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.
:)
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.
Even this article, while stating the opposite conclusion, directly scientifically supports permanent daylight time as beneficial for most people.
It points out sunrise being at 0751 versus 0851 for Toronto. That's the anticipated sunrise time on 1 January 2027. The anticipated sunset time is 1651.
That means that someone working in a cubicle for a standard 0800-1700 schedule will get 9 minutes of possible daylight under winter time, versus 51 minutes under daylight time (sunrise 0851, sunset 1751).
Lack of sunlight leads to terrible circadian rhythms. There is absolutely zero scientific support for the proposition that nine minutes of daylight is healthier for our circadian rhythms than fifty-one minutes of daylight. No person could possibly argue such a thing in good faith.
(Also, I have a terminology quibble with "Standard Time," since Daylight Time is the actual standard, and we observe it eight months of the year.)
With standard time you eat at 12 and with daylight saving you eat at 1, either way you eat when the sun is highest or around that time.
The thing is that the biannual dance of the clock hands wrecks any notion of time and schedules as this month you eat/wake up/leave work too early and the next too late.
34% of respondents in a Manitoba government poll wanted it:
* https://news.gov.mb.ca/news/?item=73919
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQcMhLF183w
I want it (in Ontario). Every chronobiologist and sleep research society wants it: see comments with link dumps on their position statements:
My entire household wants it.
Staying on Summer time means additional sun after work for an extra month. Can go for a walk or do something outside in the sun.
And for those further South it doesn't matter anyway.
I'd like to see what the additional vitamin D from that extra sun does to sleep etc. I imagine that's not part of the study.
Can't blame em: Daylight Saving is a terrible name for something that happens during the time of year when there's more daylight
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) in Winnipeg.
Discussions on daylight savings time are pointless without stating your lattitude.
[Here in London at 51 Deg North, DST is much more relevent and appreciated when the summer sun rises so early, and the winter sun so late; it helps keep ones body somewhat in line with nature].
Large areas in Europe are permanently away from solar time already (regardless of DST).
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.
> In this analysis, we focus not on whether seasonal clock adjustments should end, but on which policy should be adopted if time changes are eliminated. We explore the public health implications of pDST and pST — with attention to mental health and broader determinants of health — and propose measures to monitor and mitigate the impacts of policy change on population health.
* 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
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?
In the fall, it means brighter mornings, making getting up so much easier for the entire family. It’s worth 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.
In fact, I have considered whether it may not make sense to just have a single timezone. Would make planning internationally much easier.
We already have UTC, which is almost always used as the legal basis for all local timezone definitions. In many industries (such as in many aviation and maritime operations), UTC is used almost exclusively to synchronize things worldwide and to avoid any local timezone confusion that might cause problems.
So using UTC works great in situations where participants span multiple timezones. But I think the intuition of maintaining a local clock for local things, with solar noon kept somewhere approximately around clock noon, is still useful, since many day-to-day scheduling concerns remain entirely within one's local timezone. The key is that participants must be aware of their local timezone's offset from UTC. Not having to change their clocks twice a year would hopefully also make this easier.
You can't have a fixed schedule, because the time of daylight changes during the year.
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.
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.
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.
Edit: Or negotiate that with your boss. Most of my team works 8 to 5, I work 7 to 4, as long as its consistent no one cares. Obviously retail employees can't do that, but customer-facing people are working past dark no matter what if it's an afternoon shift.
If it benefits you to have DST timing, you'll want permanent DST. If it benefits you to ditch it, you'll want to ditch it.
The effects of being on the "wrong side" affect mental health and safety.
Thus... whichever way you want to be true, is true.
No matter which way the government goes, someone's "mental health and safety" WILL be affected... just... somewhere else.
Implying only one side has those effects (like this topic's headline) is underhanded.
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
Would have taken permanent BST in a heartbeat. There's little so depressing as getting out of work into the dark for months at a time, IMHO.
I remember being vaguely on board with the a radical proposal that did the rounds about 20 years ago there - Single winter, Double summer. Keep changing the clocks but shift the whole thing an hour later so we got lighter evenings.
On top of which, people seem to have a large variation in preferences, see : https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10870...
We can also let people dictate that it will be my/another way, and pass laws to govern businesses instead.
And it's wild that so many people nowadays don't seem to realize this is perfectly normal and expected.
We didn't used to have 5-day workweeks. Or 8 hour days as the norm. Or worker's comp. etc etc etc etc...
It’s interesting for me because early morning means for me: dealing with duties (prepare for school, commute to work, etc) so I don’t really mind doing that in the dark. But afternoon time means for me: free time (school/work is finished ) So if there’s daylight I can decide to go to the park, or play outside, or go to a terrace to eat something. Doing that in the dark is just not feasible
Your circadian rhythm does not care about whether you are doing duties or fun stuff. It is being triggered/reset (or not) depending exposure to light. The more light you receive during the morning, post-wake-up, regardless of activity, the better your biology will run.
The age old morning people versus evening people. Sounds like the kids aren't morning people either.
We should probably start high school later in the morning even if we stay on standard time ; it's way more important if we switch to permanent daylight time.
It also makes a world of different how earlier you get exposure to light in the morning:
It is so depressing to wake up, go to work in the dark and go home in the dark.
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.)
It starts earlier so it can end earlier so that there is time for sports and other extra-curricular activities?
Teachers spend time with students doing these activities, and the teachers have lives too. If high school ends at (e.g.) 2:30 pm, there's 60-90 minutes that stuff can happen and teachers still have 'regular work hours' of 8-4 (a shifted 9-5) so they can do things in their lives.
Activities also can stop during the really dark weeks around the solstice in a way school can't.
From the published paper:
> Findings suggested that pDST and pST offered health advantages compared with the current twice-yearly clock changes, but the health benefits of pDST were lower than those of pST by a third. Notably, the comparative benefits of pST were greatest in northern regions of the continental US, which are similar to the latitudes in which most people in Canada reside.
* https://www.cmaj.ca/content/cmaj/198/34/E1335.full.pdf
Yes, there are benefits to pDST. There are more benefits to pST.
The reasoning the article takes to reach its incorrect conclusion is plainly erroneous. For example, it reasons that "Northern latitudes have later onset of winter sunrise and higher prevalence of SAD, with the latter increasing by 0.2% per 1° increase in latitude," ignoring that northern latitudes also have less sunlight overall.
What possible meaning could the phrase "noon happens at noon" have? That's tautological and meaningless.
And if your solution requires a wholly independent, newly built mass coordination mechanism rather than just a minor tweak to the existing one, then I think the burden you bear for arguing your position is extremely high.
If we’re going to ignore the position of the sun, let’s just set a single “American time” to follow DC like China does and be done with it.
Conversely, getting up in the pitch dark and leaving the house in the pitch dark when the sun isn't going to rise for another hour is a horrible prospect and I hope I never have that inflicted on me. The evidence in the article is clear: our bodies need light in the morning more than we need it in the evening. Yes, winter sucks in northern latitudes, but we've just got to make use of the little daylight as best as we can. The flip side is by using DST we get these lovely long evenings in the summer.
Quite the entitled, unreflected comment. Not everyone works in an office or somewhere where this is a possibility!
I am not interested in whatever you've got going on right now. Being dishonest about others' positions is bizarre. Refusing to clarify your own is bizarre. Let me know when you're willing to engage in good faith.
