I hope this gets done away with sooner rather than later. While I enjoy the extra one hour in the weekend before the holiday season, the spring forward generally causes me a headache lasting about a week.
Because you're missing one hour of sleep? Maybe try to ease into it? 2-3 days before it happens, start getting up 15 minutes earlier. Then 30 minutes. Then 45 minutes. Then when its daylight saving get up on time (which would be 60 minutes earlier than usual, but only 15 minutes earlier than the day before).
These keep coming out, but I guess I just don't get it. Say, looking at it from the POV of parents with daycare/school-aged kids. Let's say that school always starts at 8, and kids wake up at 7. Full-day school/aftercare etc. is done by 5 PM or so.
During the summer in California, with daylight savings, the sun will rise at ~6 AM and set at 8 PM. The morning sun is mostly useless, at least for me. But 3 hours of sun after school ends is nice for kids to be outside, it's warmer, etc.
Without daylight savings, the sun would rise even earlier at ~5AM and set at 7 PM. So we've lost an hour of evening sun for an our of super-early morning. Sounds like a bad deal to me, but what am I missing?
The issue with this is the late sunrise in the winter. In mid-Jan in LA the sun rises at ~7AM. It would rise at 8AM with daylight savings in winter. This sucks terribly since it moves your whole commute into dark; kids walk to school in the dark, etc.
It's pretty depressing to start the day in the dark, to be honest (with apologies to folks living in very northern or southern latitudes)
"But before the end of the first month of daylight saving that January, eight children died in traffic accidents in Florida, and a spokesperson for Florida’s education department attributed six of those deaths directly to children going to school in darkness."
I live a few miles from the 120th meridian in PST, and I enjoy astronomy. So let's just avoid DST completely, please. Don't know why anyone wants to live in DST all year, which is effectively just pretending you live 15 degrees to the east of where you are.
On the other hand, leap seconds can die in a fire. Let's only correct that once a century, because no one outside of astronomy cares about that level of astronomical accuracy.
> So we've lost an hour of evening sun for an our of super-early morning. Sounds like a bad deal to me, but what am I missing?
In other words, because you want you and your kids to have more daylight at the end of the day, you like having your schedule moved up an hour every year in spring, and moved back in the fall when there are fewer hours of daylight.
What you're missing is that I don't want to move my schedule to accommodate yours, but the government has determined that I must do so.
There is no daylight "saved." It's just a massive schedule change for everyone.
If all the parents with school-aged children want their kids to have more daylight in the afternoon, great! Convince the school to change their schedule twice a year! If you want more daylight at the end of the day, great! Start work an hour earlier!
But why do I and everyone else have to change our schedules so you can have your way?
As for having DST year-round (mentioned by others), the starting point for marking time has generally been noon, when the sun is highest in the sky. (Some cultures start counting at sunrise.) Ignoring the question of "local noon" vs. "Time Zone noon" for the sake of this argument, DST just moves noon to 1:00 p.m. Really, this is even dumber than changing twice a year. Just start your day an hour earlier year-round.
If only we really could legislate the natural order of things caused by the rotation of the earth on its axis, then maybe we could also change the natural order of things caused by the orbit of the earth around the sun.
I propose that we have Summer Savings Time! We should start Spring three weeks earlier, on March 1 of each year, and end Summer three weeks later, on October 15 of each year. We can then eliminate six weeks of Winter, ending December on the 15th of that month and skipping straight to February 1. Think of all the bad weather we will avoid!!
This will also obliterate six weeks of unproductive holiday time, silly resolutions, bad music, and untoward self-reflection. It will reduce any rancor that might be caused by people celebrating Christmas and also eliminate New Year's parties and the associated debauchery. People who are suicidally depressed will experience far less social pressure, since families will only have to contend with Thanksgiving (in the U.S.).
I'm going to write to my congressman right now, in fact.
For some reason you seem to be terribly angry, though I assure you I didn't mean to impose anything here, just curious about the reasons. There's quite a bit of snark to cut through in your reply and the only substantial sentence I can find is "I don't want to move my schedule".
This is a perfectly valid reason, from which I assume you're not encumbered by any particular organizational schedule (such as school starting at a certain time, work starting at a certain time, regularly scheduled meetings year-round etc.); it makes sense that you would find these time changes annoying, although I'm not sure why it affects you if you truly don't care what the clock shows when the sun rises and sets.
I remember reading somewhere that the whole switching time by an hour twice a year thing literally kills people every year.
The premise was that on the days right after the switch to the later sunrise schedule, sleepy people that were used to driving to work in daylight are now driving to work at night, and there's a statistically significant increase in traffic fatalities on those days.
My source has been lost to the sands of time, but it rings true for me.
My goal in life is to perform a us government sponsored cost-benefit analysis for ending "daylight savings time" and have it come out as an overwhelming positive.
Is your question if lawns can brown out from too much daylight? Because they certainly can, and e.g. in South Korea they were brown most of the summer. (in reality, it's probably more a mix dry, warmth and light).
Since several DST articles have been posted this week as we approach a DST-event weekend, I have found it interesting to read the comments on HN. My own comment [1] on Florida's vote to use permanent DST (assuming the federal government will allow it) expressed my sentiment as succinctly as I could.
But I want to make one more point to counter a sentiment I've seen in these threads. Most of us who out of convenience characterize ourselves as "anti-DST" don't much care if we have permanent standard time or permanent "daylight-saving" (summer) time. The specific singular timezone we select is inconsequential in my mind, as long as it is in fact singular. What anti-DST means to me is being opposed to the twice-annual madness of changing every clock in the nation. As I said in my other comment, these clock changes cause countless small nuisances, immeasurable drowsiness and lost productivity, and a non-trivial number of injuries or worse. So shift every state one timezone eastward, but do so and be done with clock adjustments once and for all.
And yes, there are bigger problems in the world. But unlike solving healthcare, abolishing DST is just a decision. There's no hard problem to solve—just remove it.
I remember how weird it felt the first time I visited Hawaii, where the sun year round comes up around 6am and goes down around 6pm. You could feel the cultural response to this. People were waking up earlier then I was used to, out shopping earlier then i was used to, and eating dinner earlier then I was used to.
Nowadays it makes sense to me how much our schedules have been dictated by the effects of daylight savings. Going to work at 9am, eating dinner at 8pm, going to sleep at 1am. It feels now like we need DST to function correctly.
How much expense goes into software which needs to support daylight savings? How many bugs have occurred because of it?
Personally I deal with this problem a lot. It is a pain and expensive. Of course this is a problem because the time data my software ingests often doesn’t include the offset or zone. So I have to work around it. All for subtracting then add one hour for the year.
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[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 89.8 ms ] threadhttps://youtu.be/k4EUTMPuvHo
During the summer in California, with daylight savings, the sun will rise at ~6 AM and set at 8 PM. The morning sun is mostly useless, at least for me. But 3 hours of sun after school ends is nice for kids to be outside, it's warmer, etc.
Without daylight savings, the sun would rise even earlier at ~5AM and set at 7 PM. So we've lost an hour of evening sun for an our of super-early morning. Sounds like a bad deal to me, but what am I missing?
It's pretty depressing to start the day in the dark, to be honest (with apologies to folks living in very northern or southern latitudes)
"But before the end of the first month of daylight saving that January, eight children died in traffic accidents in Florida, and a spokesperson for Florida’s education department attributed six of those deaths directly to children going to school in darkness."
On the other hand, leap seconds can die in a fire. Let's only correct that once a century, because no one outside of astronomy cares about that level of astronomical accuracy.
Why should your odd preference for reduced morning sunlight be enforced by law on everybody else?
In other words, because you want you and your kids to have more daylight at the end of the day, you like having your schedule moved up an hour every year in spring, and moved back in the fall when there are fewer hours of daylight.
What you're missing is that I don't want to move my schedule to accommodate yours, but the government has determined that I must do so.
There is no daylight "saved." It's just a massive schedule change for everyone.
If all the parents with school-aged children want their kids to have more daylight in the afternoon, great! Convince the school to change their schedule twice a year! If you want more daylight at the end of the day, great! Start work an hour earlier!
But why do I and everyone else have to change our schedules so you can have your way?
As for having DST year-round (mentioned by others), the starting point for marking time has generally been noon, when the sun is highest in the sky. (Some cultures start counting at sunrise.) Ignoring the question of "local noon" vs. "Time Zone noon" for the sake of this argument, DST just moves noon to 1:00 p.m. Really, this is even dumber than changing twice a year. Just start your day an hour earlier year-round.
If only we really could legislate the natural order of things caused by the rotation of the earth on its axis, then maybe we could also change the natural order of things caused by the orbit of the earth around the sun.
I propose that we have Summer Savings Time! We should start Spring three weeks earlier, on March 1 of each year, and end Summer three weeks later, on October 15 of each year. We can then eliminate six weeks of Winter, ending December on the 15th of that month and skipping straight to February 1. Think of all the bad weather we will avoid!!
This will also obliterate six weeks of unproductive holiday time, silly resolutions, bad music, and untoward self-reflection. It will reduce any rancor that might be caused by people celebrating Christmas and also eliminate New Year's parties and the associated debauchery. People who are suicidally depressed will experience far less social pressure, since families will only have to contend with Thanksgiving (in the U.S.).
I'm going to write to my congressman right now, in fact.
This is a perfectly valid reason, from which I assume you're not encumbered by any particular organizational schedule (such as school starting at a certain time, work starting at a certain time, regularly scheduled meetings year-round etc.); it makes sense that you would find these time changes annoying, although I'm not sure why it affects you if you truly don't care what the clock shows when the sun rises and sets.
There...are...no... benefit.
The premise was that on the days right after the switch to the later sunrise schedule, sleepy people that were used to driving to work in daylight are now driving to work at night, and there's a statistically significant increase in traffic fatalities on those days.
My source has been lost to the sands of time, but it rings true for me.
My goal in life is to perform a us government sponsored cost-benefit analysis for ending "daylight savings time" and have it come out as an overwhelming positive.
I think it is mentioned in Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker.
...wait, what? What am I missing here?
But I want to make one more point to counter a sentiment I've seen in these threads. Most of us who out of convenience characterize ourselves as "anti-DST" don't much care if we have permanent standard time or permanent "daylight-saving" (summer) time. The specific singular timezone we select is inconsequential in my mind, as long as it is in fact singular. What anti-DST means to me is being opposed to the twice-annual madness of changing every clock in the nation. As I said in my other comment, these clock changes cause countless small nuisances, immeasurable drowsiness and lost productivity, and a non-trivial number of injuries or worse. So shift every state one timezone eastward, but do so and be done with clock adjustments once and for all.
And yes, there are bigger problems in the world. But unlike solving healthcare, abolishing DST is just a decision. There's no hard problem to solve—just remove it.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16547740
Nowadays it makes sense to me how much our schedules have been dictated by the effects of daylight savings. Going to work at 9am, eating dinner at 8pm, going to sleep at 1am. It feels now like we need DST to function correctly.
Personally I deal with this problem a lot. It is a pain and expensive. Of course this is a problem because the time data my software ingests often doesn’t include the offset or zone. So I have to work around it. All for subtracting then add one hour for the year.