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.
Couldn't you adjust the school schedule by an hour to achieve the same effect?
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.
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.
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).
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.
(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.
And even many digital clocks are still dumb devices that need to be manually synced. Such as most kitchen appliance clocks.
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."
Sometimes I get the impression that the spirit of states rights in the US has died.
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/...
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.
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.
It still requires federal approval, but from Sec Transit instead of Congress
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/10.1177/07487304198541...
* 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.
"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/physiology/articles/10....)
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...").
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
We've already had to ask you this recently so it would be good to fix. I don't want to ban you - your good comments are fine. But bad comments do more damage than good comments add goodness... a sad fact of life.
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.
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...
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."
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.
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.
I do not care if the sun is up as I shuffle groggily into the building. I don't think I'm alone.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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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 60° of longitude.
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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".
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.
Eastern parts of China gets up at 05:00 AM and westtern part gets up at 10:00 AM.
People get used to it.
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.
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...
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.
But also, all the opinion polling (business and individual) was like over 90% in favour of year-round daylight time, so here we are.
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.
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.
Absolutely not. It was a compromise tempered by practical and political considerations.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
I want to be able to say I sleep from 0 to 3 hours or 30 percent of the day.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
(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.)
(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.
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.
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.
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.
God bless you for keeping that top of mind. So many people miss the forest for the trees here.
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."
In Białystok, 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.
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.
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.
"Daylight Savings" time never made sense. 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.
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.
The linked map is outdated regarding Russia. Here is an up to date map: https://64.media.tumblr.com/4a9a4613f057d3b5f17ec548e6ac06d1...
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://www.timeanddate.com/news/time/end-clock-changes-euro...
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
I think we'll need to say Vancouver time or California time.
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.
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.
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?).
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.
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
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.
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
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.
Germany population is about 2x that of Canada.
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.
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?
Now that's a win-win
> when you have to get up an hour earlier
no you don't. it's weekend.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
1 metre can be 100cm or 200cm depending on the season and your location
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.
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.
Now, 13 month calendar with each month 4 weeks, on the other hand..
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.
That's an odd read. Residents have eight months to prepare for an event already known to be nonexistent: a non-happening.
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).
The worse case is he pushes a federal change to standard time, in which case I suspect BC would have to go along.
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.
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.
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.
"hurr durr summer better than winter, me choosey summer"
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)
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.
I live in Köln, 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.
Relevant Negativland? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDmWYVdN8ug
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.
Since you're discussing BC housing policy, I assume you know of the amazing Uytae Lee?
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.
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)
https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/policies/seasonal-time-ch...
With switch, we get reasonable half a years. Without it, it would be whole unreasonable year.
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?
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.
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.
https://lists.iana.org/hyperkitty/list/tz@iana.org/thread/66...
Bad timing on BC's part. They just tagged release 2026a today.
In one country lunch is at 1200 another country lunch is at 0500
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 2026is it summer time or winter 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).
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.
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.
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.
They should have picked Standard Time.
Ultimately, it's entirely arbitrary anyway. The only issue is that American states cannot pick DST without a federal law 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.
Obviously all this is arbitrary including standard time.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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. :-)
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.
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.
> 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.
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
> 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).
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).
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?
If that means that bedtime falls within 3 hours of the sunset then so be it. I’ve survived this long at least.
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.
But, what a terrible argument! "I prefer", haha. Oh well.
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.
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.
Sadly, not if you're a student living in a basement in Vancouver!
Southerners...
(Chiming in from Denmark)
Had to do a double take, as that's my steam handle.
"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.
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.
Same here. And I've never figured out why DST fades the curtains.
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
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.
> 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
In the summer, we already have lots of sunlight regardless, so it doesn't make sense to optimize for that.
We tried permanent DST in the US in the 1970s. People hated it.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FY9mXPcloaM
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.
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.
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.
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.
If that's what passes for aspiration these days then the labour movement truly is dead.
Move to DST and if you want the ability to start your day later and end later, [...].
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.
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.
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?
I apologize society is inconveniencing you.
> 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%.
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.
Currently it's doubly bad because the clocks changing also cause a spike in deaths.
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.
Switching to daylight time will switch sunrise/sunset to 9AM/515PM, guaranteeing kids will be walking in the dark in the morning.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Wait, why? Where? I've never heard this. Which driving conditions are you talking about? Rain? Snow?
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.
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.
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.
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.)
Anyone in the north has seen “winter hours” and “summer hours”.
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?)
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).
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.
DST means a later sunrise.
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?
Changing the clock around is insane.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
* 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.
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.
https://blogi.thl.fi/kellojen-siirtaminen-pysyvasti-talviaik...
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/10.1177/07487304198541...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Given it one winter season across the solstice and I'd bet a lot of your fellow residents will come around to your viewpoint.
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.
“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!”
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
The mornings are just wasted daylight anyway because I'm just on the way to work.
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.
In any case, most people can get up earlier, if they want to.
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.)
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?
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.
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.
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.
It's not 1900s anymore. Cars have fancy headlights and sensor suites for AEB. And generally street lighting is available around schools.
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."
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.
https://andywoodruff.com/blog/where-to-hate-daylight-saving-...
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/File:Difference_between_l... and the Wiki article https://en.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 São 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.
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.
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.