It's pretty astounding to me the number of pro-DST advocates in this forum. If you had hundreds of daily jobs on your platform and you happen to have some regular requirement to change them in unison, if a junior engineer said "let's just change the system clock to adjust for when we want the jobs to run", you would say no, because while it might be easy compared to changing the config for each of the jobs, the risk of ongoing errors, side effects, introduction of jobs that need to fixed in absolute time that you have to make the inverse change... It's a system nightmare.
In the summer the suns up at 5 am. But at 5am I am asleep. I could get up earlier but that's pointless since school and work doesn't start until 8.30.
So in stead of having an hour of sunlight before school and work we all change our clocks to have an hour of extra sunlight in the evening in stead, which fits our cultural preference for social activities.
We could also, as you say, change every single sign, post and display of opening hours for every school, business and organisation at the same time to achieve the same effect.
But in the real world changing the clock is simpler.
It's a fairly trivial change. We already have timezones, which exist to deal with the fact that the sun comes up at different times in different parts of the world. We already have to design everything around the assumption that timezones can change, since people sometimes move to different parts of the world. All we do is cause, for an entire timezone, that it becomes a different timezone at one point in the year, and switches back later. This ensures that the sun continues to come up at a consistent time. The main issue it causes is to make the lives of programmers slightly more difficult, which I am sure they can cope with...
Imagine having a solution that already works with changing system clock but then some very big very important very senior very developer shows up and launches a multi-year project to redesign this, potentially opening pandora box of endless bugs. PhD in Job Security, typical shit I see in corporate.
In Seattle, without DST, sunrise happens at 4:11am. Because of DST, it's pushed back an hour later to a more reasonable 5:11am.
I am not awake at 4am, I have no use for sunlight at 4am, and I don't want the sun appearing that early. That hour of early sunlight is wasted for me. Plus with DST, the sun sets an hour later, at 9:11pm, a time I am actually awake, and I can actually go outside and use the extra sun.
And, with permanent DST (which is what many people are advocating for), then in winter sunrise is at 9am in Seattle, which is far too late. I do not want to drive to work in the dark, before sunrise. So I want standard time in winter, pushing sunrise an hour earlier to a more reasonable 8am.
In both situations (summer and winter), modifying the time via DST benefits me and gives me better use of sunlight.
Yeah, as someone who lives in Vermont, you could talk me into permanent DST. That would move the winter sunset from, say, 4:21pm to 5:21pm, which would mean I'd get enough twilight for a short walk after work. And Maine is even further east and north in the same time zone, so they have an even earlier sunset. On the other hand, Vermont's standard time sunrise around 7:20 is reasonable enough.
Parts of Vermont have traditionally coped with this by having an 8-4 workday instead of 9-5.
But the reality is that Vermont gets only about an hour of daylight outside working hours, depending on local customs. People have extremely strong preferences about how that hour gets split up.
Yeah, it’s insane. Along with that, any permanent gains in the morning will be lost as soon as it becomes normal. Businesses will just open that much earlier. And this study assumed bedtimes of 10pm, which is not the average anywhere on the planet from what I remember the last time I looked into this. The average is like past midnight.
This just seems like a backwards justification. There is nothing wrong with a 9am sunrise or a 4:11am sunrise. People in Anchorage deal with both just fine.
> I am not awake at 4am, I have no use for sunlight at 4am
Most people aren’t awake at 5am either. Your use for the sun when there is an excess of it that goes well past your bedtime if you get up at 5am is irrelevant.
You realize that you can change your own sleep patterns seasonally if you want to? Heck, you could do that even gradually instead of those abrupt 1 hour changes. That is your choice, we don't need to fiddle with clocks for the whole society for that.
Between this and the "Sunset time and the economic effects of social jetlag: evidence from US time zone borders" paper [0], it seems like the issue is the size of the discontinuous jump in time, not necessarily that we change the clocks. So why not "smear" the DST<=> ST transitions by having four half hour transitions, once each quarter?
With DST, there are actually 2 new concepts: ambiguous time (if the clock rolls back) and invalid time (if the clock jumps forward).
Java and Ruby work differently. Java would simply round the invalid time to the closest valid time IIRC. Ruby would accurately raise the InvalidTime exception. Same behaviors for an ambiguous time.
Chile is actually the country that will cause tricky issue in a system because they adjust DST at midnight... so there is one day a year where its midnight is considered invalid time. If we are building a system that depends on a day's boundary, then we will encounter this nightmarish issue where one of the days must start at 1am instead of midnight.
My controversial idea: midnight should be where current 4AM is because 04:00 is the lowest point of human circadian rhythm. Currently we have nonsense like "1AM is technically a part of the next day but for all practical purposes it's still the previous day". Also, 24h clock should be the standard so that we can avoid discussions "is 12AM noon or midnight".
Are you Yanks seriously not going to get this sorted out before winter? BC has moved - can at least the rest of Cascadia get their asses in gear? Come on, California, I do not want to be dealing with a north-south time zone difference with my coworkers
I really don't want the sunrise time to be 5:00 in the morning and still not have any daylight to do errands after work. I don't care what the reasons are, but if seasons change the sunset time, what's so wrong with changing it a bit more?
> the researchers estimate that permanent standard time would result in some 300,000 fewer people having suffered from a stroke and result in 2.6 million fewer people having obesity
That 2.6 million people are obese because of a 1h shorter change night in one Sunday a year is an extraordinary claim. I would love to understand how they got to this result.
It's pretty astounding to me the number of pro-DST advocates in this forum. If you had hundreds of daily jobs on your platform and you happen to have some regular requirement to change them in unison, if a junior engineer said "let's just change the system clock to adjust for when we want the jobs to run", you would say no, because while it might be easy compared to changing the config for each of the jobs, the risk of ongoing errors, side effects, introduction of jobs that need to fixed in absolute time that you have to make the inverse change... It's a system nightmare.
I live in the Netherlands.
In the summer the suns up at 5 am. But at 5am I am asleep. I could get up earlier but that's pointless since school and work doesn't start until 8.30.
So in stead of having an hour of sunlight before school and work we all change our clocks to have an hour of extra sunlight in the evening in stead, which fits our cultural preference for social activities.
We could also, as you say, change every single sign, post and display of opening hours for every school, business and organisation at the same time to achieve the same effect.
But in the real world changing the clock is simpler.
It's a fairly trivial change. We already have timezones, which exist to deal with the fact that the sun comes up at different times in different parts of the world. We already have to design everything around the assumption that timezones can change, since people sometimes move to different parts of the world. All we do is cause, for an entire timezone, that it becomes a different timezone at one point in the year, and switches back later. This ensures that the sun continues to come up at a consistent time. The main issue it causes is to make the lives of programmers slightly more difficult, which I am sure they can cope with...
Thee golfing industry is one of the big proponents of keeping DST and lovbbies hard for it.
Imagine having a solution that already works with changing system clock but then some very big very important very senior very developer shows up and launches a multi-year project to redesign this, potentially opening pandora box of endless bugs. PhD in Job Security, typical shit I see in corporate.
That is why you run your jobs on GMT/UTC and not display time.
Do the anti-DST people understand what they're advocating for?
Have a look at the sunset/sunrise graph for northern parts of the US https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/seattle
In Seattle, without DST, sunrise happens at 4:11am. Because of DST, it's pushed back an hour later to a more reasonable 5:11am.
I am not awake at 4am, I have no use for sunlight at 4am, and I don't want the sun appearing that early. That hour of early sunlight is wasted for me. Plus with DST, the sun sets an hour later, at 9:11pm, a time I am actually awake, and I can actually go outside and use the extra sun.
And, with permanent DST (which is what many people are advocating for), then in winter sunrise is at 9am in Seattle, which is far too late. I do not want to drive to work in the dark, before sunrise. So I want standard time in winter, pushing sunrise an hour earlier to a more reasonable 8am.
In both situations (summer and winter), modifying the time via DST benefits me and gives me better use of sunlight.
Why should the clock be set to those arbitrary points? If you want sun in the morning, wake up later, it you want sun in the evening, wake up earlier.
If your issue is when work is scheduled, well businesses set their own hours, not the government.
Yeah, as someone who lives in Vermont, you could talk me into permanent DST. That would move the winter sunset from, say, 4:21pm to 5:21pm, which would mean I'd get enough twilight for a short walk after work. And Maine is even further east and north in the same time zone, so they have an even earlier sunset. On the other hand, Vermont's standard time sunrise around 7:20 is reasonable enough.
Parts of Vermont have traditionally coped with this by having an 8-4 workday instead of 9-5.
But the reality is that Vermont gets only about an hour of daylight outside working hours, depending on local customs. People have extremely strong preferences about how that hour gets split up.
Yeah, it’s insane. Along with that, any permanent gains in the morning will be lost as soon as it becomes normal. Businesses will just open that much earlier. And this study assumed bedtimes of 10pm, which is not the average anywhere on the planet from what I remember the last time I looked into this. The average is like past midnight.
Hol up, don't fix time, there's a few guys in Seattle without curtains. Sorry everyone.
> Do the anti-DST people understand what they're advocating for?
They do, which is why only 45 countries observe DST.
25 observe it partially.
And the rest, roughly ~125 countries do not.
Historically, ~140 countries did.
To put this into perspective, only about 1.2B people out of 8.3B observe it today. Which puts you into a very small <15% minority.
This just seems like a backwards justification. There is nothing wrong with a 9am sunrise or a 4:11am sunrise. People in Anchorage deal with both just fine.
> I am not awake at 4am, I have no use for sunlight at 4am
Most people aren’t awake at 5am either. Your use for the sun when there is an excess of it that goes well past your bedtime if you get up at 5am is irrelevant.
You realize that you can change your own sleep patterns seasonally if you want to? Heck, you could do that even gradually instead of those abrupt 1 hour changes. That is your choice, we don't need to fiddle with clocks for the whole society for that.
You can have your own household clock.
Every few years these studies are published. Nothing changes. Unfortunately policy isn’t dictated by science, facts, or optimal outcomes for all.
Between this and the "Sunset time and the economic effects of social jetlag: evidence from US time zone borders" paper [0], it seems like the issue is the size of the discontinuous jump in time, not necessarily that we change the clocks. So why not "smear" the DST<=> ST transitions by having four half hour transitions, once each quarter?
[0]https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31030116/
This isn’t going to get fixed in my lifetime, and that’s sad. Countries have lost the ability to act.
Of all the things that cause obesity and sleep loss, is an hour change twice a year really a major issue?
I really wonder about the methodology. The article didn't mention it.
Did they get several cities to participate?
It was tried 52 years ago, and no one actually liked it, so we went back to DST again:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanent_time_observation_in_...
Possibly another example of the old Chesterton's Fence.
This is so much effort for next to no gains.
And the rest of the world people? would it be healthier? the doubt is striking me
Oh my God, just move it by half an hour permanently!
With DST, there are actually 2 new concepts: ambiguous time (if the clock rolls back) and invalid time (if the clock jumps forward).
Java and Ruby work differently. Java would simply round the invalid time to the closest valid time IIRC. Ruby would accurately raise the InvalidTime exception. Same behaviors for an ambiguous time.
Chile is actually the country that will cause tricky issue in a system because they adjust DST at midnight... so there is one day a year where its midnight is considered invalid time. If we are building a system that depends on a day's boundary, then we will encounter this nightmarish issue where one of the days must start at 1am instead of midnight.
I really hope DST is going away soon.
My controversial idea: midnight should be where current 4AM is because 04:00 is the lowest point of human circadian rhythm. Currently we have nonsense like "1AM is technically a part of the next day but for all practical purposes it's still the previous day". Also, 24h clock should be the standard so that we can avoid discussions "is 12AM noon or midnight".
Are you Yanks seriously not going to get this sorted out before winter? BC has moved - can at least the rest of Cascadia get their asses in gear? Come on, California, I do not want to be dealing with a north-south time zone difference with my coworkers
I really don't want the sunrise time to be 5:00 in the morning and still not have any daylight to do errands after work. I don't care what the reasons are, but if seasons change the sunset time, what's so wrong with changing it a bit more?
Assuming they don't get hit by a car walking to school.
> the researchers estimate that permanent standard time would result in some 300,000 fewer people having suffered from a stroke and result in 2.6 million fewer people having obesity
That 2.6 million people are obese because of a 1h shorter change night in one Sunday a year is an extraordinary claim. I would love to understand how they got to this result.
"Study by people who hate daylight savings time and have great bias against it, suggests that..."