If we can’t agree on permanent DST vs permanent standard time, I propose we divide the continent in half and have permanent DST on the West and permanent standard time on the East, leaving a 2 hour time gap between the coasts. Over time the morning people will flock to one side and the evening people the other, and all will be harmonious.
TimeZones and DST are for humans and physical realities, such as the tilt of the earth and circadian rhythms. And they serve to address these things in a universal, coordinated way rather than asking each of us to change our schedules individually.
During DST, we all agree to start our days, open our business, and adjust our schedules one hour earlier, but without changing our individual clock times.
With DST all year long, can we choose to send our children to school at 9:30 instead of 8:30 during the winter? Should the school have a different winter schedule than a summer one? Or should we just wake up our young children well before dawn and drag them off?
People in Hawaii and Arizona seem to be doing just fine. Hell, have you heard about how the daylight cycles work in Alaska? They generally somehow don't complain about it much.
The time change is super inconvenient, both as a regular person who doesn't like futzing with the oven clock, and as a programmer for whom it is pure madness to try and comprehend all the rules and edge case when converting between time zones.
p.s. mdavis6890, I find myself wanting to leave spiteful words in response to your post. Upon inspecting this, I accept that these feelings are on me. You haven't really done anything. I think it stems from feeling like trash due to the hour time shift, combined with my own deeply seated desire to live in a slightly less nonsensical and insane version of reality. In this present version we seem to be forever saddled by the bullshit of y'ore.
See also: Texas and as of today also Idaho regarding abortion rights rollbacks. Combine that with the highly suspicious conflict of interest of our newly appointed supreme court justices ( https://www.npr.org/2022/03/14/1086535100/wife-of-justice-th... ) and we're in full-on regression insanity mode.
All I want at the moment is to stop being subjected to time zone shift fatigue without the benefit of getting to travel somewhere.
> Or should we just wake up our young children well before dawn and drag them off?
This is the norm for much of America, and has been for a long time (and will continue to be if we move away from changing clocks). If you want to play the "think of the children" card let's talk about moving their school start times later regardless of DST. 8:30 would be a great start, 9:30 would be phenomenal!
It’s changing, slowly. All the research supports starting at 9 or 10 is much better for childhood and teenage development especially, and many private schools and even some public school districts have started pushing start times back to 9 am or even later in some cases. Give it another decade
Aren't you basically still replicating the clock change? Everyone who goes to, works inside, or drops children off at the school will be less productive, at greater risk of heart attack, etc.
If we were really accounting for physical realities, we'd change our schedules by a much smaller amount every week or even every day, as the sun gradually shifts over time, instead of by an hour all at once. But nobody wants to coordinate that.
I think the only logical thing to do is have permanent standard time...
I’ve wanted this since I moved to Seattle 20 years ago (whoa)… until this winter. I still want to stop time changes, but now I’d definitely prefer permanent standard time.
What changed? Until about three years ago, I was a night owl with chronic insomnia. Since then, I’ve done some important mental healthy work, and I got a pup. The former helped with my insomnia and helped me adjust to an earlier schedule. The pup, well she used to rise with the sun, but going into her third year she has a much more stable internal clock. Now I understand the dread people feel waking early in wintertime in a way I never did. It feels like waking up in my insomniac days, except that I’d still be able to sleep.
I still understand why others prefer this, and I don’t think there’s a solution that will please everyone. It’s just really strange to (potentially) get something I wanted for almost my entire adult life, just as I’ve had a change of heart.
Is this really all fueled by having to change your clocks?
The primary driver of your circadian rhythm is the hours of daylight. Left to their own devices, (ie literally excluding alarm clocks) humans wake up at sunrise. Daylight savings time is an attempt to make it easy for institutions to have canonical hours while also attempting to account for this essential fact about human physiology. It feels weird because it's optimizing two things simultaneously.
It's fueled by the exhaustion caused by monkeying with what time it is. It's not about circadian rhythms. It's about having to wake up an hour early and pretend that you got enough sleep, and for no good reason.
If the primary driver of our circadian rhythm is sunlight, switching from DST and back leads you to doing stuff an hour off from your body’s natural circadian rhythm.
It’s not about changing your clock. It’s about changing your body’s schedule.
The hour of sunlight is approximately sinusoidal. Changing time is approximating the sinusoid with a square wave. It's not as smooth as it could be, but smoothing it out would cause more accounting problems than it would solve. It is also easier to manage than having schools and businesses change their hours in winter, which is the other way to approach the solution. If you want a smoother transition you are fully in control of that.
Also, it'll give that privilege to everyone else who doesn't work standard 9-5- it helps those who work 8-4, and 7-3. It doesn't help 10-6ers, but those are almost universally office jobs (who generally tend to have the luxury of windows).
It's quite difficult to understand just how much no sun in the morning sucks until you've had to live through it. On Standard time only, you'll go down into the artificial-light-only place in the dark, and you'll come out of it in the dark, for half the year.
Switching permanently to DST means this sector of the population gets an opportunity to see the sun after work before it goes away even when the sun sets at what would normally be 3:30-4 PM. They aren't going to see the sun in the morning no matter what anyway; they're waking up in the dark even if DST is permanent.
Sure, people will complain about the purity of "but 12 means noon", but most of our modern systems of measure have no human-scale base units and everyone loves those, so there's no reason why time should be based on that either.
Permanent DST makes more sense as a lot more people are awake at 6pm vs. 6am.
From an optimization problem / energy conservation point-of-view we should try to place noon as close as possible to the midpoint of the population's wakefulness window.
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During DST, we all agree to start our days, open our business, and adjust our schedules one hour earlier, but without changing our individual clock times.
With DST all year long, can we choose to send our children to school at 9:30 instead of 8:30 during the winter? Should the school have a different winter schedule than a summer one? Or should we just wake up our young children well before dawn and drag them off?
The time change is super inconvenient, both as a regular person who doesn't like futzing with the oven clock, and as a programmer for whom it is pure madness to try and comprehend all the rules and edge case when converting between time zones.
p.s. mdavis6890, I find myself wanting to leave spiteful words in response to your post. Upon inspecting this, I accept that these feelings are on me. You haven't really done anything. I think it stems from feeling like trash due to the hour time shift, combined with my own deeply seated desire to live in a slightly less nonsensical and insane version of reality. In this present version we seem to be forever saddled by the bullshit of y'ore.
See also: Texas and as of today also Idaho regarding abortion rights rollbacks. Combine that with the highly suspicious conflict of interest of our newly appointed supreme court justices ( https://www.npr.org/2022/03/14/1086535100/wife-of-justice-th... ) and we're in full-on regression insanity mode.
All I want at the moment is to stop being subjected to time zone shift fatigue without the benefit of getting to travel somewhere.
9am sunrises are going to be very unpleasant for northern states under permanent DST.
This is the norm for much of America, and has been for a long time (and will continue to be if we move away from changing clocks). If you want to play the "think of the children" card let's talk about moving their school start times later regardless of DST. 8:30 would be a great start, 9:30 would be phenomenal!
If we were really accounting for physical realities, we'd change our schedules by a much smaller amount every week or even every day, as the sun gradually shifts over time, instead of by an hour all at once. But nobody wants to coordinate that.
I think the only logical thing to do is have permanent standard time...
What changed? Until about three years ago, I was a night owl with chronic insomnia. Since then, I’ve done some important mental healthy work, and I got a pup. The former helped with my insomnia and helped me adjust to an earlier schedule. The pup, well she used to rise with the sun, but going into her third year she has a much more stable internal clock. Now I understand the dread people feel waking early in wintertime in a way I never did. It feels like waking up in my insomniac days, except that I’d still be able to sleep.
I still understand why others prefer this, and I don’t think there’s a solution that will please everyone. It’s just really strange to (potentially) get something I wanted for almost my entire adult life, just as I’ve had a change of heart.
The primary driver of your circadian rhythm is the hours of daylight. Left to their own devices, (ie literally excluding alarm clocks) humans wake up at sunrise. Daylight savings time is an attempt to make it easy for institutions to have canonical hours while also attempting to account for this essential fact about human physiology. It feels weird because it's optimizing two things simultaneously.
If the primary driver of our circadian rhythm is sunlight, switching from DST and back leads you to doing stuff an hour off from your body’s natural circadian rhythm.
It’s not about changing your clock. It’s about changing your body’s schedule.
It's quite difficult to understand just how much no sun in the morning sucks until you've had to live through it. On Standard time only, you'll go down into the artificial-light-only place in the dark, and you'll come out of it in the dark, for half the year.
Switching permanently to DST means this sector of the population gets an opportunity to see the sun after work before it goes away even when the sun sets at what would normally be 3:30-4 PM. They aren't going to see the sun in the morning no matter what anyway; they're waking up in the dark even if DST is permanent.
Sure, people will complain about the purity of "but 12 means noon", but most of our modern systems of measure have no human-scale base units and everyone loves those, so there's no reason why time should be based on that either.
From an optimization problem / energy conservation point-of-view we should try to place noon as close as possible to the midpoint of the population's wakefulness window.