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by BeetleB 17 days ago
Studies also show that permanent standard time is better than permanent daylight time. But for some reason, the US wants to go against the rest of the world on this.
2 comments

For what reasons is it better? I’d rather have the evening light than the first 20 minutes when I get up.
> For what reasons is it better?

To start:

> Later sunrises and sunsets, as seen with pDST, are associated with multiple long-term health outcomes including increases in stroke, heart attacks, diabetes, obesity, and cancer.[8–10]

> The increase in obesity and other cardiovascular health problems show that even if DST were to encourage exercise in some individuals it is not enough to outweigh the effects of sleep and circadian disruption on food choices, metabolism, hunger hormones, and glucose control and other cardiovascular risk factors.[11,12]

* https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10476036/

It matches our circadian rhythms better. That leads to absolutely massive better health outcomes, society-wide.

People wanting to drive home with a bit of light doesn’t really offset everyone’s sleep getting screwed up, especially those with later natural circadian rhythms.

You are aware that at least much of Europe uses a similar system to what the US uses today?
Europe is less than 8% of the world's population. The vast majority of the world uses standard time. It works. No one there pines for permanent daylight time.

Europe is wrong 50% of the time. The US[1] will be wrong 100% of the time. It can mostly get away with this because it spans the continent. But still, you're going to deal with the stupidity that crossing the Mexican border you will always have to correct your watch.

[1] And Alberta + BC. But really - all of Canada is just a rounding error anyway!

> The vast majority of the world uses standard time. It works. No one there pines for permanent daylight time.

Timezones are political, there are many cities and countries that are an hour or more west of the timezone implied by their longitude, which is equivalent to permanent daylight time, even if they don't call it permanent daylight time.

See Spain.
Meanwhile, China has one timezone so I sort of doubt that DST registers given that.
> The vast majority of the world uses standard time.

This doesn't make any sense, "standard" is just an arbitrary choice.

See India for example, single time zone.

Ultimately the dumbest thing is to change the clocks back and forth. Just pick one, stick with it.