[HN Gopher] The US Tried Permanent Daylight Saving Time in the '...
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The US Tried Permanent Daylight Saving Time in the '70s. People
Hated It
Author : cmurf
Score : 22 points
Date : 2022-03-15 20:04 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.washingtonian.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.washingtonian.com)
| jamesliudotcc wrote:
| Institutions have computers now. So they should be able to have
| hours to fit the sun with far less trouble.
| tryptophan wrote:
| Seriously. Don't understand why businesses can't have hours
| like "from sunup to sundown".
|
| Wouldn't even need to check the time to see if it is open or
| not, you can just look outside.
|
| Plus...we have the super advanced technology needed to figure
| out when sundown is on our smartphones!
| moltke wrote:
| Many parks do this. It makes a ton of sense. IMO the best
| system for businesses that need rigid times would be to have
| separate winter and summer hours or just make the opening
| time <x> integer hours from sunrise.
| tyldum wrote:
| Polar area here. So, in the transition from summer to
| winter the day is shortened about 15-20 minutes each day.
| And vice versa from winter to summer.
|
| And at some point in the summer, the sun never sets. During
| winter it never rises...
|
| Time isn't easy on a global scale.
| rdtwo wrote:
| Northern folks will finally get an hour back after work to do
| things
| ehutch79 wrote:
| Fine, make standard time permanent instead.
| cafard wrote:
| I was there, Charlie.
|
| In the winter of 1973-1974 I was carpooling to college, leaving
| the house about 6:30 to get to campus before 8. I could have done
| without the DST. It was imposed with the notion of saving energy
| after the oil shock. Did it really save energy, though?
| sschueller wrote:
| Why can't we do a 30 minute shift? Then we get rid of this back
| and forth and we get the best of both worlds. What am I missing
| here?
| silisili wrote:
| One negative would be you'd need to get the entire world on
| board. I mean, there are a handful of off-by-30 time zones in
| existence, but the rest of the world is in sync in that way.
| skissane wrote:
| India and Sri Lanka use a 30 minute offset (+5:30 all year
| round). So does part of Australia (Northern Territory is
| +9:30 year round, South Australia is +9:30 standard time and
| +10:30 daylight saving.) And one Canadian province (the most
| populated parts of Newfoundland and Labrador are on -3:30
| standard time, -2:3 daylight saving.) It doesn't cause any of
| these places any major difficulty. If the US were to adopt 30
| minute timezone offsets, I don't see how that would cause the
| US any major difficulty either. Probably would break some
| buggy software which was written for US domestic use only and
| assumes timezone offsets are hourly, but buggy software can
| be patched or replaced.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| It depends on what you are optimizing for and _where_ you are
| optimizing for. Standard and Daylight times have different
| meanings in different sides of the time zone. On Eastern edges
| of a time zone Standard time truly is more "standard" with
| respect to solar noon. On Western edges of a time zone Daylight
| time starts to be more preferable and closer to solar noon.
| Half-hour between the two might favor the "middle" of the time
| zone perhaps and/or it might just leave all the populations on
| either side of the time zone unhappy.
|
| Arguably our timezones have grown too wide to accommodate
| preferences of both edges. Our timezones were optimized for
| train schedules and full hour-wide zones made some sense based
| on the speed of train travel. Maybe instead of trying to pick
| just "Standard" Time or just Daylight Time we should instead be
| talking about narrowing our time zones (to half-hour wide,
| perhaps) and better figure out what geography we are best
| trying to represent versus solar noon, the center of a
| timezone, one edge or the other.
| ouid wrote:
| Is this really all fueled by having to change your clocks?
|
| The primary driver of your circadian rhythm is the hours of
| daylight. Left to their own devices, (ie literally excluding
| alarm clocks) humans wake up at sunrise. Daylight savings time is
| an attempt to make it easy for institutions to have canonical
| hours while also attempting to account for this essential fact
| about human physiology. It feels weird because it's optimizing
| two things simultaneously.
| thawaya3113 wrote:
| Your comment neatly encapsulates the problem.
|
| If the primary driver of our circadian rhythm is sunlight,
| switching from DST and back leads you to doing stuff an hour
| off from your body's natural circadian rhythm.
|
| It's not about changing your clock. It's about changing your
| body's schedule.
| ouid wrote:
| The hour of sunlight is approximately sinusoidal. Changing
| time is approximating the sinusoid with a square wave. It's
| not as smooth as it could be, but smoothing it out would
| cause more accounting problems than it would solve. It is
| also easier to manage than having schools and businesses
| change their hours in winter, which is the other way to
| approach the solution. If you want a smoother transition you
| are fully in control of that.
| area51org wrote:
| It's fueled by the exhaustion caused by monkeying with what
| time it is. It's not about circadian rhythms. It's about having
| to wake up an hour early and pretend that you got enough sleep,
| and for no good reason.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| People are different now.
|
| It's the old tired refrain "We already tried that!* (*under
| different circumstances, at a different time, with a different
| generation)
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| How do you know people are different now? Shouldn't we learn
| from history and do something different this time around, like
| permanent standard time?
|
| We did permanent standard time in the past, too, and people
| didn't seem to have a problem with it.
| area51org wrote:
| The past is prologue and not necessarily predictive. That was
| then; this is now.
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(page generated 2022-03-15 23:02 UTC)