Anyone looking at this with an ounce of willingness to research it would have chosen permanent standard time but they never even offered that in any of the referendums across the provinces that switched. I'm getting the high end bright wake uplights for my kids this winter. Pretty annoying.
If we’re going to adopt unnatural time standards to manipulate people, like permanent DST, let’s at least do something interesting like China does and set the whole country to one time zone. At least that way we can all ignore the “official” time and set business hours to whatever works best.
Humorous, but why is this person “calling” someone in 2026?
Anyway, China manages somehow. I obviously think keeping our time zones and moving them to standard time (noon ~= actual noon) would be best, I was just offering a farcical alternative that would be better than permanent DST.
I thought we wanted to prevent imposing unnatural time standards? "China manages somehow" seems nowhere close to that.
The point of the article is that timezones solve practical problems that will keep existing if you remove timezones - no matter if you do it globally or only in one large geographic region.
People have a use for a time grid that is relative to when they're awake, and the article I linked to goes into great detail why. Don't worry about telephones, people can still interact without them.
Yes, but if we’re going to impose an unnatural standard (year-round DST), which I do not prefer, let’s at least make it an interesting one. That’s been my point all along and I don’t know how to make that more clear. I’m demonstrating a preference for standard time and offering a tongue-in-cheek (though possibly slightly better somehow) alternative to universal DST, which would be horrible.
(For the curious, Chinese businesses just adjust their actual working hours locally, it’s not really an issue.)
Ok, understood. It seemed like you were proposing an alternative to permanent-DST that should be worse by your own logic (unnatural standard), but if it's tongue in cheek, then I'm much less confused.
Not really, as its a pretty shallow and trite article about abolishing ALL time zones around the world, not just within a country, totally different thing
Not entirely, if the country covers enough time zones, like China suggested above. 4 hours of difference is already half the working day, and a sizable chunk of daylight.
> Anyone looking at this with an ounce of willingness to research it would have chosen permanent standard time but they never even offered that in any of the referendums across the provinces that switched.
Manitoba did, and 58% wanted pDST and 34% wanted pST:
I understand this period. We force kids to get up and go to school way too early, especially in the teen years. I forget what the researcher said, but it was something like starting high school at 9 to 10:00 in the morning.
For me, it doesn't matter much. I've blacked out the windows in my bedroom because any light while I sleep isn't good, and morning sunlight triggers migraines, which isn't a great way to start the day. Since I'm on the far eastern edge of the Eastern Time Zone, I will miss a lot of summer daylight.
Not only that but east-west position in the time zone. That’s the problem with DST… those on the west side of a time zone are going to work and school in complete darkness. We’ve tried this before and it was a disaster.
I used to live in Spain, about one time zone West of Greenwich, but the actual time was set one hour East of Greenwich. A two hour difference.
That is to say, in winter we would wake up in pitch black darkness, commute in the dark, and the sun would finally rise while we were at school. It sucked. When I moved to London I was shocked to see how bright it was in the mornings because of that, even in winter.
Latitude is only half the picture, when someone wakes up and how they spend their days also matters. I was really unhappy with DST when I had to wake up at an ungodly hour to school in the dark most of the year (except for the few days/weeks in March before the clock change).
The _other_ option is to shift, perhaps in two x half-hour stages over a month or longer, but around the equinoxes - the 'standard operating hours' for services and businesses.
This is often overlooked as an alternative to shifting everyone's timepiece at the same instant -- I've never understood why there's so much much emotion and/or inertia around clock changes.
I'd much prefer this option; businesses open an hour after sunrise, close an hour before sunset. That's more natural and human, to actually follow nature's cues.
But you know, why inconvenience social constructs for wealth generation when you can just literally inconvenience every human alive instead?
Most of the comments so far are pushing or pulling the clock in whatever direction their personal preference is. Call me crazy but the time should be a constant, unchanging reference.
If it's dark in your location earlier in the evening, don't mess with the clock. Agree as a local society that instead of working 800 to 1700 at some point in the calendar most people transition to 700 to 1600, if that's a local issue.
I don’t get it. Every time-change feels like such a huge relief to me.
In the fall, it means brighter mornings, making getting up so much easier for the entire family. It’s work giving up the evening light so we’re not waiting for the morning schoolbus in the dark.
And likewise; I don’t want it to be sunny at 4am in June.
I never really understood why not just shift schedule. Set a certain date and move all schedules of public institutions. Inform this early enough to allow rest who want to follow. Then later fix as needed.
I fully support permanently moving to correct time. Meaning not summer time. And then just fixing schedules as needed.
How about, pick a time and stick with it. Then, if it turns out people should be getting up with the sun, we change the stupid school and business hours to accommodate humans?
I couldn't see anything in the article about early vs late risers.
My impression when looking at this kind of research, is that it, like everything else around this subject in society. Is from the perspective. That early risers are the only valid type, and us late risers are anomolies, that should not be catered to, and our challenges are a moral failing.
For me living in Norway, one of the hardest things every fall, and that makes me depressed for weeks, is when one weekend, when the days are already getting shorter fast. One hour of evening day light gets janked overnight. It is imo. horrible.
> one of the hardest things every fall, and that makes me depressed for weeks, is when one weekend, when the days are already getting shorter fast. One hour of evening day light gets janked overnight
Same! Though you have it way worse.
I live in Belgium, I mostly get up around 08:00/08:30. I already feel quite guilty for not making the best of use of daylight in spring and summer. Around the summer solstice, the sun comes up around 05:30 over here. I can't imagine it coming up at 04:30 in the middle of summer. (Which is probably already what happens in Norway?)
I would rather the planet run on UTC time and no "savings" time stuff either. It would take a while to get used to, but it would make working with my teammates across the world easier, the constant time zone conversion, oh are they on DST, oh they don't honor it.. way more exhausting than hours of light or dark on one side of my work day or another.
This is all a product of decoupling hours of operation from seasonal cycles.
People are worried about waking up in darkness to have to go to work (rightfully), and the actual solution is not to shift the clock around, it's to shift starting hours later in the day, and end working earlier, in the winter.
We're arranging our entire lives around the convenience of corporations, and doing studies to figure out which way of doing so is least detrimental to us, rather than just not doing so in the first place.
> People are worried about waking up in darkness to have to go to work (rightfully), and the actual solution is not to shift the clock around, it's to shift starting hours later in the day, and end working earlier, in the winter.
Or you can perhaps use an old school Japanese system where hours are not of fixed length (3600s) but variable:
Another way to accomplish this is to observe the longitude where the sun is currently at meridian and label that in some concise way that doesn't get confused with temperature.
Exactly this. Digital devices with GPS are pervasive and there is no reason sunrise shouldn’t be at 6 a.m. every day. Every night at 3 a.m. the time is skewed ever so minutely so we have all the advantages of daylight savings with no sudden, jarring transition. Time zones would be 2D.
Only if you’re video conferencing with some other time zone would you ever need to look up the meeting times (via your AI assistant) which are block aligned and start at slightly different times every morning, far after you’re comfortably at work.
It’s Human Time, the way humans evolved to thrive—rising with the sun. What daylight savings time should have been and what it will become.
But then the sun would set at midday or a little after in many northern cities at midwinter.
Personally, I'm a morning person so could probably cope with that - but you'd have full astronomical darkness for kids walking home from school etc., which most people would be pretty unhappy about.
At a minimum we could do it on the same day in the UK as in America. All the meetings moving by an hour four times a year is deeply unhelpful. I have no idea when the clocks change but I definitely missed a lot of meetings by an hour.
> The health evidence points to standard time, largely because morning light matters for our body clocks, sleep, and mood
Depending on where you live, depending on how long your commute is and by what time you have to be at your job, ... a lot of people don't get that anyway in the winter. There is no one solution, and you're going to piss of a bunch of people anyway.
Radical proposal: end both daylight savings and time zones entirely. One global clock, and regions simply choose which hours are best for working based on where they are.
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[ 0.27 ms ] story [ 11.8 ms ] thread* https://www.cmaj.ca/content/198/34/E1335 / https://doi.org/10.1503/cmaj.261089
* PDF: https://www.cmaj.ca/content/cmaj/198/34/E1335.full.pdf
Anyway, China manages somehow. I obviously think keeping our time zones and moving them to standard time (noon ~= actual noon) would be best, I was just offering a farcical alternative that would be better than permanent DST.
The point of the article is that timezones solve practical problems that will keep existing if you remove timezones - no matter if you do it globally or only in one large geographic region.
People have a use for a time grid that is relative to when they're awake, and the article I linked to goes into great detail why. Don't worry about telephones, people can still interact without them.
(For the curious, Chinese businesses just adjust their actual working hours locally, it’s not really an issue.)
Manitoba did, and 58% wanted pDST and 34% wanted pST:
* https://news.gov.mb.ca/news/?item=73919
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQcMhLF183w
Get ready for a December 21 sunrise at 09:24 (17:30 sunset).
For me, it doesn't matter much. I've blacked out the windows in my bedroom because any light while I sleep isn't good, and morning sunlight triggers migraines, which isn't a great way to start the day. Since I'm on the far eastern edge of the Eastern Time Zone, I will miss a lot of summer daylight.
Discussions on daylight savings time are pointless without stating your lattitude.
(Here in London at 51 Deg North, DST is much more relevent and apreciated when the summer sun rises so early).
That is to say, in winter we would wake up in pitch black darkness, commute in the dark, and the sun would finally rise while we were at school. It sucked. When I moved to London I was shocked to see how bright it was in the mornings because of that, even in winter.
But you had that extra daylight time in the afternoon (which in London wouldn’t be the case). Wasnt that better? Just curious. For me it would be
You can blame General Franco for doing that.
Would have taken permanent BST in a heartbeat.
This is often overlooked as an alternative to shifting everyone's timepiece at the same instant -- I've never understood why there's so much much emotion and/or inertia around clock changes.
But you know, why inconvenience social constructs for wealth generation when you can just literally inconvenience every human alive instead?
If it's dark in your location earlier in the evening, don't mess with the clock. Agree as a local society that instead of working 800 to 1700 at some point in the calendar most people transition to 700 to 1600, if that's a local issue.
In the fall, it means brighter mornings, making getting up so much easier for the entire family. It’s work giving up the evening light so we’re not waiting for the morning schoolbus in the dark.
And likewise; I don’t want it to be sunny at 4am in June.
So changing the clock suits me perfectly.
For context: I’m at 45latitude (Toronto)
I fully support permanently moving to correct time. Meaning not summer time. And then just fixing schedules as needed.
For me living in Norway, one of the hardest things every fall, and that makes me depressed for weeks, is when one weekend, when the days are already getting shorter fast. One hour of evening day light gets janked overnight. It is imo. horrible.
Same! Though you have it way worse.
I live in Belgium, I mostly get up around 08:00/08:30. I already feel quite guilty for not making the best of use of daylight in spring and summer. Around the summer solstice, the sun comes up around 05:30 over here. I can't imagine it coming up at 04:30 in the middle of summer. (Which is probably already what happens in Norway?)
5:15 in Chicago, so 4:15, but also the sky starts lightening up 30 minutes earlier so it would effectively be more like 3:45 instead of 4:45.
People are worried about waking up in darkness to have to go to work (rightfully), and the actual solution is not to shift the clock around, it's to shift starting hours later in the day, and end working earlier, in the winter.
We're arranging our entire lives around the convenience of corporations, and doing studies to figure out which way of doing so is least detrimental to us, rather than just not doing so in the first place.
Or you can perhaps use an old school Japanese system where hours are not of fixed length (3600s) but variable:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_clock
There were six "hours" (time periods) between sunrise and sunset, and six between sunset to the next sunrise.
:)
I don't particular care one way or another, it was just the main 'flexible hours' system I was aware of.
Only if you’re video conferencing with some other time zone would you ever need to look up the meeting times (via your AI assistant) which are block aligned and start at slightly different times every morning, far after you’re comfortably at work.
It’s Human Time, the way humans evolved to thrive—rising with the sun. What daylight savings time should have been and what it will become.
Personally, I'm a morning person so could probably cope with that - but you'd have full astronomical darkness for kids walking home from school etc., which most people would be pretty unhappy about.
Depending on where you live, depending on how long your commute is and by what time you have to be at your job, ... a lot of people don't get that anyway in the winter. There is no one solution, and you're going to piss of a bunch of people anyway.