Oregon and Washington have already passed bills to change, but the bills require California to also pass one, and they have not. Oregon signed their bill in 2019.
It may be worth noting that most of the population in Washington, Oregon, and northern California is quite far west in the Pacific timezone so standard time in those areas is roughly equivalent to daylight saving time in much of the northeast US at least some of which would be in Atlantic time if we respected actual longitude more. In other words, the west coast already gets a lot of evening light and it gets light relatively later in the morning even without DST.
This is pretty silly nowadays. Sure, we don't need it. But I give even odds that folks would complain about how off sunrise and sunset are in non equator places.
Edit: I should say that my post is mostly inline with the updates to this article.
It is far more difficult to get thousands of businesses to coordinate on a fundamental cultural shift to a 10a-6p working day, than to just not change clocks back after switching to DST one last time.
People say that but I'm not sure it's true. As long as they all agree about what time it is at any given moment (which is something we're not proposing to change) why do their business hours even have to line up perfectly? And to the extend that they do need to, wouldn't they just sort of figure it out over the course of a week or a month and then not have to worry about at again from that point on?
Also, it would be a shift to an 8-4 working day, right, if we were going to keep the clocks on standard time year round?
> wouldn't they just sort of figure it out over the course of a week or a month and then not have to worry about at again from that point on?
You'd have to re-negotiate every time you work with a new client. Are they on 9-5? Or 10-6? When can we schedule that weekly call? Businesses have no incentive to go through this headache, so they won't.
We already shift our working hours twice a year with practically no issues. Let's just not switch back once.
> You'd have to re-negotiate every time you work with a new client. Are they on 9-5? Or 10-6? When can we schedule that weekly call? Businesses have no incentive to go through this headache, so they won't.
My experience is that these meeting coordinations still have to happen. Even within your own company, in the same office building.
Quite a few folks/societies that study chronobiology and sleep rhythms have put out statements that permanent Standard Time is what we should ideally be using.
A comment of mine from a few months ago with links to various position papers, many of which are referenced in the story you linked to:
> Local and national governments around the world are currently considering the elimination of the annual switch to and from Daylight Saving Time (DST). As an international organization of scientists dedicated to studying circadian and other biological rhythms, the Society for Research on Biological Rhythms (SRBR) engaged experts in the field to write a Position Paper on the consequences of choosing to live on DST or Standard Time (ST). 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.
> In summary, the scientific literature strongly argues against the switching between DST and Standard Time and even more so against adopting DST permanently. […]
The US tried a 2-year experiment of eliminating Daylight Savings Time back in the 1970s, and it was so reviled in practice that it was cancelled after 7 months.
People tend to hate change in general, so these things are hard to shift once put in place. That doesn't take away the fact that humanity managed to thrive without DST for thousands of years, so clearly it can be done.
> That doesn't take away the fact that humanity managed to thrive without DST for thousands of years, so clearly it can be done.
They effectively did have DST. They just didn't implement at as a two segment step function like we do. They implemented it as a 365 segment step function (366 segments in leap years). I.e., they synchronized their activities to sunrise.
We're fine with getting rid of the time shift, but if we're going to do that, it makes more sense that the back half of the day have sunlight for longer. People need to do things and kids need to play. Most folks aren't going to work to plow fields anymore.
Why does it have to be a "one off error?" When's the last time you used a sundial to figure out the time down to a quarter hour or didn't have a device with you that gave you the current time?
I think most people would agree on two things: (1) that having time after work to do things during daylight hours is ideal, and (2) that the work hours they already have are fine.
A shift in working hours might be fine for childless adults, but it doesn't work for most people. People have to be present to get their kids ready for school or daycare, and you're never going to get teacher's unions to agree that they should be in the doors of a school by 6am to receive students.
So... this fall, no shift. For now or ever. Boom, done. Yes, the days get a bit shorter, but you're still talking about a 6:45pm sunset in Texas, which gives people about 2 hours of active time in the evenings, which is preferable to the 45 minutes previously.
> When's the last time you used a sundial to figure out the time down to a quarter hour or didn't have a device with you that gave you the current time?
I live in Scandinavia some 500km South of the Arctic circle. Let me tell you that it's very obvious that the sun is one hour off at "midnight" in Summer. If we kept DST in Winter it would be even more noticeable. It would also mean that there'd be some 3 months per year where I need to go to and leave from work in complete darkness. At least right now I get to wake up to some sunlight in December.
Daytime is fundamentally an astronomic concept. Proponents of permanent DST could at least be intellectually honest and admit they want everyone to get up an hour earlier rather than force everyone to pretend that 11am is actually 12pm.
> Yes, the days get a bit shorter, but you're still talking about a 6:45pm sunset in Texas
That's cute. I just walked back home from work and the sun was already setting here at 5:30. And it's still Autumn.
That's cool, but this article is written by an American to an American audience with an American sensibility regarding daylight and time in general. What works best for us may not be what works best for you, and people in your country are free to set your time however you like.
I disagree. The US has states quite a lot further North and their decisions are also likely to affect Canadian timezone decisions. Furthermore the same discussion is taking place in the EU with countries in Central Europe on the Easternmost part of CET (in particular Germany) pushing for permanent DST, so take my opinion not as a Northern-European one but as a Northern one.
To me it looks like it's mainly the Southernmost states and countries that are pushing for this. Which is especially strange since actual tropical countries don't seem to have issues with standard time.
It's better for society to adapt to people's biological clocks than to force DST on populations at different latitudes for commercial reasons. In reality, schedules would change every six or three months, not every month.
The logistics problem seems overstated, because countries that have different time zones manage fine.
That feels like the “what if instead of legalizing gay marriage we just got rid of marriage” take in this debate. In the sense that “people being able to work when they want to” is a utopian thing that isn’t going to happen, in part because there is real value in people being in the workplace (or even just logged in) at the same time. And even of I did change my working hours, stores and restaurants and coffee shops operating on the normal schedule would open/close at the “wrong times” for me. Plus when I have kids someday I won’t be able to change when they go to school.
Much as we’d all like to be special snowflakes who march to the beat of our own drum, the fact of the matter is that society moves as a unit, and our happiness is often dictated by where it is moving to.
>This doesn't work geographically in practice anyway.
It's still more correct than DST.
>And who wants to start work earlier?
You ARE starting work earlier with DST. That's the whole point. I sometimes wonder if there's some fundamental difference in understanding. To me the time in your watch is just a numeric value the _actual_ time of day is the location of the sun on the sky.
Plus one hour less of sun-exposure for half a year (I mean, if we get rid of DST) will most certainly decrease the quantity of vitamin D absorbed by many, not sure if the powers that be factored that in their decision-making process.
I think most people have difficulty waking up in time and difficulty falling asleep early enough. To fix this, doesn't it make sense to have daylight in the morning and darkness in the evening?
There will also be people who do not want to wake up to a pitch black sky and the coldest of the night.
Some people like to wake up at 5 AM to work. Some people like to wake up at 5 AM to play. Some people like to play and go to bed at 5 AM.
The source of the issue is the fixed 9 to 5 work hour instead of which hour we call 9 AM. So use your tooth and nail for whoever tells to work from 9 to 5 instead of the divided opinion of when exactly is 9 AM.
The problem in northern latitudes with permanent DST is that morning darkness is generally more harmful than evening darkness.
First, the weather tends to be worse in the morning. It tends to be colder. Fog is more likely. Ice on the sidewalks and roads is more likely.
Second, people's schedules are generally more synced in the mornings. People tend to go to work or school over a narrower morning time span than the evening time span in which people come home.
Morning darkness then means you are putting the time when you have the most people traveling at the time you have the worst travel conditions of the day.
In the northern parts of the US, permanent DST wouldn't even give most people much usable after-work sunlight. Here in the vicinity of Seattle, for example, on the last day of DST this year sunset is 5:43 PM. If you are a 9 to 5 worker your commute likely uses up most or all of your evening sunlight.
I totally understand your point. I don't see why all the daylight hours need to happen during the time when I'm stuck in the office (or otherwise at work), leaving only darkness for the hours I'm not at work. This may have made sense in an era when the majority of people worked in the field, but today most people work in buildings, and a great many of those buildings sadly have permanently shuttered windows and artificial lighting.
> I get that it's subjective, but my subjective view is that having sunlight after work is more important, and I stand by that.
Plenty of folks that study chronobiology do not think it is subjective. The Society for Research on Biological Rhythms:
> Local and national governments around the world are currently considering the elimination of the annual switch to and from Daylight Saving Time (DST). As an international organization of scientists dedicated to studying circadian and other biological rhythms, the Society for Research on Biological Rhythms (SRBR) engaged experts in the field to write a Position Paper on the consequences of choosing to live on DST or Standard Time (ST). 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.
> In summary, the scientific literature strongly argues against the switching between DST and Standard Time and even more so against adopting DST permanently. […]
It's funny how the real reason we jump through time hoops escapes the conversation... the business class doesn't want to offer flexable work time for employees.
The OP links to another site that says the science is in: "Wake up to the morning sun". Well, clearly, the answer is then to get rid of the stupid two shift shuffle each year (use standard time), get up to the sunrise, and go to fucking work.
But NO, business leaders of america will sob and whine... working hours are 9 to 5 ONLY! Natch, no cookie for politicians.
> Even if you had flexible work hours, you'd have to start early to enjoy evening sun. That's not great.
Or you could wake up later in order to not screw up your circadian rhythm and in turn lower your risks of various ailments. It would be your own choice.
In the end, wouldn't it result in much the same thing?
Assuming that we want everyone to know that we're waking up earlier in the summertime and closing up shop later, it would be preferable to coordinate this, right? We couldn't want all banks and shops and things closing at their own time. Or schools starting two minutes earlier every single day as we approach summer, to match up exactly with the sun, right?
So we could coordinate it all to happen in one big step. We'd say "Hey, from March 14th onward, all public schools are now going to be starting at 7:30 AM instead of 8:30 AM, and banks will open at 8:00 AM, and post offices will close at 4:00 PM.
And then we could so the same thing in the Fall, backwards.
But then, with nothing forcing private businesses and private schools from following this, wouldn't we get some horrible mismash? We'd have to call up every restaurant before making a reservation: hey, do you follow personal summertime hours? Banks would have their own closing hours, your older kid's public high school starts 1.5 hours before the private elementary school instead of a half hour, etc etc..
I don't have boss. But I am not going to go to sleep at 10pm, just to wake up at 6, because I do things later in the day. Like going out with friends and going to sauna later in the evening and 10-6 schedule would be disturbed a lot.
The older I've gotten, the more I'm convinced that people don't care what the clock on the wall says, what they care about is minimizing the effects of sunrise/sunset. No one wants to be awake or get their kids awake before sunrise, and many jobs can't continue after sunset. Lifestyles will adjust forwards or backwards to match the hours in between
Exactly. Whenever I have this conversation with folks, I point out that the purpose of clocks is to keep human behavior in synch, and all that daylight saving time does is make that harder in an age in which people don't rely upon the position of the sun in the sky anymore to determine when it's time to do things.
Yes, we are diurnal animals. Yes, sunlight matters to how we sleep. But why do we care whether the hands on the clock are pointing up when the sun is highest overhead? Everybody could do what they needed to do sleep wise regardless of where they were pointing.
The simplest solution is not only to do away with DST, but to adopt a single universal time. This would make keeping in synch easy. No longer would time zone conversions be necessary. No longer would we have to adjust our sleep schedules twice a year or worry about whether whomever we had to collaborate with in a different part of the world was doing the same.
But outside a handful of industries and technical fields, we seem unable to stomach the thought that the clock might read 17:00 as the sun rises. and 7:00 as it sets. That's just too weird. And why should Tavarua have to tolerate that when Greenwich gets to live with the historical norms?
Politics. Politics are the end reason for why we fight over what the clock says.
> or worry about whether whomever we had to collaborate with in a different part of the world was doing the same.
How would having a single universal time solve knowing whether your collaborators were asleep or having dinner or whatever? You could have some kind of lookup table -- "Australians usually wake up around 18:00 UTC" -- but then what have you solved?
With universal time you wouldn't have to do conversion when you want to determine when an event is in one time-zone when it's specified in another one.
I mean, it wouldn't be a complete road block. But when visiting cross country, it is easy to know folks get up around eight to nine. Pretty much wherever I go. Similarly, I can check out my call will hit around five to know I will probably be interrupting meal time for families with kids.
So you still need lookup table to figure out whether you're being considerate of them or not. At least you don't have to worry also that you're miscommunicating with them regarding when you want to meet! My sense is that more of the problems we have result from not understanding what time somebody is proposing. People are free to point out, after all, that that isn't a convenient time so long as they understand what is proposed accurately.
There's some possibility, in fact, that everybody living with their own local time makes it harder for people to learn how their local time works relative to others'. If we all used one universal time, we'd probably have developed an intuition for when people were sleeping in different parts of the world according to that universal time. As it is, we tend to rely on the lookup tables every time.
I totally agree, but as someone who has a lot of flexibility to set my own schedule I probably don't have as much awareness of the pain points of the current system.
The reality is that days get too damn short in the winter and any system of time zone switching is going to run into that limitation somewhere.
If I were dictator I would switch us to permanent standard time and normalize the concept of seasonal hours (which should be—but frustratingly often isn't—a lot less painful in the era of the internet).
You could even extend the concept of seasonal hours to making work days shorter in the winter and longer in the summer (not a new idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_clock).
I have always been of the opinion that it's the schedule, not the clock!
You need to change the schedule if you don't like the hours. Changing the clock does nothing!
If the point is that business are closing too late so we lose too much daylight during winter, then we need to tell businesses to move their operating hours earlier.
My gut says that we decided school should operate 8-3 and work 9-5 for a reason. If we were to move the clock permanently by an hour, why wouldn't those times just shift as well?
Just look at Spain. For historical reasons they're in the European time zone even though they're really aligned with the UK. Culturally they do everything "late" - start work, finish work, eat dinner. That's just the schedule shifting to meet the sun.
Could we just move it 30 minutes in between the current 2 options and make that permanent? Honest question. No one will ever be happy with any choice, but if we split the difference, we'd still have some unhappy people, but one less thing to deal with 2x per year.
Yes. I used "savings" in the title and first paragraph for SEO reasons. This blog post is from 2006, when google didn't change words into other words without asking, so it was useful to use the variant that people search for rather than the version that is correct.
The whole point of time zones is to make it somewhat close to noon when the sun is at its peak, and do make midnight somewhat close to the middle of the night. Otherwise we should all just use UTC.
That's my main objection to permanent DST: it's really just shifting everyone one timezone to the east.
What I learned from this post is that one of the big reasons that permanent DST is appealing is that a lot of areas in the current timezones really ought to be one timezone to the east. For example (see https://observablehq.com/@awoodruff/daylight-saving-time-gri...) Nevada ought to be in the Mountain timezone and Alabama ought to be in the Eastern timezone. And a lot of the states that split into multiple timezones probably shouldn't (at least if you focus only on optimizing sunrise and sunset times).
You do realize DST is purely to reduce crime, right? Minimum 10% reduction, even with all the leftist cities crime sprees, riots, burning and destruction.
77 comments
[ 9.3 ms ] story [ 458 ms ] threadEdit: I should say that my post is mostly inline with the updates to this article.
Also, it would be a shift to an 8-4 working day, right, if we were going to keep the clocks on standard time year round?
You'd have to re-negotiate every time you work with a new client. Are they on 9-5? Or 10-6? When can we schedule that weekly call? Businesses have no incentive to go through this headache, so they won't.
We already shift our working hours twice a year with practically no issues. Let's just not switch back once.
My experience is that these meeting coordinations still have to happen. Even within your own company, in the same office building.
https://herf.medium.com/why-standard-time-is-better-e586b500...
The human body “needs” DST like diabetes needs cookies.
A comment of mine from a few months ago with links to various position papers, many of which are referenced in the story you linked to:
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26416574
The Society for Research on Biological Rhythms:
> Local and national governments around the world are currently considering the elimination of the annual switch to and from Daylight Saving Time (DST). As an international organization of scientists dedicated to studying circadian and other biological rhythms, the Society for Research on Biological Rhythms (SRBR) engaged experts in the field to write a Position Paper on the consequences of choosing to live on DST or Standard Time (ST). 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.
* https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31170882/
* https://doi.org/10.1177/0748730419854197
World Federation of Societies for Chronobiology:
> In summary, the scientific literature strongly argues against the switching between DST and Standard Time and even more so against adopting DST permanently. […]
* https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2019.0094...
* https://doi.org/10.3389/fphys.2019.00944
If anyone think that these are wrong, feel free to contact the original authors.
They effectively did have DST. They just didn't implement at as a two segment step function like we do. They implemented it as a 365 segment step function (366 segments in leap years). I.e., they synchronized their activities to sunrise.
I get that it's subjective, but my subjective view is that having sunlight after work is more important, and I stand by that.
We're fine with getting rid of the time shift, but if we're going to do that, it makes more sense that the back half of the day have sunlight for longer. People need to do things and kids need to play. Most folks aren't going to work to plow fields anymore.
I think most people would agree on two things: (1) that having time after work to do things during daylight hours is ideal, and (2) that the work hours they already have are fine.
A shift in working hours might be fine for childless adults, but it doesn't work for most people. People have to be present to get their kids ready for school or daycare, and you're never going to get teacher's unions to agree that they should be in the doors of a school by 6am to receive students.
So... this fall, no shift. For now or ever. Boom, done. Yes, the days get a bit shorter, but you're still talking about a 6:45pm sunset in Texas, which gives people about 2 hours of active time in the evenings, which is preferable to the 45 minutes previously.
I live in Scandinavia some 500km South of the Arctic circle. Let me tell you that it's very obvious that the sun is one hour off at "midnight" in Summer. If we kept DST in Winter it would be even more noticeable. It would also mean that there'd be some 3 months per year where I need to go to and leave from work in complete darkness. At least right now I get to wake up to some sunlight in December.
Daytime is fundamentally an astronomic concept. Proponents of permanent DST could at least be intellectually honest and admit they want everyone to get up an hour earlier rather than force everyone to pretend that 11am is actually 12pm.
> Yes, the days get a bit shorter, but you're still talking about a 6:45pm sunset in Texas
That's cute. I just walked back home from work and the sun was already setting here at 5:30. And it's still Autumn.
To me it looks like it's mainly the Southernmost states and countries that are pushing for this. Which is especially strange since actual tropical countries don't seem to have issues with standard time.
It's much easier to change our clocks twice a year.
The logistics problem seems overstated, because countries that have different time zones manage fine.
Much as we’d all like to be special snowflakes who march to the beat of our own drum, the fact of the matter is that society moves as a unit, and our happiness is often dictated by where it is moving to.
I think that most people would want to switch to permanent daylight saving time.
This moves the sunset "later" in the day so that you get more sunlight after work.
This is good for restaurants and leisure activities.
Arguments against this typically come in a few flavors every time this subject comes up:
This doesn't work geographically in practice anyway. It doesn't matter to anyone either. We're not an agrarian society without clocks. They often have to do this anyway. Schools could change the starting hours if they cared. Most people don't have kids. This isn't going to happen worldwide at any scale. And who wants to start work earlier? Fair point, but I think this is the minority of folks. Most social activities are at night, and this is when venues make the most money.It's still more correct than DST.
>And who wants to start work earlier?
You ARE starting work earlier with DST. That's the whole point. I sometimes wonder if there's some fundamental difference in understanding. To me the time in your watch is just a numeric value the _actual_ time of day is the location of the sun on the sky.
It is not subjective according to the scientists.
Some people like to wake up at 5 AM to work. Some people like to wake up at 5 AM to play. Some people like to play and go to bed at 5 AM.
The source of the issue is the fixed 9 to 5 work hour instead of which hour we call 9 AM. So use your tooth and nail for whoever tells to work from 9 to 5 instead of the divided opinion of when exactly is 9 AM.
First, the weather tends to be worse in the morning. It tends to be colder. Fog is more likely. Ice on the sidewalks and roads is more likely.
Second, people's schedules are generally more synced in the mornings. People tend to go to work or school over a narrower morning time span than the evening time span in which people come home.
Morning darkness then means you are putting the time when you have the most people traveling at the time you have the worst travel conditions of the day.
In the northern parts of the US, permanent DST wouldn't even give most people much usable after-work sunlight. Here in the vicinity of Seattle, for example, on the last day of DST this year sunset is 5:43 PM. If you are a 9 to 5 worker your commute likely uses up most or all of your evening sunlight.
Plenty of folks that study chronobiology do not think it is subjective. The Society for Research on Biological Rhythms:
> Local and national governments around the world are currently considering the elimination of the annual switch to and from Daylight Saving Time (DST). As an international organization of scientists dedicated to studying circadian and other biological rhythms, the Society for Research on Biological Rhythms (SRBR) engaged experts in the field to write a Position Paper on the consequences of choosing to live on DST or Standard Time (ST). 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.
* https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31170882/
* https://doi.org/10.1177/0748730419854197
World Federation of Societies for Chronobiology:
> In summary, the scientific literature strongly argues against the switching between DST and Standard Time and even more so against adopting DST permanently. […]
* https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2019.0094...
* https://doi.org/10.3389/fphys.2019.00944
Article that links to various other societies and such:
* https://herf.medium.com/why-standard-time-is-better-e586b500...
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26416574
The OP links to another site that says the science is in: "Wake up to the morning sun". Well, clearly, the answer is then to get rid of the stupid two shift shuffle each year (use standard time), get up to the sunrise, and go to fucking work.
But NO, business leaders of america will sob and whine... working hours are 9 to 5 ONLY! Natch, no cookie for politicians.
And your friends would have to have the same flexibility.
Also, you'll have to use your flexibility to go to bed before them to wake up and enjoy your evening sun.
Just move sunset later. It's a simple logistical option to apply uniformly that will maximize happiness.
Or you could wake up later in order to not screw up your circadian rhythm and in turn lower your risks of various ailments. It would be your own choice.
Assuming that we want everyone to know that we're waking up earlier in the summertime and closing up shop later, it would be preferable to coordinate this, right? We couldn't want all banks and shops and things closing at their own time. Or schools starting two minutes earlier every single day as we approach summer, to match up exactly with the sun, right?
So we could coordinate it all to happen in one big step. We'd say "Hey, from March 14th onward, all public schools are now going to be starting at 7:30 AM instead of 8:30 AM, and banks will open at 8:00 AM, and post offices will close at 4:00 PM.
And then we could so the same thing in the Fall, backwards.
But then, with nothing forcing private businesses and private schools from following this, wouldn't we get some horrible mismash? We'd have to call up every restaurant before making a reservation: hey, do you follow personal summertime hours? Banks would have their own closing hours, your older kid's public high school starts 1.5 hours before the private elementary school instead of a half hour, etc etc..
Without DST, in my hometown, it will get dark at 6pm every day from Sept 23rd to March 4th. That's depressing for the 9-5ers with commutes.
I wouldn't see the sun past 7pm outside of May 1st -> August 16th.
If we're getting rid of DST, we need to switch the working day from 9-5 to 8-4 or 7-3.
Maybe your boss (if you have one) would let you do it.
To clarify, is your hometown in the southern hemisphere? DST generally occurs in the summer months.
If scientists say that getting rid of DST will lower diabetes/cardiovascular risks/etc. then I’m all for it.
Yes, we are diurnal animals. Yes, sunlight matters to how we sleep. But why do we care whether the hands on the clock are pointing up when the sun is highest overhead? Everybody could do what they needed to do sleep wise regardless of where they were pointing.
The simplest solution is not only to do away with DST, but to adopt a single universal time. This would make keeping in synch easy. No longer would time zone conversions be necessary. No longer would we have to adjust our sleep schedules twice a year or worry about whether whomever we had to collaborate with in a different part of the world was doing the same.
But outside a handful of industries and technical fields, we seem unable to stomach the thought that the clock might read 17:00 as the sun rises. and 7:00 as it sets. That's just too weird. And why should Tavarua have to tolerate that when Greenwich gets to live with the historical norms?
Politics. Politics are the end reason for why we fight over what the clock says.
How would having a single universal time solve knowing whether your collaborators were asleep or having dinner or whatever? You could have some kind of lookup table -- "Australians usually wake up around 18:00 UTC" -- but then what have you solved?
Would also make moving amusingly harder. You would be used to schools and business starting at time X, but you would be wrong.
There's some possibility, in fact, that everybody living with their own local time makes it harder for people to learn how their local time works relative to others'. If we all used one universal time, we'd probably have developed an intuition for when people were sleeping in different parts of the world according to that universal time. As it is, we tend to rely on the lookup tables every time.
The 2015 article "So You Want to Abolish Time Zones" gets regularly discussed on HN:
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8902765
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26416337
The reality is that days get too damn short in the winter and any system of time zone switching is going to run into that limitation somewhere.
If I were dictator I would switch us to permanent standard time and normalize the concept of seasonal hours (which should be—but frustratingly often isn't—a lot less painful in the era of the internet).
You could even extend the concept of seasonal hours to making work days shorter in the winter and longer in the summer (not a new idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_clock).
You need to change the schedule if you don't like the hours. Changing the clock does nothing!
If the point is that business are closing too late so we lose too much daylight during winter, then we need to tell businesses to move their operating hours earlier.
My gut says that we decided school should operate 8-3 and work 9-5 for a reason. If we were to move the clock permanently by an hour, why wouldn't those times just shift as well?
That's my main objection to permanent DST: it's really just shifting everyone one timezone to the east.
What I learned from this post is that one of the big reasons that permanent DST is appealing is that a lot of areas in the current timezones really ought to be one timezone to the east. For example (see https://observablehq.com/@awoodruff/daylight-saving-time-gri...) Nevada ought to be in the Mountain timezone and Alabama ought to be in the Eastern timezone. And a lot of the states that split into multiple timezones probably shouldn't (at least if you focus only on optimizing sunrise and sunset times).