[HN Gopher] British Columbia is permanently adopting daylight time
___________________________________________________________________
British Columbia is permanently adopting daylight time
Author : ireflect
Score : 1098 points
Date : 2026-03-02 20:30 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cbc.ca)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cbc.ca)
| rubatuga wrote:
| Wow we finally did it
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| I won't complain about the NDP for at least 3 days after this
| one. This is cause for celebration!
| SpecialistK wrote:
| Even a stopped clock is right twice a day!
| mulmen wrote:
| Another falsehood programmers believe about time. A stopped
| clock is only right twice a day if it is a 12 hour clock
| and only if it's not set at a leap second or at a skipped
| time during the shift from standard to daylight time.
| SpecialistK wrote:
| I was being generous. Which wasn't really justified
| considering Eby's track record.
| brailsafe wrote:
| At least he has a decent housing minister
| SpecialistK wrote:
| Touche. The rezoning policy is one of the very few things
| I can give credit for.
|
| Since you're discussing BC housing policy, I assume you
| know of the amazing Uytae Lee?
| brailsafe wrote:
| He's one of my fave local video ppl, fairly sure we live
| in the same neighbourhood
| SpecialistK wrote:
| Please tell him I said hi and that I love the content!!
| brailsafe wrote:
| Haven't met him personally, but it's nice to hear he's as
| regionally popular as he is. I'm just going off the fact
| I've seen him around and he's often documenting nearby
| streets. It's good stuff and super informative.
| OsrsNeedsf2P wrote:
| My dream world is everyone using 24 hour clocks set to UTC
| boothby wrote:
| My dream world would have 86400 time zones, one per arc-second
| of the globe, so we can all sync our clocks at high noon.
| userbinator wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_time
| pseudalopex wrote:
| https://qntm.org/continuous
| SpecialistK wrote:
| Sounds good on paper, terrible idea in practice.
| pezezin wrote:
| Nah, it also sounds terrible on paper.
| SpecialistK wrote:
| I'll correct myself: it sounds good for about 5 seconds
| before you think about it and realize it's an unworkable
| idea which creates more problems than it solves.
| __s wrote:
| I have all my clocks set to UTC. Works for me
| 1718627440 wrote:
| I also did that for some time, I just don't perceived
| clocks to have a single point that is up and mentally
| rotated clocks all the time. The hours just lost their
| meaning beyond their numerical value.
| pezezin wrote:
| Good for you. I am currently living in Japan, and I don't
| want sunrise to happen at 21:00, noon at 3:00, and sunset
| at 9:00.
| dirasieb wrote:
| >I don't want sunrise to happen at 21:00, noon at 3:00,
| and sunset at 9:00
|
| but it will happen regardless of what you think about it,
| the only choice you have is to pretend it's happening at
| a "different time" because you assign a different number
| to it
| pezezin wrote:
| True, but I want the numbers assigned to it to have a
| sensible meaning for us humans.
|
| Even if dealing with time zones is annoying, we must
| remember that computers should serve humans, not the
| other way around.
| recursive wrote:
| I will readily admit that I'm an idiot, but I've thought
| about it for literally multiple minutes, and I still love
| it. It even still seems workable!
| redfern314 wrote:
| My favorite depiction of your dream world:
| https://qntm.org/abolish
| bvanheu wrote:
| thank you for sharing, I was trying to find something similar
| that explains why UTC everywhere is such a bad idea!
| allknowingfrog wrote:
| > Uncle Steve is zero hours ahead.
|
| Uncle Steve is the same number of hours ahead that he has
| always been, and that's a thing that could be looked up just
| as easily as finding his time zone. I think the author is
| greatly exaggerating the degree to which time zones solve any
| of the problems mentioned. Uncle Steve might be on a
| different sleep schedule from me, regardless of whether or
| not he's in a different time zone.
|
| Days of the week definitely become interesting in a global
| UTC system, but noon used to literally mean "the sun is at
| it's highest point". I suspect that people would grumble for
| a year or two and then forget that another system ever
| existed.
| redfern314 wrote:
| There's certainly a bit of dramatization/exaggeration here,
| but the main point is that it doesn't really fix the stated
| problem while also being a huge change for everyone to
| adapt to.
| stackskipton wrote:
| I think you missed entire point of operation.
|
| If everywhere runs on UTC, they will still have different
| times when people are working/not working/sleeping so you
| still have to look something up and figure it out.
|
| With time zones, you look up "What time is it?", realize
| it's 4:30AM and since most people around the world follow
| similar schedule, you quickly realize he's fast asleep.
| Arch485 wrote:
| I feel like days are a non-issue; they would just start at
| different times (UTC) in different territories. This
| wouldn't make things any more complicated than they already
| are (currently, if I want to talk to someone in Australia,
| I have to look up what time it is in Australia and infer
| the day of the week from that, if necessary. If everything
| is under UTC, I know what "time" it is, but I still have to
| look up what day it is).
|
| Most of the issues time zones cause are not "day of the
| week" related anyways (at least in my experience), so I
| think having to figure out what day of the week it is
| somewhere else wouldn't be a common problem anyways.
| Groxx wrote:
| tbh I think a more realistic depiction would be:
|
| Before UTC4ALL: is UB awake? what time zone is UB in? idk,
| what zone is Melbourne? +11? uh... carry the one... 6:25,
| maybe a bit early, let's try in an hour[1].
|
| After: is UB awake? he said gets up at 13:30, so call in a
| couple hours.
|
| You want to call someone, but you don't know when they're
| available? _Maybe you should ask them_ , so they can tell you
| it's 13:30 to 4:00, with zero "is that my time or your time"
| worries. Or check your shared location-aware calendar, which
| already handles both cases equally well.
|
| How often do you do several-thousand-mile phone calls
| _without knowing anything about the recipient 's schedule_?
| Where I come from that's gonna be rude, send an async message
| instead.
|
| 1: yes, the math/calculated time is wrong. on purpose. as an
| example.
| yen223 wrote:
| My dream world is we apply time zone logic to every other unit
| of measurement.
|
| 1 metre can be 100cm or 200cm depending on the season and your
| location
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| 12 oz of alcohol would obviously be larger in the winter the
| closer you get to the poles. I think I like this idea.
| leoapagano wrote:
| My nightmare world would be one where we apply "everything
| else" logic to time.
|
| 1 kilosecond: about 17 minutes
|
| 1 megasecond: about 12 days
|
| 1 gigasecond: about 32 years
|
| "Oh man, it's been a hot megasecond since we last spoke!"
| Said everyone, in my worst nightmares.
| karmakurtisaani wrote:
| Time zones are a pain, but it might be too much to fix.
|
| Now, 13 month calendar with each month 4 weeks, on the other
| hand..
| throwway120385 wrote:
| But if we abolish time zones how will we keep trains from
| hitting each other on the tracks?
| gonzalohm wrote:
| And then it's going to be so fun guessing at which time each
| country in the world starts working
| notnullorvoid wrote:
| Not hard, visualize the locations on the globe and a pie with
| 24 slices. If you start work at 12, and you want to know when
| someone 2 slices West will start you add 2 to get 14. 2 slice
| East of you, subtract 2 to get 10.
|
| Better than guessing what timezone the region picked when it
| spans multiple natural time zones, and whether they do or
| don't have time changes.
| notnullorvoid wrote:
| Also it's much easier for communication, because if someone
| sends you a message asking to have a call or meeting at X
| hour there's no need to know their timezone, because your X
| hour is the same as theirs no matter where you are in the
| world.
| duskdozer wrote:
| Ideally, you would be asking what time your specific
| colleagues start and end work, which could be quite different
| than the average of people who work in their country.
| notnullorvoid wrote:
| Mine too. People seem to have are hard time conceptualizing the
| hour as an arbitrary number, rather than having a static
| (usually incorrect) meaning associated with it like 12 as
| noon/midnight.
| alex_suzuki wrote:
| Mine would use Swatch Beat:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time I'm writing
| this at @296.77
| gbriel wrote:
| My dream is everyone has a personal clock based on their GPS
| location and solar noon is always when the sun is highest
| overhead wherever they are. Go to sleep and wake up based on
| this clock and use it for nothing else.
| wraptile wrote:
| If only we had UTC 2.0 with UTC-0 set somewhere in the middle
| of Pacific or Atlantic - UTC would finally have cultural
| adoption. Setting UTC on GMT was such a mistake.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| I would have preferred permanent standard time to permanent
| daylight time. But I accept I'm in the minority, and even
| permanent daylight time is far superior to changing clocks twice
| a year.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| It's "standard" for a reason. Humanity settled on these numbers
| long ago because they work best. It boggles my mind why anyone
| would choose otherwise since what we do at any given hour is
| arbitrary.
| jamie_ca wrote:
| The US decided (and Canada followed) that daylight time was
| more correct for the larger portion of the year, presumably
| it's easier to transition the remaining 4mo to daylight than
| it is to move 8mo to standard.
|
| But also, all the opinion polling (business and individual)
| was like over 90% in favour of year-round daylight time, so
| here we are.
| tzs wrote:
| > The US decided (and Canada followed) that daylight time
| was more correct for the larger portion of the year,
| presumably it's easier to transition the remaining 4mo to
| daylight than it is to move 8mo to standard.
|
| How is transitioning permanently to one easier than
| transitioning permanently to the other?
|
| How to transition to permanent DST: wait until we are in
| DST and then stop switching.
|
| How to transition to permanent Standard time: wait until we
| are in standard time and then stop switching.
| tempestn wrote:
| If we assume that the ideal time for 8 months of the year
| is DST and for 4 months is standard, but we want to
| eliminate the switch, then permanent DST gives you only 4
| months out of the ideal timezone rather than 8.
| toast0 wrote:
| If you adopt permanent DST, the there's a 1 hour
| difference between the current clock and the future clock
| for 4 months, and nothing for 8 months. If you adopt
| permanent ST, the difference between the current clock
| and future clock is 1 hour for 8 months and nothing for 4
| months.
|
| It's a 4 month-hour difference over the year, instead of
| an 8 month-hour difference.
|
| Personally, I'd prefer standard time, but having all days
| be 86400 seconds is a pretty great improvement over
| status quo. I find what most people really would like to
| change is the amount of time with sunlight in the winter,
| especially the more north they live... but changing the
| clock doesn't change the number of hours of sunlight;
| Vancouver, BC just doesn't have much sunlight in the
| winter.
| delta_p_delta_x wrote:
| > It's "standard" for a reason
|
| The reason is that with standard time, solar noon coincides
| with local noon, so the day is approximately symmetric about
| noon, not regarding atmospheric refraction lengthening the
| day. It wasn't done on a whim.
| jcranmer wrote:
| A lot of people hate standard time in winter because the sun
| sets at 4 or 5, and they want the sun to instead set at 8 or
| 9 like it does in summer. DST in winter doesn't actually give
| you the 8 or 9 sunset, it gives you a 5 or 6 sunset (which
| doesn't get you all that much) combined with moving your
| sunrise to 8 or 9, which causes its own set of issues most
| people don't think about.
|
| The last time we went to year-round DST, we stopped almost
| immediately because people experienced what winter DST was
| actually like and went "wait, this sucks."
| somat wrote:
| Obviously(/s) the solution is to change to a sunset
| centered day. new day starts at sunset so people can get up
| late and enjoy the maxim number of daylight hours.
|
| I always find it strange how particular people are about
| the numbers attached a purely astronomical phenomena(myself
| included, but I am pretty hard in the "let the sun figure
| it out camp"). If they want more "daylight" hours then get
| up at a time to enjoy them. But people would rather bend
| over backwards fiddling with the numbers as if that is
| going to change how long a day is.
| anal_reactor wrote:
| I think that midnight should be around current 4AM
| because that's the brief moment when party people already
| sleep and work people aren't awake yet.
| toast0 wrote:
| Does the night belong to the day it follows or the day it
| precedes?
|
| Does it become Friday at dawn, at sunset, at noon, or at
| midnight?
|
| This is all convention and not something that can be
| decided objectively.
| hdjrudni wrote:
| The new day ought to begin at the darkest hour. Opposite
| of high noon. Which is apparently called 'solar
| midnight'.
| DangitBobby wrote:
| The problem is that work does its best to capture all of
| my daylight hours.
| verall wrote:
| No, I hate standard time, because in winter the sun sets at
| 4 or 5, when it could set at 5 or 6, i.e. daylight when
| leaving work.
|
| I do not care if the sun is up as I shuffle groggily into
| the building. I don't think I'm alone.
| __turbobrew__ wrote:
| You are not alone according to polling in BC.
|
| I think fundamentally it comes down to energy for me. I
| have very little energy in the morning so I am not going
| to harness the pre-work daylight hours to do something
| outside like taking my dog to the park, biking, or
| running. For me I don't actually start feeling energized
| until maybe 9-10AM.
|
| After work however, I have much more energy to do things
| outside with the daylight.
| tptacek wrote:
| Right, but one problem is that people with kids do care a
| lot that they're going to school in the dark.
| dave78 wrote:
| > which doesn't get you all that much
|
| After college I moved from the far western edge of one
| timezone to the far eastern edge of another zone. I grew up
| with 5-5:30pm sunsets in winter, and now I live with
| 4-4:30pm sunsets. I moved here 25 years ago, and every
| single year when November/December come around and I get
| those early sunsets I hate it. It's one of the reasons I'd
| like to move away from here.
|
| I know it's just one person's opinion, but to me those
| extremely early sunsets in the middle of winter are a huge
| quality of life reduction.
|
| I believe part of the problem is that if you're in the
| middle or western edge of your zone, the winter sunsets
| aren't so bad. I suspect a lot of people who would prefer
| DST year round live on the eastern edge.
| madcaptenor wrote:
| I live in Atlanta (western edge of US Eastern time) and
| permanent DST sounds horrible - the sun would rise at
| 8:45 in early January. Honestly I'd prefer we be on
| permanent standard time. Call it permanent Central
| Daylight Time if you must.
|
| On the other hand, I used to live in Boston (eastern edge
| of US Eastern time) and those 4:15 sunsets were pretty
| depressing. Permanent DST sounds reasonable there.
| illusive4080 wrote:
| Despite all this I am a permanent DST fan. However I'll be
| happy with permanent anything over the current madness
| WarmWash wrote:
| The main driver of people wanting year round DST is so they
| can have sunlight after work in the winter. Those late
| sunsets in the summer are awesome too though.
| Gimpei wrote:
| I'd guess that there is less of a need for light at the
| beginning of the day since most people don't farm. Personally
| I prefer more light at the end of the day.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| I don't get that argument. The numeric time is just a
| measure for the state of the sun in the sky. When you
| choose your day to have ended is completely independent.
| There is already a high enough variance of people deciding
| when they go to sleep, that DST is hardly relevant. Some
| people have dinner at half past 5, some do at half past 8,
| the hour daylight saving time can't possibly make that
| difference.
| wat10000 wrote:
| It's not just a measure for the state of sun in the sky,
| it's also a measure for the state of society on the
| ground. It's an arbitrary number in a sense, but it also
| strongly influences my schedule.
|
| And yes, we _could_ have all the schools and everything
| else open later in the winter than the rest of the year,
| but it turns out it 's easier to change the clocks.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| But the school schedule does already shift and it shifts
| later, so in the opposite direction. The policy trend is
| going in the opposite of what you want to achieve with
| year-long DST, you could instead vote for the status quo
| and have the same effect.
| wat10000 wrote:
| Do BC schools have a different winter schedule? That's
| not how it is where I live, at least. It seems like it
| would be pretty annoying to have to reschedule activities
| around getting to/from school twice a year.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| I can only comment on some parts in Germany, and no I
| don't know of different seasonal schedules. I meant that
| the general trend is for the school day to start later,
| so that the teenagers get more of their precious sleep.
| Year-long DST would get them to get up earlier again
| compared to the sun. This trend is the same for office
| hours and working shifts, they become later, since people
| just want to sleep longer. (Which is obviously bullocks.)
| __turbobrew__ wrote:
| My local BC school district does not have winter hours,
| it is the same all year.
| prmoustache wrote:
| Exactly, here in Spain we have lunch between half past 2
| and half past 3 on workdays, which can extend up to 5pm
| in the weekend and I usually finish dinner at half past
| ten.
|
| Why? because they decided to be on the same timezone as
| our eastern neighbors in Europe. The eastern part of
| Polonia is on the same timezone and probably have
| probably the opposite with much much earlier lunch and
| dinner than we do.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| The timezone centered across Gorlitz made a lot of sense
| for the German empire, because it was nearly in half
| longitude wise and 15deg away from Greenwich. It is still
| somewhat centered in Europe. If you wanted to divide it
| again, you would need to decide whether the border should
| be between Germany and France or France and Spain. If you
| place it between Germany and France, which side will the
| BeNeLux countries be on? France still has some parts that
| are nominally in +1 and we don't want to disturb the
| German-French "friendship", so maybe place it between
| Spain and France, where there is at least a mountain
| border? Would that be acceptable? Railways connections
| between Spain and France are also much less and
| concentrated than between Germany and France.
|
| -----
|
| https://vividmaps.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/time-
| zones-...
|
| The old borders aligned with the sun a lot more, so we
| can blame that on WW2 as well.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| Farmers don't care about clocks, they do the work whenever
| needed. Roosters crow whenever they want. There's literally
| no point in talking about farmers in this debate.
| sorenjan wrote:
| They worked best when everybody were farmers and had to get
| up early and go to bed early. Now most people don't live
| their lives centered around noon, our free time comes after
| our work is done at around 17:00, so having more light in the
| evening instead of worthless light in the night makes sense.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| That's a myth.
|
| Farmers have to wake up early because their animals wake up
| at sunrise and some tasks are best performed at that time.
| So they wake up before sunrise regardless of the clock
| time.
|
| Human, like farm animals, are better off if they wake up at
| sunrise and go to sleep in full dark. At the equator that's
| easy, wake at 6, bed at 10PM. And standard work hours are
| 7-3 or 8-4.
| sorenjan wrote:
| Right, but where I live sunrise is in the middle of the
| night in the summer (around 03:30). Using standard time
| in the summer gives me one less hour of useful sunlight
| in the evening, and while it doesn't technically
| disappear it gets moved to where I can't use it because
| that's when I sleep. It's the same for people further
| south as well, another bright hour in the early morning
| before they wake up is a wasted bright hour that would
| make more sense in the evening, when most modern humans
| are awake. The argument "noon should coincide with solar
| noon" is nonsensical to me, the clock is a social
| construct and should make sense for how most of us live
| our lives.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Optimizing for summer is silly. Summer gets lots of
| daylight already. We need to optimize for winter.
| layer8 wrote:
| People disagree on whether to prioritize mornings or
| afternoons in the winter. For the summer, only very few
| people care if the sun rises at four or five (or
| whatever), but most people like having long summer
| evenings. Therefore the summer tips the scales.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| Then they are also social activities that you just need
| to wait for in summer, because they can only happen after
| sunset. Viewing a movie (outside), sitting around a fire,
| having a party all just really happen after sunset.
| Zanfa wrote:
| The extra hour of daylight in the evening on summer time
| is even more valuable in the winter.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| But the social construct of work hours shifted later by
| more than that one hour during the last century, so this
| is not what people actually prefer by their actions.
| dessimus wrote:
| So, it sounds like you're actually arguing that the
| numbers are just a construct and that we should all just
| use UTC and set appropriate work hours to the times that
| most correlate to the solar day in our region rather than
| adjust the clock approximately 1 hour per 15 degrees
| around the equator and have an International Date Line.
|
| I think this would make way more sense, when they say the
| Olympic Opening Ceremony start at 18:00, its 18:00 for
| everyone around the world. No one as to work out which TZ
| Italy is in or scheduling meetings with Tech Support in
| far flung locales does not require knowing IST is how far
| ahead or behind.
| shagie wrote:
| Yes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandford_Fleming (
| https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-
| institution/sandf... )
|
| > He promoted worldwide standard time zones, a prime
| meridian, and use of the 24-hour clock as key elements to
| communicating the accurate time, all of which influenced
| the creation of Coordinated Universal Time.
|
| The one bit where this would be problematic would be
| "what day is it?" When does today become tomorrow?
|
| There are a lot of systems that we've built that depend
| on that distinction. Things like business days and
| running end of day so that everything that happens on
| March 2nd is logged as March 2nd. I've encountered fun
| with Black Friday sales where the store is open over the
| midnight boundary and the backend system _really_ wants
| today to be today rather than yesterday (sometimes this
| has involved unplugging a register from the network so
| that it _doesn 't_ run end of day, running EOD on the
| store systems, and then plugging the register back in
| after it completes and then running a reconciliation.).
|
| Other than that particular mess of banks and
| businesses... yea, running everything on UTC would be
| something nice in today's world.
|
| ---
|
| This is also kind of what happens in China (with a
| complicated history).
| https://github.com/eggert/tz/blob/main/asia#L272
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_China UTC+08:00 is
| observed throughout the country even though it spans
| about 60deg of longitude.
|
| ---
|
| Aside on the "changing clocks" and realizing my flexible
| schedule privilege at a company I worked at I switched my
| schedule from 8-4 to 9-5 with the change in daylight
| savings so that I maintained a consistent "this is the
| hour I wake up".
| zarzavat wrote:
| China shows why this is impossible.
|
| When people propose switching to UTC what they are
| actually proposing is that everyone _nominally_ switches
| to UTC but still uses local time informally in everyday
| life, which is a worse system than time zones. At least
| with time zones there is a way to know what time it is in
| any given place. With informal time you lose that.
| est wrote:
| how so?
|
| Eastern parts of China gets up at 05:00 AM and westtern
| part gets up at 10:00 AM.
|
| People get used to it.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Local time tells you things like "when is it a good time
| to call this person". Unless the person is calling is in
| China.
| est wrote:
| That's a fair point. And CRM system should take notes.
| Not everyone lives a 9 to 5 schedule.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| > arguing that the numbers are just a construct
|
| Yes.
|
| > and that we should all just use UTC and ...
|
| No. that does not follow. Abstraction is useful. Having
| commonly understood terms (in this case hours of the day)
| that share certain traits regardless of where you happen
| to be in the world facilitates communication.
| pseudalopex wrote:
| https://qntm.org/abolish
| mhurron wrote:
| And that reason was that it was the standard before the
| standard was rethought. There's no deeper meaning to it.
|
| And we rethought it yet again, should we go on the time
| standard (DST) that we're already on for ~65% of the year, or
| the one we're on for ~35% the year.
|
| It should be pretty obvious why DST is the new winner, it's
| the current standard.
| taeric wrote:
| Sadly, this isn't really right. Humanity settled on solar
| time. For somewhat obvious reasons.
|
| Alas, I don't see my preferred method of changing the clock
| by 10 minutes every month taking hold. Basically ever. :D
|
| I also don't think this is nearly as important for places
| that are not further away from the equator. If you are on the
| equator, you are almost certainly fine with no change
| throughout the year.
| fhars wrote:
| That method wont work, that is a too large change that
| happens to seldom. What you want is a leap second every
| hour for five months to switch between standard and
| daylight savings time and back, with a month of constant
| time around each solstice. That gives you a smooth
| transition without perceptible discontinuities.
| computomatic wrote:
| Seems to me the most obvious answer is to return to
| sundials, no?
| taeric wrote:
| Only works during the day? Which, come to think of it,
| I'm not entirely clear how humans kept time at night long
| ago. I'm assuming they learned roughly where some
| constellations were?
| taeric wrote:
| I challenge the idea that 10 minutes is too large of a
| change?
|
| I accept that it was too many changes back when we didn't
| have smart phones/clocks controlling the vast majority of
| time pieces. Even most cars, nowadays, set themselves off
| of a GPS signal.
|
| Nowadays, though? A surprising number of people flat out
| don't notice that the time even changed until people tell
| them about it.
|
| As the other response said, though; if you look at when
| people were on solar time, the length of an hour just
| flat out wasn't constant. Such that most animals are
| already used to wake times changing throughout the year.
| It was specifically our move to a mechanical method that
| was constant that is causing this.
|
| To that end, shifting to a change every month would, in
| many ways, be a step back towards how sundials worked
| with constant changes. As you say, we could go even more
| continuous someday. That feels like it would have
| slightly more complications. But by the time everything
| is controlled by a central computer like thing, most of
| them would be completely obviated.
| tbrownaw wrote:
| We don't use standard time because it works best, we use it
| because it's "correct" relative to the position of the sun.
|
| Now, _standard business hours_ (9-5 or whatever) were
| probably chosen for working well in the circumstances where
| they became standard, and it might be interesting to watch
| for whether tweaking the clocks leads to tweaking the nominal
| time of things...
| wvenable wrote:
| > Humanity settled on these numbers long ago because they
| work best.
|
| Absolutely not. It was a compromise tempered by practical and
| political considerations.
| wat10000 wrote:
| Not that long ago, and we keep fiddling with them. The US
| time zones were adopted just over a century ago. The dates
| for daylight saving time were changed less than 20 years ago.
| Much of Western Europe changed time zones (much of it rather
| violently) in the 1940s, as did China. The tz database often
| requires updates for changes.
|
| If you want to go with what was settled long ago, that would
| probably be a return to each town observing its own time
| based on local solar noon, which would be pretty annoying.
| karlosvomacka wrote:
| the reason was valid 50 years ago when most people didn't
| work 9-5 in front of a computer.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| Yeah they started work at 6. So the working schedule
| shifted later by three hours, but with year-long DST it
| will shift back only one hour. Sounds like people don't
| actually want what they now vote for. My bet is that the
| work hours will just move later yet another hour in the
| future.
| throwaway7783 wrote:
| The article, however, says 93% wanted daylight savings in the
| linked public engagement report.
| rawgabbit wrote:
| Meh. The nerd in me prefers the French Revolutionary clock of
| 10 hours in a day.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time.
|
| I want to be able to say I sleep from 0 to 3 hours or 30
| percent of the day.
| Zak wrote:
| > _Humanity settled on these numbers long ago because they
| work best._
|
| Standardized time zones are a recent invention (late 1800s
| through early 1900s). Working hours in that period were
| determined by what factory owners could get away with, and
| later shortened by pressure from labor movements.
|
| Some time-related practices, like high school in most of the
| USA starting especially early in the morning are at odds with
| what research suggests would work best (teenagers on average
| perform best later in the day than adults or younger
| children).
|
| It's wise to consider the reasons behind existing standards
| before changing them, but unwise to assume they're what works
| best without examining whether that's reality.
| WalterGR wrote:
| > I would have preferred permanent standard time to permanent
| daylight time.
|
| Do you have children?
|
| In past HN threads, the preference largely comes down to
| whether you have children (and want more early morning light
| for safer trips to school) or not.
| irishcoffee wrote:
| Conversely, I'd rather my kids have more daylight after
| school so they can explore outside.
|
| Selfishly, I just want as much daylight as possible, which
| has very little to do with how a government selects a time
| range for legal reasons. The rotation of the globe has not
| been yet controlled, as far as I'm tracking.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| As a child, there was nothing worse than getting out of
| school at 3pm and then having the sun set at 4:21pm. I
| barely got home before it got dark, forget about playing
| outside. Morning time was useless, since school prep ate
| that up.
| amatecha wrote:
| Right? I literally never once cared if I have to
| walk/ride to school in the relative dark. But I did care
| pretty much every afternoon how much time I have to enjoy
| the rest of my free time. Being able to go out with my
| friends and enjoy the daylight made a huge difference.
| It's soooo long overdue to put this stupid system in the
| past.
| playa1 wrote:
| I have children and I've never heard any arguments for DLS
| that make any sense.
|
| Most of the time people conflate longer summer days with DLS.
|
| The situation with dark mornings is winter not standard time.
|
| My children are already waking to school in daylight this
| time of year prior to the switch to DLS.
|
| As others have said. I would rather permanent standard time
| but I'll take permanent DLS. Moving the clocks twice a year
| is insanity.
| bluGill wrote:
| As far north as BC is winter just doesn't have enough
| daylight to think you can get everything done with
| sunlight. Maybe Arizona has enough - but they don't do
| daylight savings time (one of two us states)
| exmadscientist wrote:
| > winter just doesn't have enough daylight to think you
| can get everything done with sunlight
|
| That's the perfect way to say it.
|
| The other piece that a lot of people are missing is the
| whole larks (early risers) vs owls (late risers) divide.
| I think the best illustration of that is to ask, if you
| got your pick, which shift you'd take, based solely on
| _your own body_ and habits: 8-4, 9-5, or 10-6 (or perhaps
| even further in one direction)? My guess is that the
| answer to that question predicts your desire for Standard
| or Daylight time pretty well.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| My guess is that both owls & larks get their preference
| logically backwards.
|
| My guess is that owls will say they prefer permanent
| daylight time and larks will say they prefer permanent
| standard time.
|
| But their revealed preference is the opposite -- owls
| wake up well after sunrise and go to bed well after
| sunset. Yet permanent daylight time will shift it so
| they'll be waking up closer to sunrise and going to bed
| closer to sunset.
|
| Larks revealed preference is more like permanent daylight
| time yet I think they're more likely to say they want
| permanent standard time.
| Levitz wrote:
| I'm definitely in the night owl camp and I'd much rather
| have sunlight in the mornings because I already am going
| to have trouble waking up each morning, making it so I
| can't even set my circadian rhythm properly is just
| adding insult to injury.
|
| It amazes me that we actually argue about this based on
| vibes. We _know_ that people are better off the closer
| the time between waking up and sunrise.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| 10-4 obviously.
| exmadscientist wrote:
| Okay, yes, but not helpful here: that's a different
| thread.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| Where I live, in winter it's dark in the morning (and also
| the evening depending on the length of the school day) with
| and without DST, and in summer the sun is also up either way.
| ink_13 wrote:
| I don't have children and I prefer permanent Standard Time
| because I have the apparently weird belief that noon should
| be at noon.
|
| (i.e. the time 12:00PM should be when the sun is overhead)
|
| I'm not a "capitalism gives you brain worms" kind of person,
| but the idea that it is somehow better to literally change
| the location of the sun in the sky because the holy hours of
| 9-5 are sacrosanct is so strange to me.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| 9-5 aren't sacrosanct. When the 9-5 song came out
| approximately nobody worked from 9-5. Standard working
| hours were 8-5 with an hour for lunch. Starting at 7 was
| far more common than starting at 9.
|
| The song is about a secretary who didn't get a lunch hour,
| so started an hour later than her boss.
|
| Tech workers generally start at 9, but that started decades
| after the song came out.
| sdevonoes wrote:
| I lived once in Ecuador. Pretty much the whole year the sun
| rises at 6am and sets at 6pm. I very much prefer Spain: in
| summer the sun sets at almost 10 pm at its peak... best
| summers of my life. I lived in Poland once too, where in
| winter the sun sets at 3pm: I wanted to kill myself
| gonzalohm wrote:
| I miss sunset times from Spain. It makes days feel longer
| alexhans wrote:
| Summers in Spain, e.g. Madrid can be extremely hot.
| Having the sun not set until very late can create an
| unpleasant city life experience.
|
| With people acknowledging heatwaves and energy issues, I
| find it interesting how that's seldom part of the
| conversation.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _because I have the apparently weird belief that noon
| should be at noon_
|
| But why? Because it's not even in standard time, except for
| around 1/60th of a time zone at best, if you're rounding to
| the minute.
|
| If solar noon jumps from being at 11:35 in standard time,
| to at 12:35 under DST, at your coordinates, what does that
| matter?
|
| Noon was at noon before the railroads. But ever since time
| zones were invented, that's no longer been the case.
|
| Digits on a clock are just a number. If you care about when
| solar noon is, just memorize it.
| sdevonoes wrote:
| I don't have children, but I was a child once. I didn't mind
| going to school in darkness (in winter) and enjoy 1h more of
| daylight in the evening. Having that extra hour of daylight
| in the morning always seemed a waste for me because I wasn't
| doing something I wanted (I was doing something I had to do,
| this is, going to school)
| Aurornis wrote:
| When we had kids I thought daylight savings time was going to
| be some kind of nightmare because ever DST thread on the
| internet cites children as the reason why's it terrible.
|
| Then it was a complete non-issue for our kids. I had this
| conversation with several parent friends and they couldn't
| figure it out either.
|
| At most we've had a day or two where the kids wake up 10-20
| minutes later than the target time, but it's not a big deal.
| Honestly it takes me longer to adapt than my kids.
|
| I can believe that some kids are hyper sensitive to clock
| changes, but the more I talk to fellow parents I think it's a
| minority case. Traveling a couple states away is a bigger
| swing than DST.
|
| I think this is a talking point that came up on the internet
| at one point and then got amplified because so many liked the
| direction it was going, but never stopped to think about how
| accurate the claim was.
| Dusseldorf wrote:
| Some people think that if their toddler misses naptime by 5
| minutes it will be a disaster. Fairly sure it's just a
| vocal minority kind of thing. Totally with you though, our
| kids never seem to notice.
| madcaptenor wrote:
| Me too. Who are these people whose kids' sleep schedules
| are regular enough that this makes it noticeably worse?
|
| (There was one year where the time change in March did
| actually have a noticeable effect on my kid... and a few
| days later, just when she had gotten back to "normal",
| everything shut down for COVID.)
| gbriel wrote:
| Start school later. I understand people also have jobs, start
| those jobs later. I understand people have expectations about
| when stores open. They can figure it out that stores open
| when the sun comes up. If they need to plan they can ask when
| sunrise is.
| randyrand wrote:
| Indeed, we could start everything +1 hr later I suppose.
| renehsz wrote:
| Which practically puts us back into standard time, as
| things should be
| globular-toast wrote:
| I don't have children but would still prefer permanent
| standard time because you don't magically get more daylight
| with DST. Just finish your stupid job earlier if you want
| "more daylight".
| sampo wrote:
| > and even permanent daylight time is far superior to changing
| clocks twice a year
|
| This paper implies that for health, permanent standard time
| would be best, and permanent DST would be the worst. And even
| keeping the current clock-shifting would be better than
| permanent DST.
|
| _" The combination of DST and winter would therefore make the
| differences between body clocks and the social clock even worse
| and would negatively affect our health even more."_
|
| https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/07487304198541...
| awakeasleep wrote:
| > even permanent daylight time is far superior to changing
| clocks twice a year
|
| God bless you for keeping that top of mind. So many people miss
| the forest for the trees here.
| mhurron wrote:
| <Insert Archer WOOOOO video>
|
| Seriously, woo!
| emptybits wrote:
| I'm in BC. The astro-nerd in me would have preferred to see
| permanent Standard Time instead of a permanent +1 offset.
| Instinctively, I think morning light is important to our biology
| for a daily reset and the solar cue of "high noon" is also a real
| thing. I'm sure I've read that sleep health experts have
| historically supported a change to permanent Standard Time, not
| DST.
|
| I respect there are economic arguments for permanent DST. But I
| question the road safety stat I hear with announcements like
| this. Kids walking, biking, and being driven to school in
| mornings in darkness ... that's also what permanent DST gives us.
|
| Oh well, I am in the minority it seems. So R.I.P. "high noon" ...
| I'll never see you again here. And, yes, I understand that
| depending on where one is within a time zone, a true "high noon"
| is only in theory. But it's a nice ideal. :-)
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| I'm a relatively early riser, but: if you steal an hour of my
| summer evening time, I think that would call for civil unrest.
| singpolyma3 wrote:
| What time the clock says shouldn't affect this
| zetanor wrote:
| I've seen arguments about kids going to school in the darkness
| being thrown around a lot, but I've never understood why that
| (against fresh drivers) is always taken to be worse than kids
| coming home in the darkness (against exhausted drivers).
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Average school start/end times in BC are 8:30 AM and 3 PM.
| Standard time in Vancouver puts sunrise/sunset at 8AM/415PM
| at winter solstice for standard time. That's 30 minutes of
| daylight before school and 75 minutes after school. IOW, kids
| are more likely to be walking in the dark in the morning,
| even with standard time.
|
| Switching to daylight time will switch sunrise/sunset to
| 9AM/515PM, guaranteeing kids will be walking in the dark in
| the morning.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| P.S.
|
| Switching to daylight time makes more sense in Eastern BC
| than it does in Western BC. But Eastern BC is relatively
| unpopulated. The population of Penticton is 40,000 vs
| 3,000,000 in metro Vancouver. Second largest metro
| (Victoria) is west of Vancouver.
|
| Penticton experiences sunrise/sunset about 25 minutes
| before Vancouver, so their kids experience approximately
| equal amounts of sun before & after school on the winter
| solstice.
| sefrost wrote:
| I know exactly what you mean with your comment, but
| interesting fact, Vancouver is in the East of BC! BC is
| huge in both directions.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Even more so when you consider that most of metro
| Vancouver lives east of Vancouver city.
| __turbobrew__ wrote:
| Penticton is also in a valley so in reality the sun goes
| behind the mountains in the west around 3:30PM.
| throw0101c wrote:
| * https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/canada/vancouver?month=12
| &ye...
| amatecha wrote:
| yeah the 4:15 PM sunset actually means it's getting dark at
| 3:30 PM. Pretty ridiculous. For everyone like "the kids
| have to walk to school in the dark!" it seems like they
| aren't considering that kids generally don't care at all
| what the morning is like because their day is about to be
| consumed by an obligation they never agreed to (school).
| When they're finally free for the day, it's effectively
| dark outside. The perspective among my peer group when I
| was a kid was that daylight savings system is totally
| clueless, has never made sense, and we should permanently
| switch to the schedule that allows more daylight after
| school (aka DST).
| bena wrote:
| But we care about the kids. It's not about whether or not
| the kids are having a good time, but whether or not
| groggy people on their way to work can see them.
| ikr678 wrote:
| Would the better thing to do be to vary school hours by
| season? Add an hour in summer and remove an hour in
| winter?.
| bena wrote:
| No school in summer.
|
| When we start getting more sun, it's fine in the morning
| even with the spring forward.
|
| We go back to standard time in winter because otherwise
| it stays dark too long.
|
| And all of this ignores the core fact that time zones are
| way more politically determined than geographically. And
| that's a whole other problem
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| This is basically what Daylight Savings Time does.
| prpl wrote:
| if it ends up being an issue, then the schools could just
| change start time?
| andyferris wrote:
| But that's the whole thing.
|
| Why change the clocks when we could change the definition
| of school time, business hours, liquor/gambling licensing
| hours, construction noise hours, etc? Just use standard
| time and then base our society around the physics of the
| sun.
| galangalalgol wrote:
| And if we do that, why can't we all just use unix time
| and let school can just atart whenever makes sense
| henrikschroder wrote:
| The reason for daylight savings, as batshit insane as it
| sounds, is that it's _easier_ to authoritatively tell
| people what time it is, with a one-hour jump twice a
| year, than to tell people to change business hours twice
| a year for a better experience around daylight.
|
| It's absolutely fascinating from a psychology standpoint.
|
| My one big hope for when countries now stop doing the
| stupid clock change thing, is that people become a lot
| more flexible around business hours and school hours, and
| adapt a schedule that fits people.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| _" ...easier to authoritatively tell people what time it
| is, with a one-hour jump twice a year,..."_
|
| Exactly. Also, changing business hours to suit specific
| work conditions would ease traffic congestion. For
| instance, a farmer would milk cows at different times of
| the year. Similarly, milk tankers would be on the road at
| hours set by cows' routines.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| No, kids will just die because schools match the offices,
| which match expected hours
| djmips wrote:
| Move the school starts later. Problem solved.
| teunispeters wrote:
| Speaking as growing up in Fort St John, BC, sunrise was
| after school began, and sunset was before school was out -
| more or less - in the middle of winter. But then, that city
| (in BC, and nowhere near as far north as that province
| gets) - is rather more arctic in every sense of the word.
| But then, that corner also opted out of time changes, so
| ... the rest of the province is catching up :)
| tzs wrote:
| In addition to the reason already given (kids get home before
| the evening traffic picks up), another reason is that
| generally driving conditions are worse in the morning than
| they are in the evening so if there isn't enough light for
| both the morning and evening drives to be in light it is
| safer to give the light to the morning drive.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| > kids get home before the evening traffic picks up
|
| When we change the general time, this applies to school
| days as well as office hours, so the kids go home to
| evening traffic relation will stay constant.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _another reason is that generally driving conditions are
| worse in the morning than they are in the evening_
|
| Wait, why? Where? I've never heard this. Which driving
| conditions are you talking about? Rain? Snow?
| gosub100 wrote:
| It's coldest at night, so morning ice would be worse than
| evening, when daily highs are reaches and roads have been
| driven on more.
| tzs wrote:
| Generally the coldest part of the day is just after
| sunrise. The warmest part of the day is typically in the
| early afternoon, around 1-4 pm.
|
| This makes a few driving hazards more likely or more
| intense in mornings, including fog, sleet, and ice. Also
| tires have less traction when they are colder. In the
| morning it is less likely for snowplows or earlier
| traffic to have cleared paths on secondary roads.
|
| Driver assist systems tend to have more trouble with
| sensor fogging, frosting, or icing in the morning.
|
| That's not to say evening is a piece of cake. Evening
| tends to have denser traffic which increases the risk of
| accidents. Places that are in shadow for much of the day
| might maintain ice while most of the morning ice melts,
| or might start developing new evening ice earlier than
| places the heated up more in the day which could be
| particularly bad--if most of the road is ice free in the
| evening people might let down their guard.
| jbm wrote:
| I agree with you. I also need to shout at the clouds on this
| because the experts who make the argument for time changes
| drive me crazy.
|
| I live in Calgary. At a previous grade school my daughter
| went to, school started early enough that she left in pitch
| black conditions in winter, regardless of "experts" and their
| precious daylight savings time.
|
| 'You need sunshine when you wake up' is really a ridiculous
| argument, there is no sunshine even with DST.
|
| Get rid of it. Maybe egg the houses of the "experts" too.
|
| (As for my kids, thankfully, they did remote school during
| Covid (hence late mornings) and then I moved to a place where
| the school starting time was later than 8.)
| bena wrote:
| Yes, a lot of griping about "standard time" is really
| griping about winter. There are fewer hours of daylight in
| the winter. That's just the way it is. You can't fool time.
| bombcar wrote:
| You can also just change the hours when things start
| without changing the clock for the entire country.
|
| Anyone in the north has seen "winter hours" and "summer
| hours".
| dddddaviddddd wrote:
| > I've seen arguments about kids going to school in the
| darkness being thrown around a lot
|
| I'm sure there's some correlation with the time zone, but it
| feels like a "think of the children!" argument that ignores
| much more significant factors (e.g. traffic speed and
| volume).
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| > kids coming home in the darkness (against exhausted
| drivers).
|
| If you're exhausted you shouldn't be driving. Period. You're
| the danger to kids, not light or darkness. (Your headlights
| are in working order, right?)
| denkmoon wrote:
| Nice sentiment, sadly we live in the real world
| Mawr wrote:
| Correct. Alas, we've designed our society around the
| expectation of everyone always getting everywhere via
| driving. And once you've driven to work, you probably don't
| have any other real option than to drive back.
| dylan604 wrote:
| > (against fresh drivers)
|
| How many people roll out of bed, rush out the door and jump
| in the car before they're actually awake? In my circles, that
| would be a larger percentage that of those that get up with
| plenty of time to wake up. I'm not sure any time of the day
| is safer regarding attentive drivers. Especially if we're
| going to consider idiots on their phones while driving.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| There is still a typical morning routine of an hour. How
| long do people need to wake up? If they are chronically
| tired is this going to get better through out the day?
| dylan604 wrote:
| Personally, I need multiple hours. I'm not the type to
| open my eyes, jump out of bed, and hit the floor running.
| I'm more the type of "fuck, why am I awake?" but then at
| the end of the day if there's stuff to do, I can be up
| for a while. So I'm much better at night than in the
| morning. Even if I'm my keyboard at 10am, I'm still not
| up to speed. My best comes later in the day. I think part
| of that is I've worked for places for so long that I was
| in meetings all day, and never got to do my actual job
| until late in the day when everyone else was winding
| down.
| duskdozer wrote:
| You could just have a different chronotype but are forced
| to conform to societal expectations around when you
| should do work.
| cyberax wrote:
| I grew up in an area outside the US, and quite a bit more to
| the north. I still remember how for several weeks each year I
| had to walk to school in the dark, sometimes having issues
| with seeing where I was walking.
|
| The DST changes abruptly made everything visible again.
| Around that time we were also getting a permanent snow cover.
| And the whiteness of the snow significantly improved
| visibility for the rest of the winter.
|
| So I don't think that the concerns are completely unfounded,
| but they are probably not as dire either.
| BeetleB wrote:
| Am I missing something? DST will make walking to school in
| the darkness more likely, not less.
|
| DST means a later sunrise.
| cyberax wrote:
| I mean, the change from the DST ("summer") time to the
| standard ("winter") time.
| macintux wrote:
| One difference between morning and evening: in the mornings,
| some or even many students must wait outdoors for their bus
| to arrive, because they live too far away from the bus stop
| to run out when the bus pulls up. That means they are
| standing around in the darkness and the cold. In the
| evenings, they can go straight home from the bus.
| scythe wrote:
| Thankfully, this is a situation we don't need to speculate
| about without evidence. Spain is on de facto permanent DST,
| serving as a natural experiment. I bet the results support you.
| shagie wrote:
| That's partly because it's in the same timezone as Poland.
| Madrid is further west that London, but London is an hour
| behind. Moving Spain to permanent DST puts it on the same
| effective timezone as London.
|
| http://blog.poormansmath.net/images/SolarTimeVsStandardTime..
| ..
|
| Without the DST offset, Spain much more "red" than England.
|
| It's not so much a "permeant DST" but rather a "we want to
| change to GMT without moving out of the CET timezone."
| 1718627440 wrote:
| That map is interesting, so most of the world prefers "red"
| to "green"? Why is that?
| shagie wrote:
| Most of the world tends to prefer to not be _too_ far
| from the center of the timezone (where solar noon matches
| solar time in standard time). Geographic and political
| boundaries make it so that often it 's more red. The
| extremes of north and south tend not to care as much
| because it doesn't matter as much.
|
| https://andywoodruff.com/blog/where-to-hate-daylight-
| saving-...
| 1718627440 wrote:
| I don't think that explains it. The "red" offenders are
| basically Russia, China?, Sudan, Argentina and Alaska.
| The only "green" offender is Greenland, which is still
| large enough to enough red to justify it. I get China, it
| aligns with the population density. Sudan likely wants to
| have the same time as Somalia and Ethiopia. Why
| Argentina? Why Alaska? And why does Russia basically have
| zones that range from +2 to the +1 offset? They don't
| even have the excuse of avoiding 2 hour jumps like
| between Alaska and Canada, because they still have that.
| shagie wrote:
| I'd have to dig to try to find out what the date on this
| would be.
|
| Russia is telling since they changed their timezones in
| 2016. I'm going to note that timezones are also a
| _political_ identity too.
| https://www.timeanddate.com/news/time/russia-new-time-
| zones.... For a map https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi
| le:Difference_between_l... and the Wiki article https://e
| n.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Russia#Russian_Federat...
|
| China is aligned with Beijing and the rest of the country
| follows from when noon in Beijing is.
|
| Sudan's history is in
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Sudan
|
| Argentina is
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Argentina - My
| speculation would be that Argentina (the east coast
| especially) wanted to be economically synchronized with
| the coastal cities of eastern Brazil. Buenos Aires and
| Sao Paulo being on the same timezone makes it easier for
| the two of them to do business.
|
| Alaska used to have four timezones. In 1983, they were
| consolidated into two timezones - Aleutian and Alaska.
| Being in -9 rather than -10 brings Anchorage closer to
| the Pacific west coast in its business day with the note
| that it doesn't matter too much when solar noon is if sun
| is up for 22 hours or 5 hours.
| sdevonoes wrote:
| In Poland in winter it gets dark around 3 PM. Awful. In
| Spain in winter it gets dark around 5:45 pm. And people
| wonder why spaniards live longer.
| naranjito wrote:
| The clocks should show 4:45PM in Spain if the TZ was
| right (same as UK), and even so it would still be mostly
| red-white with barely any green. Poland appears white-
| green in the map, to have a bit of red it should be in a
| 1/2 TZ like India.
|
| Minimum daylight (winter) in Warsaw is 7h 42m [0] and in
| Madrid 9h 17m [1]. Maximum (summer) is 16h 47m and 15h
| 4m. That is due to latitude and unavoidable. The exact
| numbers for sunset and sunrise are pushed around by the
| TZ choices.
|
| [0] https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/poland/warsaw
|
| [1] https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/spain/madrid
|
| Life lenght depends on many factors.
| bena wrote:
| Spain instead adjusted it's entire country around the time.
|
| And they still do DST. They're just on a different time zone
| than they should be because during WWII, they changed to the
| same time zone as Germany.
| naranjito wrote:
| Spaniards are a lazy bunch of party animals, waking up late
| and going to sleep late too...
|
| Or the clocks are wrong. Once you realize noon is 13h in
| winter and 14h in summer, never 12h, things start to make
| sense. Late lunch? Not really, Sun at same height than
| Italy, but clocks off by 1.
|
| For the "public image" part of the experiment, the
| conclusion is easy: bad. Time to change clocks so waking up
| happens at "3h" in the morning, and become a country of
| hard workers with no nightlife, because everyone retires
| "early". Even if discos are full as in the past.
| throw0101c wrote:
| > _I 'm in BC. The astro-nerd in me would have preferred to see
| permanent Standard Time instead of a permanent +1 offset._
|
| So would the folks who study circadian rhythms:
|
| > _Over much of the highly-populated areas of Canada, the sun
| would not rise until about 9 am in winter under DST, and the
| daylight will linger an hour later in summer evenings than
| under Standard Time. As a Northern country, Canada includes
| higher latitudes where the effects of late winter dawns and
| late summer dusks under DST would be felt more profoundly. What
| long-term effects on health can we expect from year-round DST?
| As predicted from our understanding of the human biological
| clock, our brain clock will try to synchronize to dawn and push
| us to go to bed later. However, our social clock will force us
| to wake an hour earlier in the morning. Will this have any
| health effects?_
|
| > _We have good evidence for the negative impact of being an
| hour off of biological time, and this comes from studies on the
| health of populations living on the edges of time zones. We
| have arbitrarily divided the earth into one-hour time zones, so
| that people on the east side of a time zone see the sun rise an
| hour earlier (according to their social clocks) than people on
| the west side of the same time zone. Researchers have analyzed
| the health records and economic status of those two
| populations, and have found poorer health outcomes on the west
| side: increased rates of obesity and diabetes, heart disease,
| and cancer (Gu et al., 2017). Moreover, people on the west
| sides of time zones earned 3% less in per capita income
| (Giuntella and Mazzonna, 2019). What could account for this? As
| predicted, people on the west sides of time zones go to bed
| later than people on the east sides, but then have to get up at
| the same time in the morning because of fixed work and school
| schedules. Therefore they lose sleep: about 20 minutes per
| weeknight, which adds up to a significant sleep debt over the
| week. We know from other research that sleep deprivation
| negatively impacts health and workplace performance. We can
| already see the negative impacts of a one-hour difference
| across a time zone, and year-round DST would put our social
| clocks another hour out of alignment with our biological
| clocks._
|
| * https://www.chronobiocanada.com/official-statements
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronobiology
| Aerroon wrote:
| I guess northern Europe must be an unpopulated wasteland
| where everybody's health just instantly declines.
|
| I find these explanations to these studies so bizarre. We
| _know_ that there are large populations living significantly
| further north, who don 't get sunlight in the morning in
| winter, no matter whether there's DST or not. We also know
| that they get almost perpetual light during summer. If these
| explanations were true then you would expect a country like
| Sweden to have an impact on life expectancy and illness from
| this. But it's not. It's about as rich as Canada and has
| about the same life expectancy.
| throw0101c wrote:
| The European Biological Rhythms Society (EBRS), European
| Sleep Research Society (ESRS), and Society for Research on
| Biological Rhythms (SRBR) put out a joint statement that
| recommends all-year Standard Time in the EU:
|
| * https://esrs.eu/wp-
| content/uploads/2019/03/To_the_EU_Commiss...
|
| I would hazard to guess some of those folks have looked at
| data for northern Europe and took it into account when
| forming their conclusions.
| indecisive_user wrote:
| I think you're missing the parent's point.
|
| Cities in northern Europe, like Stockholm and Oslo,
| _already_ have sunrise times as late or later than
| Vancouver will have under permanent DST.
|
| If the effects of shifting the clock an hour are as
| extreme as purported, then we should already see those
| negative health effects in populations that live their
| entire lives under those conditions, but we don't.
| chpatrick wrote:
| Suicide rate is higher in northern countries.
| Fargren wrote:
| Do we know that we don't see adverse health effects on
| those populations? I couldn't find any studies on the
| subject. I think it would be very hard to measure, since
| you can't really compare without comparing populations of
| different countries, and at that point any effects can be
| attributed to a myriad of differences between countries.
| throw0101c wrote:
| > _I think you 're missing the parent's point._
|
| I'm not missing the point: the various various folks who
| study sleep and chronobiology would have (I hope)
| reviewed all the literature, _including studies that
| cover northern Europe_ , before coming to their all-year
| Standard Time conclusion.
|
| A position paper from Society for Research on Biological
| Rhythms (SRBR) in _Journal of Biological Rhythms_ cites
| Russian data for example:
|
| > _Borisenkov MF, Tserne TA, Panev AS, Kuznetsova ES,
| Petrova NB, Timonin VD, Kolomeichuk SN, Vinogradova IA,
| Kovyazina MS, Khokhlov NA, et al. (2017) Seven-year
| survey of sleep timing in Russian children and
| adolescents: chronic 1-h forward transition of social
| clock is associated with increased social jetlag and
| winter pattern of mood seasonality. Biol Rhythm Res
| 3-12._
|
| * https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/074873041
| 98541...
|
| Last time I checked a map (parts/lots of) Russia is just
| as north as Finland, Sweden, and Norway, and still the
| Russian government decided to rollback all-year DST.
|
| Perhaps the effects differ in magnitude depending on
| geographic region, but as a general rule all-year
| Standard Time appears to be the best policy for most
| people most of the time.
| sampo wrote:
| Here is a circadian rhythm and sleep scientist in
| Finland, arguing for permanent standard time.
|
| https://blogi.thl.fi/kellojen-siirtaminen-pysyvasti-
| talviaik...
| rtpg wrote:
| I mean it's possible for there to be bad health effects
| from something without it outright killing everyone. This
| is why things like hygiene are tough! You can have terrible
| hygiene and still be alive for a long time.
|
| Perhaps if Sweden adopted a different policy it would have
| an even longer life expectancy!
| lucumo wrote:
| > Perhaps if Sweden adopted a different policy it would
| have an even longer life expectancy!
|
| The policy of being between 55 and 69 N? I'm not sure the
| world is ready for another viking age.
|
| Joking aside, GPs point was that Sweden has long nights
| and long days. Based on the studies you'd expect life
| expectancy to be worse there than in more Southern parts,
| like most of Canada. It isn't.
| lunatuna wrote:
| I don't get why we just don't cut it down the middle. Go +0.5
| offset and get a little bit of both. Love the idea of no one
| being able to do the math when talking to people outside the
| province. I can't tell you what time it is in mountain time,
| NFLD, or Saskatchewan. Nothing bad comes of it.
| tmp10423288442 wrote:
| No one wants another Indian time zone in the world - one is
| already enough of a hassle to deal with.
| anon84873628 wrote:
| Or just have schools change their hours as needed.
|
| Time changes are just a hack to make every business change
| their effective office hours back when the sign on the door -
| and coordination - mattered. Today brick and mortar is way
| less relevant. Way more people are working from home or going
| to work at random hours. The time change doesn't affect going
| to grocery store or restaurants or the gym. It's basically
| just schools, banks, and the DMV.
|
| Why not have a given entity change its hours through the
| year, if the relation to the sun actually matters?
|
| (And no, I don't buy that there needs to be time coordination
| between schools, since they are all already slightly
| different anyway. Different kids have different after school
| programs different days. Different parents are already going
| to work different hours. There's no way to coordinate for
| everyone to be happy, ever.)
| cluoma wrote:
| I live in the Yukon so will now be in sync with BC time again
| after this change. The concerns about commuting to school in
| the dark seem almost comical, given the experiences of
| everybody here with the winter darkness.
|
| For other reasons, I also wish we were closer to solar noon
| though. High noon is actually closer to 2pm here and seems to
| push the whole day back in the summer. The best (warmest) parts
| of the day get pushed too late into the afternoon.
| pwg wrote:
| > Oh well, I am in the minority it seems.
|
| Given it one winter season across the solstice and I'd bet a
| lot of your fellow residents will come around to your
| viewpoint.
| tempestn wrote:
| I'm really curious how people will feel about it after
| experiencing a year of continuous PDT. I expect I'll
| personally like it, but the polling will be interesting for
| sure.
| jorvi wrote:
| > Instinctively, I think morning light is important to our
| biology for a daily reset
|
| I'd bet people would happily trade away the inkling of light
| they get during their winter commute before locking themselves
| into their office for some extra daylight when they leave that
| office.
|
| Daylight is most enjoyable if you can actually make use of it.
| allknowingfrog wrote:
| Well, I'm not one of those people. I like waking up with the
| sun and driving to work in the daylight. The idea that DST
| solves anything absolutely blows my mind. If you want the
| ability to start your work day earlier and end it earlier,
| that seems like a worker protection bill that needs to be
| passed. DST is the kludgiest kludge that ever kludged.
| davidw wrote:
| > If you want the ability to start your work day earlier
| and end it earlier, that seems like a worker protection
| bill that needs to be passed.
|
| I don't think that's very realistic though is it? School
| times are fixed and that anchors a lot of families to those
| specific times, and businesses tend to have set hours.
|
| Changing the time to give people more light in the evening
| frees up a bunch of people to enjoy some sunlight without
| making it a whole fight to have different hours at work.
| whycome wrote:
| School and the workday already awkwardly don't work
| together. Schools often end an hour or two after the
| traditional work day. It wouldn't be crazy to have an
| effective 'DST' via just adjusting the school start/end
| times -- start at 10am for part of the year dammit.
| alpinisme wrote:
| Where I live June sunrise (with DST) is 5:11am and sunset
| is 8:21pm (a city on the American east coast). I just can't
| imagine a majority of people would want 4:11 rising and
| 7:21 setting.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| In June, they wouldn't. That's why we currently change
| the clocks. But changing the clocks sucks, so you have to
| optimize for either the winter or the summer.
|
| In the summer, we already have lots of sunlight
| regardless, so it doesn't make sense to optimize for
| that.
| __turbobrew__ wrote:
| Winter sucks anyways when you live in the north. I grew
| up at 56 degrees north and you are cooked no matter what
| is done. Better to optimize April-October.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| In summer when there's lots of sunlight, the benefit of
| an extra hour--while not zero--isn't that significant.
|
| We tried permanent DST in the US in the 1970s. People
| hated it.
| baq wrote:
| Clock is a social contract. China has just one time zone
| and it seems to work fine.
| michaelt wrote:
| The thing about DST is it makes _every_ scheduled event
| move, all at the same time.
|
| It shifts my contracted start time at work, my first
| meeting, when places start serving lunch, when my kid
| needs to get to ballet class, when my sportsball club
| meets, and when the supermarket closes. All at once.
|
| Lawmakers changing the time shown on clocks is, I think,
| a lot easier than society changing the social contract.
| albert_e wrote:
| The equation change a bit when you have distributed
| teams.
| Poacher5 wrote:
| There's a noticeable increase in sleep disorders and
| related conditions in the far west of the single time
| zone [0]. I think when it's on the order of a single
| hour's shift for daylight savings the effects are pretty
| negligible but they are measurable.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FY9mXPcloaM
| eloisant wrote:
| Not sure how well that works in China, but I like that
| when I travel I can have a similar schedule compared to
| home.
|
| I wouldn't want to have to learn a different schedule
| such as getting up at midnight, having lunch at 04:00
| then going to bed at 15:00. That would also make jet lag
| much worse because you wouldn't be able to rely on your
| watch to know what activity you're supposed to be doing
| at the time.
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _Clock is a social contract. China has just one time
| zone and it seems to work fine._
|
| If it didn't would the government actually care?
|
| Most of the population is in the east, in which clock-
| noon and solar-noon is better matched:
|
| * https://www.china-mike.com/china-travel-tips/tourist-
| maps/ch...
|
| Doubt Beijing listens to the complaints from Lasa (Tibet)
| much.
| Izkata wrote:
| It's always annoyed me a bit how everyone talks about
| sunrise in winter and sunset year round, but sunrise in
| summer is almost never mentioned. This is the sole reason
| if we settle on one or the other I want sunrise later.
| at_compile_time wrote:
| >If you want the ability to start your work day earlier and
| end it earlier, that seems like a worker protection bill
| that needs to be passed.
|
| If that's what passes for aspiration these days then the
| labour movement truly is dead.
| abustamam wrote:
| It's been dead ever since workers thought 40h work weeks
| and 2 weeks off a year was a good deal.
| sjkoelle wrote:
| yeah im curious if people will end up liking it. sucks from
| my perspective.
| duskdozer wrote:
| It's the obvious real solution that sidesteps all the
| personal-preference-driven claims on what option is
| "objectively" better/healthier/whatever, but corporate
| society isn't ready for it I guess
| Mumps wrote:
| Isn't the converse then equally appropriate?
|
| Move to DST and if you want the ability to start your day
| later and end later, [...].
| stult wrote:
| Except for people like me who struggle to wake up before
| dawn. And whether people prefer light after work doesn't
| change the available scientific evidence which suggests there
| are significant negative health effects of waking up too
| early relative to sunrise, but no significant health benefits
| from having sunlight hours after work. People's preferences
| in this case are generally only mildly held and typically are
| not well informed by the science. I suspect if more people
| were aware of the deleterious health effects, their stated
| preferences would change.
| hgomersall wrote:
| Except for the health benefits of not being killed by tired
| drivers in the dark late afternoons, which is a thing.
|
| Currently it's doubly bad because the clocks changing also
| cause a spike in deaths.
| at_compile_time wrote:
| The problem of offices is not when we spend time in them but
| rather that we spend time in them at all. What a banal hell
| it is we have consented to endure compared to the comforts of
| our homes or of any space actually designed for the wellness
| of human beings or even focused work.
| pkulak wrote:
| That's what everyone says. But it turns out people hate
| spending their morning in darkness for more light at night.
| Which makes perfect sense:
|
| https://washingtonian.com/2022/03/15/the-us-tried-
| permanent-...
|
| > the inkling of light they get during their winter commute
|
| It's not an inkling. Unless you roll out of bed and instantly
| onto your commute, you're getting natural sunlight through
| all your windows for hours every morning. That's exactly when
| you need it.
| messe wrote:
| That has to be latitude dependent.
|
| > you're getting natural sunlight through all your windows
| for hours every morning
|
| Hah "hours". Not in Northern Europe you're not. My commute
| is dark on both sides. If I had to choose which side I'd
| prefer to be brighter I'd prefer the end of the day rather
| than feeling like my daylight has been wasted in the
| office. I shift my schedule in winter to make up for this
| as best I can.
| pkulak wrote:
| I guess. I'm at 46 degrees and civil twilight at
| Christmas starts at 7am. I get up at 6:30, so yeah, dead
| of winter, I spend 30 minutes in darkness. But that's
| better than 1:30.
|
| I guess it kinda hinges on this idea of "wasting"
| daylight. I don't feel like that. I want the sun to wake
| me up, and have no problem doing whatever I like when
| it's dark in the evening. Do people generally go on hikes
| after work? I go out for drinks. haha
| messe wrote:
| 56 degrees here (Denmark, and grew up in Ireland @ 53
| degrees).
|
| > I guess it kinda hinges on this idea of "wasting"
| daylight. I don't feel like that. I want the sun to wake
| me up
|
| The problem is that during the darkest parts of winter,
| even if I postpone my wake up as long as possible, I'm
| still getting up in the dark if I want to be able to
| commute into work on time. There's no sunlight waking me
| up.
|
| > Do people generally go on hikes after work? I go out
| for drinks. haha
|
| No, but I still have to do things like walk the dog, do
| the shopping on the way home. I find it a lot more
| pleasant starting out that part of day with a bit of
| sunlight.
|
| Also, yes, drinks. This is Northern Europe after all.
|
| EDIT to add: Civil twilight in December where I am starts
| ~07:40, and I also get up around 06:30 (when not dealing
| with insomnia like tonight).
| Svip wrote:
| Also from Denmark, but I would prefer permanent standard
| time (just like it was prior to 1982); yes, it's still
| dark in the morning, but at least I won't have to wait
| _months_ before I start seeing sunlight for my commute. I
| can only manage the darkness for so long, before the
| winter depression truly takes hold. Permanent summer time
| would be devastating to a lot of people here.
| Hamuko wrote:
| 07:40 still sounds pretty early when compared to 66
| degrees where we could expect the civil twilight after
| 09:00 in December. You'd go to school at 08:00 in the
| dark and go home at 15:00, also in the dark.
| httpsterio wrote:
| _cries in 62deg N_
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _The problem is that during the darkest parts of
| winter, even if I postpone my wake up as long as
| possible, I 'm still getting up in the dark if I want to
| be able to commute into work on time. There's no sunlight
| waking me up._
|
| Russia tried all-year DST for several years and ended up
| getting rid of it. So even in more-north regions, where
| you'd think it would not matter, people still do not seem
| to like all-year / permanent DST (pDST).
| jasonkester wrote:
| _Do people generally go on hikes after work?_
|
| Yes. Of course. That's the whole point of shifting the
| daylight hours.
|
| You get off work and head to the crag to climb a few
| routes before it gets dark. It's like a little mini
| weekend every evening for those summer months.
|
| But yeah, if you never take advantage of that, it's
| understandable to want some light in the morning I guess.
| But yikes, why not go out and enjoy the sunshine?
| Asmod4n wrote:
| So you get the sunlight when you are about to go to sleep
| and none when you wake up. That doesn't sound healthy.
| jasonkester wrote:
| Exercising in the sun for 3 or 4 hours a day doesn't
| sound healthy? Compared to the guy who planned to spend
| that time in the pub?
|
| If that means that bedtime falls within 3 hours of the
| sunset then so be it. I've survived this long at least.
| MarkusWandel wrote:
| Bike after work! (own latitude - 45.4N). In the summer
| the days are long enough that, with daylight saving time,
| you can be an office slave and still have time for a
| significant bike ride after work (having biked to work in
| the first place).
|
| Also at this latitude, without daylight saving time, the
| sun would be waking you up at 4AM! Totally happy with the
| time switch, but if it has to go, yes, give me daylight
| saving time all the time. Winter is dark anyway.
| pkulak wrote:
| I used to bike commute every day, and rather enjoyed the
| cold rides home in the dark in the middle of winter. I
| always have great hear, and plenty of lighting. I guess
| my weird brain associates that stuff with winter
| holidays. I like trick-or-treating in the dark too. It
| just seems like where they belong.
|
| But, what a terrible argument! "I prefer", haha. Oh well.
| alistairSH wrote:
| Yes, I like to exercise outdoors after work. Much more
| pleasant when the sun is up. Especially if I'm cycling -
| even with multiple blinking lights, I don't feel
| particularly visible to drivers.
|
| That said, with the shortest day's light ending before
| 5pm, even shifting to near 6pm doesn't really help - I'm
| at the office to 5-ish and if I'm lucky I can be ready to
| run/bike/whatever by 5:45, so its going dark mid-workout
| at best.
|
| And I'm up at 5am, so in the dark most of the year.
| Ditching DST would make it daylight in mid-summer, but I
| do really enjoy having daylight past 8pm, so I can sit
| outside and read.
| gregdeon wrote:
| > Unless you roll out of bed and instantly onto your
| commute, you're getting natural sunlight through all your
| windows for hours every morning.
|
| Sadly, not if you're a student living in a basement in
| Vancouver!
| messe wrote:
| > Vancouver
|
| _Southerners_...
|
| (Chiming in from Denmark)
| tharkun__ wrote:
| Icelanders want a word with you :P
| messe wrote:
| Wait. Somebody else who uses the dwarvish name for
| Gandalf?
|
| Had to do a double take, as that's my steam handle.
| buildbot wrote:
| "Garden level"
| djmips wrote:
| Why not just start school later?
| timschmidt wrote:
| Protestant work ethic? I know it's a terrible reason.
| Seems to be the reason, though.
| baq wrote:
| DST and time zones have been invented much later than
| Protestantism, so I wouldn't worry about the ethical part
| specifically
| edoceo wrote:
| I've heard it's so parents can get the kids to school at
| 0800 and then start job a 0900. But why school is out at
| 1500 and job at 1700 is a mystery.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| _" But why school is out at 1500 and job at 1700 is a
| mystery."_
|
| Same here. And I've never figured out why DST fades the
| curtains.
| kelseydh wrote:
| School ends at 3pm so that the teachers, who work a 9-5
| like you, get two hours after class to grade homework and
| prepare lessons for the next school day.
| Ntrails wrote:
| I do not believe that teachers are working 9-5 if the
| children are arriving at 8am. Though to be fair I don't
| either, so doesn't much matter.
| eloisant wrote:
| It also improves the rush hours by enlarging the time
| range. Most jobs start at 9am or later, so if kids also
| started at 9am or later the morning rush hour (for
| traffic but also public transportation) would be even
| worse.
| ako wrote:
| It really depends on your interests: I use daylight for
| sports after work, really like being able to surf until
| 22:30 midsummer (52 degrees), so DST works for me. On the
| other hand, also don't mind the switching between
| wintertime and summertime, it's just like a minor jetlag we
| all have no problem with when going on holiday.
| derektank wrote:
| >it's just like a minor jetlag we all have no problem
| with when going on holiday.
|
| I can only say speak for yourself, some of us have major
| problems with jet lag. Especially as someone on the west
| coast, I am exhausted any time I have to travel east for
| work
| TheCapeGreek wrote:
| East-West in US is a lot different to a 1 hour shift.
| Hence _minor_ jetlag.
| armedpacifist wrote:
| fwiw, getting sunlight from behind a modern window is
| almost the same as getting it from a led or lightbulb,
| vastly insufficient. The glass filters out the specific
| frequencies that are most beneficial to us. You need to get
| out...
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| And that's true even if you _are_ sleeping with all your
| curtains wide open...
| avadodin wrote:
| I only lived under the saving regime for a few years and I
| don't remember it being particularly bad.
|
| I like how the light signals the shift from angst season to
| normal season, though.
|
| I'd rather not have a clock and farm from sunrise to
| sunset, to be honest.
| rob74 wrote:
| Well, days get longer without DST too (in countries far
| enough from the equator, but those nearer to the equator
| don't have to worry about DST anyway). What bothers me
| about DST is that just before the clock is moved forward,
| the sun starts rising before I have to get up. Then the
| clock is moved, and suddenly I have to get up when it's
| pitch dark again! Great...
| kelseydh wrote:
| One of the most depressing days of the year in B.C. is when
| daylight savings ends, and clocks are switched back an hour
| in November. The sun goes from setting at ~6pm to ~5pm, and
| you officially end work with it dark out. I'm very happy we
| are switching to permanent daylight time.
|
| There's nothing more glorious than those late summer
| solstice sunsets w/ daylight time, where the sun doesn't
| set until 10pm. Great for festivals and planning outdoor
| activities with friends.
| jp191919 wrote:
| I agree, pretty close to the same thing here in WA state.
| I'm jealous of you guys up there now.
| ewgoforth wrote:
| You sometimes hear that farmers are behind Daylight Savings
| Time, but that's not true. Farmers are self-employed and
| can set their hours to be whenever they want. If they need
| to work longer hours at harvest time, they can just do it.
| They don't need to monkey around with clocks to do this.
|
| "Big Golf" has been super active in lobbying for DST.
| https://businessjournalism.org/2020/10/the-stakeholders-
| of-d... I'd personally prefer Standard Time year round, so
| I can have daylight to do activities early in the morning.
| stouset wrote:
| Maybe just once we can not bias literally everything in
| life towards morning people and throw night owls a bone?
| linkregister wrote:
| That is literally what permanent DST is-- benefitting
| people who like to wake up before sunrise. Night owls
| want to wake up after it's been light already.
| stouset wrote:
| Yes, and GP is arguing that it should be optimized for
| morning people instead. Hence my comment.
| starkparker wrote:
| Farming is just the investment part of the job. Unless
| they're US corn or soy farmers living primarily on
| subsidies, they still generally have to sell what they
| grow. The agribusiness side means dealing with the rest
| of civilization on terms that farmers don't get to set.
| So do the very non-trivial parts of farming where you
| have to regularly buy supplies, service equipment, and
| otherwise deal with employees (yours or others) and their
| labor regulations.
|
| This description of farming also generally ignores animal
| husbandry, which outside of factory farms also ties work
| to the sun regardless of what the clock says, what part
| of the year it is, or what latitude you're on. When the
| rest of the world you have to interact with changes their
| clock, you have to both accommodate the animals' lack of
| understanding and desire for routine and adjust your own
| work around it. Dairy farmers aren't putting lighting in
| cow barns for fun or aesthetics, they're manipulating
| day/night schedules to get cows on the times that
| commerce relies on.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| This whole debate is cyclical[1]. I expect in a few years
| everyone will be complaining about not enough daylight in
| the mornings and DST seasonal changes will come back.
|
| > Permanent daylight saving time was signed into law by
| President Richard Nixon in January 1974, but there were
| complaints of children going to school in the dark and
| working people commuting and starting their work day in
| pitch darkness during the winter. By October 1974,
| President Gerald Ford signed a law repealing year-round
| daylight savings time.
|
| It's a perfect example of "the public" not really knowing
| what they want or perhaps different factions (unknowingly)
| wanting different things and not realizing this until the
| change actually happens. This isn't helped by how these
| ideas are often oversold as having no downsides instead of
| being realistic about what the trade-off is.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time#History
| Zak wrote:
| I know that I want an end to clock changes more than I
| want the time zone to be optimized. Both spring and fall
| clock changes cause a spike in car crashes and serious
| health events, which I suspect of being worse than the
| problem they're trying to solve.
| gwerbin wrote:
| Yeah I don't agree with this at all. I want the light when
| I'm getting up in the morning. When I'm coming home from work
| it's the end of the day: I'm tired, I'm hustling home to do
| errands or chores or make dinner, I'm probably going to spend
| that time inside anyway because that's where the things that
| I need to get done are, and if it it's going to be cold and
| windy, it's going to be cold and windy in the evening. I much
| much prefer daylight in the morning and I like when noon is
| actually noon (+/- depending on longitude). I'm not looking
| forward to the time change and I'm not looking forward to the
| sun setting at 9 PM.
|
| If it wasn't for that damn 9 AM Monday meeting (ugh) I would
| just keep my clocks sent to standard time and start work an
| hour late in the summer.
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| > I want the light when I'm getting up in the morning
|
| I apologize society is inconveniencing you.
| gegtik wrote:
| interesting, I see his preference is some kind of
| slavering radical antisocial screed whereas yours is the
| universal desire of all of society
| dlev_pika wrote:
| Kinda?
|
| > In summer 2019, the Province conducted a public
| engagement on time observance that saw participation from
| a record 223,000 people, with 93% supporting adopting
| year-round DST. Similarly, across all industry groups and
| nearly all occupational groups, support for year-round
| DST observance was higher than 90%.
| tavavex wrote:
| It's weird, my opinion is the exact opposite from yours,
| but for the same reasons. When it's the morning, I haven't
| had the time to get tired yet. So I don't care yet, I don't
| require the sunlight at that time of the day. And it's
| always a better feeling when there's only a bit of darkness
| left before sunrise, when the alternative is feeling like
| the day was wasted as you step outside and it's already
| night out. Depending on your timing, you may also see the
| sunrise while commuting to work, which I find enjoyable.
|
| In the evening I'm tired, so I want the extra sunlight to
| cancel that out a bit, and I want it so I have more
| opportunities to do things after work. No one is going to
| do anything for fun in the morning, so giving the light to
| that time period is wasting it. I want it after work, so I
| can go somewhere, enjoy the extra warmth, just be anywhere
| besides home and work.
| Acinyx wrote:
| Same here at 52 degrees, the evenings feel so much more
| useful when the sun is out than in winter when it is
| dark, an hour extra sun would be massive.
|
| So I am wondering what the percentages for these
| preferences are, is t 50-50 split or is one dominant?
| You'll piss off part of the population any chocie you
| make nayway, but at least in the European (non-
| representative) polls they found 80% don't want the
| twice-yearly switch, so it would be progress anyway?
| Defenestresque wrote:
| According to the article at least, it's 93% pro/7%
| against in BC, though I haven't had a chance to look up
| how the question was phrased or n.
| bfmalky wrote:
| You are very lucky to have a strong circadian rhythm that
| doesn't require light in the morning then. Not all of us
| work that way. If there is no light in the morning I find
| it very hard to get up and function. Where I live, if we
| adopted permanent summer time the sun wouldn't rise until
| 9:45 in the dead of winter. I couldn't handle that many
| hours of complete darkness at the start of the day.
| dangus wrote:
| Time is an arbitrary construct in the sense that the mere
| lack of arbitrary change in time is a net benefit.
|
| I.e., anyone who doesn't like the change in either direction
| can just change schedules accordingly for business hours.
| Whether that means 8-4 or 9-5 or 10-6 is irrelevant. The fact
| that we would stop altering schedules twice a year is a
| positive.
| gylterud wrote:
| No changing when schools and kindergartens are open. Where
| I live, kindergarten closes 16:30. So 8-16 it is!
| squidgyhead wrote:
| Going outside for lunch is a great idea.
| pajko wrote:
| Also don't forget losing daylight in summer evenings.
| jcarrano wrote:
| 100% agree. I used to watch the sun rise over the river from
| the train during my commute. It was worth having to wake up
| when it was still dark.
| bayindirh wrote:
| I'll politely disagree with this.
|
| We have moved to permanent DST some years ago, and in
| December and January I wake up and leave home at darkness.
| Also, since days are so short, I leave office at dark, too.
|
| My body is strongly solar powered. I can't wake up, I can't
| get up to speed mentally, my brain and body can't work until
| it sees sunlight.
|
| Body's circadian rhythm needs that light, and artificial
| replacements doesn't cut it, because it's not only light for
| my body, apparently.
|
| This behavior is not dependent on my vitamin levels, either.
| My body is an avid consumer of B, and I take the whole family
| and then some as supplements. My energy levels visibly
| increase when I start to wake up with daylight, regardless of
| what I take.
|
| While many people disagree with me, I'm in this body for more
| than 40 years now, and I believe I know at least a couple of
| things about how it works and behaves.
|
| So yes, we should start respecting nature more. Optimizing
| for numbers doesn't cut it.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| When I commuted that inkling of light was the only thing that
| kept me going some days.
| singpolyma3 wrote:
| Can't you just get up at a different time if you prefer
| different sunlight?
| ImJamal wrote:
| Will all jobs, schools, stores, etc also change their working
| hours?
| singpolyma3 wrote:
| Usually there are several hours of reasonable buffer in the
| morning. We're only talking about moving wakeup time by one
| hour here.
| ImJamal wrote:
| That massively depends on where you live. The northern
| most city of British Columbia is Atlin and during some
| parts of the year the sun doesn't rise until 9:54 AM.
|
| If you take into account places further north than
| British Columbia it gets even more extreme. Barrows
| Alaska has the sunrise after 1 PM some days. Do you think
| businesses, schools, etc are going to start at 1 PM on
| those days?
| duskdozer wrote:
| Unless the required morning start time is already too
| early for you on either ST/DST
| kmm wrote:
| Everytime people extoll the virtues of high noon, I ask the
| same question: why does it matter if the sun reaches it highest
| point near 12 o' clock? You're awake for 4-6 hours before 12,
| and you remain awake for 10-12 hours after it. Noon isn't the
| middle of the day for nearly anyone in the western world.
|
| I understand the argument for having an early sunset, clearly
| having sunlight when you're awake has an effect. But who cares
| about having an early high noon, when there's still two thirds
| of the day left at best?
| __turbobrew__ wrote:
| 100%. Almost nobody goes to bed at 8pm and wakes up at 4am,
| so high noon is a pointless exercise.
| wyre wrote:
| this might be controversial and a sign of growing up in
| America, but i think its a lot like people preferring Celsius
| over Fahrenheit. I don't care if water boils and freezes at
| exactly 100 and 0 degrees, it's easy to know its state by
| looking at it. But its very easy to understand what temp
| differences will feel like between 90, 70, 50 degrees F etc
| compared to 31, 22, and 4 degrees C.
| lucumo wrote:
| So because we're used to it? I know perfectly how those C
| numbers will feel. Haven't got a clue about the F numbers.
|
| Anyway, I doubt that that analogy goes for noon. I eat
| lunch by the clock, not when the sun's highest. I expect
| most people do. Especially the ones that are cooped up in
| an office during the daytime.
| sparrc wrote:
| As someone who grew up in America but lived abroad a few
| years, you just start using different markers but it's the
| same idea. Something like 0, 10, 15, 20, 30, 40 gives you
| the full range from freezing to pleasant to very hot.
| stephen_g wrote:
| In the same way, I have absolutely zero idea of what 90, 70
| or 50 degrees Fahrenheit feels like - literally no
| intuition, those numbers seem foreign and disconnected from
| my experience, having always known and used Celsius.
| Celsius temperatures just make sense to me. It's literally
| just about growing up with it.
| Izkata wrote:
| It's what someone might come up with without a scientific
| definition. Think of 0 - 100 F being (very very roughly)
| the survivable range for humans without special
| precautions beyond normal winter/summer clothes. -18 - 38
| C is way more arbitrary from that perspective.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| textbook post-hoc rationalization
| Izkata wrote:
| They said there's no intuition there, I gave them one. I
| didn't say this was how it was defined, just how it could
| make more sense in daily life than the Celsius range
| without relying on familiarity.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Conclusion before reasoning. post-hoc.
|
| I can do it too.
|
| - 0C - 30C are nice round numbers that are much better
| numbers for human comfort than 0F and 100F are. - above
| 0C in the winter means "it's going to be messy outside",
| and is the most important number. - 100C is an important
| number for cooking - a degree C is a reasonable interval.
| People using degrees F tend to round to multiples of 5,
| which is too large especially around room temperature,
| but a single degree F change is imperceptible.
| geon wrote:
| I think the better question is: If people want to go to work
| an hour earlier, why the F do they need to change the clock
| for that? Just leave the house at 6 instead of 7.
|
| Changing the clock around is insane.
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| A lot of people must schedule their day around school
| hours. You can't decide those.
| seanalltogether wrote:
| And yet I guarantee that with permanent DST, they will
| start pushing school start times later and later in the
| morning, then they're all right back to where they
| started.
| 1313ed01 wrote:
| That is pretty much what I hope will happen here.
|
| Step 1 is to fix the time at any UTC+N. I don't
| particularly care what n.
|
| Step 2 is adjust all times in society to work with
| whatever UTC+N we are now stuck with.
|
| I think step 2 will sort itself out, as it has
| historically. Schools begin at a certain time because of
| whatever historical reason tied to what timezone we are
| in. If we change to a different timezone schools should
| naturally drift towards starting at some other time in
| the day, unless people for some unrelated reason changed
| their mind about what s good time for school start would
| be.
|
| I really only care about fixing the clocks and stop doing
| the annual changes back and forth. What number should be
| seen on the clock for specific events during the day,
| like school starts, can be adjusted later.
| mongol wrote:
| To me it feels like redefining the meter to make it better
| for some particular purpose. For example, it is defined as
| the distance light travels in 1/299792458th of a second. Why
| not make it an even 300000000? Or make it perfect to measure
| say the width of train tracks?
|
| There is value to stick to a historical tradition which is
| easy to reason about. I like the connection standard time has
| to the course of the sun. It makes a lot of sense. It serves
| as a reference. Time does not say when you need to do
| something. It is up to you and the people around you. Time is
| just the way you communicate about it
| GuB-42 wrote:
| About 50% of people want permanent standard time, 50% want
| permanent DST, 50% want to keep time changes. Doesn't add up?
| That's the point.
|
| Everyone finds arguments that suits them. Some will quote
| "sleep experts", others will mention economic reasons, others
| will talk about road safety, each one with studies proving
| their point, peer-reviewed for the most sophisticated.
|
| My take is that we are all different, and whatever you choose,
| some people will be better off, others will be worse off. There
| is a high chance that that variety is an evolutionary
| advantage, at least it was for our ancestors, as a group where
| everyone is sleeping at the same time is more vulnerable. Not
| great for office hours though.
| tempestn wrote:
| In the winter I can see arguments both ways (though I'm
| personally in the evening light is better camp). But in the
| summer, it already gets light earlier than almost anyone would
| want to be awake. An extra hour of sunlight at 4am is little
| benefit to anyone, and likely just makes it harder to sleep.
| Light evenings in the summer are wonderful though. I think part
| of the health argument _against_ DST is that those light
| evenings make it harder to get to sleep at night, which is
| fair, but I still wouldn 't want to give them up!
| mapt wrote:
| If you have a problem with school start times, you could also
| just change school start times.
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| > Kids walking, biking, and being driven to school in mornings
| in darkness.
|
| It's not 1900s anymore. Cars have fancy headlights and sensor
| suites for AEB. And generally street lighting is available
| around schools.
| apparent wrote:
| Some kids walk and bike for a mile or more. Lighting around
| schools only helps with the very last bit.
| Affric wrote:
| 100% with you.
|
| And every argument I hear from the pro DST group is really just
| an argument for ending adult work at 15.30 rather than 17.00
| and maintaining a 9.00 start time.
|
| It blows my mind that we are all meant to wrap our lives around
| bullshit jobs.
| fragmede wrote:
| just move it by .5 permanently
| gerdesj wrote:
| I live a bit north of Whistler. BC is rather larger than the UK
| but it is very roughly the same in north/south extent. Yeovil
| (Somerset) is about the same lat as Calgary, next door to you.
|
| Unfortunately we live on an oblate spheroid what spins around
| the sun and its a bit tricky when the sun comes on and is
| switched off. It doesn't help that the basted planet is tilted
| to the ecliptic too so we end up with daylight/nighttime
| procession and all that equinox/solstice bollocks. I live quite
| close to both Glastonbury and Stonehenge. People have some
| pretty odd ideas about reality, let alone time in these parts
| 8)
|
| The "perfect" solution is of course moving the clock
| continuously and keeping 12:00 fixed to peak daylight. Sadly
| that wont work too well when the time changes every 50 miles or
| so!
|
| No one will ever be happy when it comes to fiddling with clocks
| - that is the way of life. There is no right answer for
| everyone and never will be. I might accept an arguement based
| on road fatality statistics but not much else and then you'll
| get some sort of economic based falacy in response.
| dlenski wrote:
| Same, also in BC.
|
| I agree with everything you write, and in principle I'd prefer
| just to stay on standard time forever.
|
| _However_ for my selfish individual interests: I work with a
| lot of people in Europe, and this change to permanent DST will
| make the time difference once hour less for 4 months a year...
| until the rest of the world goes this way too, at least.
| confidantlake wrote:
| Seems dumb that we change the time to an offset rather than
| changing from 9 to 5 to 8 to 4.
| CalChris wrote:
| +0 vs +1 boils down to dropping kids off vs shopping.
| francislavoie wrote:
| Hell noooo. 4:30pm sunsets are ultra depressing in the winter.
| Less light in the morning is not at all a problem in
| comparison.
| eru wrote:
| > Instinctively, I think morning light is important to our
| biology for a daily reset and the solar cue of "high noon" is
| also a real thing.
|
| You know, you can just set your watch to whatever you feel
| like?
|
| > I'm sure I've read that sleep health experts have
| historically supported a change to permanent Standard Time, not
| DST.
|
| What difference does it make? If people want to get up later or
| especially earlier, they can, no matter what the 'official'
| time is.
|
| For an example: Spaniards and Poles are officially in the same
| timezone, but the Spaniards do everything 'late'. At least when
| you only look at the clocks; not so much when you look at the
| sun.
| duskdozer wrote:
| They "can" if they don't have jobs that demand they stick to
| arbitrary hours.
| eru wrote:
| Sure, social coordination is always a thing.
|
| In any case, most people can get up earlier, if they want
| to.
| 14 wrote:
| I agree and would have preferred that as well. But what I
| really thought they would do was split the two and just meet in
| the middle.
| zenoprax wrote:
| As a fellow astro-nerd you are much calmer about this than me!
| DST is just a way to uniformly enforce "summer" and "winter"
| hours of operation on everyone.
|
| If all the evidence supports starting our activities later in
| the day during winter why don't we just... change the start
| time of our activities rather than all our clocks? Why stop at
| one hour ahead? Let's add three hours to standard time...
|
| I'm still livid :D
| MitchSchwartz wrote:
| The obvious stupid answer is half way between.
| Reason077 wrote:
| > _"Kids walking, biking, and being driven to school in
| mornings in darkness ... that 's also what permanent DST gives
| us."_
|
| Can't schools just open 60 (or 30) minutes later if this is a
| problem? ie: school has winter hours where class starts at 9AM
| instead of 8:30AM?
| rkomorn wrote:
| I don't get how having "random" things change opening hours
| is any better than changing clocks.
|
| I'm not a parent, but I can imagine that if some of my
| schedule had to change by 30 minutes some months out of the
| year, I'd find it more inconvenient.
|
| What if school starts/ends at a different time but my job
| does not?
|
| What if I have a standing appointment at a business that
| keeps its hours year round that now conflicts with one that
| changed to winter hours?
|
| It seems more like a different set of problems than a
| solution.
| mongol wrote:
| It is completely obvious to me. There is only one uniform
| time, and thousands of arguments for what is a good time to
| do this or that. Reschedule things to work better. Don't
| force everything else according to some most important
| thing
| rkomorn wrote:
| How is "rescheduling some things" a solution and not a
| different problem?
| alexhans wrote:
| Don't get discouraged by being in the minority in one
| particular forum, specially when specific angles dominate.
|
| People put different weights to different arguments.
|
| For the Spain argument below. I actually think it's quite
| uncomfortable to be +1 and +2 in daily life because people
| leaving office at 5pm are actually leaving at 3pm under
| scorching sun. The difference of having light until 23 instead
| of 22 is negligible in a country that is still up at night in
| winter.
|
| I can't cite anything at the moment but from what I can recall,
| economic benefits of switching during the year have not been as
| tauted and the cost of changing every year has been harmful in
| many ways (operational being one), but I think here the
| discussion is where should countries land.
|
| I hope that a country like UK doesn't decide to switch to +1
| and the same for Europe, further separating themselves from the
| American continent countries with the focus on summer sunlight
| where summer already has a huge window of sun and people often
| tend to want to escape that heat.
| sillyfluke wrote:
| Yes, once you look at the daylight times it's clear that UK
| time naturally fits Spain better.
| sillyfluke wrote:
| >Kids walking, biking, and being driven to school in mornings
| in darkness ... that's also what permanent DST gives us.
|
| I think this is the worst thing about it frankly, the kids. And
| you can't just push the school time back cause it interferes
| with the parents getting to work.
| dheera wrote:
| Times are just numbers, just shift your work hours accordingly.
| The only real problem is that the people seeing you leave at
| 4pm and grumble are the same sort of people who don't
| acknowledge you starting work at 7am. As long as you don't have
| those sorts of people around you're fine.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| This has to be done in two steps
|
| 1) Do ANYTHING you can to stop the clocks being fucked with
| twice a year.
|
| 2) After that is done and stabilised, everything has been
| updated to non-wobbly time. Now's the time you can start
| arguing what the exact time zone should be.
|
| Never try to argue both at the same time. This is what prevents
| the EU from stopping the DST madness.
| vbarrielle wrote:
| I'm in strong agreement with this. Even though I'd prefer
| winter time all year round, I would rather enjoy permanent
| summer time over switching twice a year. And I'm living in
| France, so my "winter time" is actually already a DST
| compared to the standard time (France's timezone should be
| UTC like the UK, but WW2 changed that to UTC+1 and we never
| switched back), so the "summer time" is actually a "double
| DST".
| dmos62 wrote:
| Speaking of, I've recently started using a daylight therapy
| lamp 10k lumens @ 10-30cm for at least 20 minutes within 1 hour
| of waking up: the first few days, the effect is dramatic.
| Later, when the body is readjusted you don't feel it as
| vividly, but if I don't do it for a few days I can feel my mood
| and energy drop. I recommend everyone who doesn't get much
| light (bright enough to make you squint) in the morning try it.
| wolvoleo wrote:
| I personally love the DST option because I'd have some useful
| daylight after work in winter.
|
| The mornings are just wasted daylight anyway because I'm just
| on the way to work.
| tgv wrote:
| I don't know what time the sun rises in BC, but during the
| summer the sun rises here at 5 o'clock in DST. That would be
| 04:00 without. That means people (not everyone can darken their
| room sufficiently) waking up really early, and that can't be
| healthy.
| dalmo3 wrote:
| Eyemasks are extremely cheap and effective.
| tgv wrote:
| That's admitting it's bad for your sleep. So why would
| sleep experts say otherwise? Why do they think an early sun
| rise is better? Perhaps it's situation dependent.
| vhodges wrote:
| It's purely personal, but my body really seems to prefer
| daylight savings. I always have very rough and fluctuating
| sleep schedules during the winter. They seem to go away after
| the spring ahead (it could just be the longer daylight hours
| that become more apparent during spring). Greetings from
| Mission!
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Yeah, I would argue strongly it's just because you have more
| sunlight during daylight savings. Having the sun rise later
| in winter would just make your sleep worse.
|
| If you wanted to test this, try setting your alarm one hour
| earlier for a few weeks in winter and see if it makes you
| feel better.
| roysting wrote:
| I would prefer you simply adjust your personal schedule (yes,
| it's far more likely the shorter daylight and probably
| insufficient Vitamin D) than that we permanently turn the one
| hour offset from high noon of the sun...the very basis for
| time itself coupled to the natural phenomenon of earth's
| rotation ... into the standard now.
|
| "Daddy, why is the sun at its highest point at 1300 and not
| noon like since the beginning of time?" ... "because right
| before humans destroyed themselves they became idiots and
| lost their mind and started being confused about their
| genitals, time itself, whether they should be alive or not,
| and even tried convincing themselves that the Big Arch burger
| was not disgusting food-product slop; that's why, my AI robot
| son, that's why!"
| sampo wrote:
| > I'm sure I've read that sleep health experts have
| historically supported a change to permanent Standard Time, not
| DST.
|
| Yes, science is very clear: Permanent standard time is best for
| health.
|
| https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/07487304198541...
|
| https://srbr.org/advocacy/daylight-saving-time-presskit/
|
| https://esrs.eu/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/To_the_EU_Commiss...
|
| https://www.ama-assn.org/press-center/press-releases/ama-cal...
|
| https://jcsm.aasm.org/doi/10.5664/jcsm.10898
|
| https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jsr.14352
|
| https://www.chronobiocanada.com/official-statements
|
| But I think the scientists have made a mistake in their
| communication: They focused too much arguing against the clock-
| shifts, and didn't put enough effort to communicate why also
| permanent DST is a bad choice.
| dleslie wrote:
| I'm in favour of PDT from a forward-thinking perspective.
|
| With climate change causing extreme heat events to be more
| frequent, having the sun rise later in the day will defend the
| work hours of those who find themselves labouring outside
| without having to adjust the hours that they work.
| Yizahi wrote:
| There is no significance to the number 12 on the analog clock
| outside it being painted on top of the clock face. And even
| that is completely absent in the digital clock, where hour
| 11:00 is the same as 12:00 or 13:00 in significance.
|
| So there is zero astronomic reason to fixate noon to a
| particular number if doesn't suit us, humans.
|
| I'm just saying that astronomic argument is kinda meaningless
| for the DST discussion, the only thing that matters is manual
| allocation of light time for the most people as possible, so
| that a majority of population would receive highly beneficial
| natural light as much as possible. When the solar high point
| would happen in that scheme should be entirely irrelevant.
| billnad wrote:
| Also in BC and I agree completel;y. The one hour offset seems
| strange. The trouble with any time change is that I still wake
| up a couple hours before the sun in the morning in the Winter
| in Vernon and in the Summer I couldn't get up early enough for
| a sunrise. I try to get out as much as often during the day in
| the Winter as I am sure I am starved for the Sun in the Winter.
| Was much tougher in Calgary
| dade_ wrote:
| Great, wake up at 5 in the morning.
| andsoitis wrote:
| They picked wrong.
|
| They should have picked Standard Time.
| wvenable wrote:
| As someone else pointed everyone is already on DST for
| approximately 65% of the year. This just removes the remaining
| 35%. Picking standard time would have been a much bigger
| change.
|
| Ultimately, it's entirely arbitrary anyway. The only issue is
| that American states cannot pick DST without a federal law
| change.
| throw0101c wrote:
| > _As someone else pointed everyone is already on DST for
| approximately 65% of the year. This just removes the
| remaining 35%. Picking standard time would have been a much
| bigger change._
|
| This 65% started during the Dubya presidency (source: I was
| there updating _tzdata_ on systems), and previous to that it
| was a 50 /50 split.
|
| So 65/35 or 50/50 is arbitrary.
| wvenable wrote:
| But the reasoning for that was a preference for DST.
|
| Obviously all this is arbitrary including standard time.
| throw0101c wrote:
| > _But the reasoning for that was a preference for DST._
|
| There was no reasoning for the Dubya alteration: the
| change was not debated anywhere, and (AIUI) no one was
| ever able to figure out how it actually got slipped into
| the legislation.
| wvenable wrote:
| The DST extension was included in Section 110 of the 2005
| Energy Policy Act, debated as part of the bill, and
| justified on energy-savings grounds. Congress even
| required the Department of Energy to study its impact
| afterwards!
| Daviey wrote:
| Metric time would have been better.
| ndr42 wrote:
| In germany the terms are Sommerzeit (summer time) and Winterzeit
| (winter time). Of course everybody would chose the former as
| summer sound better than winter but the latter is "better" as it
| corresponds more to "wake up when there is light" which is
| favorable to health, performance etc.
| PhilippGille wrote:
| That's a very dishonest take, as I'm sure you know that
| Sommerzeit proponents have reasons other than "summer sounds
| better than winter".
|
| For example most people just wake up and go to work in the
| morning, but in the evening they meet friends, BBQ, hike/run
| through nature, do sports etc., and prefer doing those
| activities while it's bright outside.
| vesinisa wrote:
| What stops you from going to work one hour early, so you get
| off earlier as well? Most employers these days allow flexible
| working hours.
|
| And if we are permanently moving our clocks to advance by an
| hour, why stop at just one hour? Why not have +2h or +3h so
| we get even more brighter evenings.
| ghaff wrote:
| Because most people don't have that degree of flexibility.
| When I was commuting I'd have been happy to have double DST
| or whatever you want to call it.
| PhilippGille wrote:
| With flexible working hours it works in both directions, so
| @ndr42 can also wake up an hour later for his health and
| performance :)
| paxys wrote:
| "Most employers" definitely don't allow flexible working
| hours. You have to be in specific sectors - basically just
| "modern" tech companies - to have that privilege. And that
| is a very tiny slice of the working population.
| ndr42 wrote:
| My "very dishonest take" is the result of the polls after the
| EU parliament voted to stop the time change.
|
| The question in these polls had been which time the person
| would prefer. A big majority in Germany chose "summer time".
| So without any reasons given/discussed/researched the
| preference is summer time.
|
| Of course there are proponents with reasons for or against
| this or that time but this doesn't matter as the majority
| does not decide by reasons.
|
| My point is that alone the naming the time "summer" or
| "winter" influences the preference to a big extent.
| eigenspace wrote:
| What's dishonest about your take is your strawman
| interpretation of the poll results. Just because you
| disagree with the majority of people does not mean they
| simply misunderstand the question and think
|
| "hurr durr summer better than winter, me choosey summer"
| ndr42 wrote:
| Well, at least thats the way I would have responded to
| the question when interviewed. Maybe I'm dumber or more
| mindless than the average german.
|
| There were say some 100s of people called by phone, asked
| a lot of questions about a lot of topics, one of them is
| "which do you prefer: summer or winter time" - I would
| have said summer (without thinking to much) because I
| like the long summer evenings too.
|
| That has nothing to do with misunderstanding the
| question.
|
| It is of course possible that the average interviewee is
| well prepared or thinks long and hard before answering
| without letting the wording influence their answer.
|
| But you should at least consider the possibility that
| also the german naming (summer/winter) could influence
| some people (like me) in their answers.
|
| (I think the wording can have a big influence (maybe
| because of my linguistic background) but you are free to
| disagree)
| sdevonoes wrote:
| Im very healthy and performant during sommerzeit. It's in
| winterzeit when I get depressed bc there isn't enough daylight
| in the evenings (it gets dark around 3pm-4pm in winter... that
| sucks big time)
| lytfyre wrote:
| The report linked in the article has BC support _massively_ in
| favour of "more light in the evenings" instead of "wake up when
| there is light", citing health and wellness concerns. "Better"
| seems a matter of opinion.
| eigenspace wrote:
| This is total bullshit.
|
| I live in Koln, and the reason people want to move to
| Sommerzeit year round is that during Winterzeit near the
| solstice, the sun rises at 8:30 and sets at 16:30, which means
| that most people are not getting any daytime sun if they work
| inside.
|
| They get a tiny bit of sunlight right as they arrive at work,
| and then when they work all day, step outside and the sun is
| already gone, which is really depressing. Many many people look
| at this situation and decide that if they have to choose
| between light before work or after work, they'd take the light
| after work.
| ndr42 wrote:
| Just in case someone has some time I recommend this scientific
| article:
|
| Assessing the best hour to start the day: an appraisal of
| seasonal daylight saving time
|
| https://www.proquest.com/docview/3187599695/fulltext?sourcet...
|
| The article is easily accessible and addresses (in the
| concluding remarks) the various aspects in a nuanced way.
| The_Fox wrote:
| "Pacific time" is going to be so confusing though. Should have
| just called it Yukon Standard Time, since that's already a thing,
| at least informally. Cause that would not be confusing at all...
| cpncrunch wrote:
| Yes, it's going to cause a lot of confusion and missed
| meetings. At the moment everyone says "pacific time", but now
| that will mean two different things.
|
| I think we'll need to say Vancouver time or California time.
| tempestn wrote:
| Maybe people will finally learn the difference between PST
| and PDT.
| troad wrote:
| They won't.
|
| In my professional experience, having needed to work with
| relatively unsophisticated people across many time zones,
| the only thing that worked consistently was "[City] time".
| That way people could always check 'what time is it in X
| now' or 'when it's X in [City], what time is it here', and
| get correct responses.
|
| Descriptors like "Mountain time" are too vague, especially
| when there are various places that do/do not practice DST
| within that timezone, or there are similarly named time
| zones internationally. (Australia has Eastern and Central
| time too, for example, and in summer - which is northern
| hemisphere winter - they split into four different time
| zones due to varying DST practices.)
|
| Trying to be overly clever and exactly specify the time
| zone, e.g. "MDT", leads to lots of subtle mistakes in my
| experience. Often people will think they know what that is,
| and then get it wrong. Or their calendar app will helpfully
| suggest MST and they'll click on it, not noticing the
| difference. Or they'll just scramble the letters when
| writing them down and wind up with "NTT time" or "AT&T
| time" or some such.
| madcaptenor wrote:
| My theory on why people use "xST" is that the word
| "standard" time sounds like it is the fancy official
| time.
|
| When people say EST and mean EDT I'm tempted to just show
| up an hour late, if it's a meeting I don't want to go to.
| satiric wrote:
| Mountain time is ambiguous due to Arizona, and yet we still
| use that phrase. Hawaii-Aleutian time is also ambiguous: the
| Aleutian islands do daylight savings, but Hawaii doesn't.
|
| Casual speech doesn't use the city names (like
| America/Los_Angeles for pacific time); presumably we'd have
| Pacific time (America/Los_Angeles) and BC time (an update of
| the existing America/Vancouver). If Washington's time change
| ever gets approved it would presumably become simply
| Washington time (America/Seattle maybe?).
| ThatPlayer wrote:
| Until it happens in California too!
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_California_Proposition_7
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _" Pacific time" is going to be so confusing_
|
| It's already ambiguous. Just use a city and let your calendar
| do the rest. New York, Phoenix and San Francisco time are
| unambiguous in a way trying to name time zones is not.
| esoltys wrote:
| Why now? From the Govt of BC press release: "The Interpretation
| Amendment Act, which is the legal framework that enables the
| Province to adopt permanent DST, became law in 2019. At the time,
| government chose not to bring it into force in order to co-
| ordinate timing with neighbouring U.S. states in the same time
| zone.
|
| Recent actions from the U.S. have shifted how B.C. approaches
| decisions that merit alignment, including on time zones. Making
| this change now reflects the current preferences and needs of
| British Columbians, and helps ensure the province is well-
| positioned to thrive, even when circumstances across the border
| evolve."
|
| https://news.gov.bc.ca/releases/2026AG0013-000209
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| Notably Washington state legislated the same change to DST
| years ago (instead of standard time, the morons!) but the
| federal government never approved the switch. AFAIK it's still
| pending. I remain unclear what authority the federal government
| has over such a matter and why Washington (or any other) state
| has opted to respect it. What are they going to do if a state
| just ignores them and switches their clocks?
|
| Sometimes I get the impression that the _spirit_ of states
| rights in the US has died.
| throw0101c wrote:
| If US states want to get rid of time switches they are free
| to go to year-round Standard Time (like Arizona).
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| You're saying the federal government granted blanket
| authorization to switch to the one? So the only reason
| states wait on authorization is merely obtusely insisting
| on the wrong choice? (In addition to being impotent.) The
| more I learn about this issue the more things I find to be
| angry about.
| pwg wrote:
| Yes. States are allowed to ignore "summer time" and
| remain on "standard time" all year round. Arizona is the
| usual example cited, they do not change the clocks, and
| remain on standard time year round.
|
| The special auth. from the Fed's is needed to switch to
| "permanent summer time" (and, possibly advocating for
| year round "summer time" gives the state politicians
| cover to do nothing, because "their hands are tied...").
| tempestn wrote:
| Permanent DST being the "wrong" choice is your opinion,
| and a minority one. Certainly doesn't make those who
| disagree "morons".
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| Indeed, it is my opinion. It's not in the minority so
| much as it runs counter to what lobbyists with vested
| interests have loudly promoted. Most people haven't given
| the matter much thought and don't have an opinion on it
| (let alone an informed one).
|
| "Morons" was an overly dramatic way of putting it but it
| is very clearly the technically deficient choice as will
| be apparent to anyone who bothers to consult the history
| books. The US already attempted permanent DST in 1974 but
| quickly repealed it. Russia similarly tried it out from
| 2011 to 2014 before switching to permanent standard time
| instead. The UK also tried it at one point before
| abandoning it. Mexico might have tried it for the
| longest, from 1996 until 2022 when they too switched to
| permanent standard time. (Actually I'm unclear why Mexico
| gave it up. They're far enough south that the difference
| between the two shouldn't be particularly impactful.)
|
| The correct answer here is obvious. (This being HN I
| guess personal political rants aren't really the thing to
| do so I should at least link to some actual literature on
| the topic. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/physiolog
| y/articles/10....)
| chupasaurus wrote:
| I can attest that switch to DST was felt as a curse
| during winters in Moscow.
| throw0101c wrote:
| > _Permanent DST being the "wrong" choice is your
| opinion, and a minority one._
|
| It is the majority opinion of people that study
| chronobiology (circadian rhythms) and sleep researchers,
| as issued via their professional societies:
|
| * https://srbr.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/SRBR-
| Statement-o...
|
| * http://www.chronobiocanada.com/official-statements
|
| * https://sleepresearchsociety.org/wp-
| content/uploads/2022/11/...
|
| * https://jcsm.aasm.org/doi/10.5664/jcsm.8780
|
| * https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2019
| .0094...
|
| * https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35382618/
|
| * https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/074873041
| 98541...
|
| * https://www.ama-assn.org/public-health/prevention-
| wellness/s...
|
| * https://esrs.eu/wp-
| content/uploads/2019/03/To_the_EU_Commiss...
|
| From a public health perspective, all-year DST is not
| good, and all-year Standard Time is what should be done.
| sampo wrote:
| > Certainly doesn't make those who disagree "morons".
|
| But it makes them anti-science.
| seniorsassycat wrote:
| Just switch to the +1 standard time. WA can switch to MST,
| which is equivalent to PDT.
|
| It still requires federal approval, but from Sec Transit
| instead of Congress
| TheSkyHasEyes wrote:
| I read elsewhere this may be partial reason why BC forged
| ahead. As Canada/US relationship is on the rocks and BC
| stopped waiting for the US to change.
| xer0x wrote:
| Nailed it. It's been ~5 years, and the odds of coordinating
| with the US grow smaller by the month.
| bonestamp2 wrote:
| I think we just needed some government with the balls to
| go for it and everyone else on the west coast will
| follow. The legality of DST might be an issue in the US
| but if we can clear that hurdle then BC could be the
| catalyst.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| It is crazy, because there is actually a law that allows us
| to switch to year round PST if we want (but no one wants
| that), while we need congressional approval to switch to PDT
| year round (which is what everyone wants) and the house voted
| for it, but the senate simply didn't make it a priority.
| wahern wrote:
| > I remain unclear what authority the federal government has
| over such a matter
|
| It's actually an enumerated power under Article I, Section 8,
| Clause 5:
|
| > [The Congress shall have Power...] To coin Money, regulate
| the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard
| of Weights and Measures; ...
|
| https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S8-C5-1/.
| ..
| troad wrote:
| I'm surprised that would be interpreted to include time
| zones. Units of time, arguably (measures), but time zones?
| Time zones are not a measure of anything. Time zones do not
| follow on from definitions of units of time, any more than
| road speed limits follow on from the definition of a mile.
|
| I would be less surprised if it were the commerce power
| used to uphold time zone coordination - for the promotion
| and regularity of interstate commerce etc etc. Tenuous, but
| consistent with a lot of the other nonsense that's been
| hung from the commerce power over the years.
|
| Then there's the actual enforcement angle - time zones are
| just a social convention whereby people in a given area
| pretend that the time is slightly different than it
| 'really' is (local solar time). There's no reason local /
| state government and businesses can't post / operate on
| different hours, and leave federal bodies to operate on
| whatever 'federal time' they want. This already happens in
| parts of the world where the official time is locally
| inappropriate, such as Eucla in Australia or Xinjiang in
| China.
|
| Obviously the optimal solution here is to coordinate a time
| change at all levels of government, but failing that there
| are other options.
| arrowsmith wrote:
| They measure the number of minutes since sunrise.
| nairboon wrote:
| Which changes every day.
| wahern wrote:
| I don't think there've been many court cases exploring
| the meaning of "[to] fix the Standard of Weights and
| Measures", and probably none as it regards time. And in
| the modern era the Commerce Power would probably be
| sufficient on its own. SCOTUS has suggested that under
| exiting precedent Congress would have the power to grant
| copyrights and patents under the Commerce Clause, and so
| the Copyright and Patent clauses today act more like
| restrictions on Congressional power.
|
| But I don't see a problem relating time zones to
| measurement. Part of the authority to standardize
| measurement is the ability to dictate the manner and
| means of determining a quantitative value. Under the
| Weights and Measures clause I think Congress can regulate
| things like scales, including their precision and
| accuracy, at least in so far as they claim to provide a
| measurement of a Federally standardized unit. You might
| intuitively think the only reasonable end to such power
| is using it to improve and mandate ever greater precision
| and accuracy. But sometimes too much precision and
| accuracy is a bad thing--it can create transactional
| friction. Case in point, when 12PM noon varied between
| every town it become increasingly problematic as the
| speed of long-distance transportation improved, i.e. the
| rail roads. So the solution was to mandate _worse_
| accuracy.
|
| Relatedly, there's a whole separate question of what time
| means. Most HN readers understand time in the scientific
| sense, and think of time in the sense of the SI second.
| But civil time used for general daily life has a slightly
| more nuanced meaning. That said, UTC/TAI time is very
| much like time zones in the sense of fudging accuracy.
| Modern clocks and gravimeter, even the kind regular
| people can buy for a few hundred or thousand dollars, are
| precise enough to be able to distinguish local time
| dilation. So the time passing in your living room is
| actually different from UTC/TAI. But think of how complex
| and, for the most part, useless it would be to try to
| "solve" that discrepancy by trying to integrate that
| reality in the general definition of civil time.
|
| Also, AFAIU the authority to standardize measurement, and
| time specifically, operates more as a prohibition on
| states imposing their own mandates. See, generally, the
| Legal Tender Cases for the push and pull between various
| powers allocated between the federal government and the
| states.
| hn_acc1 wrote:
| It was only ever a thing to promote civil war grievances.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| > Sometimes I get the impression that the spirit of states
| rights in the US has died.
|
| It was bullshit from day one. The origin of the state's
| rights argument was slave state's attempting to force free
| states to round up fugitive slave and return them to the
| slave states.
| 14 wrote:
| The more I think about it the less sure I am if I would
| prefer a permanent switch to be standard or daylight time. On
| one hand I really dislike winter months and work starting in
| complete darkness. So always enjoy the time change and
| mornings soon after feeling brighter. But on the other hand
| come summer I really love getting off work and going to the
| beach. So I will have more sun hours this way which is big. I
| really thought they would split the difference and just go 30
| minutes but guess that would be challenging for many reasons.
| briffle wrote:
| I believe both Oregon and Washington have passed bills, but
| both require CA to also pass so that the whole west coast
| moves. CA has still not passed a bill.
| dlev_pika wrote:
| Ha! I read the news and I was wondering if the scuffle with the
| US was the nudge to get this going, further differentiating the
| way of life.
|
| My intuition was correct
|
| _pats own back_
| computomatic wrote:
| I don't have a source to site, but I'm fairly certain the
| Canadian government is adopting (and presumably encouraging
| provinces to adopt) a general policy of explicitly not allowing
| US preferences to dictate our domestic policy moving forward.
| Of course, that is indeed in response to recent actions from
| the U.S. And in that light, this time change was an obvious
| early move as the only thing preventing it was the trigger
| based on the US states.
| goodmodule wrote:
| It would be great to see Europe adopt it as well. Changing clocks
| twice a year feels outdated and more disruptive than beneficial.
| watwut wrote:
| Absolutely not. The time that would stay is the bad one.
|
| With switch, we get reasonable half a years. Without it, it
| would be whole unreasonable year.
| recursive wrote:
| The biggest unreasonability is switching at all. I admit
| other points of view, but switching back and forth is a
| compromise that seems far worse than just sticking with one.
| Either one.
| jerlam wrote:
| We seem to be in the worst situation now where not only
| does the EU change their time twice a year, they change it
| on a different schedule than US/Canada.
|
| For a few weeks during the year, half of your meetings
| start at a different time. Everyone is confused.
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| Now add southern hemisphere
| asmosoinio wrote:
| Why? Can't people adjust their schedules as needed?
|
| Schools don't have to always start at the same time? And many
| jobs also not?
|
| It's not like 9-17 work hours are set on stone?
| padjo wrote:
| And coordinating that change would be easier you think?
| asmosoinio wrote:
| Coordinating that change for the RELEVANT parties, yes.
| IMHO that's a tiny part of a society.
|
| Instead of everyone EVERYONE having to adjust clocks and
| their natural schedules. I think (and some studies agree
| with me) the stress and negative effects of that
| switching twice a year is much more on aggregate.
|
| I don't personally see any benefit from daylight savings.
| But I also live at around 60+ degrees North: at peak
| summertime there is 19 hours of full daylight (barely
| gets dark the other hours), wintertime less about 5.
| Daylight saving does not really make a dent.
| asmosoinio wrote:
| It was proposed officially in 2018, but unfortunately the
| decision was never finalized:
|
| https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/policies/seasonal-time-ch...
| alexhans wrote:
| I don't like switching to daylight saving and back but I'd
| rather have that that permanently moving to +1. Then you have
| extreme examples which are already shifted like Spain (for
| historical reasons around aligning with Germany) and I don't
| find that alignment useful economically, in city life practice
| and more.
|
| If had to make an executive choice with no further analysis at
| this moment I'd put them all in their respective original times
| and move Spain and any outlier to their proper timezone (a
| vertical map alignment of sorts)
| ternus wrote:
| Almost nowhere do you see the sun directly overhead at noon, even
| during Standard Time. The differences can be quite stark:
| https://24timezones.com/cms-static/images/uploads/solartimev...
|
| BC (and PST) is actually quite reasonable in this regard, with
| Vancouver and LA being fairly close to "on the money." Contrast
| that with China and Russia, where clock time can be 2h+ off from
| solar time.
|
| As a further note, this is one reason it's miserable to be in
| Boston/Maine during the winter if you're an SAD sufferer: sunset
| times of 4pm or sooner feel like "insult to injury."
| MoonWalk wrote:
| Maybe, but Standard time is still closer to "correct."
|
| "Daylight Savings" time never made sense. Why are we "saving
| daylight" when there's more of it?
| PieTime wrote:
| Save it in the evening, it was always dark in the morning.
|
| Historically we were saving daylight for the morning
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _Why are we "saving daylight" when there's more of it?_
|
| We're saving it from the morning in the summer, when there's
| _way_ too much of it while we 're asleep, to use it in the
| evening, when we want to enjoy the outdoors with our families
| and friends after dinner.
|
| The point is to increase the enjoyment of summer sunlight
| after the work day is over.
| bena wrote:
| No, the point was to conserve fuel for the winter months.
| Which was why dst was a wwi directive that was abandoned
| after the war. We reimplemented it during wwii and just
| never changed back
| crazygringo wrote:
| I'm talking about the modern rationale, not the
| historical one.
|
| Also, no, it wasn't to conserve fuel for the _winter_. It
| was to conserve fuel during the _summer_ so it could be
| used in the war, also during the summer.
|
| But it's not like we _forgot_ to change back. It 's that
| we decided we _really liked_ the longer usable daylight
| in the summer. There have been _tons_ of adjustments to
| DST since WWII, reflecting the fact that we like it in
| the summer, and have variously adjusted which months it
| covers.
|
| The point is, it is literally described as _saving
| daylight_ , which is what I explained. "Saving" it in the
| morning to use in the evening. The "saving" in the name
| always referred to daylight, not to fuel.
| dachris wrote:
| In Western Europe this is also quite pronounced.
|
| In Bialystok, Poland, solar noon is at 11:39. In Vigo, Spain,
| it's at 13:46, .
|
| Being in favor of all-year DST (more sun in the evening is just
| nice), nice to see that those lucky Spaniards already have it
| and then some.
|
| Whatever the preference for the permanent time, abandoning the
| switching should be advocated by the software industry. I've
| yet to work at a company where there are no bugs related to
| switching the clock. Those bugs have ranged from harmless to
| pretty severe.
| spragl wrote:
| That sounds like an unnecessary EU standardization. Having
| the same timezone in Poland and Spain possibly made sense 30
| years ago, but now that all communication goes through
| computers of one kind or another, time conversion is
| seamless.
|
| For those companies that have offices in both countries, and
| for which the synchronicity matters, it is not that difficult
| to just have special office hours.
| inejge wrote:
| > [The same timezone in Poland and Spain] sounds like an
| unnecessary EU standardization.
|
| Well, if you look up the histories of the time zones in the
| respective countries ("Time in Poland" and "Time in Spain"
| on Wikipedia, I have no reason to doubt their accuracy)
| you'll see that both settled on CET, with or without
| daylight savings, long before the EU was even an idea.
| fuoqi wrote:
| >Contrast that with China and Russia
|
| The linked map is outdated regarding Russia. Here is an up to
| date map:
| https://64.media.tumblr.com/4a9a4613f057d3b5f17ec548e6ac06d1...
| MOSI2 wrote:
| I fully support removing DST (as a parent at least, it's a PITA
| twice a year).
|
| However, clocks should show noon correctly, as best as they can
| within your chosen timezone. Also, I really like long evenings in
| the summer to get outdoors and go biking or hiking. It follows
| that we should abolish DST, stick to the correct time, and move
| regular school and business hours back one hour.
| bsimpson wrote:
| Good luck coordinating that.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| School and business hours are already fairly arbitrary where
| I live. The only places observing "standard" hours seem to be
| banks and even many of those stay open later in the evening
| these days. Meanwhile the schools do everything based on
| juggling a limited number of busses meaning that start and
| end times are staggered over a period of 3+ hours. You see
| evidence of this in traffic patterns as well. It starts early
| with the trades and runs well into the late morning due
| (AFAIK) to tech.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| Reminder that a few hundred years ago when clocks were oddities
| we didn't have to deal with any of this madness because everybody
| used True Solar Time as a sundial would read it. What time do
| kids go to school? After the sun rises. Simple. Now that we have
| clocks it suddenly becomes difficult to schedule simple things
| like sending kids to school in sunlight.
| hatthew wrote:
| While true, I'm not sure what your point is? Centuries ago,
| everyone got up at sunrise to tend to the farm because the farm
| needed tending at sunrise. These days, organizations like
| schools and grocery stores need to coordinate with hundreds to
| thousands of people daily, and "angle of sun in the sky" is
| nowhere near precise enough. Let alone phone calls and instant
| messages that travel across many timezones.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| I'm merely saying that the mass adoption of clock time for
| planning daily routines was an industrialist conspiracy to
| get people working when by natural right they should be
| sleeping.
|
| We could easily have software presenting time to us as true
| solar time. We're not limited to gears and levers anymore,
| our "clocks" now have GPS and can trivially calculate solar
| time with that. Doing this one off is easy. The problem is
| society at large still trying to make plans like when to
| start work shifts or school hours based on a system of time
| that flies wildly out of synch with Earth's natural rhythms
| throughout the year.
|
| Massive self-own for humanity.
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| I think point is that now we have technology that is super
| adaptive to local longitude while changing timezone in all of
| worlds software is super difficult.
| walthamstow wrote:
| Once we invented the railway we quickly realised that Oxford
| Time and London Time being 6 minutes out was not helpful. That
| was 180 years ago.
| imagetic wrote:
| I am so jealous. I hope the entire West Coast can follow this
| example.
| darknavi wrote:
| Indeed. Very much hoping WA hops on board. I know we stalled
| after 2019 but I wish we'd just hop on board.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| WA didn't stall, it's not within WA's jurisdiction (unless it
| wants to go against the federal government). Also WA isn't
| going to do it, and shouldn't do it, unless California does.
| cf100clunk wrote:
| Not all of British Columbia can make the change. BC's northeast
| and much of the Columbia-Kootenays are presently on Mountain
| time, which means that the Province of Alberta holds the choice
| of when/whether their own and those BC areas go to a permanent
| time. Then AB would have to sync with Saskatchewan along their
| borders, but SK is already on a permanent time zone system.
| Decisions, decisions.
| glatisaint wrote:
| The northeast is already on permanent PDT.
| cf100clunk wrote:
| On further reading, the northeast of British Columbia is on
| permanent Mountain Standard Time, as seen here:
|
| https://www.timeanddate.com/time/zone/canada/chetwynd
|
| Parts of the Columbia-Kootenays change between Mountain
| Standard and Mountain Daylight time:
|
| https://www.timeanddate.com/time/zone/canada/cranbrook
|
| while the Town Of Creston is permanently on Mountain Standard
| Time.
| bena wrote:
| So they chose the wrong way. Nice.
| water-data-dude wrote:
| Everyone else is throwing in there 2C/, so here's my pet
| proposal.
|
| Here's the undeniable fact: everyone (ok, almost everyone, but
| it's a rounding error) hates the switchover in spring, when you
| have to get up an hour earlier. Conversely, everyone (or a rough
| approximation) likes the switchover in the fall, when we get to
| sleep in an extra hour. So why don't we just get rid of the
| switchover in the spring and get rid of the one in the fall?
| meatmanek wrote:
| I hate both. The time jump in fall means sunset starts
| happening depressingly early (almost exactly 5pm where I am,
| which means no sunlight after work).
| karlosvomacka wrote:
| that's a load of horseshit. everyone around me want's the
| daylight savings time, to have more light after work. nobody
| cares about mornings.
|
| > when you have to get up an hour earlier
|
| no you don't. it's weekend.
| ex-aws-dude wrote:
| I vote we sleep in an extra hour for BOTH time changes
|
| Now that's a win-win
| kshacker wrote:
| So maybe make the day a bit shorter, same 24 hours same 60
| minutes, just shorter by a few seconds, so that we can add an
| extra hour every quarter.
| __turbobrew__ wrote:
| Work/school days should just be shorter in the winter. We can
| easily leave work/school an hour earlier in the winter and
| nothing bad would happen.
| bluebarbet wrote:
| This question IMO reveals how the abstraction of numbers can
| imprison our minds.
|
| It literally makes no sense to say, "I prefer to have an extra
| hour in the evening" (the morning and evening will always have
| equal numbers of hours). Or "I hate it when it's dark at 5pm"
| (translation: "I hate when it's dark at 5 arbitrary periods after
| an arbitrary moment that may be hours either side of solar
| noon").
|
| My solution: pick the time peg closest to the "correct" one (i.e.
| standard time) and stick to it. People who want year-round
| "summer" evenings can continue to have them by the simple
| expedient of doing what DST forces them (and everyone else) to do
| already: get up earlier.
| sailingparrot wrote:
| > This question IMO reveals how the abstraction of numbers can
| imprison our minds.
|
| Is it the abstraction of number that imprison our mind or just
| the reality of having a job and other social constraint based
| on all of us agreeing on a time?
|
| When most people can't leave their job before 5pm, wether it's
| dark at 5 or 6 makes a huge difference.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| The social construct is moving later though. I guess this is
| because people's desire to sleep longer is making them move
| the social constraint of being at work later, while they stay
| up "partying" regardless of the social constraint.
| frotaur wrote:
| In a world where there isn't work schedule and in general the
| whole of society's schedule which works around the arbitrary
| time, I agree with you.
| bluebarbet wrote:
| Sure. But this argument is surely less powerful than it was
| back in the era of church bells and big clocks on factory
| walls and so on. We now have electronics that add a whole new
| layer of abstraction to our schedules, to the point that you
| can now miss a DST change if you're not paying attention. For
| many people (I'm one) this change is now just a useless
| irritation.
| lamontcg wrote:
| So adjust the work schedule.
|
| If people want more time in the evening, get up earlier and
| go to work and go home earlier.
|
| You can even shift school/work schedules throughout the year.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| The work schedule is adjusting all the time, and it moves
| in the opposite direction.
| dagss wrote:
| Changing the time (zone) IS changing the work schedule.
| That is essentially what a time change IS. In the most
| expedient way possible.
| gonzalohm wrote:
| It makes sense when schedules are fixed and time is the only
| thing we can change. I wouldn't mind switching to standard time
| if I can change my work schedule to have more light after work.
| I work from home, I don't care about not having light in the
| morning
| dagss wrote:
| It just happens that all recurring scheduled events we use in
| society is encoded to happen at "$globalDailyOffset +
| $eventTime".
|
| Then a democratic decision was made to change
| $globalDailyOffset, that being the most expedient way to change
| 100000 calendar entries at once.
|
| Everyone is ofc still free to change $eventTime to compensate
| should if they want to and have the mandate.
|
| I don't see the mind prison...
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| what does "daylight time" mean?
|
| is it summer time or winter time?
| deathanatos wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time
|
| Probably, "summer time"; it means the +n hour change in offset
| (usually +1h) that some timezones jump into in the spring, and
| remove in the fall.
|
| This zone is making DST "permanent" (subject to future
| legislation).
| sharkjacobs wrote:
| I'll genuinely miss it getting dark at 4PM. Winter won't be the
| same.
| tsoukase wrote:
| A few years ago I was against changing the time but now I tend to
| even suggest a full two hour change! In the developed northern
| hemisphere the summer/winter daylight difference is huge (about 2
| hours in the morning and 2 in the night) with a short time of
| equal length. Maximizing sunlight exposure while the people are
| outside is vital, mainly for psychological purposes. That means
| let the light begin at about 7-8 all year long and let summer
| afternoon extend as much as possible. No kid leaves home before 8
| and the 6-in-the-morning drivers will pay attention all year long
| and not only during the winter. But all types of people will
| enjoy the long summer afternoons.
| hshdhdhj4444 wrote:
| Ultimately the arguments between whether one should pick daylight
| or standard times are a red herring.
|
| The benefits of one over the other usually balance out and in
| either case are insignificant compared to the problems caused by
| changing time zones twice a year.
|
| Changing time zones is directly linked with all sorts of health
| issues, deaths, car crashes, etc.
| francislavoie wrote:
| Changing timezones suck, but sunset happening at 4:30pm before
| I leave work to go home massively contributes to winter
| depression. It's like "well that was a tiring day" and then
| instantly served with _darkness_. It sucks. If you get at least
| SOME light on the way home, it's a bit of a bright spot in the
| day, especially if the sunset is particularly pretty that day,
| as it often happens to be in Canadian winters. So I am
| extremely happy to see they chose the correct option for mental
| health of Canadians in the winter, and I really hope the rest
| of the provinces follow suit.
| ethersteeds wrote:
| I went looking for a visualization tool to help get a sense of
| what this change means experientially. Found this:
|
| https://savestandardtime.com/chart/?city=6173331&clock=pdst
| kwar13 wrote:
| FInally!
| cameldrv wrote:
| Especially living that far north, they're going to find out next
| winter why we do the whole DST thing. It seems to be something
| like the Measles vaccine where you just have to have a big
| outbreak every once in a while so that the cultural memory is
| refreshed.
| anal_reactor wrote:
| Most people agree that changing the clock twice a year is silly,
| for obvious reasons. Still, there's a small minority that thinks
| that the existing system is good, for obvious reasons. Among
| those who want to abolish time zone change, there's roughly 50/50
| split between those who prefer permanent summer time for obvious
| reasons, and those who prefer permanent winter time for obvious
| reasons. There are a few more exotic ideas floating around - many
| of which are obviously better than any of mainstream ones, but
| they unfortunately have a low chance of being adopted.
|
| The end result is probably going to be more and more fracture on
| local level, as smal units of administration adopt their favorite
| solutions. This is obviously bad for doing business between units
| of administration, and obviously good for circadian rhythms of
| the people living within given unit. One thing obviously has more
| importance than the other.
| userbinator wrote:
| It's worth noting that in China, where the whole country is on a
| single timezone (which is roughly solar time in the eastern part,
| but far from it in the western part), places in the west simply
| have a different notion of time.
| Lammy wrote:
| > China, where the whole country is on a single timezone
|
| Relevant Negativland?
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDmWYVdN8ug
| VladVladikoff wrote:
| How exactly do I fix the backend after this? Will a newer version
| of php or nodeJS have the correct handling of these timezone
| changes? I've been wondering about this for a while but can't
| find an answer when googling.
| physicles wrote:
| Not sure why you're getting downvoted. When I read the
| headline, my first thought was "how are they going to update
| the tz database on all Linuxes in the world in time?" I expect
| some confusion on November 1.
|
| Here's the thread on IANA time zone mailing list where this is
| being discussed:
| https://lists.iana.org/hyperkitty/list/tz@iana.org/thread/66...
|
| BC should've timed this better. They just released 2026a.
|
| In the future, you can check if your database has been updated
| with this: (it should show no transition in November):
| zdump -v America/Vancouver | grep 2026
| ireflect wrote:
| The new rules will be incorporated into tzdata, which is used
| for various operating systems, software libraries, etc.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tz_database
| Groxx wrote:
| This will never not feel insane to me, it's just because no one
| wants to say "move classes and work an hour later on [x date]".
| Somehow changing noon away from _noon_ is a better answer.
| bethekidyouwant wrote:
| DST is move everything an hour earlier. Work starts at 8am
| instead of 9.
| physicles wrote:
| Here's the IANA time zone mailing list thread where this is being
| discussed:
|
| https://lists.iana.org/hyperkitty/list/tz@iana.org/thread/66...
|
| Bad timing on BC's part. They just tagged release 2026a today.
| nneonneo wrote:
| Eh, they're still keeping the impending switch _to_ PDT, just
| ditching the future switch back to PST (and all future
| changes). That should give around 7-8 months for a new timezone
| file update to percolate.
| hbjkhgkytfkytv wrote:
| This is the best possible choice. I hope everywhere follows suit.
| EchoReflection wrote:
| tangentially related, Dr. Andrew Huberman shared a video in which
| he asserts that exposing one's eyes to sunlight very soon after
| waking is "good for your brain" (essentially):
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2aWYjSA1Jc
|
| https://grok.com/share/c2hhcmQtMi1jb3B5_f52a6bb5-dc0d-4a3a-8...
|
| Multiple peer-reviewed studies and analyses indicate an increase
| in traffic accidents--particularly fatal ones--following the
| spring transition to DST. This is often attributed to acute sleep
| deprivation (losing one hour of sleep), circadian rhythm
| disruption, and altered light conditions during peak commuting
| hours, which can impair alertness, reaction times, and
| visibility. Key findings include:
|
| A large-scale U.S. study analyzing over 732,000 fatal motor
| vehicle accidents from 1996 to 2017 (published in Current
| Biology, 2020) reported a consistent 6% increase in fatal crash
| risk during the workweek immediately following the spring DST
| transition, equating to approximately 28 additional deaths
| annually in the U.S. The effect was more pronounced in western
| regions of time zones and persisted into afternoon hours despite
| longer evening daylight. Other research has documented short-term
| spikes, such as increases of 16% on the first day and 12% on the
| second day after the spring change in some analyses, or broader
| elevations in fatal crashes linked to the "DST effect."
| Systematic reviews and meta-analyses confirm short-term
| elevations in collision risk post-spring transition in many
| (though not all) contexts, with some evidence of higher fatal
| accident rates in the U.S. specifically.
|
| The fall transition back to Standard Time shows more mixed or
| opposite patterns: some studies report small increases in certain
| crash types (e.g., due to darker evening commutes increasing
| pedestrian or deer-vehicle collisions), while others note
| decreases in vehicle-occupant fatalities or no net increase
| overall. A 2017 systematic review of road traffic collision risk
| found inconsistent short-term effects across studies (some
| showing increases, decreases, or no change), but long-term
| analyses often suggested a net safety benefit from DST periods
| due to evening light. Recent Insurance Institute for Highway
| Safety (IIHS) research (covering 2010-2019 U.S. data) indicated
| that spring DST increases fatal motor-vehicle occupant crashes
| (+12% in the following five weeks) but decreases fatal
| pedestrian/bicyclist crashes (-24%), resulting in a near-neutral
| net effect on total fatal crashes (slight increase in occupant
| deaths offset by fewer pedestrian/cyclist deaths). In summary,
| your memory is correct in that empirical data--particularly from
| U.S.-based studies--support an increase in traffic accident
| frequency (especially fatal crashes) associated with Daylight
| Saving Time variations, most reliably in the immediate aftermath
| of the spring transition due to sleep loss and misalignment.
| However, effects are not uniform across all studies, regions, or
| crash types, and some research highlights trade-offs (e.g.,
| benefits to pedestrians from evening light). Debates continue
| regarding permanent DST, permanent Standard Time, or abolition of
| changes altogether, with organizations like the American Academy
| of Sleep Medicine favoring permanent Standard Time to minimize
| disruptions.
| tripdout wrote:
| What is daylight time - daylight savings? If so, I'm all for
| this. Dark in the mornings, more sun in the evenings, win-win.
| [deleted]
| shmerl wrote:
| In US this effort is still dragging its feet.
| kshacker wrote:
| maybe this prods either the congress to allow permanent
| daylight savings or the western states to just move to standard
| time. but no, they will drag their feet.
|
| what we need is some kind of critical mass which finally makes
| them act. Maybe a few more canadian provinces although it
| appears ontario is harder since they made a pact with Quebec
| and New York. But we need some more, maybe one major US state
| to break free and go to standard time.
| protocolture wrote:
| Buying stocks in curtain manufacturers and cow sunscreen
| retailers.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| The tzdata database is a modern miracle.
| globular-toast wrote:
| Lame. I'm convinced that people think DST actually creates more
| daylight. If people want more daylight, leave work earlier. Work
| less. Most of your jobs don't matter anyway. For people who have
| jobs that do matter, like teachers, nurses etc. the choice
| between 0 or +1 hardly makes a difference. Should have just gone
| with 0.
| arcadianalpaca wrote:
| The European Parliament voted to end clock changes in 2019 [1]
| but it got stuck and nothing happened. Meanwhile, BC just goes
| ahead and does it. I suppose one can still dream... :)
|
| [1] https://www.timeanddate.com/news/time/end-clock-changes-
| euro...
| qalmakka wrote:
| Unfortunately two very big things happened afterwards:
|
| 1. Covid, which caused a dramatic shift in the EU focus and
| required the Commission to permanently take on lots of extra
| responsibilities (debt, shared procurement of medical goods and
| vaccines, way more international recognition/influence, etc)
|
| 2. Brexit: Ireland has to follow whatever Northern Ireland
| does. Northern Ireland's Unionists will never tolerate being in
| a different timezone than London, and Farage and his cronies in
| the UK will never tolerate having to swallow down an EU
| directive for ideological reasons. BoJo was already saying back
| in '19 that the UK was going to keep daylight savings only to
| spite the EU. This means that Ireland will almost 100% veto any
| changes to DST unless London is on board with them.
|
| There's also an underlying internal divergence about what
| abolishing DST should look like. While nobody in Europe likes
| daylight savings (the material act of switching), Southern and
| Northern Europe have a very different opinion about which
| timezone to keep. Right now basically 70% of the EU is in
| CET/CEST, so trade and business are frictionless - from the tip
| of Sweden down to Malta, from Galicia to the Suwalki Gap - all
| year round.
|
| The issue now is that Northern Europeans generally don't give a
| fuck about more daylight in the summer - they already have a
| humongous amount of daylight during the night. What they'd like
| to do is to keep "natural" time all year around, because summer
| time would cause the sun to rise extremely late in winter.
| They'd like CET to become the new central European standard.
|
| On the contrary, in Southern Europe people don't really care
| that much about sun rising at 7 or 8 in winter but really love
| the extra hour of sun on summer evenings. This means keeping
| CEST all year round.
|
| Given that having a timezone between Southern Germany and
| Austria/Northern Italy or between the Rhineland and France is
| objectively terrible for the EU economy, nobody is going to
| propose this ever again unfortunately. I think we're stuck with
| DST forever unless someone caves - most likely the Nordics.
| Having basically all of Europe on a single timezone is just too
| convenient, that's why nobody went back to their previous
| timezones after Hitler and Franco fucked them up in the '40s
| and why China is still on Beijing time
| dnpls wrote:
| When, Europe, when????? Sick and tired of these switches...
| lxgr wrote:
| Permanent standard time would have made more sense to me, but I
| get it - humans can't possibly influence fundamental natural
| forces such as school starting times, TV schedules, museum
| opening hours etc.
| novia wrote:
| Compromise solution: In the spring, just lose the hour during the
| workday at 3pm instead of in the middle of the night. Designate
| that missing hour a holiday so employees still have to get paid
| for it. All the complaints about switching back and forth would
| go away.
| bsza wrote:
| Compromise between what? Disrupting people's sleep schedules
| and not disrupting people's sleep schedules?
| novia wrote:
| compromise between observing the daylight saving time switch
| and not observing it. There are benefits to switching twice a
| year (sunlight in the morning during the winter when you're
| supposed to be getting up for work, or when kids are getting
| on the school bus) (sunlight later into the evening during
| the summer so you can go play soccer after work if you want
| to) and you lose things if you decide to stick with just one
| wink wrote:
| Ignoring the fact itself, doing this in a single province and not
| the whole country is the really wild thing for me (as a
| European). I have opinions about DST but having it different per
| German state sounds much more horrible than anything we have now,
| no matter how complicated the rules are.
| blululu wrote:
| Less of a problem in a county that is more or less laid out
| East to West with massive 500 mile wide provinces. British
| Columbia deciding to adopt Mountain Standard Time is more or
| less equivalent to Portugal using Berlin time.
| wink wrote:
| I'm thinking more 'companies in the same country working
| together' - physical distance does not really matter, imho.
| Many countries span 1000km and unless traveling in person you
| don't care if it's east-west or north-south. Coordinating
| meetings and opening times is different.
| 9rx wrote:
| Canadian provinces are structurally more like countries within
| the EU than states within Germany. The EU operates with more
| than one timezone.
| wink wrote:
| Yes, but my experience tells me that you'll interact (on a
| level where timezones matter) much more with people in your
| country than in others - and this has nothing to do with
| small states vs big provinces, I don't know enough about
| Canada if every big company has offices in Vancouver an
| Toronto (or Ottawa, Montreal) that work closely together.
| dubcanada wrote:
| Sadly that is not really true in Canada. Most companies in
| Canada only really work with a small group of close
| provinces.
|
| BC/Alberta
|
| Sackatchewan/Manitoba
|
| Ontario/Quebec
|
| Quebec/New Brunswick
|
| Nova Scotia/PEI/NFLD/New Brunswick
|
| etc
|
| The big companies have offices in each, but they'll usually
| break them down even further into eastern, central, western
| regions. And they'll largely never talk to eachother.
| 9rx wrote:
| Not really. That might change due to what is going on in
| the world, which is now seeing provinces having to become
| serious about expanding into new markets, but in the past
| sharing timezones with the USA has been much more important
| for the sake of industry. Again, things are now starting to
| change, but historically the provinces haven't even had
| free trade between themselves -- despite having free trade
| agreements with the USA. That's how much they have worked
| together.
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| For your entertainment, look up
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Arizona#Daylight_savin...
|
| Arizona, unlike the rest of the US, does not observe Daylight
| Savings Time (good!). However the Navajo Nation, whose
| territory is largely in Arizona, does. However the Hopi
| Reservation, which is inside the Navajo Nation territory inside
| Arizona, does not.
|
| Let me rephrase that:
|
| - The USA does DST
|
| - Arizona (in the USA) _does not_ do DST
|
| - Navajo Nation (in Arizona) does do DST
|
| - Hopi Reservation (in Navajo Nation) _does not_ do DST
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I wonder how mobile network operators (the modern authorities
| of time) deal with this situation.
| wink wrote:
| I get your point and it's certainly and interesting one. But
| my point was less "oh my, this is unbelievable" but more a
| question of how much impact it has on everyday life. Again
| (like in the other thread) quoting Wikipeda, I see ~10k in
| the Hopi Reservation and 165k in the Navajo Nation, that's
| not a lot of people.
|
| But of course your point with Arizona stands and I'm
| wondering if people do mind. Glancing at the map, the only
| major city just at the border is Las Vegas and I don't assume
| a lot of cross-border commutes there.
| eigenspace wrote:
| Well, Canada is a VERY wide country. We have 4.5 time zones
| across the country, and BC itself is as wide as Germany.
|
| Perhaps even more surprising for you maybe is that even within
| a Canadian province, its not just one time zone. There are
| several regions along the border between BC and Alberta that
| already eliminated daylight savings time years and years ago,
| so they were on a different time zone for half the year.
|
| E.g. the Peace River Region
| wink wrote:
| I know it's big (I've just not seen it myself), but also it's
| only 5m people in BC if I can believe Wikipedia. That's like
| a big city. Maybe that actually makes it less of a problem
| though, we simply don't know :)
| dubcanada wrote:
| About 90% of BC is nothing but wildlife and trees. You
| can't really compare it to Germany in any capacity, it
| doesn't work. Canada has land with literally 0 people on it
| bigger then the entirely of Germany. The vastness of Canada
| cannot be understated. Canada is almost 10mil km2, Germany
| is 350k km2.
|
| Germany population is about 2x that of Canada.
| eigenspace wrote:
| I think if Canada was just two or maybe even three BCs
| wide, we probably would have settled on just one timezone
| for the whole country, but the country is so wide that the
| sun today will set 4 hours and 6 minutes later in Halifax
| than it will in Vancouver, we just fundamentally do need
| timezones inside the country, otherwise it'd be a total
| mess.
|
| Once you start putting timezones inside a country, the
| provincial borders start to become pretty natural places to
| put timezones.
|
| And yes, you are correct that the small population makes it
| easier. Or rather, it's less about the small population,
| and more about the spikiness of the population. Practically
| Nobody lives anywhere near the border between BC and
| Alberta, it's a gigantic mountainous national park the size
| of a medium-sized European country. Almost everyone in BC
| lives in Vancouver, and almost everyone in Alberta lives in
| Calgary or Edmonton. When I lived in Edmonton, it'd usually
| take me about 12 hours to drive to visit my parents near
| Vancouver, and if I was in Calgary it'd take around 10 or
| 11 hours. So putting a timezone change at the halfway mark
| is pretty much irrelevant.
|
| The strong interconnections and vibrant border regions of
| European countries are the main reason so much of the EU is
| in one timezone. If it weren't for that, it'd probably make
| sense to put a timezone border between Germany and Benelux
| / France, but that'd be too annoying for everyone, so
| people just put up with a wide timezone. e.g. this map
| gives a good idea of where the 'natural' timezone
| boundaries are, and lets you compare against what people
| decided on based on political / economic realities.
| madcaptenor wrote:
| The US is sort of intermediate here. In a few cases state
| borders are time zones borders, but in practice they're
| determined by which big city people are most integrated
| with and that often oesn't line up well with state
| borders. For example the bit of Indiana that's closest to
| Chicago is on Chicago time.
| zjaffee wrote:
| If there's a single section of the entire world where daylight
| savings makes the most, it's above and below the 45th parallel.
| This means the earliest sunrise is 9am in the winter what a
| horrible idea just to give people a little bit more sunlight when
| they'd still be out at work anyways.
| timonoko wrote:
| I suggest installing Sun Dial on youres smartwatch. Especially
| when daytime is 4 hours, it somewhat aleviates the "eternal
| darkness" brain fuzz. I try to be awake on those few hours, and
| do not care about those other dials.
|
| There is Sun Dial right there on Zepp Watchmaker on "editable
| components". From 9 to 15 seems to best amplitude as it reflects
| the sun's movement on the skies.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| About fucking time! The EU has been edging us all since 2019 on
| ending daylight savings, and it seems to have stalled yet
| again...
| kazinator wrote:
| > _Residents will have eight months to prepare for Nov. 1, 2026,
| when the clocks would have been turned back one hour, but will
| now remain the same._
|
| That's an odd read. Residents have eight months to prepare for an
| event already known to be nonexistent: a non-happening.
| zoogeny wrote:
| I think this means preparing for BC to go out of sync with the
| US states we normally sync to (Washington, Oregon, California).
|
| However, there is some hope I've heard expressed that this may
| push one or more of those states to make the switch as well.
| Unlikely, but hey, a lot can happen in eight months (as this
| year is already proving).
| dragonwriter wrote:
| US states cannot, under current federal law, go permanent
| daylight time (they can go permanent standard time, though),
| and they can't unilaterally make the latter have the same
| effect as the former by simultaneously switching time zones
| because they can't switch timezones without approval of the
| federal Department of Transportation. I don't see the current
| federal government making special accommodation for
| California, Oregon, or Washington on, well, anything in the
| next eight months, so...
| zoogeny wrote:
| I actually agree on how unlikely it is but the wildcard is
| Trump. I mean, he is the kind of guy who just goes with his
| gut and he has already publicly supported getting rid of
| the time change, calling it a "50-50 issue" (on which to go
| with, standard or savings).
|
| The worse case is he pushes a federal change to standard
| time, in which case I suspect BC would have to go along.
| kazinator wrote:
| Fellow Vancouverites: what ... fall back ... strategy are you
| planning on executing, as an alternative? :)
| noduerme wrote:
| Ahhhhh I've been waiting for Oregon to do this for years. The
| idea that driving north in winter would make the sun set an hour
| later is maddening.
| Ekaros wrote:
| I think regular time is always the correct option.
|
| If you want to move work start time. Regulate that. Schools,
| government institutions and public transport can all be directed.
| The rest will likely follow on recommendation. See for period of
| time and allow those that want to re-adjust again for their
| needs.
| incomingpain wrote:
| Finally a win for BC, they really really needed it.
| beepdyboop wrote:
| As a dev, I think the entire world should just adopt UTC
| ex-aws-dude wrote:
| That would be confusing in other ways though, especially
| traveling
|
| In one country lunch is at 1200 another country lunch is at
| 0500
| bloak wrote:
| These discussions are always very annoying. People tend to state
| their preferences without mentioning their latitude, their
| longitude, or their current time zone.
|
| Anyway, here are my preferences: GB should switch to UTC+0 all
| year. UTC+1 all year was tried (1968-1971) and was very unpopular
| in Scotland. School hours are roughly 09:00 till 15:00 and they
| only get about 6 hours of sunlight in winter up north so local
| noon has to be at around 12:00. Also, for political reasons
| relating to Northern Ireland, it is very helpful for GB and
| Ireland to have the same time. So UTC+0 it is.
|
| Seasonal changes in school hours is a theoretical possibility,
| but parents of schoolchildren have a hard enough time as it is
| and lots of other things are linked to school hours. It would be
| much easier for everyone else to make seasonal changes to their
| timetables, like just get up an hour earlier if you want to.
| Nobody's stopping you.
| Pirate-of-SV wrote:
| What is your latitude, longitude, current time zone?
| bloak wrote:
| Fair question, I suppose. I'm in England. It's a small
| country so that's sufficient precision!
| prh8 wrote:
| Fwiw I thought it was pretty self evident in your OP, and
| additionally that England is small enough to be a
| sufficient answer
| steezeburger wrote:
| I couldn't believe it wasn't mentioned after that intro haha
| stetrain wrote:
| > GB should switch to UTC+0 all year. UTC+1 all year was tried
| (1968-1971) and was very unpopular in Scotland. School hours
| are roughly 09:00 till 15:00 and they only get about 6 hours of
| sunlight in winter up north so local noon has to be at around
| 12:00.
|
| Couldn't you adjust the school schedule by an hour to achieve
| the same effect?
| bloak wrote:
| You mean switch to UTC+1 all year while doing +1 on the
| timetables of all schools and anything else that might
| directly or indirectly depend on them: childcare for younger
| children, working hours of teachers and parents, sports
| activities, public transport, ...? Compared to switching to
| UTC+0 all year and leaving the timetables as they are, the
| disadvantages would seem to greatly outweigh the advantages.
|
| The other confusing thing about this discussion is that when
| you include timetable changes there are quite a lot of
| options and it's not always obvious which alternative people
| are comparing an option against. To be honest, the current
| system with clock changes isn't the worst possible option.
| Perhaps it's the second best.
| stetrain wrote:
| Sure, my point is just that all of those schedules are
| arbitrary. We made them all up.
|
| One way might require less rescheduling, and that's valid,
| but these discussions out in the world tend to go to "but
| everyone does X at Y time and it will be dark out!" as
| though this isn't all made up and changeable.
|
| I also think that learnings from previous attempts decades
| ago may not apply as strongly today. In the US at least I
| think people's schedules tend to be much less fixed on the
| rigid 8am/9am to 5pm in-office schedule than they were 10
| or 20 years ago. The number of people out driving at all
| hours of the day all week speaks to that.
|
| The world used to revolve around everyone being in-office
| next to their phone during defined expected business hours.
| Today my mortgage broker is texting me from a coffee shop.
| shikon7 wrote:
| Maybe you could use different timetables in summer and
| winter, so that only the relevant part of activities is
| affected, not everything indiscriminately. This would also
| make it possible to cater to local needs much better
| instead of simply fixing school hours from 9 to 15 and
| adjusting the clock that it falls into daylight.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| Then local businesses would have to shift their hours to
| support parents with kids. And before you know it, you've
| effectively shifted everyone's clock anyway.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| I think part of why people's preferences get so different in
| different sides of a timezone is as much because the hour-wide
| timezone is too wide. If you asked people to use a thirty-
| minute timezone or fifteen-minute timezone agreement would be a
| lot easier, and a lot easier to match local noon to timezone
| noon for the most people covered.
|
| Of course, there would be just as many arguments against that
| because people would hate having to learn that many timezones
| and do that much more timezone math. We finally have the
| technology to make that easy for a lot of people (phone clocks
| auto-sync to local time, for instance; most schedules are
| posted on websites and have computers involved; fewer analog
| clocks in general remain in the world).
| hnlmorg wrote:
| I do like your optimism but most of modern communication
| isn't done via meeting invites from Google / MS Office.
|
| I might say to someone on Slack: are you free at 14:00 UK
| time? Or organise a time on a Zoom call.
|
| Because so much of modern technology is already soulless, I'd
| hate to see a future where the only practical way to organise
| some time with someone becomes via business productivity
| suites.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| In Discord you have Time tags for things like like "Are you
| free at <t:unixtimestamp>?". There's a well known tool
| called Hammertime [1] to make it easy to create those tags
| and copy/paste them into place.
|
| (I miss Hammertime sometimes daily when using Slack at
| work.)
|
| We could standardize such tools. We could make them easier
| to use like <mylocaltime:14:00> or <mylocaltime:3/2 2pm>.
| We have the technology (decades of date parsing experience
| and date math libraries).
|
| Will we? Probably not. Unless we did something wild like
| move to 15-minute timezones and force ourselves to.
|
| [1] https://hammertime.cyou
| hnlmorg wrote:
| That's handy. But who's going to teach the other 98% of
| the worlds population who don't use Discord and who
| aren't good with technology like us?
| bfmalky wrote:
| Or, how about we alter the clocks by +/- an hour twice a year
| to maximise the amount of useful daylight? Get the best of both
| worlds.
| grogenaut wrote:
| Why don't we just adjust the clocks by a minute a day
| constantly all year? They're all digital now.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| That's not even remotely true. Plenty of people still wear
| analogue wrist watches (eg for fashion). Then there's old
| clocks in buildings like town halls. And it's still
| reasonably common for people to hang analogue clocks in
| homes like one might a painting.
|
| And even many digital clocks are still dumb devices that
| need to be manually synced. Such as most kitchen appliance
| clocks.
| jdr23bc wrote:
| Chances are it will get repealed because it isn't standard time.
|
| Examples of failed permanent daylight switches:
|
| - USA 70s
|
| - Russia 2010s
|
| - UK 70s
|
| The only examples of failed switches to permanent standard time
| are Egypt and Jordan.
|
| There are 12 prominent examples with permanent standard time,
| including most of Mexico, Argentina, Russia, and parts of
| Australia.
|
| Only the Yukon, Turkey, Jordan, Morocco, and Syria are on
| permanent daylight time.
|
| DST is popular because people associate it with summer, so it is
| chosen as the permanent time. Then the population experiences
| reality of no sunshine when they get up in the winter and hate
| it.
| orloffm wrote:
| It didn't fail in Russia, it's permanent day time there and no
| one complains at all. The only problem is +1 hour difference
| with Europe during Winter.
| robinson7d wrote:
| It's not just because it's associated with summer, quite the
| opposite: many of us just feel that sunset 30 minutes after
| work in the winter will be less depressing than the sun setting
| while we're in the office. And then even more so during the
| days where it moves from 5:30 to 6:30, that's enough to
| actually get out and do an activity.
|
| I get that there are good reasons for morning light too, I'm
| just saying that I don't think it's just an association with
| summer.
| winddude wrote:
| And we're stoked!
| stronglikedan wrote:
| lucky mfers
| bethekidyouwant wrote:
| Instead of starting work at 8 AM we just moved the sun?
| bgnn wrote:
| Good to see this is getting more common!
|
| Changing the time every year cause a lot of accidents involving
| wildlife. Wild animals learn human activity patterns and avoid
| the roads during our active hours. When we shift the time we
| start they get caught off guard and a lot of accidents happen. It
| takes roughly 2 weeks of adjustment apparently.
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