST hour actually does a difference I guess.

But one hour less in the night has been shown to give a higher death rate that week every year so it's been discussed to get rid of it here too.

[_ph_]

What makes you think the school wouldn't start an hour later after the switch to permanent DST?

[pdonis]

> In light of this research, permanent winter time would be good for health and economy. Permanent summer time will be worse.

Only one of these papers (the researchgate one) actually asserts a hypothesis for the root cause of the correlation observed that might (but see below) make this true--later time of sunrise. The others all assert the hypothesis that being further out of sync with the rest of your time zone (which determines what one paper calls "social time") is the root cause. The way to fix that is not permanent winter time but narrower time zones--for example, a good chunk of what is now the Eastern time zone in the US is closer to the Central time zone meridian and should really be in that time zone. But that fix is orthogonal to the permanent summer time question.

Unfortunately for your argument, the one remaining paper (the researchgate one) is looking at variation with latitude, not variation with longitude. Latitude variation is going to be there regardless of what we do with daylight savings time. The fix for anyone bothered by the researchgate paper's findings is to move further south.

[throw0101a]

To add to the pile-on, the position papers of various sleep and chronobiology societies:

* https://srbr.org/advocacy/daylight-saving-time-presskit/

* https://old.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/dq2nv3/

* http://www.chronobiology.ch/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/JBR-D...

* https://www.chronobiology.com/impact-daylight-saving-time-ci...

* https://esrs.eu/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/To_the_EU_Commiss...

> The authors take the position that, based on comparisons of large populations living in DST or ST or on western versus eastern edges of time zones, the advantages of permanent ST outweigh switching to DST annually or permanently. Four peer reviewers provided expert critiques of the initial submission, and the SRBR Executive Board approved the revised manuscript as a Position Paper to help educate the public in their evaluation of current legislative actions to end DST. […] The choice of DST is political and therefore can be changed. If we want to improve human health, we should not fight against our body clock, and therefore, we should abandon DST and return to Standard Time (which is when the sun clock time most closely matches the social clock time) throughout the year. This solution would fix both the acute and the chronic problems of DST. We therefore strongly support removing DST changes or removing permanent DST and having governing organizations choose permanent Standard Time for the health and safety of their citizens.

* https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/07487304198541...

[danShumway]

The researchers may be completely correct, but this is still bikeshedding. It would be a grave mistake to stick with DST/ST switching just because permanent ST is better than permanent DST.

> If we want to improve human health, we should not fight against our body clock

You know what is really fighting against the body's clock? Suddenly shifting your normal wakeup time in any direction by an hour. No matter what your baseline sleep quality is, no matter if your body prefers getting up when it's light or dark, shifting that wakeup time by an hour with no prep will negatively affect your sleep quality.

The effort to abandon DST and move to ST (as positive as it may be) should be separated from the effort to abandon DST/ST switching. If this bill gets rejected in the House because people are so caught up in the DST/ST debate that they ignore the almost unanimous research conclusion that sudden sleep-schedule shifts are bad for most people -- that would just be a complete failure of policy.

This is like arguing over whether jogging or biking is better for your joints when the status quo is sitting on a couch. For most people, regardless of whether ST is better than DST for them, forcibly breaking their sleep schedule is the worst outcome.

[phkahler]

>> the advantages of permanent ST outweigh switching to DST annually or permanently.

So they picked the wrong one.

[throw0101a]

According to the folks that study this, that is correct.

[armagon]

So frustrating. Why would they pick this one?

I live in Alberta, Canada, and enough people want to get rid of the time zone switching that it came to a vote last fall. I couldn't believe the question on the ballot was do you want to go to permanent DST, instead of asking if we wanted to go to permanent standard time. It was snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

The people voted against the change, but I really think they would've voted for permanent standard time if it had been an option.

[jader201]

I admit I haven't read all of these links, but just thinking this through logically, whether we are on DST or ST permanently shouldn't matter one way or another. I can get how shifting back and forth twice a year can have an impact, but just not following the logic on why ST > DST.

The delta is only which number shows on the clock each hour. Whether we choose to start school/work/whatever commitment at 7am, 8am, 9am, etc. shouldn't be coupled to ST or DST.

That is, if we want to start work when the sun rises (on average), there's nothing stopping us from doing that, particularly if it's proven to be more healthy.

That alone makes me question, a bit, the validity of these studies.

But again, maybe there's more context that I'm missing -- which is why I'm posting here, in case there's context that would explain this.

[ilovesunlight]

The reason that ST > DST is that bedtime is largely influenced by the sun, yet wake time is largely influenced by work / school. When sunset is pushed back an hour, people get less sleep, and for kids this is massively detrimental to their education. India is doing this experiment in real time because they only have one time zone. Kids in the western half, where the sun sets later, have much worse educational outcomes, and as you move east the education outcomes get better.

[caddemon]

The sun sets where I am at ~430pm during the winter in standard time. I don't really see how having the sun set at 530pm instead would have a substantial effect on bedtime. There is so little sunlight in the winter that work/social life are what drive wakeup and bedtime. I imagine this isn't as true in India. Is there any research that accounts for the actual length of daylight available?

[sampo]

> just thinking this through logically, whether we are on DST or ST permanently shouldn't matter one way or another

It's observational, empirical research. The results are valid whether you understand them or not.

[20after4]

Seeking to understand the research is still a valid endeavor. We shouldn't blindly accept research without understanding it's implications and trying to suss out the reason for the observed results.

[Tenoke]

Presumably because opening/working hours remain the same by the clock when we switch (or when you are on the edge of a zone as in some of the studies) rather than adjust, and they are currently more optimal for one of those.

At any rate, I also strongly suspect it doesn't matter which one is picked but only as long as everything else is adjusted around it.

[busyant]

All I can say is that I find "losing" the hour to be brutal for several weeks. I've never been good with jet-lag either.

I like to joke that I never fully recover until they give me back the hour come November.

I'd rather they just pick one and be done with it.

[audunw]

Would this be due to lack of light in the morning when waking up?

If so, that's a solved problem these days. There's hundreds of ways to have lights that turn on in the morning. Having some kind of wakeup-light (simply two bright Philips Hue bulbs in the bedroom ceiling lamps these days) and taking vitamin D has solved the issues I've had with living far north, where it's dark most hours in the morning in mid-winter.

[laurent92]

Most of us solve it by flooding our face with phone light in the middle of the night ;)

[Miner49er]

You can say the same thing about lack of light at night?

[necovek]

That's quite interesting.

I wonder how much of the population in US (and worldwide) lives in Eastern/Western part of timezones and whether people's preference is correlated with what part of the timezone they live in. I'd also like to see research if moving an extra hour or two would continue to see gains (not sure how one would do that, perhaps recruiting people with different life schedules).

Eg. I prefer having DST on all the time, but I am at the almost Eastern end of the timezone, so perhaps my preference is affected by my experience too: eg. I already get 1h of earlier sunrise than Western-most parts of the TZ for the same wall clock time, but it's already dark outside at 4pm in winter months so way before work is done, which is what makes me unhappy.

If it turns out majority of the population would prefer DST only because majority of the population lives in Eastern parts of the timezones, that'd be pretty unfair to those living in Western parts of the timezones, which is why I wonder what's the population distribution across timezones.

[lmm]

I'm happy to believe that sleeping for 19 minutes less makes you less productive and less healthy, but does that effect outweigh having an extra 19 minutes of presumably leisure time? E.g. your paper says 3% lower salary, but 19 minutes is probably much more than 3% of a typical person's free time.

[tzs]

> Why would people want the sun to go down in the afternoon?

They don't. They want it to come up in the morning. In many places there isn't enough sunlight in the middle of winter to have it up both in the morning and the afternoon, so they need to pick one.

From a safety point of view, probably sunlight in the morning in more useful because sunlight drives temperature. That means mornings tend to be colder than afternoons, and so are more likely to have hazards such as ice on the roads.

When you go with dark mornings, you are combining the worst road conditions with the worst visibility. When you choose light mornings over light afternoons, then morning is combining the best visibility with the worst road conditions and afternoon is combining the best road conditions with the worst visibility.

Another factor is that commutes tend to fall into a narrower time range in the mornings. The commutes back home after work tend to be more spread out. This tends to make the morning commute more dangerous, which further argues against placing the morning commute in darkness.

[thugthrasher]

You also have the issue with kids who take the bus to school. With dark mornings, kids sit by the road and wait for the bus. So they walk in the dark to the bus stop, then wait there for some indeterminate amount of time in the dark.

Getting darker earlier at night, there are two advantages for schoolkids. One is that school tends to get out before the sun goes down even on the shortest days for most areas. So, many kids who'd have to wait in the dark in the morning don't have to deal with the dark at all in the afternoon. The other is that even when it's getting dark by the time the kid gets home, they don't have to wait next to the road for an indeterminate amount of time until the bus gets there.

[Apocryphon]

> When you go with dark mornings, you are combining the worst road conditions with the worst visibility.

You're still passing the buck to commutes during dark evenings. Driving at night is always more dangerous:

https://www.nsc.org/road-safety/safety-topics/night-driving

[mechanicalpulse]

I'd argue that evening darkness is somewhat safer than morning darkness when I'm considering winter weather. The temperature of the roads are higher after ten hours of daylight than they are after ten hours of darkness. The coldest and iciest conditions are often found right before dawn.

[_ph_]

Another important thing is, that people might be tired in the morning as they are not fully awake yet. This gets worse, the earlier they have to rise vs. the sun raise.

[jpindar]

Also, on average, people are in less of a hurry after work.

[Apocryphon]

But, more accidents happen at that time.

https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/overview/crashes-b...

[tzs]

My point is that given equal lighting morning is probably going to be worse for driving because of road conditions.

If we then have to add darkness to one of those, adding it to evening will probably be less damaging because evening has a larger safety margin due to better road conditions.

Adding darkness to morning is taking what is already the hardest case and making it even worse.

[Apocryphon]

But currently more accidents happen at night than they do in the early morning, even when morning darkness factored in.

https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/overview/crashes-b...

[Talanes]

> You're still passing the buck

Well, yeah. That's the key to their whole argument: the buck HAS to be passed somewhere.

[seanalltogether]

Do you have kids? Do you have to wake those kids up for school in the dark and wrestle with your own ability to wake up in the dark? Have you been to school board meetings and listened to other parents who are extremely opinionated about every aspect of their children's schedules.

The simple answer is that while lots of people "want" the sun in the evening, there is a sizable group of people that "need" the sun in the morning.

[Apocryphon]

They could also shift when school schedules start to later in the morning.

[seanalltogether]

But that shifts work schedules to later in the morning, which pushes lunch and dinner schedules, and bedtime schedules, and then you're right back where you started.

[gifnamething]

Then we lose the conceit that we're doing it for the kids' benefit.

[Apocryphon]

It wouldn't shift meal or bedtime schedules.

[m463]

I think that is the answer.

Keep kids away from traffic during darkness and let them have a little more darkness in the evening when they're inside and safe.

[thehappypm]

If your desire is to make sure that kids have light on both ends of the school commute, then adjust your time zone such that winter is optimal. Then just keep that time zone year round. Why bother moving the clocks?

[ilovesunlight]

Daylight savings effectively shifts school 1 hour earlier relative to sunrise, which is the exact opposite of what is good for kids (who need more sleep than adults).

[dham]

School just starts way too damn early. I remember school at like 8:30 in elementary school. My son starts at 7:20. He has to get up at like 6:00 because it takes so long to get him up.

[colinmhayes]

I "need" the sun to not rise before 5 for a third of the year.

[wittjeff]

Morning vs Evening Light Treatment of Patients With Winter Depression

"These results should help establish the importance of circadian (morning or evening) time of light exposure in the treatment of winter depression. We recommend that bright-light exposure be scheduled immediately on awakening in the treatment of most patients with seasonal affective disorder."

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/...

[stickfigure]

Those people can get up later?

It really doesn't matter whether we're on daylight time or standard time, schedules will adjust to whatever makes sense for that particular locale. Just stop changing the damn clocks back and forth.

[davis_m]

The time most people wake up is dictated by when they need to be at work. They can't simply "get up later".

[danShumway]

Could work hours shift for those people?

What I can't get past is that we are literally changing the numbers on our clocks. That can't be a less invasive or easier to coordinate solution than a schedule shift for a business would be. If we can pass a law mandating daylight savings time, is that less invasive than passing a law saying that some businesses should shift their hours in the winter?

Even without a law -- businesses can voluntarily have summer hours and winter hours, because they already do, we just change the clocks to pretend that's not what we're doing. Businesses can already ignore or set their own hours voluntarily regardless of DST, and the majority have completely voluntarily decided that in the winter they'll shift their opening and closing times by an hour.

I just feel like -- couldn't they do literally the exact same thing they're doing right now, except without us all having to pretend that time itself has changed? Is it a mental thing, are we just relying on CEOs not understanding how DST works, so we have to trick them into having seasonal hours?

[ghaff]

It's a mass coordination problem. Businesses have customers. OK, segments of the business that don't interact with customers could choose to switch working hours. But if I'm retail say, my customers probably expect that I'll be open at 10am for a random store.

[creeble]

Aren't the health detriments the same whether you shift your working hours / schedule or shift the clock?

Aren't they effectively exactly the same thing, especially if they're coordinated? And if they're not coordinated, isn't it a bigger mess in terms of knowing when things are supposed to change?

[yakak]

Shifts, etc, are all basically negotiated business by business, school system by school system, etc. The night shift, restaurant workers, school kids, etc, are really pushed around by logistics to match rush hours for office workers.

A split between organizations changing their winter and summer hours and ones choosing an hour earlier or later permanently is not necessarily harmful because it ends up spreading the traffic across more time. Everyone moving in sync causes a very precise traffic jam.

[tshaddox]

But isn’t it the case that the jobs that are directly concerned with whether the sun is up would also just do the job based on solar time with no regard for standard time? There’s obviously some need for accommodating those people so they can get their kids to school or have some time to go to the bank or whatever, but I find it hard to believe that applying standard time offsets twice a year is the most efficient way to make these accommodations.

[joncp]

Uh huh.

"Hey boss, sickfigure over on HN says I can get up later so I'll be coming in at 10. k thx"

[greyhair]

Lol! Oh yeah.

[xyhopguy]

this proposal will set sunrise at 9am during december in Oregon and washington. 'Wake up later' doesnt really work for most people.

[stickfigure]

How is 8am so much better? If you start work at 8am, you need to be up 1-2 hours earlier to get ready, commute, etc. The only people who wake up with the sun in the winter are folks that roll into work at 10am.

[xyhopguy]

Currently we deal with >= 8am sunrise for 2 months of the year. With this proposal, you get it for November and February too. yay!

[greyhair]

Says the person that has never punched a clock on a blue collar job.

7:00 AM to 4:00 PM.

[nerdponx]

Most people can't get up at 8 and get to work by 9.

[lacrosse_tannin]

You could get up earlier??

[eli]

I don't particularly care whether the sun rises or sets +/- 1 hour. I do care about having my routine and sleep schedule disrupted.

[D13Fd]

Because it make zero sense for everyone to have to get up an hour earlier. And it makes no sense for kids to stand around in the dark at freezing cold bus stops every morning.

[Tempest1981]

There is also a movement to start school later:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Start_school_later_movement

For example, in California, starting this Fall, high school can't start before 8:30 AM.

[iso1210]

I get the feeling that it's fairly common in US schools to have kids in before 8am, possibly even before 7am!

Is this because of the widespread school transport and the need to stagger the bus usage? In the UK it's quite rare to have school transport, with most kids at high school taking public transport, and at primary school either walking or being driven

I got the feeling from German textbooks at school that early starts were common in Europe too.

[nickff]

Early school hours are often a result of teachers' desires to get out of work early. Many teachers' unions include school hours in their bargaining/contracts.

[mschuster91]

Yeah, and that is because being a teacher is not just an incredibly mentally taxing job (made worse by the fact that class sizes are way too large) but also involves an awful lot of invisible after-school work: preparing and correcting exams, preparing class material, dealing with IEPs, following up with parents (particularly in financially or otherwise challenged families), organizing after-school and extra-curricular activities, dealing with other bureaucratic bullshit because the administration is understaffed...

[kube-system]

Yes, it is commonplace for bussing to be staggered -- they often pick up a route for one school (maybe a high school), then run another route for another school (maybe an elementary school).

[Jtype]

I'm sure parents with jobs are going to love this.

[Apocryphon]

They will if it makes their kids healthier and puts pressure on industries to shift job schedules later.

[LastMuel]

But, we do that anyway. Mid winter, even in the south part of the U.S. I was standing in the dark and cold waiting for a bus to arrive.

[sophacles]

Stop letting facts get in the way of a good "i dislike change" argument.

[gifnamething]

This isn't a constructive way of arguing, it's an irrefutable strawman

[D13Fd]

There is a big difference between doing it for a few weeks and doing it for most or all of the school year (depending on location and schedule).

[dham]

Same here when I was in middle school. I never understood the standing for bus in the dark argument. I thought that was just normal.

[Broken_Hippo]

"And it makes no sense for kids to stand around in the dark at freezing cold bus stops every morning."

I mean, coats exist. We could make sure everyone has winter wear appropriate for the weather, and then it just won't be an issue. Kids here are out in it and are from a young age here (Norway).

[D13Fd]

Easy to say from a low-crime, high-safety country like Norway.

[0xbadcafebee]

Are we still pushing the myth of an epidemic of kids in the states getting abducted by random strangers?

[D13Fd]

It's easy to focus on abductions and forget all of the other relevant crime, which makes up the majority of it.

Yes abductions are low, but in many many areas crime as a whole is high, and children are often involved or impacted, and likely more so when they are stuck standing around in the dark.

[Broken_Hippo]

I'm from the US - the midwest. It wasn't a big deal catching the bus when it was cold/dark there, either. We had lights at the bus stops, and half the time it was in front of the house. No big deal. We had coats, too. There are multiple programs to make sure kids have coats in the US, though they don't go far enough.

Most places in the US are pretty safe, by the way, though folks will swear they aren't.

[rattray]

Also a country where a high percentage of families can afford clothing of adequate quality.

[throwaway0a5e]

Winter coats aren't so expensive that the people of Detroit are seriously lacking for them.

Sure they can't all stand at the bus stop wearing some status symbol of a jacket but they do just fine.

[johannes1234321]

These damn socialists ...

[deagle50]

Kids shouldn't be forced to start that early anyway. It's borderline child abuse imo. Maybe permanent DST will lead to school schedules that benefit children not adults.

[sigspec]

YES! I work from 9-5. My kid is at school from 7:15 to 2:30. We're lucky my wife teaches so we don't have to worry about after school care.

[ilovesunlight]

It's actually the exact opposite. Permanent DST means that kids will be starting 1 hour earlier relative to sunrise, which is terrible for educational outcomes.

[deagle50]

It's already bad. The issue isn't when you sleep up relative to the sun, but relative to your responsibilities. Some kids have to wake up before 6am not to keep up, which severely limits their options in the evenings and their phyiscal development.

[deagle50]

*to keep up

[belltaco]

Change school start timings in winter, then?

[D13Fd]

We'd have to change work timing too, then, to facilitate dropoffs and parents who want to watch their kids at the bus stops. And at that point, we are back where we started. Better to just not mess with the time, and stick with standard time.

[rattray]

It's probably easier to change work timings now than it ever would have been before. Which is great.

[Jtype]

If you change what time people go to work from 8 am to 9 am then you will also be changing when they get home from 5pm to 6pm. Then you have lost that extra daylight in the evening, which was the entire point of the time change!

[jalk]

Changing the start time for some activities twice a year seems likely to cause even more confusion that changing the clock

[tshaddox]

> And at that point, we are back where we started.

Except only for people at latitudes where it's worth doing. Those people are precisely where they started, and everyone else has a much simpler year-round standard time.

[stickfigure]

What percentage of the population must start work at exactly 8am?

[s1artibartfast]

A pretty big chunk. I couldn't find the latest Census data, but in 2000 ~20% of people left for work before 630 and 72% left for work before 830 am.

https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/2000/...

[ddlatham]

Because the hours of sunlight are limited, and many people prefer having the sun set in the afternoon over having it rise after the day's routine is well under way. Many people prefer it the other way around. There are some inconveniences both ways, but we'll make it work one way or the other.

[tshaddox]

Every poll I’ve seen shows yearly daylight saving time adjustments to be rather unpopular.

[ghaff]

"adjustments"

Even those of us who prefer DST in general don't like the change in general. (OK, I remember in college extending the party by one hour was pretty cool but the other end wasn't so great.)

[Talanes]

>OK, I remember in college extending the party by one hour was pretty cool but the other end wasn't so great.

The magic really goes away when you hit bar-going age and realize that even though the time-change lines up with last-call perfectly, they don't stay open an extra hour.

[pavon]

Some people have a very difficult time waking up and driving to work before the sun rises.

[throwaway0a5e]

Because they don't do anything after work and would rather commute in the daylight at 7am so the late sun is of no benefit but the early sun is.

Tons of people already work 7-3 so they already deal with the downside in the morning. Not like night is gonna get any darker.

[Asooka]

Because we don't want to get up too early. If you want more sun, you're free to get up early yourself.

[IncRnd]

Exactly. There has been DST for over 100 years now. We don't use fuel the same way, so the original reason for DST is outdated.

From https://www.almanac.com/states-object-changing-clocks-daylig...

  Historically, the changing of clocks was
  established by law in 1918 as a fuel
  saving measure during World War I.  

  However, there is a common myth that DST was
  established to extend the daylight hours for
  farmers. This is not true. Farmers were
  extremely opposed to having to turn their
  clocks forward and back twice a year.
  Changing hours is actually a disruption for
  the farmer. Imagine telling a dairy cow
  accustomed to being milked at 5:00 a.m. that
  their milking time needs to be moved an hour
  because the truck is coming to pick up their
  milk at a different time! For the farmer,
  plants and animals, it is the sun and
  seasons which determines their activity.

  The 1918 law lasted only seven months. It
  proved unpopular with farmers and other
  folks.  However, after repeal in 1919, some
  state and localities continued the
  observance.  

  It took another war, World War II, to
  introduce a law by President Franklin D.
  Roosevelt, establishing year-round DST. This
  “War Time” law lasted from February 9, 1942
  to September 30, 1945.

  From 1945 to 1966, observance of DST was
  quite inconsistent across the states.
  There were no uniform rules. This caused
  massive confusion in the transportation
  and broadcasting industry which pushed for
  standardization. Farmers continued to
  oppose it.  

  To address this confusion, permanent DST was
  introduced by President Lyndon B. Johnson on
  April 12, 1966 and signed into law as the
  Uniform Time Act. This established a system
  of uniformity within each time zone.
  Daylight saving time was the law throughout
  the United States and its territories.
  However, states were allowed to opt out of
  the law, and some did.

[seangrogg]

All I'm going to say is that - after experiencing about a decade of living in AZ and not worrying about toggling time - I'd still be in that camp that support permanently choosing a time.

[deanCommie]

This is key. We can adapt to anything. Just stop making me lose an hour of my sleep once a year. It takes me > 1 week to adjust.

[MrMetlHed]

I live in Arizona as well, and agree. I'd rather everyone else just pick a time and stick with it. Preferably DST so I can be 3 hours back of the East Coast and get 3 hours at the end of the work day there for solid working while no one else is around. And I like having sporting events on at the end of a work day.

[seangrogg]

Here's to hoping!

[paxys]

You conveniently skipped the last line of that paragraph

> However, critics argue that anecdotes of deaths in the dark could be equally applied to darker evenings, and that the elimination of Permanent DST was politically motivated.

[aiisjustanif]

Children deaths tend to be more significant in the eyes of the voting population, tbf.

[paxys]

The point is that there may have been an equal number of children saved from death due to more light in the evenings, but you can't really prove that.

[bin_bash]

It wasn't repealed. That was a time-limited experiment.

[throwaway894345]

I wonder if our interconnected world will make this different. I’m guessing people are more adversely affected by DST than previously.

Also from your link:

> In the state of Florida alone, at least six school children were killed by motorists due to the dark mornings created by the new law.

I wonder how in the world they attributed that to DST?

[FastMonkey]

I had the same questions myself. I tried to follow the citation on wikipedia, but that links to a newspaper article that doesn't seem to mention it at all.

Edit: on the other hand, the claim "meta-analysis by Rutgers researchers found that Permanent DST would eliminate 171 pedestrian fatalities (a 13% reduction) per year.", does actually link to a paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00014...

[stormbrew]

Probably by ignoring the 'background noise' of every single after school death that could be attributed to early sunsets.

[ThatGeoGuy]

North America does seem to like their cars, and is quite hellbent on finding any explanation for deaths caused by automobiles that absolves the system from having to take any responsibility or do anything (e.g. build infrastructure, regulate cars, etc.).

Of course, that's not to say that six school children being killed by motorists didn't happen after the time _didn't_ switch, but to pretend that the preceding week or two were materially different in terms of light / dark levels to the degree that driving was significantly more dangerous would mean we have to accept that certain hours at certain times of year are always more dangerous (and we should then enforce more restrictions on when one may drive).

If the idea that not switching to driving an hour later causes more dead children sounds preposterous, then DST seems to be a straw-man being propped up. More likely: there was general unhappiness about the change, and people were motivated to find a reason to repeal the law (and cars and bad car-centric planning came in to save the day). It's very easy to take the wind out of a political movement for change, but not necessarily to put them back in. I've been meaning to read Jessie Singer's new book [1], and this seems similar in that regard. Rather than acknowledge that our society has built things (e.g. bad infrastructure) that cause harm (six children died) we instead point at the problem and any attempt to make change anywhere in the system is looked down upon because that would be interacting with the problem, which makes you responsible for any effect of it down the line [2].

Overall, I think my take-away is that we know that shifting the clocks twice a year causes some non-zero amount of suffering (and doesn't have a large justification for _why_). Rather than "Chesterton's fence" ourselves into inaction, we shouldn't let past reasons dictate our choices here. There's surely a lot of overhead with regard to making this change (my heart goes to anyone who has to work with international date / time APIs), but even with knowing that I still don't think it's a bad idea. A unanimous vote by the US Senate surely says that there's some will towards doing this, since it's rare for anything to be this bi-partisan nowadays...

[1]: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/There-Are-No-Accident... [2]: https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-eth...

[JumpCrisscross]

> Looks like we may be doomed to repeat the experience

Based on what? The fact that we're trying again?

If we all walk into this assuming it's doomed because it didn't work 50 years ago, sure, it will be, but that's how one doesn't get nice things.

[hereforphone]

Same thing is happening in Turkey now. Everyone gets depressed when it's dark outside when they wake up, every day of the year.

[ultimoo]

No, 50 years ago people had different lifestyles, jobs, and hobbies. Technology as we know it today did not exist. It's a very different world today and the chances of a different outcome are large enough to warrant repeating this.

[whacim]

I think they should just make a one time half-hour adjustment and split the difference. Not sure how much of a technical challenge that would present to implement.

[SllX]

Well, as far as technical challenges go, we would all have to change our clocks (or the clocks would have to receive some kind of signal to adjust their time accordingly).

Might be doable though.

[Brybry]

50 years ago we didn't have the internet and everyone plugged into phones/TVs/inside all the time.

There's no reason we have to follow the same pattern this time around.

[jeffchien]

The UK tried it from 1968 to 1971 as well: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Summer_Time#Periods_...

But as others have said, Arizona (sans some reservations and jurisdictions) have been fine so maybe history won't repeat itself. And of course there are plenty of countries worldwide that don't have DST anyways.

[rossjudson]

Ah! The difference is that in today's political climate, nobody will admit they were wrong about anything. So it will probably stick.

[Asooka]

I've always hated how DST makes me get up too early. Even after getting over the initial shock, it never felt right. Hope the USA will do the right thing eventually.

[ishjoh]

Thank you for this link. I guess we really are doomed to repeat history.

[drekipus]

Well you know what they say..

[bonniemuffin]

"Those who study history are doomed to stand by helplessly while everyone else repeats it"?

[thrill]

"Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress; but I repeat myself."?