Comment by jonny_eh
8 hours ago
It's "standard" for a reason. Humanity settled on these numbers long ago because they work best. It boggles my mind why anyone would choose otherwise since what we do at any given hour is arbitrary.
8 hours ago
It's "standard" for a reason. Humanity settled on these numbers long ago because they work best. It boggles my mind why anyone would choose otherwise since what we do at any given hour is arbitrary.
A lot of people hate standard time in winter because the sun sets at 4 or 5, and they want the sun to instead set at 8 or 9 like it does in summer. DST in winter doesn't actually give you the 8 or 9 sunset, it gives you a 5 or 6 sunset (which doesn't get you all that much) combined with moving your sunrise to 8 or 9, which causes its own set of issues most people don't think about.
The last time we went to year-round DST, we stopped almost immediately because people experienced what winter DST was actually like and went "wait, this sucks."
Obviously(/s) the solution is to change to a sunset centered day. new day starts at sunset so people can get up late and enjoy the maxim number of daylight hours.
I always find it strange how particular people are about the numbers attached a purely astronomical phenomena(myself included, but I am pretty hard in the "let the sun figure it out camp"). If they want more "daylight" hours then get up at a time to enjoy them. But people would rather bend over backwards fiddling with the numbers as if that is going to change how long a day is.
The problem is that work does its best to capture all of my daylight hours.
Does the night belong to the day it follows or the day it precedes?
Does it become Friday at dawn, at sunset, at noon, or at midnight?
This is all convention and not something that can be decided objectively.
I think that midnight should be around current 4AM because that's the brief moment when party people already sleep and work people aren't awake yet.
No, I hate standard time, because in winter the sun sets at 4 or 5, when it could set at 5 or 6, i.e. daylight when leaving work.
I do not care if the sun is up as I shuffle groggily into the building. I don't think I'm alone.
The main driver of people wanting year round DST is so they can have sunlight after work in the winter. Those late sunsets in the summer are awesome too though.
Despite all this I am a permanent DST fan. However I’ll be happy with permanent anything over the current madness
> which doesn't get you all that much
After college I moved from the far western edge of one timezone to the far eastern edge of another zone. I grew up with 5-5:30pm sunsets in winter, and now I live with 4-4:30pm sunsets. I moved here 25 years ago, and every single year when November/December come around and I get those early sunsets I hate it. It's one of the reasons I'd like to move away from here.
I know it's just one person's opinion, but to me those extremely early sunsets in the middle of winter are a huge quality of life reduction.
I believe part of the problem is that if you're in the middle or western edge of your zone, the winter sunsets aren't so bad. I suspect a lot of people who would prefer DST year round live on the eastern edge.
They worked best when everybody were farmers and had to get up early and go to bed early. Now most people don't live their lives centered around noon, our free time comes after our work is done at around 17:00, so having more light in the evening instead of worthless light in the night makes sense.
That's a myth.
Farmers have to wake up early because their animals wake up at sunrise and some tasks are best performed at that time. So they wake up before sunrise regardless of the clock time.
Human, like farm animals, are better off if they wake up at sunrise and go to sleep in full dark. At the equator that's easy, wake at 6, bed at 10PM. And standard work hours are 7-3 or 8-4.
Right, but where I live sunrise is in the middle of the night in the summer (around 03:30). Using standard time in the summer gives me one less hour of useful sunlight in the evening, and while it doesn't technically disappear it gets moved to where I can't use it because that's when I sleep. It's the same for people further south as well, another bright hour in the early morning before they wake up is a wasted bright hour that would make more sense in the evening, when most modern humans are awake. The argument "noon should coincide with solar noon" is nonsensical to me, the clock is a social construct and should make sense for how most of us live our lives.
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So, it sounds like you're actually arguing that the numbers are just a construct and that we should all just use UTC and set appropriate work hours to the times that most correlate to the solar day in our region rather than adjust the clock approximately 1 hour per 15 degrees around the equator and have an International Date Line.
I think this would make way more sense, when they say the Olympic Opening Ceremony start at 18:00, its 18:00 for everyone around the world. No one as to work out which TZ Italy is in or scheduling meetings with Tech Support in far flung locales does not require knowing IST is how far ahead or behind.
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We don't use standard time because it works best, we use it because it's "correct" relative to the position of the sun.
Now, standard business hours (9-5 or whatever) were probably chosen for working well in the circumstances where they became standard, and it might be interesting to watch for whether tweaking the clocks leads to tweaking the nominal time of things...
The US decided (and Canada followed) that daylight time was more correct for the larger portion of the year, presumably it's easier to transition the remaining 4mo to daylight than it is to move 8mo to standard.
But also, all the opinion polling (business and individual) was like over 90% in favour of year-round daylight time, so here we are.
> The US decided (and Canada followed) that daylight time was more correct for the larger portion of the year, presumably it's easier to transition the remaining 4mo to daylight than it is to move 8mo to standard.
How is transitioning permanently to one easier than transitioning permanently to the other?
How to transition to permanent DST: wait until we are in DST and then stop switching.
How to transition to permanent Standard time: wait until we are in standard time and then stop switching.
If you adopt permanent DST, the there's a 1 hour difference between the current clock and the future clock for 4 months, and nothing for 8 months. If you adopt permanent ST, the difference between the current clock and future clock is 1 hour for 8 months and nothing for 4 months.
It's a 4 month-hour difference over the year, instead of an 8 month-hour difference.
Personally, I'd prefer standard time, but having all days be 86400 seconds is a pretty great improvement over status quo. I find what most people really would like to change is the amount of time with sunlight in the winter, especially the more north they live... but changing the clock doesn't change the number of hours of sunlight; Vancouver, BC just doesn't have much sunlight in the winter.
If we assume that the ideal time for 8 months of the year is DST and for 4 months is standard, but we want to eliminate the switch, then permanent DST gives you only 4 months out of the ideal timezone rather than 8.
> It's "standard" for a reason
The reason is that with standard time, solar noon coincides with local noon, so the day is approximately symmetric about noon, not regarding atmospheric refraction lengthening the day. It wasn't done on a whim.
The article, however, says 93% wanted daylight savings in the linked public engagement report.
I’d guess that there is less of a need for light at the beginning of the day since most people don’t farm. Personally I prefer more light at the end of the day.
I don't get that argument. The numeric time is just a measure for the state of the sun in the sky. When you choose your day to have ended is completely independent. There is already a high enough variance of people deciding when they go to sleep, that DST is hardly relevant. Some people have dinner at half past 5, some do at half past 8, the hour daylight saving time can't possibly make that difference.
Exactly, here in Spain we have lunch between half past 2 and half past 3 on workdays, which can extend up to 5pm in the weekend and I usually finish dinner at half past ten.
Why? because they decided to be on the same timezone as our eastern neighbors in Europe. The eastern part of Polonia is on the same timezone and probably have probably the opposite with much much earlier lunch and dinner than we do.
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It's not just a measure for the state of sun in the sky, it's also a measure for the state of society on the ground. It's an arbitrary number in a sense, but it also strongly influences my schedule.
And yes, we could have all the schools and everything else open later in the winter than the rest of the year, but it turns out it's easier to change the clocks.
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Farmers don't care about clocks, they do the work whenever needed. Roosters crow whenever they want. There's literally no point in talking about farmers in this debate.
> Humanity settled on these numbers long ago because they work best.
Absolutely not. It was a compromise tempered by practical and political considerations.
Sadly, this isn't really right. Humanity settled on solar time. For somewhat obvious reasons.
Alas, I don't see my preferred method of changing the clock by 10 minutes every month taking hold. Basically ever. :D
I also don't think this is nearly as important for places that are not further away from the equator. If you are on the equator, you are almost certainly fine with no change throughout the year.
That method wont work, that is a too large change that happens to seldom. What you want is a leap second every hour for five months to switch between standard and daylight savings time and back, with a month of constant time around each solstice. That gives you a smooth transition without perceptible discontinuities.
the reason was valid 50 years ago when most people didn't work 9-5 in front of a computer.
Yeah they started work at 6. So the working schedule shifted later by three hours, but with year-long DST it will shift back only one hour. Sounds like people don't actually want what they now vote for. My bet is that the work hours will just move later yet another hour in the future.
Meh. The nerd in me prefers the French Revolutionary clock of 10 hours in a day. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time.
I want to be able to say I sleep from 0 to 3 hours or 30 percent of the day.
And that reason was that it was the standard before the standard was rethought. There's no deeper meaning to it.
And we rethought it yet again, should we go on the time standard (DST) that we're already on for ~65% of the year, or the one we're on for ~35% the year.
It should be pretty obvious why DST is the new winner, it's the current standard.
Not that long ago, and we keep fiddling with them. The US time zones were adopted just over a century ago. The dates for daylight saving time were changed less than 20 years ago. Much of Western Europe changed time zones (much of it rather violently) in the 1940s, as did China. The tz database often requires updates for changes.
If you want to go with what was settled long ago, that would probably be a return to each town observing its own time based on local solar noon, which would be pretty annoying.