[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.

[seanmcdirmid]

Kashgar would be the worst possible situation in China, I've only ever been as far west as Urumuqi.

[riffic]

the variability of solar time depends a great deal on latitude, if I'm not mistaken.

perhaps lawmakers can try voting to change the tilt of the earth, lol.

[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.

[joshstrange]

Ahh, I think I read the comment I was replying to backwards (which is par for the course when it comes to TZ/DST-type things with me, "is it an hour earlier? or later").

[runarberg]

No, you read it correctly the first time around. E.g. from the first link in the dump above:

> we find that an extra hour of natural light in the evening reduces sleep duration by an average of 19 minutes and increases the likelihood of reporting insufficient sleep.

The health benefits of people staying out longer and spending more money (?) are disputed I believe. The reduced sleep of day starting before sun-up are pretty universally recognized as bad for public health (particularly among teenagers).

Also note that if staying out longer was a goal to strive for, there are number of alternatives to encourage that. Including shorter worker ours, more public spaces, public events, etc. Conversely getting people to sleep longer is much harder with the clock set 1+ hour after the sun clock.

[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.

[joshstrange]

I know, I mistakenly thought the comment I was referring to was saying that the research says that "Standard Time" is better for us than DST.

[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.

[justrudd]

Haha! I worked on a dairy farm in my youth. Cows also don't care about what days off your government says you should have. Kids have a recital in the afternoon? Better have someone there to milk the cows. Woke up with a tooth ache? better have someone there to milk the cows.

Cows also don't care about property lines :)

[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.

[seanmcdirmid]

I worked a blue color job where I was at work at 5:30 AM, sometimes 4:30 AM. The fact that it was never light out when I went to work, even when standard time was in effect, didn't bother me much.

[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]

Sounds like you work in an all indoor environment where the sun matters not to your livelihood, unlike farmers.

[throw0101a]

> Sounds like you work in an all indoor environment where the sun matters not to your livelihood, unlike farmers.

My (late) grandparent were farmers: they only cared about the time on Sundays to make sure they weren't late for Church services. Otherwise the the cows needed milking when they needed milking (which I helped with when I visited them).

[macintux]

Do you think farmers will orient their working hours around a clock or the sun?

[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.

[tenuousemphasis]

>Why would they pick this one?

Money. [1]

On the upside, local or state governments might be able to alter their time zone to essentially observe permanent Standard Time.

>Seasonal observation of DST was first enacted in the US during World Wars I and II, as an attempt to conserve fuel. The practice was unpopular and promptly repealed after each war; however, lobbyists from the petroleum industry lobbied to restore DST, as they had noticed it actually increased fuel consumption. Petroleum lobbyists joined with lobbyists from golf and candy corporations in the 1980s to form the National Daylight Saving Time Coalition, and they have twice since succeeded in extending the length of DST's observation from six months to seven in 1986, and again to eight months in 2005. The observation of DST has also been found to increase residential energy costs and pollution costs by several million dollars per year.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanent_time_observation_in_...

[armagon]

Whoa. That's so devious.

[throw0101a]

> So frustrating. Why would they pick this one?

Just look at all the other threads in this discussion: "I want it brighter when I leave the office".

It's like the lightbulb was never invented or something. We haven't had "dark" for decades:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_pollution

[Apocryphon]

So we don't have dark pre-sunrise mornings either, thanks to the lightbulb?

Never mind light pollution doesn't apply if you're trying to get into outdoor activities after work.

[ghaff]

The big cities in Alberta look to be fairly far west in a timezone so that may have something to do with it. The further east you are the better DST looks on average. And that far north, I can see getting at least somewhat light mornings earlier in the year being a plus.

[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?

[ilovesunlight]

Talking about the whole year, not just the winter. In Summer later sunset affects bedtime. In winter later sunrise affects rise time.

[caddemon]

The proposal will only change the winter though, we are already only on standard time for 4 months of the year.

[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.

[throw0101a]

> We shouldn't blindly accept research without understanding it's implications and trying to suss out the reason for the observed results.

You're not wrong, but (e.g.) this paper has several dozen references, stating at the end:

> In summary, the scientific literature strongly argues against the switching between DST and Standard Time and even more so against adopting DST permanently. The latter would exaggerate all the effects described above beyond the simple extension of DST from approximately 8 months/year to 12 months/year (depending on country) since body clocks are generally even later during winter than during the long photoperiods of summer (with DST) (Kantermann et al., 2007; Hadlow et al., 2014, 2018; Hashizaki et al., 2018). Perennial DST increases SJL prevalence even more, as described above.

* https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2019.0094...

If you want to fact check the folks who have this as their careers, you're welcome to pick up studying circadian rhythms as a hobby. But most of us ain't got time for that, so I'm willing to trust the experts and move on with my life.

We just spent two years having to put up with folks being arm chair epidemiologist with COVID, do we have to do it all over again with chronobiologists?

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronobiology

[Izkata]

> We just spent two years having to put up with folks being arm chair epidemiologist with COVID, do we have to do it all over again with chronobiologists?

If COVID taught me anything, it's to question the experts. Only in the past half a year or so have the "experts" come around to what the layperson had been saying in 2020.

[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.