Comment by WalterGR
5 hours ago
> I would have preferred permanent standard time to permanent daylight time.
Do you have children?
In past HN threads, the preference largely comes down to whether you have children (and want more early morning light for safer trips to school) or not.
I have children and I’ve never heard any arguments for DLS that make any sense.
Most of the time people conflate longer summer days with DLS.
The situation with dark mornings is winter not standard time.
My children are already waking to school in daylight this time of year prior to the switch to DLS.
As others have said. I would rather permanent standard time but I’ll take permanent DLS. Moving the clocks twice a year is insanity.
As far north as BC is winter just doesn't have enough daylight to think you can get everything done with sunlight. Maybe Arizona has enough - but they don't do daylight savings time (one of two us states)
> winter just doesn't have enough daylight to think you can get everything done with sunlight
That's the perfect way to say it.
The other piece that a lot of people are missing is the whole larks (early risers) vs owls (late risers) divide. I think the best illustration of that is to ask, if you got your pick, which shift you'd take, based solely on your own body and habits: 8-4, 9-5, or 10-6 (or perhaps even further in one direction)? My guess is that the answer to that question predicts your desire for Standard or Daylight time pretty well.
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I don’t have children, but I was a child once. I didn’t mind going to school in darkness (in winter) and enjoy 1h more of daylight in the evening. Having that extra hour of daylight in the morning always seemed a waste for me because I wasn’t doing something I wanted (I was doing something I had to do, this is, going to school)
When we had kids I thought daylight savings time was going to be some kind of nightmare because ever DST thread on the internet cites children as the reason why's it terrible.
Then it was a complete non-issue for our kids. I had this conversation with several parent friends and they couldn't figure it out either.
At most we've had a day or two where the kids wake up 10-20 minutes later than the target time, but it's not a big deal. Honestly it takes me longer to adapt than my kids.
I can believe that some kids are hyper sensitive to clock changes, but the more I talk to fellow parents I think it's a minority case. Traveling a couple states away is a bigger swing than DST.
I think this is a talking point that came up on the internet at one point and then got amplified because so many liked the direction it was going, but never stopped to think about how accurate the claim was.
Some people think that if their toddler misses naptime by 5 minutes it will be a disaster. Fairly sure it's just a vocal minority kind of thing. Totally with you though, our kids never seem to notice.
Where I live, in winter it's dark in the morning (and also the evening depending on the length of the school day) with and without DST, and in summer the sun is also up either way.
Conversely, I'd rather my kids have more daylight after school so they can explore outside.
Selfishly, I just want as much daylight as possible, which has very little to do with how a government selects a time range for legal reasons. The rotation of the globe has not been yet controlled, as far as I'm tracking.
As a child, there was nothing worse than getting out of school at 3pm and then having the sun set at 4:21pm. I barely got home before it got dark, forget about playing outside. Morning time was useless, since school prep ate that up.
Right? I literally never once cared if I have to walk/ride to school in the relative dark. But I did care pretty much every afternoon how much time I have to enjoy the rest of my free time. Being able to go out with my friends and enjoy the daylight made a huge difference. It's soooo long overdue to put this stupid system in the past.
I don't have children and I prefer permanent Standard Time because I have the apparently weird belief that noon should be at noon.
(i.e. the time 12:00PM should be when the sun is overhead)
I'm not a "capitalism gives you brain worms" kind of person, but the idea that it is somehow better to literally change the location of the sun in the sky because the holy hours of 9-5 are sacrosanct is so strange to me.
I lived once in Ecuador. Pretty much the whole year the sun rises at 6am and sets at 6pm. I very much prefer Spain: in summer the sun sets at almost 10 pm at its peak… best summers of my life. I lived in Poland once too, where in winter the sun sets at 3pm: I wanted to kill myself
I miss sunset times from Spain. It makes days feel longer
9-5 aren't sacrosanct. When the 9-5 song came out approximately nobody worked from 9-5. Standard working hours were 8-5 with an hour for lunch. Starting at 7 was far more common than starting at 9.
The song is about a secretary who didn't get a lunch hour, so started an hour later than her boss.
Tech workers generally start at 9, but that started decades after the song came out.
> because I have the apparently weird belief that noon should be at noon
But why? Because it's not even in standard time, except for around 1/60th of a time zone at best, if you're rounding to the minute.
If solar noon jumps from being at 11:35 in standard time, to at 12:35 under DST, at your coordinates, what does that matter?
Noon was at noon before the railroads. But ever since time zones were invented, that's no longer been the case.
Digits on a clock are just a number. If you care about when solar noon is, just memorize it.
In BC the sun isn’t overhead at noon and the further north you go the further away it is.