Boo, in the age of AI we need two dimensional time zones which skew the clock a few seconds every night, continuously, so the sunrise is always at 6 am. Humans were made to rise with the sun.
Boo! Permanent Dawn time is better. Every day at 03:00, set the time when the upper limb of the sun will cross the sea-level horizon at the equator to 06:30. That means kids never have to wait for the bus in the morning in the dark, except at high latitudes in winter but who cares about those kids right?
That is actually better in every way! Assuming the time zones are 2D so the dawn is local. It would probably cut down on cancer rates, too, by harmonizing circadian rhythms.
In my 20s, I strongly considered taking some time off to create and drive petitions across the Pacific states to put us all on permanent PDT (matching Arizona). In my research, I saw it would take an act of Congress to make that happen, so I stood down.
The only time the Sunshine Protection Act has passed the senate was when gosh danged Tom Cotton wasn't there[0]. I swear, he's in the pocket of Big Time[1].
For night owls and teenagers, who already have a hard time in society, Daylight Saving Time makes things far worse. It’s been tried and failed, already, primarily due to school/kids issues. The sun will rise really, really late in the dead of winter in some places. Sleep experts are all pretty much in agreement that permanent Standard Time is better.
I’d be all for permanent Standard Time but there’s no way that’ll happen with the old people in charge of our government. Most of them probably wake up at 4am already.
As a night owl who sleeps late, I'm stoked to not waste morning daylight while I'm sleeping, and have more time in the evening to go out and do shit before it gets dark.
I don't really care how time is reckoned so long as there is some
agreement about it, but I object to being told that I am saving
daylight when my reason tells me that I am doing nothing of the kind.
I even object to the implication that I am wasting something
valuable if I stay in bed after the sun has risen. As an admirer
of moonlight I resent the bossy insistence of those who want to
reduce my time for enjoying it. At the back of the Daylight Saving
scheme I detect the bony, blue-fingered hand of Puritanism, eager
to push people into bed earlier, and get them up earlier, to make
them healthy, wealthy and wise in spite of themselves.
-- Robertson Davies, The diary of Samuel Marchbanks,
Clarke, Irwin (1947), XIX, Sunday
Permanent DST sounds good to a lot of people, until they actually experience it. The US went on permanent DST in the 1970s and support plummeted after the first winter in DST (which is why we're not on it anymore). Of course, since it was 50 years ago, that means most people alive in the US don't remember the days of permanent DST.
The problem, I think, is that what a lot of people want is they want the sun to set quite late, like it does in summer time. But DST isn't going to give you those long summer afternoons in winter, because the sun just isn't up long enough; and the trade-off you'd make for maybe coming off work into the start of dusk is that dawn would start after you start working, which turns out to be pretty bad for your circadian rhythm.
In the upper midwest, daylight savings time generally gives way to tractor-mounted LED time as contracted harvesting companies switch into high production to beat the late-fall rain.
Permanent standard time means less sunlight time after work.
Permanent DST means kids walking to school in the dark.
Changing the clock twice a year fixes that and lets us avoid both, with the only cost being people complaining for a day afterwards. It's like ripping off the bandaid, instead of doing a slow agonizing pull that lasts months.
And yes, I know some people take like 6 weeks to adjust and they will complain incessantly to stop it, but for the whole group, the least painful thing (I'd argue by far) is just moving the clock an hour.
> Permanent DST means kids walking to school in the dark.
It means much more than that:
> Later sunrises and sunsets, as seen with pDST, are associated with multiple long-term health outcomes including increases in stroke, heart attacks, diabetes, obesity, and cancer.[8–10]
> The increase in obesity and other cardiovascular health problems show that even if DST were to encourage exercise in some individuals it is not enough to outweigh the effects of sleep and circadian disruption on food choices, metabolism, hunger hormones, and glucose control and other cardiovascular risk factors.[11,12]
I'm going to be dubious of any study that has a call to action section and the author is the vice president of an advocacy group for their cause. It's a little bit of a "we investigated ourselves and found we were right about everything".
Better solution: Adopt summer and winter hours to follow the sun rather than arbitrarily changing the clocks and interrupting sleep schedule and circadian rhythms.
Pretty sure there are studies that indicate the time shift is actually harmful - more car accidents, more heart attacks, all sorts of things.
Really, the question is which system (standard, DST, or both) causes the least damage?
Also worth noting we tried permanent DST a few decades ago and it was repealed within a year because people didn't like it. Approval in advance was north of 70% and in the aftermath below 40%, IIRC.
Which was my point - 9-5 isn't really a thing, it's usually 8-5 or 9-6 or worse. If we're going to adjust time zone, we should at least agree on when most people are/are-not at the office/school/farm fields/etc.
You're not a software developer, are you ;)? I'm not working on any timezone-aware products right now but I feel for all my brothers and sisters in the trenches if this passes and has to be fixed everywhere!
> I'm not working on any timezone-aware products right now but I feel for all my brothers and sisters in the trenches if this passes and has to be fixed everywhere!
Things have improved though: back in the 2000s when the 'Bush DST' change occurred, all sorts of software had hard-coded assumptions.
This is because US developers, who wrote a good portion of OS and other software, had never experienced a tzdata update first hand. So that when (e.g.) PST8PDT had its rules changed, it turns a lot of stuff needed to be rebooted to pickup things up.
A bunch of code was put in to notice changes dynamically, so in 2026 things should hopefully be smoother if there are new rules.
Even worse than that, it will pass, people will realize it actually sucks, then they we will go back to the quick and nearly painless "rip off the bandaid" approach.
No it wont. There's already one state in the union that has dipsensed with the silly time changes, Arizona. I've lived there for ~7 years while an adult, or about 20% of my life, now live in a time change state again.
Having experienced both I would take the no time change every time. And I have yet to meet anyone who would (small sample size for sure, I'm sure someones done some polling).
> The authors take the position that, based on comparisons of large populations living in DST or ST or on western versus eastern edges of time zones, the advantages of permanent ST outweigh switching to DST annually or permanently. Four peer reviewers provided expert critiques of the initial submission, and the SRBR Executive Board approved the revised manuscript as a Position Paper to help educate the public in their evaluation of current legislative actions to end DST. […] The choice of DST is political and therefore can be changed. If we want to improve human health, we should not fight against our body clock, and therefore, we should abandon DST and return to Standard Time (which is when the sun clock time most closely matches the social clock time) throughout the year. This solution would fix both the acute and the chronic problems of DST. We therefore strongly support removing DST changes or removing permanent DST and having governing organizations choose permanent Standard Time for the health and safety of their citizens.
> As the March 9 [2025] switch to daylight saving time (DST) approaches in the U.S., the majority of Americans (54%) say they are ready to do away with the practice. By contrast, 40% of U.S. adults say they are in favor of daylight saving time, while 6% are uncertain.
[…]
> The plurality of Americans, 48%, say they would prefer to have standard time the whole year, including summer. Half as many, 24%, prefer having daylight saving time in place the whole year, including winter. The smallest percentage, 19%, prefer the status quo of switching between the two each year.
I think that the gallup poll is flawed because it does not explain what daylight saving versus standard time is. I just spoke to an educated grad student, who thought that we were in standard time right now. Because the sun is out later during daylight saving time, the name is somewhat counter-intuitive. Also, because it’s on for most of the year, DST feels “standard.”
I've definitely talked to people that though daylight savings time is the time used in the winter, since that's when there are the fewest daylight hours and you need to "save" them or something.
Given how many times in my life I've internally groaned at yet another corporate email or website that references "EST" during the summer, I'm convinced no one is paying attention.
And that, if we do actually implement year-round daylight saving time, everyone will still call it EST.
I've heard both the "saving" has something to do with farming in the summer and candles in the winter, so either one could be daylight savings time. So I haven't been able to keep them straight and use "summer time" and "winter time" instead.
How would permanent DST matter in that regard? Are people going to bed at like 4 pm in the winter and now upset they'd have to wait until 5? DST is already used in the summer (and 3/4 of the year).
Studies have been conducted about the safety of sticking to one time. The ones who are the most vulnerable are kids waiting for buses in the dark. We can't move to dynamic school times because we are still working the same paradigm as the industrial revolution- same schedule every day, year in year out. And society is simply too divided and fractured, and the motives too hidden and craven, to decide to move en masse to a dynamic schedule.
School start times should be pushed back an hour anyways. Students learn better, especially middle school + highschool age. The only reason we don't is because it conflicts with parents working schedules.
To the degree kids are standing around outside, they're already in the dark in northern US states (to say nothing about Canada and areas of Europe) for part of the year even with standard time.
And, yes, dynamic school schedules don't work because they need to be synced at some level with work schedules. A one-time shift might work though.
I mostly don't have a dog in this hunt. I pretty much set my own schedule absent the odd morning appointment.
> To the degree kids are standing around outside, they're already in the dark in northern US states
It's a continuum, not a discrete state. Even in the northern states, they're out in the dark for perhaps 4-6 weeks. Now that will get extended to, say, 10+ weeks.
Studies also show that permanent standard time is better than permanent daylight time. But for some reason, the US wants to go against the rest of the world on this.
> Later sunrises and sunsets, as seen with pDST, are associated with multiple long-term health outcomes including increases in stroke, heart attacks, diabetes, obesity, and cancer.[8–10]
> The increase in obesity and other cardiovascular health problems show that even if DST were to encourage exercise in some individuals it is not enough to outweigh the effects of sleep and circadian disruption on food choices, metabolism, hunger hormones, and glucose control and other cardiovascular risk factors.[11,12]
It matches our circadian rhythms better. That leads to absolutely massive better health outcomes, society-wide.
People wanting to drive home with a bit of light doesn’t really offset everyone’s sleep getting screwed up, especially those with later natural circadian rhythms.
Europe is less than 8% of the world's population. The vast majority of the world uses standard time. It works. No one there pines for permanent daylight time.
Europe is wrong 50% of the time. The US[1] will be wrong 100% of the time. It can mostly get away with this because it spans the continent. But still, you're going to deal with the stupidity that crossing the Mexican border you will always have to correct your watch.
[1] And Alberta + BC. But really - all of Canada is just a rounding error anyway!
As usual, when Congress finally moves to address an issue, they manage to do it in the stupidest possible way. Permanent Standard Time is the better choice in nearly every way.
Am I the only person who thinks its odd that my government (US) thinks its can tell me what time to get up and go to bed?
Before timezones, "noon" was the point where the sun was the highest in the sky.
It seems we should focus on having our timezones be more in line with what "noon" is supposed to be: IE, major population centers should have "noon" close to true noon, with a little more flexibility for rural areas so they can stay on the same time as their closest major population center.
Okay, so you travel from, say, Washington DC to NYC and then you have to set your clock back by... I think it's like 13 minutes?
Which is why railroads started instituting time zones in the late 19th century: because it turns out having to recalibrate your watch every hour or so is a recipe for creating train crashes. Railroad time didn't become standard time until the early 20th century, in large part because a lot of the smaller cities were pretty irate at having to adjust their clocks. (It also doesn't help that coincidentally, places like Chicago and New York City are very near the center meridian of their time zone).
If you look at the "natural" disposition of the time zones, Chicago is very near the appropriate longitude (90 W) for the median of the time zone. The border between Eastern and Central time zone should be about halfway through Ohio; instead, the Eastern time zone is skewed westward, since Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan wanted to be in the same time zone as NYC.
Technically no. Work and School dictate when we get up and go to bed. It's all relative. We could create a timezone where 12:00PM is in the morning. We are just used to this idea that morning, afternoon, evening, and night need to correspond to specific time values. For example, China uses just one timezone. So local regions just adapt to what logically makes sense. In a perfect world, local regions would adapt to the amount of daylight we have for each season, like it was before timekeeping and timezones. So school and work would shift when they start based off the rising of the sun. This isn't practical though for multiple reasons. It would cause chaos and confusion for work shifts, scheduling etc.
If everyone follows the same clock, like, now is 12:30pm, across the entire world, then while everyone could also work 9-5, we know that most people like to be awake during daylight and asleep at night, so the local working hours might be 2-10.
> Beijing Time users in Xinjiang usually schedule their daily activities two hours later than those who live in eastern China. As such, stores and offices in Xinjiang are commonly open from 10:00 to 19:00 Beijing Time, which equals 08:00 to 17:00 in Ürümqi Time.[17] This is known as the work/rest time in Xinjiang.
Thus, "9-5" would get a name like "work time", or the existing name of "day shift" would have increased popularity.
This is a great question, and theres alot of history there, this is how time used to work until travel and communication speeds necessitating coordination over larger areas required it. The biggest driver in North America? Railroads.
I also really like having 12pm being the moment the sun is at the highest point. But I think the whole point of that change is to simplify and this would go the other way.
You can say today's date is 27 Messidor Year CCXXXIV if you wish.
The problem is when you want to coordinate events between people following different time conventions.
Timezones as we know it started off as a railroad company invention. Does the London/Birmingham train follow London time or Birmingham time? Does the stop in Rugby use Rugby time?
DST in the US used to be a regional choice until 1966. Coordination became an issue.
"The lack of standardization led to a patchwork where some areas observed DST while adjacent areas did not, and it was not unheard of to have to reset a clock several times during a short trip (e.g., bus drivers operating on West Virginia Route 2 between Moundsville, West Virginia, and Steubenville, Ohio, had to reset their watches seven times over 35 miles)." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_time_in_the_United_...
> with a little more flexibility for rural areas so they can stay on the same time as their closest major population center.
We can do that already. I remember when most of Indiana didn't follow DST. Businesses in Danville, Illinois, near the border followed Indiana time by changing the listed hours of operation during summer.
Speaking of Indiana, 'Attitudes began to change in the 1990s, as Indiana's time zone situation was seen as impeding the state's economic growth. Interstate travel and commerce were difficult as people wondered, "what time is it in Indiana?"' - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Indiana
Having 12:00 noon be when the sun is highest makes these issues reappear.
Why not have your own timezone based on where you are standing right now? Oh, right, because that's the opposite of universal (or at least worldwide).
One-hour shifts are manageable. One-minute shifts between population centers are not. Your meeting would start at precisely 8:03:38, your time. The business you are calling would close its doors 13 minutes before 5 pm.
Boo, hiss. Permanent Standard Time is better in every way https://savestandardtime.com/
I agree completely. But in the end permanent daylight time is better than flip flopping every year, and much more achievable.
I think if people understood that daylight time = get up early and standard time = get up late, most would agree that getting up late is better.
These arguments aren't very convincing.
It's just names, might as well call it humpty dumpty time. Local time is defined by offset from UTC.
Agree but now we could change 9-5 workday to 8-4 and that is better also
Boo, in the age of AI we need two dimensional time zones which skew the clock a few seconds every night, continuously, so the sunrise is always at 6 am. Humans were made to rise with the sun.
Boo! Permanent Dawn time is better. Every day at 03:00, set the time when the upper limb of the sun will cross the sea-level horizon at the equator to 06:30. That means kids never have to wait for the bus in the morning in the dark, except at high latitudes in winter but who cares about those kids right?
/s
That is actually better in every way! Assuming the time zones are 2D so the dawn is local. It would probably cut down on cancer rates, too, by harmonizing circadian rhythms.
Glad to see progress made on this.
In my 20s, I strongly considered taking some time off to create and drive petitions across the Pacific states to put us all on permanent PDT (matching Arizona). In my research, I saw it would take an act of Congress to make that happen, so I stood down.
> to put us all on permanent PDT (matching Arizona).
Arizona is (wisely) on permanent standard time.
Yes, but PDT = MST
The only time the Sunshine Protection Act has passed the senate was when gosh danged Tom Cotton wasn't there[0]. I swear, he's in the pocket of Big Time[1].
[0]https://www.mediaite.com/politics/that-daylight-saving-time-...
[1]https://www.cotton.senate.gov/news/speeches/floor-speech-on-...
For night owls and teenagers, who already have a hard time in society, Daylight Saving Time makes things far worse. It’s been tried and failed, already, primarily due to school/kids issues. The sun will rise really, really late in the dead of winter in some places. Sleep experts are all pretty much in agreement that permanent Standard Time is better.
I’d be all for permanent Standard Time but there’s no way that’ll happen with the old people in charge of our government. Most of them probably wake up at 4am already.
As a night owl who sleeps late, I'm stoked to not waste morning daylight while I'm sleeping, and have more time in the evening to go out and do shit before it gets dark.
We should really standardize on Time Cube
https://www.timecube.net/
Permanent DST sounds good to a lot of people, until they actually experience it. The US went on permanent DST in the 1970s and support plummeted after the first winter in DST (which is why we're not on it anymore). Of course, since it was 50 years ago, that means most people alive in the US don't remember the days of permanent DST.
The problem, I think, is that what a lot of people want is they want the sun to set quite late, like it does in summer time. But DST isn't going to give you those long summer afternoons in winter, because the sun just isn't up long enough; and the trade-off you'd make for maybe coming off work into the start of dusk is that dawn would start after you start working, which turns out to be pretty bad for your circadian rhythm.
> and put the US under time currently observed between March and November - known as permanent standard time.
Was that a typo?
In the upper midwest, daylight savings time generally gives way to tractor-mounted LED time as contracted harvesting companies switch into high production to beat the late-fall rain.
Permanent standard time means less sunlight time after work.
Permanent DST means kids walking to school in the dark.
Changing the clock twice a year fixes that and lets us avoid both, with the only cost being people complaining for a day afterwards. It's like ripping off the bandaid, instead of doing a slow agonizing pull that lasts months.
And yes, I know some people take like 6 weeks to adjust and they will complain incessantly to stop it, but for the whole group, the least painful thing (I'd argue by far) is just moving the clock an hour.
> Permanent DST means kids walking to school in the dark.
It means much more than that:
> Later sunrises and sunsets, as seen with pDST, are associated with multiple long-term health outcomes including increases in stroke, heart attacks, diabetes, obesity, and cancer.[8–10]
> The increase in obesity and other cardiovascular health problems show that even if DST were to encourage exercise in some individuals it is not enough to outweigh the effects of sleep and circadian disruption on food choices, metabolism, hunger hormones, and glucose control and other cardiovascular risk factors.[11,12]
* https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10476036/
The peer reviewed literature on the effects of changing time, pDST, and pST is quite extensive:
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48920869
I'm going to be dubious of any study that has a call to action section and the author is the vice president of an advocacy group for their cause. It's a little bit of a "we investigated ourselves and found we were right about everything".
> I'm going to be dubious of any study that has a call to action section and the author is the vice president of an advocacy group for their cause.
How about the American Medical Association?
* https://www.ama-assn.org/press-center/ama-press-releases/ama...
Or American Society for Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery, American Thoracic Society, and American College of Chest Physicians concurring?
* https://www.labmanager.com/new-position-statement-supports-p...
Chronobiologists?
* https://www.chronobiocanada.com/official-statements
* https://www.chronobiology.ch/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/JBR-...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronobiology
And health problems will pump money into big pharma.
You know what maybe all schools in the US shouldn't start at 7:30-8:15.
Similar idea with businesses.
Maybe people living in northern latitudes can have a different schedule than than south.
Better solution: Adopt summer and winter hours to follow the sun rather than arbitrarily changing the clocks and interrupting sleep schedule and circadian rhythms.
Pretty sure there are studies that indicate the time shift is actually harmful - more car accidents, more heart attacks, all sorts of things.
Really, the question is which system (standard, DST, or both) causes the least damage?
Also worth noting we tried permanent DST a few decades ago and it was repealed within a year because people didn't like it. Approval in advance was north of 70% and in the aftermath below 40%, IIRC.
I agree permanent standard time is a better solution. But maybe we change work to 8-4 from 9-5 and might be better that way anyway.
Does anybody actually work 9-5 (ie 7 hours assuming they take a break or two)?
Most of us.
(It's actually 8-5 with an hour's break).
Which was my point - 9-5 isn't really a thing, it's usually 8-5 or 9-6 or worse. If we're going to adjust time zone, we should at least agree on when most people are/are-not at the office/school/farm fields/etc.
> But maybe we change work to 8-4 from 9-5 and might be better that way anyway.
Why not change the working hours of stores, and tv programming and other schedules too?
In the end, you get the same thing as a clock change, but having to change the times of everything everywhere.
What's TV programming? :-)
Stores already open across a spectrum of times.
Fuck all the night owls, right?
You're not a software developer, are you ;)? I'm not working on any timezone-aware products right now but I feel for all my brothers and sisters in the trenches if this passes and has to be fixed everywhere!
> I'm not working on any timezone-aware products right now but I feel for all my brothers and sisters in the trenches if this passes and has to be fixed everywhere!
Things have improved though: back in the 2000s when the 'Bush DST' change occurred, all sorts of software had hard-coded assumptions.
This is because US developers, who wrote a good portion of OS and other software, had never experienced a tzdata update first hand. So that when (e.g.) PST8PDT had its rules changed, it turns a lot of stuff needed to be rebooted to pickup things up.
A bunch of code was put in to notice changes dynamically, so in 2026 things should hopefully be smoother if there are new rules.
Even worse than that, it will pass, people will realize it actually sucks, then they we will go back to the quick and nearly painless "rip off the bandaid" approach.
No it wont. There's already one state in the union that has dipsensed with the silly time changes, Arizona. I've lived there for ~7 years while an adult, or about 20% of my life, now live in a time change state again.
Having experienced both I would take the no time change every time. And I have yet to meet anyone who would (small sample size for sure, I'm sure someones done some polling).
Good for job security I guess!
> with the only cost being people complaining for a day afterwards.
I complain all summer long.
What if we just split the difference?
America/New_York becomes UTC-04:30
> with the only cost being people complaining for a day afterwards
Tell me you never had issues with sleep without telling me you never had issues with sleep.
Perhaps worth noting that most medical and sleep/circadian research folks want permanent standard time:
* https://www.ama-assn.org/press-center/press-releases/ama-cal...
* https://www.labmanager.com/new-position-statement-supports-p...
* http://www.chronobiology.ch/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/JBR-D...
* https://www.chronobiology.com/impact-daylight-saving-time-ci...
* https://esrs.eu/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/To_the_EU_Commiss...
* https://www.chronobiocanada.com/official-statements
* https://srbr.org/advocacy/daylight-saving-time-presskit/
* https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10476036/
* https://old.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/dq2nv3/
> The authors take the position that, based on comparisons of large populations living in DST or ST or on western versus eastern edges of time zones, the advantages of permanent ST outweigh switching to DST annually or permanently. Four peer reviewers provided expert critiques of the initial submission, and the SRBR Executive Board approved the revised manuscript as a Position Paper to help educate the public in their evaluation of current legislative actions to end DST. […] The choice of DST is political and therefore can be changed. If we want to improve human health, we should not fight against our body clock, and therefore, we should abandon DST and return to Standard Time (which is when the sun clock time most closely matches the social clock time) throughout the year. This solution would fix both the acute and the chronic problems of DST. We therefore strongly support removing DST changes or removing permanent DST and having governing organizations choose permanent Standard Time for the health and safety of their citizens.
* https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/07487304198541...
Recent US public opinion:
> As the March 9 [2025] switch to daylight saving time (DST) approaches in the U.S., the majority of Americans (54%) say they are ready to do away with the practice. By contrast, 40% of U.S. adults say they are in favor of daylight saving time, while 6% are uncertain.
[…]
> The plurality of Americans, 48%, say they would prefer to have standard time the whole year, including summer. Half as many, 24%, prefer having daylight saving time in place the whole year, including winter. The smallest percentage, 19%, prefer the status quo of switching between the two each year.
* https://news.gallup.com/poll/657584/half-daylight-saving-tim...
I think that the gallup poll is flawed because it does not explain what daylight saving versus standard time is. I just spoke to an educated grad student, who thought that we were in standard time right now. Because the sun is out later during daylight saving time, the name is somewhat counter-intuitive. Also, because it’s on for most of the year, DST feels “standard.”
I've definitely talked to people that though daylight savings time is the time used in the winter, since that's when there are the fewest daylight hours and you need to "save" them or something.
Given how many times in my life I've internally groaned at yet another corporate email or website that references "EST" during the summer, I'm convinced no one is paying attention.
And that, if we do actually implement year-round daylight saving time, everyone will still call it EST.
I've heard both the "saving" has something to do with farming in the summer and candles in the winter, so either one could be daylight savings time. So I haven't been able to keep them straight and use "summer time" and "winter time" instead.
In the medium term wouldn't it likely not matter? Schedules will adjust to whatever permanent time system is adopted.
I doubt it. People seem to have a strong aversion to sleeping before sunset.
How would permanent DST matter in that regard? Are people going to bed at like 4 pm in the winter and now upset they'd have to wait until 5? DST is already used in the summer (and 3/4 of the year).
You're right, I should have referred to sunrise instead. For me, permanent DST would mean the sun doesn't come up until 9am in late December.
It's about summer. And yes, some people hate it that there is still light out at 9:30pm.
It does depending what you do. For example, I'd rather have more sunlight available after my work day ends.
But someone say working physical, outdoor job might prefer to have more sunlight early on.
Or vice versa, have less of their work day in the afternoon heat peak
Studies have been conducted about the safety of sticking to one time. The ones who are the most vulnerable are kids waiting for buses in the dark. We can't move to dynamic school times because we are still working the same paradigm as the industrial revolution- same schedule every day, year in year out. And society is simply too divided and fractured, and the motives too hidden and craven, to decide to move en masse to a dynamic schedule.
School start times should be pushed back an hour anyways. Students learn better, especially middle school + highschool age. The only reason we don't is because it conflicts with parents working schedules.
To the degree kids are standing around outside, they're already in the dark in northern US states (to say nothing about Canada and areas of Europe) for part of the year even with standard time.
And, yes, dynamic school schedules don't work because they need to be synced at some level with work schedules. A one-time shift might work though.
I mostly don't have a dog in this hunt. I pretty much set my own schedule absent the odd morning appointment.
In the northern states, sure. But now you’re expanding it to southern states and places on the edge of the transition zones.
Also, 2 hour late starts for cold are a fairly common thing to happen due to cold in northern states. Now you’re talking about 3 hour late starts.
> To the degree kids are standing around outside, they're already in the dark in northern US states
It's a continuum, not a discrete state. Even in the northern states, they're out in the dark for perhaps 4-6 weeks. Now that will get extended to, say, 10+ weeks.
Studies also show that permanent standard time is better than permanent daylight time. But for some reason, the US wants to go against the rest of the world on this.
For what reasons is it better? I’d rather have the evening light than the first 20 minutes when I get up.
> For what reasons is it better?
To start:
> Later sunrises and sunsets, as seen with pDST, are associated with multiple long-term health outcomes including increases in stroke, heart attacks, diabetes, obesity, and cancer.[8–10]
> The increase in obesity and other cardiovascular health problems show that even if DST were to encourage exercise in some individuals it is not enough to outweigh the effects of sleep and circadian disruption on food choices, metabolism, hunger hormones, and glucose control and other cardiovascular risk factors.[11,12]
* https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10476036/
It matches our circadian rhythms better. That leads to absolutely massive better health outcomes, society-wide.
People wanting to drive home with a bit of light doesn’t really offset everyone’s sleep getting screwed up, especially those with later natural circadian rhythms.
You are aware that at least much of Europe uses a similar system to what the US uses today?
Europe is less than 8% of the world's population. The vast majority of the world uses standard time. It works. No one there pines for permanent daylight time.
Europe is wrong 50% of the time. The US[1] will be wrong 100% of the time. It can mostly get away with this because it spans the continent. But still, you're going to deal with the stupidity that crossing the Mexican border you will always have to correct your watch.
[1] And Alberta + BC. But really - all of Canada is just a rounding error anyway!
Meanwhile, China has one timezone so I sort of doubt that DST registers given that.
Every division of society should just use its own schedule, then the number of divisions doesn't matter.
"Standards are great. Everybody should have one!"
Maybe they'll actually do it this time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanent_time_observation_in_...
The engineer in me wants standard time, but the human in me wants daylight time.
Essentially you're just redefining the standard UTC offset for US timezones.
I wonder if UK will follow as well.
This is fine, provided we add the extra necessary time zone.
Wasn’t this already tried at least once and then reverted some 2 years later?
> Wasn’t this already tried at least once and then reverted some 2 years later?
In the US in the 1970s, but more recently in Russia as well:
* https://globalnews.ca/news/1469007/russia-abolishes-daylight...
* https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/01/russia-state-d...
Yeah but now everyone has cell phones and LED street lights that sometimes feel brighter than the sun.
It's worth trying again, it's not like it can't be reverted again.
Morons.
Nice, congrats US! EU promises to stop this madness every year for the last 6 years, and apparently it's impossible.
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As usual, when Congress finally moves to address an issue, they manage to do it in the stupidest possible way. Permanent Standard Time is the better choice in nearly every way.
Why so? Having more time in the evening after work is way better. Getting out of work and it already being dark is depressing.
And many people find it depressing getting going in the morning when it's still dark.
Plus, in Winter most people at best get off work around dusk anyway.
In addition, most studies indicate health benefits for standard time relative to both switching and permanent DST.
We tried permanent DST back in the 70s, and it sucked. We switched back. If we're going to make a change, it should be to standard time.
Am I the only person who thinks its odd that my government (US) thinks its can tell me what time to get up and go to bed?
Before timezones, "noon" was the point where the sun was the highest in the sky.
It seems we should focus on having our timezones be more in line with what "noon" is supposed to be: IE, major population centers should have "noon" close to true noon, with a little more flexibility for rural areas so they can stay on the same time as their closest major population center.
Okay, so you travel from, say, Washington DC to NYC and then you have to set your clock back by... I think it's like 13 minutes?
Which is why railroads started instituting time zones in the late 19th century: because it turns out having to recalibrate your watch every hour or so is a recipe for creating train crashes. Railroad time didn't become standard time until the early 20th century, in large part because a lot of the smaller cities were pretty irate at having to adjust their clocks. (It also doesn't help that coincidentally, places like Chicago and New York City are very near the center meridian of their time zone).
> places like Chicago and New York City are very near the center meridian of their time zone
Chicago is very close to the eastern edge of the Central time zone, though I know that was not true throughout history.
If you look at the "natural" disposition of the time zones, Chicago is very near the appropriate longitude (90 W) for the median of the time zone. The border between Eastern and Central time zone should be about halfway through Ohio; instead, the Eastern time zone is skewed westward, since Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan wanted to be in the same time zone as NYC.
Technically no. Work and School dictate when we get up and go to bed. It's all relative. We could create a timezone where 12:00PM is in the morning. We are just used to this idea that morning, afternoon, evening, and night need to correspond to specific time values. For example, China uses just one timezone. So local regions just adapt to what logically makes sense. In a perfect world, local regions would adapt to the amount of daylight we have for each season, like it was before timekeeping and timezones. So school and work would shift when they start based off the rising of the sun. This isn't practical though for multiple reasons. It would cause chaos and confusion for work shifts, scheduling etc.
Or have a universal clock. But have regional start times. 9-5 makes no sense.
9-5 is a red herring for this topic - but why does it make no sense to you?
If everyone follows the same clock, like, now is 12:30pm, across the entire world, then while everyone could also work 9-5, we know that most people like to be awake during daylight and asleep at night, so the local working hours might be 2-10.
We can get an idea of the issues in China, which has a single national timezone instead of 4 or 5 geographical time zones. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_China
> Beijing Time users in Xinjiang usually schedule their daily activities two hours later than those who live in eastern China. As such, stores and offices in Xinjiang are commonly open from 10:00 to 19:00 Beijing Time, which equals 08:00 to 17:00 in Ürümqi Time.[17] This is known as the work/rest time in Xinjiang.
Thus, "9-5" would get a name like "work time", or the existing name of "day shift" would have increased popularity.
This is a great question, and theres alot of history there, this is how time used to work until travel and communication speeds necessitating coordination over larger areas required it. The biggest driver in North America? Railroads.
Great documentary on the history of human relationship with time is available here: https://www.pbs.org/video/pbs-indies-time-1/
I also really like having 12pm being the moment the sun is at the highest point. But I think the whole point of that change is to simplify and this would go the other way.
You can get up or go to bed whenever you wish.
You can say today's date is 27 Messidor Year CCXXXIV if you wish.
The problem is when you want to coordinate events between people following different time conventions.
Timezones as we know it started off as a railroad company invention. Does the London/Birmingham train follow London time or Birmingham time? Does the stop in Rugby use Rugby time?
DST in the US used to be a regional choice until 1966. Coordination became an issue.
"The lack of standardization led to a patchwork where some areas observed DST while adjacent areas did not, and it was not unheard of to have to reset a clock several times during a short trip (e.g., bus drivers operating on West Virginia Route 2 between Moundsville, West Virginia, and Steubenville, Ohio, had to reset their watches seven times over 35 miles)." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_time_in_the_United_...
> with a little more flexibility for rural areas so they can stay on the same time as their closest major population center.
We can do that already. I remember when most of Indiana didn't follow DST. Businesses in Danville, Illinois, near the border followed Indiana time by changing the listed hours of operation during summer.
Speaking of Indiana, 'Attitudes began to change in the 1990s, as Indiana's time zone situation was seen as impeding the state's economic growth. Interstate travel and commerce were difficult as people wondered, "what time is it in Indiana?"' - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Indiana
Having 12:00 noon be when the sun is highest makes these issues reappear.
that became an issue with the introduction of trains and their schedule.
how do you think this would work today with our interconnected world? we absolutely need standardized times or everything falls apart.
Ideal and impractical. Even with modern wifi.
Why not have your own timezone based on where you are standing right now? Oh, right, because that's the opposite of universal (or at least worldwide).
One-hour shifts are manageable. One-minute shifts between population centers are not. Your meeting would start at precisely 8:03:38, your time. The business you are calling would close its doors 13 minutes before 5 pm.