How the sunrise and sunset times would be affected by abolishing daylight saving time in the USA. Would you prefer to keep it or drop it?
Measurable health effects associated with the daylight saving time shift
Adverse Effects of Daylight Saving Time on Adolescents' Sleep and Vigilance
Daylight Saving Time Transitions: Impact on Total Mortality
The impact of daylight saving time on sleep and related behaviours
This is by far the more important aspect
Humans are routine oriented creatures, introducing an arbitrary hour deficit in sleep once a year has measurable and fairly profound effects on physical and mental health. Sure, it can be planned for, but circadian rhythms are hard to mess with for a lot of people and going to bed an hour earlier isn’t always an option
Spring forward and leave it there. In the fall it currently gets dark at 5 pm. It’s depressing to get off work and not have any daylight to enjoy and run errands. It’s also dangerous because tired drivers are coming home in a dark rush hour.
Word. I couldn't care less whether the sun rises while I'm on the bus to work or while I'm getting my first coffee at work. Have to wake up in the dark either way. But whether or not i get that one hour of daylight after work makes a world of a difference in my mental health.
When i worked at a ski basin, I called that "working from dark to dark," and i hate it so fucking much.
I wish work places were more flexible with start/stop times
I work a dead end job with mediocre pay and no benefits but i will never leave because i get in when i get in and leave when i leave. Not having an insane focus on time makes this the best job I've ever had.
So, now the tired drivers are driving to work in the dark. I don't see any solution making a real difference. There's less day in the winter. Any solution at all will piss off 3/4s of the population.
Seems like the only real solution is shortened work days.
There's usually 8 hours of sunlight during the day on the shortest day of the year, a bit more or less depending on latitude, but not by a lot. Make those 8 hours 9-5. Congrats, you've solved the problem, the average day will have a bit to a lot of light before and after the standard work day.
Regular time is shown to be healthier so no, don't spring forward and leave it there.
or maybe just go back to being done with work before sunset regardless of what time that was like our ancestors did for millions of years
How is that depressing? Don't be so servile.
Split the difference by adding 30 minutes in the spring and then leave it there permanently.
But not, like... every Spring, right?
Correct
I love that we don't change here in Japan (I grew up in the US), but I do wish our time zone had sunrise a bit later (it rises at like 4am in eastern Japan in summer). Splitting Japan into two timezones would also probably be necessary (maybe even more for the minor islands. Yonaguni is almost Taiwan)
The 04:30 sunrise was a hilarious thing to get used to. But summer sunsets are not inconvenient and winter sunsets feel the same as they were in the US
Growing up in south Texas, I was more bothered by it still being daylight at 9PM during the summers.
I don't mind keeping the whole country within a single time zone. It’s never going to be perfect for everybody, but it’s close enough.
The whole switching clocks thing is a mindfuck in Texas. Summer it’s daylight at 9 pm. Winter it’s dark at 5 pm. That’s a four hour spread exacerbated by the time change.
I work outside doing farming and it sucks to have to wake up at like 3am in summer to not die to the heat (and then work my other job after which can run later)
So this chart doesn't measure sunlight levels through the day, but whatever the maker has decided which color corresponds to "reasonable" based on arbitrary numbers... Who the fuck cares about which numbers are assigned to which parts of the day?!?!
So this chart doesn't measure sunlight levels through the day
What do you mean by "sunlight levels"?
Depending how north or south you are is how much much total light you are going to get. Shifting an hour does not add or subtract total sunlight time.
The whole point of daylight savings time is to get the "arbitrary numbers" to line up to a daily schedule.
This chart shows you how well the three systems would achieve getting you those "arbitrary" times.
If the sun rose at 4 am and set at 1:30 pm. Sure, you could plan your whole day differently around that. Wake up at 4am instead of 7am. Go to bed at 8pm instead of 11pm. Work at 6 am instead of 9am, get off at 2pm instead of 5pm.
Yes they are "arbitrary" but humans are not computers. Having to go to bed at 8pm to wake up at 4am is different in our minds than going to bed at 11pm and getting up at 7am. Still 8 hours of sleep but it is perceived quite differently.
The reality is that most people work according to a fixed schedule, and the companies that they work for are not going to change that anytime soon. Opening hours of shops, banks, offices, etc don’t adjust to accommodate daylight savings, no matter how much you think those numbers are arbitrary.
Add to that that many people set their alarm such that they will be in time for work, and they still want to sleep 7-8 hours the next night, so in effect their job dictates their waking hours and the arbitrary numbers that we give to hours dictate the amount of daylight that they get.
A bill has passed both the US House of Representatives AND the US Senate to end the clock-changing, with overwhelming bipartisan support (I don't believe either one of them even held a vote) and zero pork or poison pills...
...but the two of them passed different bills that directly contradict one another. One formally ends DST and the other permanently adopts DST as the new standard time. Fucking incredible.
I'm very much of the "IDGAF please just pick one and we will all cope" persuasion. So I'm unbothered which one passes. But it's comical how, for once in a goddamn generation, we have something completely uncomplicated by party line politics, only to have it completely bungle up in congressional body power struggle politics instead.
We just can't have shit, can we?
Forced year-round pretending we're an hour ahead means more kids will have to walk to school in the dark, sharing streets with sleep-deprived drivers who are also up before their bodies say they should be. That's gonna kill people.
There is also a study that found a correlation between changing the clock to heart attacks incidents rising, suggesting that it might be caused by the clock change which triggers stress and sleep deprivation which triggers a heart attack
Didn't you hear? It's now a crime to have your kids walk by themselves. Just ask the bastions of freedom that are Georgia and Texas.
(That those events happened is obviously dumb.)
Then maybe school shouldn't start at 7:25 am
How about this compromise: we go onto permanent DST, but then we make everything one hour later.
reasonable sunrise time
7:00AM or earlier
Earlier than 7AM seems unreasonable
In winter, you burn all the daylight working and also commute in the dark. I get to enjoy the sunlight from an office skylight 30 ft away, then drive home in the dark for ~4 months under standard time.
Why let work have all the daylight? It's so depressing...
I like it when noon is at 12:00.
That's cool on paper but not in practice. If noon is at 12 then the solar day has to be symmetrical around that. But we don't really spend our day symmetrically around noon. Like 6 pm is early enough that this can still do some major activities. But 6am is so early no one thinks "oh I'll just get that major activity done before 6am"
Another example is 10 hours after noon is getting late and a good time to end the day. 10 hours before noon is 2am. If you're awake at 2am it's not because you're walking up.
That's cool on paper but not in practice.
You understand that these are all conventions and the associations between what constitutes "late" and "early" are entirely arbitrary, right? Literally any system of naming time could work in practice. If we wanted, we could set the entire world at UTC0 and just get used to the fact that it's noon at 6:00 in some places.
The disadvantage of daylight savings time is not actually that the sun doesn't line up to our expectation of the day, it's that it causes confusion.
I really want them to just pick one and stop changing the clocks twice a year. it's a huge headache and bad for people's health.
Also as someone else said, just using UTC and knowing that "here in NY, we typically work from 14:00 to 22:00" would also be fine with me.
This, we aren't in the 1800's anymore. We can have 21st century solutions.
The issue with just using UTC is that the date changes in the middle of the day. Like in Seattle it would change from one day to the next at what is currently 4 PM.
You try to plan an event for the 16th, and which physical day it's in depends on whether it's before or after an (ultimately arbitrary) cutoff time. You say "oh this happened yesterday" well was it a few hours ago before the date change or do you mean the previous physical day.
Also weekdays would be messed up. You work "Monday to Friday" between the current 9 AM and 5 PM, but then how does that work when Monday starts at (what's currently) 4 PM? Do you work between 4 and 5 since it's during work hours on a Monday? And on Fridays do you stop working at 4 because after that it becomes Saturday? You say you're busy all day Wednesday, but does that mean you're suddenly available after 4 PM when the date changes?
This is a good point I hadn't thought of. There are solutions but no elegant ones immediately come to mind.
That's the same amount of effort or possibly more vs just having time zones. I keep seeing people express this sentiment and I don't get how that's better having to memorize something that basically just equates to time zones lol.
Fuck DST though. Just put everyone back on standard time and leave it.
I would accept just using standard time.
I think it would be less work to just be like "let's meet at 15:00" and not have to worry about it on my end. I guess you could just pick a time zone. We do that at work- we just talk about eastern time and make everyone else do the conversion.
I don't care what timezone we end up in, just stop the twice a year shifts.
Set all clocks to UTC military time and calendars to YYYY.MM.DD. Date change happens on UTC.
"My work hours are from 1400 to 2200 until 2024.12.21 at which time I will be available from 1200 until 2000. I will be on vacation from 2024.12.24 until 2025.01.07".
EDIT: I do think that the colon helps readability, so 24hr might be a better choice than military (14:00 to 22:00).
I really don't care what time the sun sets or rises. Just stop messing with my body's internal clock.
Maybe it's my ADHD, but I simply can not understand how to read this map.
More yellow means better for your location if you want daylight before 7 AM (left) or after 6 PM (right).
I prefer daylight savings all the time but actually I would go for utc and regions just get used to times being when they are and schedule around daylight.
Yes! UTC! UTC! UTC!
Yes, this is the correct answer.
It’s sooo much easier to get used to getting up at 12:00 utc vs 7 am than to deal with all the time zones in our global world.
It’s just a number, you’ll get used to 12 being the “get up time”
UTC and 24 hour time.
I'd also love metric and Celsius here.
yes please. would suck a bit for me but worth it for kids growing up in a more sane system. I only ever used it in the lab.
I can get behind this. One clock to rule them all, then if schools or business want to change their start times for winter they could do that.
The issue with just using UTC is that the date changes in the middle of the day. Like in Seattle it would change from one day to the next at what is currently 4 PM.
You try to plan an event for the 16th, and which physical day it's in depends on whether it's before or after an (ultimately arbitrary) cutoff time. You say "oh this happened yesterday" well was it a few hours ago before the date change or do you mean the previous physical day.
Also weekdays would be messed up. You work "Monday to Friday" between the current 9 AM and 5 PM, but then how does that work when Monday starts at (what's currently) 4 PM? Do you work between 4 and 5 since it's during work hours on a Monday? And on Fridays do you stop working at 4 because after that it becomes Saturday? You say you're busy all day Wednesday, but does that mean you're suddenly available after 4 PM when the date changes?
I don't see these as issue. you work 9-5 because of the way we do it now. I worked a second shift job that started 5pm and went till 1:30am the next day. it was not confusing at all. It only got fucked up when we had the time change for daylight savings and back. Day would change over at 6pm for me but you know I have been up past midnight and even out of the house and I don't get all kurfluffled because the date changed while I was awake.
I'm in favor of abolishing it. This graphic doesn't make it super clear but Daylight Saving Time gives millions of people more commutes in the dark per year than if we always used Standard Time. It's a pretty significant difference.
But you commute home in the dark with Standard time in the winter, I find that more dispiriting than dark mornings.
Many people would disagree on which is more dispiriting, and there's also the safety factor.
As long as it stays the same as year, I literally do not give a damn.
Drop DST. We tried permanent DST in the '70s and everyone hated it so much we went back to switching the clocks rather than just dropping the whole mess.
I've lived in states that don't/ didn't have DST. It's much better for your sleep cycle.
I'd rather have it all the time tbh.
It works better overall.
Pick one or the other. Or use UTC globally for all I care. Just stop changing the damn time!
How about we remove it and also set the time to go home to be 2hrs before sun down? Yey! Because that's bullshit. The sun always comes up and down. Its the stupid scheduled that keeps us out of it.
I dont understand why people want the sun to come up later so they can "save daylight". Bro i hate getting up in the dark, i think your timezone should also consider when you wake up you want sunshine. This of course also depends on when the average person starts working and goes to school.
I'll just fucking adjust my schedule. This time of year, it's dark when I get up around 8am and dark well before 5pm. It really makes no difference if us central is utc - 5 or 6.
Doesn't matter what time the sun rises for me, I'm going to have to wake up much earlier than the sunrise so that I can work productively outside for a few hours before it becomes unbearably hot. I'd rather not have to wake up at 4am because some wanker working in an office wants breakfast at sunrise. Waking up along with or after the sun rises is simply not an option for many people. That's the daylight they are saving, productive and less dangerous working conditions for people working outside in the south and southwest. Work culture can be adapted to when you want to work, I can't change when the sun starts beating down and makes it dangerous to work.
Interesting to hear the opinion of someone who lives in a very hot place. As someone who lives in sweden the only thing that matters is how much sunlight you have because its depressing as hell. But in some places you want to avoid too much sunlight because its dangerous. Why dont you just do what they do in spain, that is work 4 hours in the morning and 4 at night for example?
Split the difference, then do the maps again.
We have the technology available to completely localize time. Solar noon could always be noon for everybody. If you want to schedule a meeting with somebody on the same system, only the longitude of the time is needed to convert.
I read a study once but cannot remember it.
It posited that lunch time should be half way through the daylight hours and the further away it was from this then the more effect it had on either mental or physical health (I don't remember in it's entirety.)
I'm in the minority I guess, but I like daylight savings time. I like my waking hours to be in daylight. I typically wake up with the sun and I do stuff outside.
My biggest gripe about it is that my job involves working with people in Europe, India, and other places around the globe, and it seems like they all start & stop daylight savings at different times. So for like two weeks the time difference between me & our Berlin office changes by one hour. It wouldn’t be as big a deal if every country implemented it consistently…
I couldn't agree more. I interact with a friend in the UK every Monday morning and THAT is a PITA. I can also understand why people don't like it. I'm all for standardization and I do wish they would do something worldwide. This is one of the reasons I don't think the coronavirus was a hoax. The world can't even agree on something as fundamental as what time it is, why the hell would they agree to make themselves look bad by admitting a bunch of their people died. Anyway, if eliminating daylight savings time is the worst thing Trump does, I'd be OK with that.
Getting rid of daylight savings and staying on permanent standard would be great. When it becomes daylight savings time during the colder months it really does suck ad it gets darker earlier. Thus, I feel there is a lot less I want to do in the evenings. I like the slightly darker mornings and brighter evenings of standard.
Choosing one or the other would be good, though I feel like permanent standard over permanent savings still is a bit better.
Regardless, time change is annoying.
Don't care, just pick one and don't change it every six months.
This is the correct answer.
3 upvotes from my cats.
My cat has never cared, I have a shit sleep schedule anyways 🤷♀️