Looking at the number of bills introduced right at the start of the new congress I'm under the impression that many of these are introduced only so the congressperson can go back and say "I introduced a bill to do ____" and brag about it.
It would be interesting to data mine these and see how effective certain legislators are at just introducing bills compared to actually getting them passed.
This is the wrong direction, we should be on standard time year round! Daylight saving time gives you more daylight during the hours people are awake, but only because it forces everyone to wake up earlier!
We already have major issues with e.g. making teenagers wake up earlier than most of their bodies are tuned for at that age. How much worse is it going to be if they have to get up an hour earlier in the winter? (Remember: what our bodies consider "early" is dependent on when the sun rises, and not the numbers we put on our clocks.)
And just to top it off, you'll be forcing a lot of kids to walk to school in the dark.
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Edit: To be clear, it's not just children!
On weekends and holidays when people don't have to work, how much of the population do you think wakes up right when the sun rises, in order to maximize their daylight? I certainly don't have any data on this, but I would guess a large majority take the opportunity to sleep in.
Having extra daylight seems really nice at first, and it is. Unfortunately, shifting clocks doesn't actually create more sun, it just creates a societal mandate. My view is that we already start our workdays too early, particularly when you take commute times into account.
Honestly, for teenagers it's a separate issue, which should be fixed simply by changing the start times for high schools to be a couple of hours later. It shouldn't be confused with the DST issue.
And if we can get DST all year round (which I'm personally all-for), it could help be the impetus to finally shift high school times.
The fact of the matter is, our sleep schedules are determined largely by our school/work schedules. Simply from the popularity of DST in the summer, it seems clear that people do prefer for society to coordinate to wake up an hour earlier in order to have an extra hour of daylight at the end of the day.
Here in the northeast, it's horrible in the winter when it's dark by 4:30 pm. For a lot of people, it's a huge life upgrade to change that to 5:30 pm.
> Here in the northeast, it's horrible in the winter when it's dark by 4:30 pm. For a lot of people, it's a huge life upgrade to change that to 5:30 pm.
Just to be clear, I live in New York City. It gets dark at 4:30 this time of year. I know how frustrating that is.
But I also think that if this bill passed, most would discover that getting up an hour earlier in the morning is clearly worse. Others have posted some great studies in this thread, but for me, the clearest evidence is still that on days when people have the ability to sleep later, that's what they do. We stay up late on Friday evenings and sleep in late on Saturday mornings, without a care for all of the wasted Saturday daylight.
The numbers on a clock are arbitrary—you can change them, but all you're really changing are the societal commitments for which people are obligated to wake up. Our society is already too optimized for early risers, and late risers are paying the price. I don't think we should make the problem even worse just so we can shift around a few hours of sunlight.
> This is the wrong direction, we should be on standard time year round
FFS, this is why we have to change clocks twice a year. It’s like the left or right side of the road debate. Which side you drive on doesn’t matter. Agreement is what matters.
We don’t have agreement on time because everyone has their pet argument for why this or that time standard has some marginal benefit for a given slice of the population. Meanwhile, we can all agree on that those marginal benefits pale in comparison to the measured harms of changing clocks twice a year.
We have a bill. It’s taken work. The choice isn’t daylight time or standard time. It’s this bill gets through the House (and is likely ignored by the Senate) or we punt the issue for a generation. Arguing we picked the wrong side of the coin is a point for the latter.
(If you prefer kids walking to school in the light, just change the school hours.)
I think there is a difference between “I like the extra hour of sunlight after work” and “there are serious health issues related to the predicted sleep deprivation of permanent DST”.
One is a pet argument, and the other is a health concern. And this could be resolved simply by asking public health experts to do the relevant studies.
My concern is that is not going to happen, or—more likely—public health experts will issue a recommendation which will be ignored by the the politicians. The reasoning is that people’s pet argument of extra daylight hour is convincing enough.
Also note that this pet argument ignores the majority of the working class who will most likely be working this extra hour in the service industry.
> FFS, this is why we have to change clocks twice a year. It’s like the left or right side of the road debate. Which side you drive on doesn’t matter. Agreement is what matters.
If my options are to either switch clocks twice a year, or to be at work by the equivalent of 8 am in the winter, I'd much rather switch clocks.
It's not even close, either. I'm scared of these permanent DST bills.
>We don’t have agreement on time because everyone has their pet argument for why this or that time standard has some marginal benefit for a given slice of the population. Meanwhile, we can all agree on that those marginal benefits pale in comparison to the measured harms of changing clocks twice a year.
I'm confused. You contradict yourself from one sentence to the next.
Everyone is different, but DST / summer time seems more natural for me. I prefer more daylight in the evenings. The dark days of standard time, like December through March, are particularly brutal.
Teenagers should start school later anyway. I think that is a different issue.
Even with daylight savings time they're still getting up "earlier than their bodies are tuned for"
And considering that they'd be getting hundreds of hours more daylight after their working day for the entirety of their adult lives it seems like a more than fair trade.
Teenagers are far more resilient than young kids when it comes to this kind of thing. Extending the portion of the year that parents can let younger kids recreate outdoors in daylight has far more societal benefit than whether a teenager is 10% more irritable. The teenager problem could also be solved by letting them go to school on their own and decoupling their school timing from adults work schedules.
> Extending the portion of the year that parents can let younger kids recreate outdoors in daylight has far more societal benefit.
Are you sure? Have you done the research? They had this discussion in Iceland recently and I think they found this point inconclusive. I think health officials still favored moving out of permanent DST into permanent standard because they know the health benefits of good sleeping, and they know that many children are sleep deprived.
People don't spend most of their lifetime as young teenagers. The majority of the US population are not young teenagers. It's imbalanced to make the entire country deal with a time change just for them.
Also, everything in your post would be addressed if school would simply start later, like at 9 or 10am.
If school starts later then that means work for adults has to start later too. Which means modifying public transportation schedules and business hours. What exactly is "simple" about any of this?
Another factor is that morning and evening commutes are quite different. The evening commute is more spread out over time.
In the morning, you have adults going to work, kids going to school, delivery trucks rolling out, people going to get supplies they will need for the day, people doing morning exercise, and so on. Sleep is a big synchronizer that tends to get most of us aligned at the start of the day.
By the evening rush, most of those people other than adults who went to work are already home. Also, the times people start the evening commute tends to vary more than the times they start the morning commute.
Add in to this that morning weather and evening weather are quite different. Mornings tend to be colder than evenings, as they are coming off the sunless night.
This means that hazardous driving, biking, and even walking conditions are more likely in the morning than the evening. This won't make a different in Florida (where the author of this bill is from), but it sure makes a difference when you get into the northern parts of the continental US.
Put this together and whenever you have the morning commute before the sun is up you are combining the most number of people, the greatest mixing of pedestrians and bicycles with cars, and the highest chance of bad conditions (icy roads and sidewalks, poor visibility).
When you have the evening commute after the sun has set, it sucks, but you have less traffic of all kinds and better road and weather conditions.
Thus, if you have to have one of the commutes outside of daylight, it is going to be better to have that be the evening commute.
> Remember: what our bodies consider "early" is dependent on when the sun rises, and not the numbers we put on our clocks.
I'm sure there's a contribution, but obviously the effect is small given that the length of the day varies by ~6 hours throughout the year, for pretty much all the US? And we all sit inside all day in artificial lighting anyway?
Kids don't give a shit about walking to school in the dark. I know, as someone who was recently a kid and resented winter "daylight wasting time", I would much rather have had more hours of daylight in the afternoon when I was finished with school and could actually do fun stuff outside, rather than useless daylight in the morning while I'm sitting on the bus or in a classroom at 7:30 AM. And as an adult I feel the same about work.
> Kids don't give a shit about walking to school in the dark. I know, as someone who was recently a kid and resented winter "daylight wasting time", I would much rather have had more hours of daylight in the afternoon when I was finished with school and could actually do fun stuff outside, rather than useless daylight in the morning while I'm sitting on the bus or in a classroom at 7:30 AM. And as an adult I feel the same about work.
I was actually thinking of "walking to school in the dark" as a safety issue. You and I probably live in safe communities, but not everyone does. And, sadly, the same communities that have more crime are frequently the ones less able to afford services like school buses.
But I also think a lot of kids and adults don't actually want what they think they do with regard to DST. Having more daylight in the evening seems appealing, and it's what I wanted when I was younger—but then I was in a situation where I had to get up an hour earlier in the winter. It's not fun.
You are right, kids don’t give a shit about walking to school in the dark. They don’t give a shit about eating tons of sugar either, it doesn’t mean either healthy though.
You have to be aware that there are social reasons for why people—including kids—stay up later. Moving the clock to a permanent DST might move social activities with it and ultimately cost a significant portion of the population a healthy sleep cycle.
Schools should start later. But those times don't exist in a vacuum—for obvious logistical reasons, you generally want the kids to be in school before the parents have to be at work.
Agreed. A recent study indicates that living on the Western end of a timezone decreases sleep by 19 minutes on average, with an accompanying host of negative health effects.
Permanent DST is the equivalent of shifting everyone one entire timezone west on the shortest days of the year.
Also, many of the US timezones are too far west to begin with. Indianapolis is on Eastern Time, but it is approximately where the middle of Central Time should be. Putting it on permanent DST will make noon 2 hours late.
The sun doesn't care what arbitrary numbers you assign to points in time.
Just change all of the school and office start times when you make the switch and you get the exact result you want. Numbers are arbitrary labels for points in time. You can just assign different labels.
What is lovely about this debate is that people who don't like getting up early think that DST gives them a magic extra hour of daylight, so they push hard for permanent DST. At the same time, they think that people advocating 8-4 working hours or earlier school hours are draconian ascetics. Yet what they get in both cases is exactly equivalent, other than which numeral you use when referring to the time.
Have you considered waking up an hour earlier? Unlike the reverse (where you have the start of the workday as a deadline), there's likely nothing to stop you from shifting your day to start and end an hour sooner!
I hate switching clocks, but I think I'd hate permanent DST even more. If I had a vote, I'd actually vote against this and at least keep standard time around for the winter.
> And just to top it off, you'll be forcing a lot of kids to walk to school in the dark.
That sounds like a problem of school starting too early.
Honestly, I like having sunlight after work, so I can do things out of doors like bouldering. I don't need sunlight in the morning when I'm commuting to an office with no windows, or even if I'm working from my home office.
> My view is that we already start our workdays too early, particularly when you take commute times into account.
Again, this just sounds like some people need to be accommodated for time shifting their work days. There are those of us who naturally wake up with the sunrise, even when we don't have to, and getting up when it's dark to get to work early is routine for us. Offsetting working shifts by an hour (or more) would also help reduce traffic congestion.
ETA: You sound like those people who insist that everyone has to work in an office building because otherwise they will be goofing off at home, neatly ignoring all the water cooler time wasters distracting everyone in the open office by talking about celebrities and sports.
Not everyone has children. Not everyone is the same.
It's problematic for one state to move by itself though. I live in NYC, so if New York adopted permanent standard time, we'd spend half the year in a different timezone than New Jersey. I don't think I'd be in favor of that, even though in aggregate I very much want year-round standard time.
Thank you. This is what's missing in the whole argument. They can already go back to standard...what Florida wants is the currently non-existent option to go full time DST. Most states want full time DST.
> what our bodies consider "early" is dependent on when the sun rises, and not the numbers we put on our clocks.
It's more of when we turn on the lights in the house. The lightbulb has messed with our sleep cycle for a long time, e.g. causing people to stay up later than they did in the days of kerosene lamps.
It depends on which edge of a timezone you live on. Standard time makes more sense for the eastern most edges of timezones and Daylight time makes more sense for the western most edges of timezones (and people towards the exact center of timezones distrust both because they both don't work correctly to the sun), because timezones are hour-wide. Going back to 15-minute wide timezones would be extraordinarily painful, of course, but as someone in a city that partly defines the western edge of a timezone, I do sometimes wonder what life would have been like when the city had a 45-minute offset from its eastern edge counterparts back before railways standardized on hour-wide timezones.
Geography definitely makes a difference, but I think that on average, society is currently optimized for early risers at the expense of late-risers. I've been trying to find this article all afternoon, and I finally remembered enough of the title: https://www.vox.com/2016/3/18/11255942/morning-people-evenin...
The article largely thinks increased schedule flexibility is the solution, but I don't think that's every going to be practical for many types of work. But, we can at least make sure we don't make our world even more lopsided.
It depends on where you are. For instance once could make the argument that a good chunk of the northeast should either be permanently EDT or Atlantic standard time. Meanwhile, for folks on the western edge of the eastern timezone that'd be a silly proposition
It does increase car crashes for teenagers. It seems like schools should move their start times to be a 1-2 hours later, while DST should be made year-round. How adults would then help their kids get ready for school before work though, I don't know.
With standard time, if children are participating in outdoor social activities (band, crew, etc.), those have to be moved to the morning, forcing them to wake up even earlier. Daylight saving allows them to do those after school.
I really like having sunlight after work, but as a teenager in high school, we had "zero hour" marching band practice before the sun rose, and over one hundred students had no problem making rehearsals.
I think making the argument that everyone should be forced to cater to a special interest group is not the way to go, and I strongly believe that school start times should be adjusted, and work shifts should be flexible too. Too much regimenting with a one size fits all approach is the problem, not DST
I disagree with this. The summer time is much, much better for my mental health. I am stuck working all day and the time of day when I want to and can enjoy daylight is after 5pm. Hence, the summer hours are much better.
But is that really daylight saving time though, or the fact that we just have more hours of daylight in the summer?
I can't speak for your psyche (and you may well be a naturally early riser), but we know that having to wake up earlier decreases a lot of people's sleep overall, and that is also not good for mental health.
Waking up "earlier" doesn't really mean anything because you'd also go to bed "earlier". Our bodies don't really time to the sun anymore since the invention of artificial light and blackout shades. It's a lot more dependent on when you turn off your screens and lights.
And kids have been going to school in the dark for a long time already. Talk to the Alaskans who go to school in the dark for a lot of the year. If anything, this would push people to move to a year round school schedule so we can take a longer winter break during the darkest part of the year.
> Our bodies don't really time to the sun anymore since the invention of artificial light and blackout shades
Is there any research that shows this? I’m not aware of any. In fact there are social reasons people might stay up late. It is a mistake to ignore that.
They had this discussion in Iceland recently (which is on permanent DST; and with heavy population centers way north of Alaskan population centers) and health officials were pretty keen on moving to standard time precisely because teenagers have a hard time waking up so often before sunrise. Yes a big part of the year will always be before sunrise, however on standard that part is shorter.
So because we _can_ disregard the sun, we should? I have lights in my home, but the sun still shines in the windows in the morning and on my head while I walk to work. I'd rather have sane policy than worry about always having a portable SAD light available in the winter mornings.
The problem with standard time year around is that in the more northern areas it'll be light at ~4:30AM in June. Maybe we could meet in the middle and compromise by 1/2 an hour?
Year round Standard Time sounds absolutely horrible. I would much rather prefer year round DST or just what we have now with clock shifting. I actually think what we have now isn't as bad as people make it out to be.
> I actually think what we have now isn't as bad as people make it out to be.
Out of curiosity, do you have children? I didn't think it was so bad until we started having kids in the family. They do not adjust well to time zone changes.
> We already have major issues with e.g. making teenagers wake up earlier than most of their bodies are tuned for at that age.
Forget the teenagers, standard time kills people. People are more tired in the afternoon and have more accidents if the sun is already down. Summer time actually saves lives.
I could just as easily argue that permanent DST kills people. People are sleep deprived, and stressed, and have higher rate of depression, etc.
I think these claims are best supported by public health experts that actually use studies to back up their claims. In fact we should ask public health experts if this move is cleaver instead of leaving it up to the politicians to decide what is best for us.
Is it? They did claim this back in the 60s, however the logic seemed a little handy to be believable.
Some armchair logic would say it is a mistake to ignore sleep-deprived workers when measuring what is “good for business”. It is also a mistake to ignore the health impact of teenagers that are forced to wake up before sunrise bigger part of the year now. My armchair logic says that you should expect a rise in depression, especially among teenagers. And that seems kind of bad for business, when workers have to deal with their teenage children being more depressed.
You are absolutely, 100% right about this. I am astronomically offended at the idea of "midday" meaning "an hour before the sun is at its highest". That's just wrong.
If we're doing away with DST, so be it. I mean, it'll be horrible in the winter when sunrise is at like 9AM (or in the summer when it sets at 8PM, depending on which option you choose), but I understand the arguments.
But if we get rid of it, permanent standard time is the only sane choice.
Solar noon is already far removed from 12-o-clock; up to 30 minutes in either direction for an average-sized timezone and even further for wide timezones like EST (solar noon is 12:50 in Boston in the summer). What matters much more than solar noon is sunrise and sunset; let's focus discussion on that.
I'm not a fan of the clock shifting twice a year but perhaps someone can explain why they'd make daylight savings permanent instead of just abolishing it?
Covid-19 has shown that stores/businesses are perfectly capable of adjusting their hours and people have minimal issues handing that change. Why not just standard time everywhere. Seems like more mucking about for "reasons".
In short, because DST better aligns with most people's day schedules than standard time does because it adds daylight time in the evening instead of in the morning (I'd love a better source than this[0], but it matches the rationale I've always heard).
> DST better aligns with most people's day schedules
I'd like to see that studied closely in light of the fact that 1 in 3 Americans suffers from chronic sleep deprivation.
And just because people have earlier schedules doesn't mean that they operate well with earlier schedules -- and because society programs us for decades to wake up earlier and to view oversleeping as sloth just asking people what their preferred sleep schedule is may bias results. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that half the people in this thread who think they really want that hour of light at the end of the day wouldn't function much better if they got more sleep in the morning.
There's also the asymmetry where people who are early risers want that extra hour of light in the evening -- at the cost of the late sleepers suffering chronic sleep deprivation and all the related health costs ("I want an extra hour of light, and you dying early of a heart attack is a small cost to pay for that").
Making DST permanent effectively shifts all of the U.S. one timezone eastward (so EDT = UTC+4, PDT = UTC+7, instead of +5 and +8 for their standard time equivalents). People seem to prefer the earlier timezone (which gives extra daylight in the evening at the expense of the morning), and it also makes collaboration with Europe a bit easier.
I certainly prefer it, but I think it's too soon to say that "people" prefer it, unless you are aware of some kind of public poll that asked the question.
Until Europe also switches to DST permanently, which will almost certainly happen if the US does it. I reckon if any developed country does it then all others would follow within a few years at most.
I hate that it's permanent DST, though. Why make noon at one hour past the sun at its highest point? So annoying.
The reason I hear most often when this comes up: People like having more "sunshine" hours after their work day is done. DST provides an extra hour than standard time.
The interesting thing is the person sponsoring the bill is from FL, where I don't think it matters to them which time to keep as much. For more Northern latitudes, both have issues for particular times of the year (like the sun coming up at 4:00 AM in the summer in most of NY State if we stuck to Standard time).
But I also think this person is choosing DST over ST because, in 2019, Florida passed a law to make DST the normal time. Of course, it was symbolic because a state can't choose to be on DST (only to stay on ST): https://www.abcactionnews.com/news/state/florida-passed-a-bi...
Seems like you could flip a coin. Daylight saving time is bad for some longitudes and latitudes in the winter, standard time is bad for other longitudes and latitudes in the summer.
I don’t think it matters in the grand scheme of things which one you pick: it’s going to suck for some.
This is being pushed by Florida politicians who want later sunsets in the winter, which is better for tourism (and general quality of life for many residents there). If you are on the Western part of a timezone (e.g. Michigan), you may prefer to be in standard time all year long, or prefer the status quo or just not care either way.
Creating new time zones split north/south is a possible solution here. I would prefer that to any option that involves changing the clocks twice a year.
as much as I would like DST to be the standard, I would find it absolutely awesome where, if Congress can agree to one or the other but not which, a binding coinflip were done to decide which one wins.
In the real world, shrewd business lobbies certainly have too much interest one way or the other to let fate decide.
I'm in the camp that wants "permanent DST" - like others have said, I prefer the light after work, into the dinner hours. I live in the southern US and at winter solstice, it's dark by 6pm. So strange.
It's more politically viable to give people an hour after work to shop, even though it's far more healthy to wake up in the sunlight rather than darkness, and it's asinine to make children walk to school in the dark.
Except it is not just a name: standard time is supposed to indicate that the sun is at its zenith at noon somewhere in a timezone. If we do not care about that, why not abolish all timezones while we are at it?
If it’s always daylight saving time, then that is the standard time. We use daylight saving time 2/3 of the year already. Staying on DST is the least disruptive option.
“Daylight savings time” is a bit of a misnomer as commonly used, particularly in this case. What people generally find frustrating, and what this change is addressing, is the twice-yearly time change. People (and businesses and the like) will still schedule things when it makes sense for them. Whether a meeting is at 9:00 or 10:00 or some other number isn’t the real point.
Most geeks have at some point been nocturnal, sometimes intentionally, sometimes not. We therefore recognise that the clock is just an instrument showing the current approximate position of the sun and nothing else. But normal people sort of, well, worship the clock. The clock tells them when to get up and when to come home. It's kinda lame, but it is what it is.
People work together on things during the day and also happen to want to be able to visit stores and businesses around the same time every day. Also people sleep at night because it's easier to sleep in the dark than in the light. It sounds pompous to act like the clock is some sort of religious ritual and how anyone that wakes up in the morning to go to a 9-5 job is just a sheep. Most people like being awake when other people are awake so every one can do things together. Just like how NTP helps synchronize devices across the internet, regular clocks help people do the same.
Eh, it's just saying whether we'll stay an extra +0100 from UTC or not. I don't see a big deal. If people prefer the extra daylight in summer overall, then I don't really see it making a big difference.
I'm one of those people who would much prefer more sunlight in the afternoon, even at the expense of less sunlight in the morning. Sign me up for this bill.
I don't mind either way, but it does make a difference for coordinating meetings and for international commerce.
Adding 1 hr is advantageous because it will give the Americas (UTC -8 to -5, minus Hawaii and Alaska) an extra usable overlap hour for meetings with Europe (~UTC 0 to +2), and with Asia-Pacific (~UTC +8 to +9) for 18 weeks of the year.
Europe observes daylight savings, but Asia largely doesn't [1]
About the only thing that people truly synchronize on is that lunch is around noon, but practically there's an hour of flexibility on when people actually eat. When is the official time for work to start or end? Maybe 7, 8, or 9? Office work seems to end around 5 or 6. School starts sometime between 6 and 10 AM depending on grade and locale.
My point is that there already is no standard wake/sleep schedule. Noon may be the tightest bound on when people all want to be doing the same thing, but importantly that happens after everyone is already awake so picking DST or ST is arbitrary.
People who want sunset or sunrise to occur earlier or later in the day have a conflict coordinating with other people in their life, not a problem with official timezones. Maybe pick your job and school district based on start times instead.
I'm happy to jump on the first bandwagon that gets rid of seasonal changes to timezones.
Didn’t know how much more annoying day light savings could be until I had small children in the house.
You spend so much time trying to schedule bedtime for everyone’s sanity. Having an hour screw up the schedule because they aren’t tired or over sleepy is very annoying (for about a week).
Parent of small children, you can certainly try that. It turns out though that small children don't care when you put them to bed they aren't going to sleep until they are tired, and they'll spend the extra time coming out of their room, screaming, fighting, or kicking their door.
While tapering bedtime is sometimes possible (not when they can read the clocks!), you can't taper when they wake up quite as easily. I would expect that this suggestion cannot be easily implemented by many families.
What I learned from my toddler is - they do what they want to do. It takes couple of weeks of consistent efforts to change his behavior. Sadly one week is not enough.
Forgive my ignorance - but what's stopping employers/employees/schools from shifting their working hours instead? Doesn't that seem less drastic and extreme (and easier for a government to implement)?
You end up with a situation where say 20% have shifted and 80% haven't. Then over time, like planets falling into a ring of orbits, everyone ends up shifting back because too many other people are on the other schedule. These sorts of things need critical mass to have effect.
That said, with all the lockdowns and isolated living, I do wonder if the social conformity effect will be as strong going forward.
But that doesn't go far enough. I work on software that, among many other things, calculates durations between local times that have been recorded. DST is a constant thorn in my side.
And no, I can't "just use UTC". To be compliant, the software must accept input in local times.
If it's possible to shift working hours (which it is), then what is the purpose of DST anyway. I'd rather trade the one-time cost of eliminating it entirely than reliving the same mini-crisis twice a year. The upside of DST is nothing but inertia.
Hours are interlinked across society. If you drive your kid to school, you need that to roughly line up with when you go to work. Maybe you don't have this constraint, but your coworker does, so if they were to keep the existing hours, you have some incentive to keep the same hours too, etc.
“Although chronic effects of remaining in daylight saving time year-round have not been well studied, daylight saving time is less aligned with human circadian biology—which, due to the impacts of the delayed natural light/dark cycle on human activity, could result in circadian misalignment, which has been associated in some studies with increased cardiovascular disease risk, metabolic syndrome and other health risks. It is, therefore, the position of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine that these seasonal time changes should be abolished in favor of a fixed, national, year-round standard time.”
The whole reason we have time zones is so that midday (12:00) happens somewhat close to the middle of the day, and that midnight happens somewhat close to the middle of the night.
I'm not sure what shifting everyone's timezone east accomplishes. My hunch is we'll all adapt by shifting activities/business hours/school hours and then instead of griping that "It's only X o'clock and the sun is already setting" we'll be griping that "It's only X+1 o'clock and the sun is already setting" and people will start proposing "permanent daylight + 1" time.
Think of this less as shifting one direction or another, and more as discontinuing the endless bi-annual shifting. It just so happens that by discontinuing it, we have to pick a side, and people seem to prefer this one.
Of course. I should have made it clear that I'm slightly in favor of a switch to permanent standard time (with liberal application of things like winter and summer hours for businesses and schools), but would prefer the current system to permanent daylight time.
I think the preference for permanent standard time, while perhaps real, is shortsighted. The fact that in winter the days seem too short will continue to exist forever, and the yearly switch to standard time simply rubs our noses in this fact.
There's also an element of Chesterson's Fence, where few people alive today are familiar with the problems that DST was invented to solve (most areas that avoid switching seem to be at moderate latitudes).
The flaws of the current system—and the problems that it leaves unsolved—are well-known and tangible, whereas the flaws and shortcomings of the proposed system are unknown and abstract. So of course changing it looks superficially appealing.
Applying this principle to political systems is left as an exercise to the reader.
Readit News
https://www.congress.gov/search?q=%7B%22source%22%3A%22legis...
It would be interesting to data mine these and see how effective certain legislators are at just introducing bills compared to actually getting them passed.
It might as well say "so and so said...".
It's worthless news.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
We already have major issues with e.g. making teenagers wake up earlier than most of their bodies are tuned for at that age. How much worse is it going to be if they have to get up an hour earlier in the winter? (Remember: what our bodies consider "early" is dependent on when the sun rises, and not the numbers we put on our clocks.)
And just to top it off, you'll be forcing a lot of kids to walk to school in the dark.
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Edit: To be clear, it's not just children!
On weekends and holidays when people don't have to work, how much of the population do you think wakes up right when the sun rises, in order to maximize their daylight? I certainly don't have any data on this, but I would guess a large majority take the opportunity to sleep in.
Having extra daylight seems really nice at first, and it is. Unfortunately, shifting clocks doesn't actually create more sun, it just creates a societal mandate. My view is that we already start our workdays too early, particularly when you take commute times into account.
And if we can get DST all year round (which I'm personally all-for), it could help be the impetus to finally shift high school times.
The fact of the matter is, our sleep schedules are determined largely by our school/work schedules. Simply from the popularity of DST in the summer, it seems clear that people do prefer for society to coordinate to wake up an hour earlier in order to have an extra hour of daylight at the end of the day.
Here in the northeast, it's horrible in the winter when it's dark by 4:30 pm. For a lot of people, it's a huge life upgrade to change that to 5:30 pm.
Just to be clear, I live in New York City. It gets dark at 4:30 this time of year. I know how frustrating that is.
But I also think that if this bill passed, most would discover that getting up an hour earlier in the morning is clearly worse. Others have posted some great studies in this thread, but for me, the clearest evidence is still that on days when people have the ability to sleep later, that's what they do. We stay up late on Friday evenings and sleep in late on Saturday mornings, without a care for all of the wasted Saturday daylight.
The numbers on a clock are arbitrary—you can change them, but all you're really changing are the societal commitments for which people are obligated to wake up. Our society is already too optimized for early risers, and late risers are paying the price. I don't think we should make the problem even worse just so we can shift around a few hours of sunlight.
FFS, this is why we have to change clocks twice a year. It’s like the left or right side of the road debate. Which side you drive on doesn’t matter. Agreement is what matters.
We don’t have agreement on time because everyone has their pet argument for why this or that time standard has some marginal benefit for a given slice of the population. Meanwhile, we can all agree on that those marginal benefits pale in comparison to the measured harms of changing clocks twice a year.
We have a bill. It’s taken work. The choice isn’t daylight time or standard time. It’s this bill gets through the House (and is likely ignored by the Senate) or we punt the issue for a generation. Arguing we picked the wrong side of the coin is a point for the latter.
(If you prefer kids walking to school in the light, just change the school hours.)
One is a pet argument, and the other is a health concern. And this could be resolved simply by asking public health experts to do the relevant studies.
My concern is that is not going to happen, or—more likely—public health experts will issue a recommendation which will be ignored by the the politicians. The reasoning is that people’s pet argument of extra daylight hour is convincing enough.
Also note that this pet argument ignores the majority of the working class who will most likely be working this extra hour in the service industry.
If my options are to either switch clocks twice a year, or to be at work by the equivalent of 8 am in the winter, I'd much rather switch clocks.
It's not even close, either. I'm scared of these permanent DST bills.
I'm confused. You contradict yourself from one sentence to the next.
Can we not agree, or are we all in agreement?
I say it's the former, not the latter.
Teenagers should start school later anyway. I think that is a different issue.
And considering that they'd be getting hundreds of hours more daylight after their working day for the entirety of their adult lives it seems like a more than fair trade.
Teenagers are far more resilient than young kids when it comes to this kind of thing. Extending the portion of the year that parents can let younger kids recreate outdoors in daylight has far more societal benefit than whether a teenager is 10% more irritable. The teenager problem could also be solved by letting them go to school on their own and decoupling their school timing from adults work schedules.
Are you sure? Have you done the research? They had this discussion in Iceland recently and I think they found this point inconclusive. I think health officials still favored moving out of permanent DST into permanent standard because they know the health benefits of good sleeping, and they know that many children are sleep deprived.
Also, everything in your post would be addressed if school would simply start later, like at 9 or 10am.
In the morning, you have adults going to work, kids going to school, delivery trucks rolling out, people going to get supplies they will need for the day, people doing morning exercise, and so on. Sleep is a big synchronizer that tends to get most of us aligned at the start of the day.
By the evening rush, most of those people other than adults who went to work are already home. Also, the times people start the evening commute tends to vary more than the times they start the morning commute.
Add in to this that morning weather and evening weather are quite different. Mornings tend to be colder than evenings, as they are coming off the sunless night.
This means that hazardous driving, biking, and even walking conditions are more likely in the morning than the evening. This won't make a different in Florida (where the author of this bill is from), but it sure makes a difference when you get into the northern parts of the continental US.
Put this together and whenever you have the morning commute before the sun is up you are combining the most number of people, the greatest mixing of pedestrians and bicycles with cars, and the highest chance of bad conditions (icy roads and sidewalks, poor visibility).
When you have the evening commute after the sun has set, it sucks, but you have less traffic of all kinds and better road and weather conditions.
Thus, if you have to have one of the commutes outside of daylight, it is going to be better to have that be the evening commute.
I'm sure there's a contribution, but obviously the effect is small given that the length of the day varies by ~6 hours throughout the year, for pretty much all the US? And we all sit inside all day in artificial lighting anyway?
Kids don't give a shit about walking to school in the dark. I know, as someone who was recently a kid and resented winter "daylight wasting time", I would much rather have had more hours of daylight in the afternoon when I was finished with school and could actually do fun stuff outside, rather than useless daylight in the morning while I'm sitting on the bus or in a classroom at 7:30 AM. And as an adult I feel the same about work.
I was actually thinking of "walking to school in the dark" as a safety issue. You and I probably live in safe communities, but not everyone does. And, sadly, the same communities that have more crime are frequently the ones less able to afford services like school buses.
But I also think a lot of kids and adults don't actually want what they think they do with regard to DST. Having more daylight in the evening seems appealing, and it's what I wanted when I was younger—but then I was in a situation where I had to get up an hour earlier in the winter. It's not fun.
You have to be aware that there are social reasons for why people—including kids—stay up later. Moving the clock to a permanent DST might move social activities with it and ultimately cost a significant portion of the population a healthy sleep cycle.
You make a compelling argument for the schools starting later, they should do that.
Also, many of the US timezones are too far west to begin with. Indianapolis is on Eastern Time, but it is approximately where the middle of Central Time should be. Putting it on permanent DST will make noon 2 hours late.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01676...
Just change all of the school and office start times when you make the switch and you get the exact result you want. Numbers are arbitrary labels for points in time. You can just assign different labels.
Source: I was a teenager in a place that observed permanent DST in a heavy north latitude.
Permanent standard time, seven hour work day.
Presumably this is only relevant to people who live with no household lights?
> And just to top it off, you'll be forcing a lot of kids to walk to school in the dark.
Is this an inherent problem? People manage this in the far north and south all the time.
That sounds like a problem of school starting too early.
Honestly, I like having sunlight after work, so I can do things out of doors like bouldering. I don't need sunlight in the morning when I'm commuting to an office with no windows, or even if I'm working from my home office.
> My view is that we already start our workdays too early, particularly when you take commute times into account.
Again, this just sounds like some people need to be accommodated for time shifting their work days. There are those of us who naturally wake up with the sunrise, even when we don't have to, and getting up when it's dark to get to work early is routine for us. Offsetting working shifts by an hour (or more) would also help reduce traffic congestion.
ETA: You sound like those people who insist that everyone has to work in an office building because otherwise they will be goofing off at home, neatly ignoring all the water cooler time wasters distracting everyone in the open office by talking about celebrities and sports.
Not everyone has children. Not everyone is the same.
It's more of when we turn on the lights in the house. The lightbulb has messed with our sleep cycle for a long time, e.g. causing people to stay up later than they did in the days of kerosene lamps.
Artificial lights certainly mess with our clocks, but not to the same extent as the sun, because they have different wavelengths.
The article largely thinks increased schedule flexibility is the solution, but I don't think that's every going to be practical for many types of work. But, we can at least make sure we don't make our world even more lopsided.
I think making the argument that everyone should be forced to cater to a special interest group is not the way to go, and I strongly believe that school start times should be adjusted, and work shifts should be flexible too. Too much regimenting with a one size fits all approach is the problem, not DST
I can't speak for your psyche (and you may well be a naturally early riser), but we know that having to wake up earlier decreases a lot of people's sleep overall, and that is also not good for mental health.
And kids have been going to school in the dark for a long time already. Talk to the Alaskans who go to school in the dark for a lot of the year. If anything, this would push people to move to a year round school schedule so we can take a longer winter break during the darkest part of the year.
Is there any research that shows this? I’m not aware of any. In fact there are social reasons people might stay up late. It is a mistake to ignore that.
They had this discussion in Iceland recently (which is on permanent DST; and with heavy population centers way north of Alaskan population centers) and health officials were pretty keen on moving to standard time precisely because teenagers have a hard time waking up so often before sunrise. Yes a big part of the year will always be before sunrise, however on standard that part is shorter.
So because we _can_ disregard the sun, we should? I have lights in my home, but the sun still shines in the windows in the morning and on my head while I walk to work. I'd rather have sane policy than worry about always having a portable SAD light available in the winter mornings.
Either way is probably fine but daylight time applies for more of the year, so this is a smaller change.
Next step: to abolish leap seconds.
In favor of what? Having the day just drift?
Out of curiosity, do you have children? I didn't think it was so bad until we started having kids in the family. They do not adjust well to time zone changes.
No federal law is needed for this. Each state can decide on its own to stay on standard time the full year. Notably Arizona still doesn't.
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Forget the teenagers, standard time kills people. People are more tired in the afternoon and have more accidents if the sun is already down. Summer time actually saves lives.
What is this, a high school competitive debate?
I could just as easily argue that permanent DST kills people. People are sleep deprived, and stressed, and have higher rate of depression, etc.
I think these claims are best supported by public health experts that actually use studies to back up their claims. In fact we should ask public health experts if this move is cleaver instead of leaving it up to the politicians to decide what is best for us.
They remind me of “if you’re not happy with our immigration policy just move somewhere else”. It is completely ignoring how people actually live.
Winter is depressing because it's dark during our leisure hours. This bill gives us an extra hour to enjoy.
This is the correct decision.
Some armchair logic would say it is a mistake to ignore sleep-deprived workers when measuring what is “good for business”. It is also a mistake to ignore the health impact of teenagers that are forced to wake up before sunrise bigger part of the year now. My armchair logic says that you should expect a rise in depression, especially among teenagers. And that seems kind of bad for business, when workers have to deal with their teenage children being more depressed.
If we're doing away with DST, so be it. I mean, it'll be horrible in the winter when sunrise is at like 9AM (or in the summer when it sets at 8PM, depending on which option you choose), but I understand the arguments.
But if we get rid of it, permanent standard time is the only sane choice.
Covid-19 has shown that stores/businesses are perfectly capable of adjusting their hours and people have minimal issues handing that change. Why not just standard time everywhere. Seems like more mucking about for "reasons".
[0]: https://time.com/5888112/daylight-savings-time-permanent/
I'd like to see that studied closely in light of the fact that 1 in 3 Americans suffers from chronic sleep deprivation.
And just because people have earlier schedules doesn't mean that they operate well with earlier schedules -- and because society programs us for decades to wake up earlier and to view oversleeping as sloth just asking people what their preferred sleep schedule is may bias results. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that half the people in this thread who think they really want that hour of light at the end of the day wouldn't function much better if they got more sleep in the morning.
There's also the asymmetry where people who are early risers want that extra hour of light in the evening -- at the cost of the late sleepers suffering chronic sleep deprivation and all the related health costs ("I want an extra hour of light, and you dying early of a heart attack is a small cost to pay for that").
I don't understand how this can be true. If it's better for people to wake up an hour earlier or later, then do that. Who cares what the clock says?
I hate that it's permanent DST, though. Why make noon at one hour past the sun at its highest point? So annoying.
It's interesting how we try to solve problems.
But I also think this person is choosing DST over ST because, in 2019, Florida passed a law to make DST the normal time. Of course, it was symbolic because a state can't choose to be on DST (only to stay on ST): https://www.abcactionnews.com/news/state/florida-passed-a-bi...
I don’t think it matters in the grand scheme of things which one you pick: it’s going to suck for some.
In the real world, shrewd business lobbies certainly have too much interest one way or the other to let fate decide.
For the summer solstice though it's light out till almost 10pm
"Standard time" is just a name. Daylight time is actually more "standard" from the perspective of most Americans.
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Adding 1 hr is advantageous because it will give the Americas (UTC -8 to -5, minus Hawaii and Alaska) an extra usable overlap hour for meetings with Europe (~UTC 0 to +2), and with Asia-Pacific (~UTC +8 to +9) for 18 weeks of the year.
Europe observes daylight savings, but Asia largely doesn't [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time
DST gives us daylight to enjoy at the end of the day.
I don't care if it's dark in the morning. I'm not a morning person, and I want the sun reserved for the evening.
Restaurants and businesses are going to like this change too.
My point is that there already is no standard wake/sleep schedule. Noon may be the tightest bound on when people all want to be doing the same thing, but importantly that happens after everyone is already awake so picking DST or ST is arbitrary.
People who want sunset or sunrise to occur earlier or later in the day have a conflict coordinating with other people in their life, not a problem with official timezones. Maybe pick your job and school district based on start times instead.
I'm happy to jump on the first bandwagon that gets rid of seasonal changes to timezones.
You spend so much time trying to schedule bedtime for everyone’s sanity. Having an hour screw up the schedule because they aren’t tired or over sleepy is very annoying (for about a week).
That said, with all the lockdowns and isolated living, I do wonder if the social conformity effect will be as strong going forward.
But that doesn't go far enough. I work on software that, among many other things, calculates durations between local times that have been recorded. DST is a constant thorn in my side.
And no, I can't "just use UTC". To be compliant, the software must accept input in local times.
If it's possible to shift working hours (which it is), then what is the purpose of DST anyway. I'd rather trade the one-time cost of eliminating it entirely than reliving the same mini-crisis twice a year. The upside of DST is nothing but inertia.
The issue here is that the individual choice you and I would prefer doesn't exist for parents since their schedule is dictated by schools.
Edit: also not all jobs offer that choice. Think things like construction, public transit or hospital jobs
There's lots of room for experimentation and variability.
“Although chronic effects of remaining in daylight saving time year-round have not been well studied, daylight saving time is less aligned with human circadian biology—which, due to the impacts of the delayed natural light/dark cycle on human activity, could result in circadian misalignment, which has been associated in some studies with increased cardiovascular disease risk, metabolic syndrome and other health risks. It is, therefore, the position of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine that these seasonal time changes should be abolished in favor of a fixed, national, year-round standard time.”
I'm not sure what shifting everyone's timezone east accomplishes. My hunch is we'll all adapt by shifting activities/business hours/school hours and then instead of griping that "It's only X o'clock and the sun is already setting" we'll be griping that "It's only X+1 o'clock and the sun is already setting" and people will start proposing "permanent daylight + 1" time.
I think the preference for permanent standard time, while perhaps real, is shortsighted. The fact that in winter the days seem too short will continue to exist forever, and the yearly switch to standard time simply rubs our noses in this fact.
There's also an element of Chesterson's Fence, where few people alive today are familiar with the problems that DST was invented to solve (most areas that avoid switching seem to be at moderate latitudes).
The flaws of the current system—and the problems that it leaves unsolved—are well-known and tangible, whereas the flaws and shortcomings of the proposed system are unknown and abstract. So of course changing it looks superficially appealing.
Applying this principle to political systems is left as an exercise to the reader.