This is ridiculous. Why don't they make the regular time permanent? And if people want to have more light in the evening, then they just leave work earlier. Surely that is easier than permanent daylight savings time.
I know people will say it's too hard to change habits and (clock) work hours, but with permanent DST you will have to change that anyway, when people realize how dark winter mornings will be. I predict a lot of people will want to move school start to a later hour then.
There's a pro-DST lobby because more post-work daylight hours is correlated with higher consumer spending. For that reason, permanent DST is more politically expedient in relation to permanent standard time.
> And if people want to have more light in the evening, then they just leave work earlier. Surely that is easier than permanent daylight savings time.
I don't think it's possible to lobby employers to change their shift hours. It is, in fact, much easier to lobby the government to change the clocks.
> I predict a lot of people will want to move school start to a later hour then.
This is probably a good idea, though... good ideas don't really seem to have much bearing on the way we arrange school schedules.
> There's a pro-DST lobby because more post-work daylight hours is correlated with higher consumer spending. For that reason, permanent DST is more politically expedient in relation to permanent standard time.
You're probably overthinking this. Not every government action is a five-level Machiavellian scheme. Sometimes overwhelming public sentiment carries the day.
I wish we could change the phrase “economic incentive”.
At the very essence of Economics it is the focus on actions human beings, fundamentally trade and labor. And it seeks the most optimal level of benefit or utility for humans.
This is an incentive for companies, not necessarily humanity.
Standard time just sucks. If you work or do after school activities, you simply stop seeing the sun in the wintertime during the week. Its set by 5:30pm when things have wrapped up for you, and it rises just as you are getting into work or school. You spend the entire day indoors and don't see the sunlight until clocks change in the spring.
I don't know whether there is such a lobby, but if there is, they fall victim to the same mistake as many other proponents of permanent DST: society is highly synchronized with the movement of the sun. Permanent DST means that timetables are going to be adjusted over time to compensate for it and no one is getting out of work earlier before sunset.
lol what? This gives you an extra hour to enjoy sunlight in the afternoon. Do you think employers are going to move from 8-5 to 10-7 just so you won't be able to enjoy a bit of sunlight?
No, they wouldn't shift the work times to prevent you from enjoying a bit of sunlight. They would shift the work times if people have problems getting awake for work in the morning or are late as they have to bring their children to school, which is probably going to be later than before.
I don't like when people accuse others of living in a "bubble", but this is a particularly egregious example of being deeply out of touch with the lives of most working people.
Why didn't I think of this sooner? Here I was, slaving away until 6-7pm every day, when I could have just got up from my chair and walked out of the building!
Honestly anyone who is passionate about which time to switch to has put way too much faith in the whole academia-to-reality pipeline. Those folks get shit so directionally wrong so often on more important things, I really don't think any academic's model of the consequences of ST/DT will be anything remotely close to complete.
We should all just chill, and be grateful for the relief.
No, I am aware of the lives of other working people, and I have worked jobs with fixed shifts before.
But I also have seen over the last 20 years that flexible time has moved from an exotic perk to a standard contract term in my country, at least for white-collar workers. And we have mandatory works councils, where workers can have a say in certain decisions, for example shift hours. (In the US the equivalent is roughly when a company has a union.)
So it is not being out of touch, it is a political demand. I am just saying what's possible.
In the US, workers don't get to make political demands. Union membership is at an all-time low and most states have stacks of anti-worker laws. So maybe our different perspectives are simply based on the realities of our different countries.
This is ridiculous. Why don't they make the DST permanent? And if people want to have more light in the MORNING, then they just WAKE UP LATER. Surely that is easier than permanent REGULAR time.
Because, aside from that noon should be at noon (roughly, allowing for the obvious error that standard time and mean solar time introduce, but which are present in both perma-standard and perma-DST) and you shouldn't be legislating business hours by screwing around with what the clock says…, it's a bad decision:
> Permanent standard time is considered by circadian health researchers and safety experts worldwide to be the best option for health, safety, schools, and economy, including the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, National Sleep Foundation, American College of Chest Physicians, National Safety Council, American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, Canadian Sleep Society, World Sleep Society, Society for Research on Biological Rhythms, and several state sleep societies.
> It is supported by environmental evidence, owing to evidence that DST observation increases driving, morning heating, and evening air conditioning, which all in turn increase energy consumption and pollution.
"Noon should be at noon" is not coherent in a world where we have standardized time zones across broad geographic areas. I don't think I have to explain why standard time zones are clearly worth the tradeoff around the accuracy of "noon".
You are also only mentioning a subset of research on the subject. Increasing ambient light in the evenings is directly associated with reduction in evening crime.
That said, there is clearly a lot of scientific evidence that it would be better if people got up earlier and enjoyed the morning light. In practice, that doesn't seem to be what "most people" actually do. The time that most people engage in activities is in the evenings, after work, not in the morning before work. As such, it seems a clear win to give more daylight in the times people are actually enjoying themselves, rather than condemning most of the country to leave work in the pitch dark.
> "Noon should be at noon" is not coherent in a world where we have standardized time zones across broad geographic areas.
You are ignoring the entire portion of the comment that addresses this complaint: it applies equally to either position, thus, it's a non-argument.
> [less crime during DST]
Well, that's interesting, perhaps, but still one has to weight it against the alternative. It seems a quick Google says things like DST-attributed deaths alone are ~$200M/yr, an order of magnitude larger effect, not to mention the emotional toll. So while I grant that as an argument against… I'm not sure it is enough.
> rather than condemning most of the country to leave work in the pitch dark.
Instead, you condemn the country to arrive at work in the dark.
It was also tried before, and people hated it:
> Polling in November and December 1973 showed strong and in some cases overwhelming support — 57 percent in a Gallup poll, 74 percent in a Louis Harris and Associates poll, and 73 percent in a poll from the Roper Organization.
> […] In a Roper poll conducted in February and March, just 30 percent remained in favor of year-round daylight saving time, while a majority favored switching times again. Louis Harris polling in March showed just 19 percent of people said it had been a good idea, while about twice as many — 43 percent — said it was a bad one.
Even if the data you showed were true (I have seen similar arguments from the pro-DST side), of all decisions were based on optimizing public health outcomes then any kind contact sport among kids/teens would be banned (including soccer, basketball, baseball, football, hockey), sugary soda's would be outlawed, fast food heavily restricted and other dangerous activities like skiing and snowboarding aggressively regulated to outright banned.
We make tradeoffs all the time to give the people the option to do the things they enjoy doing even if it means non-optimal public health outcomes. perma-DST is incredibly popular as most people prefer having the option of extra daylight in the evening.
> I have seen similar arguments from the pro-DST side
You have to be somewhat careful when reading pro-DST articles; yes, the same sorts of arguments tend to be presented, but when I read carefully, they're always vs. the status quo; I've yet to see it vs. perma-standard. That is "we should switch to perma-DST b/c it is better than normal-DST/the status quo." I think that argument is probably correct; the point is that perma-standard-time is better yet.
> of all decisions were based on optimizing public health outcomes […] aggressively regulated to outright banned.
… well… perhaps we shouldn't be giving children concussions & obesity that lead to a long list of health problems down the line …
But aside from that, most of those a parent or the person themself can simply opt out of. I can't readily opt out of society's time-keeping; I'm going to have to use the same system to communicate with the rest of y'all. And AFAICT, perma-standard is a better overall decision, and perma-DST is a local maxima of sorts.
> Noon should be whatever noon's offset from UTC should be.
I presume one wants a fixed offset / a fixed 24h day (modulo leap days). (The length of a day changes during the year. And I mean in the sense of "the time between high noon on one day to the next" changes, not the amount of sunlight, which of course changes. This is what the "mean" in "mean solar time" is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_time#Apparent_solar_time)
This is ridiculous. Why don't they make AEST time permanent? And if people want to have more light in the DAYTIME, they can just MOVE TO AUSTRALIA. Surely that is easier than PEOPLE BEING ABLE TO SEE MY FACE DURING ZOOM MEETINGS.
1) Permanent DST
2) Permanent Standard Time
3) Status Quo
And the problem is that, at least based on what I've gathered anecdotally from speaking to people and from which side the media pushes, preferences are usually 1-2-3, followed by 2-1-3, followed by 2-3-1, with anyone who prefers the status quo in dead last.
Personally I prefer standard time to DST as well, but we don't really have any power to make that decision.
I could not stand a permanent standard time. The sun would rise at 4:15 in the summer. The sun already rises way to early in the summer, making it even earlier would be unimaginable.
I'm guessing that would be crazy unpopular (for Americans at least) but I'm not sure. I actually had a 30 minute shifted timezone bite me last week, I ended up being 30 minutes late to a conference call with our team in Mumbai
Not everyone has the freedom to choose when to get off work as many have commitments from looking after children and to commute. Given a fixed schedule, I think more people have free time in the afternoon and would like to have that time be in the light and spend the time like commuting in the dark.
I do not see how either daylight or standard time is fundamentally easier than the other. I could just as easily tell people who want brighter winter mornings to just wake up later.
The argument in favor of DST generally goes that people have more spare time in the afternoon than in the morning. So extending afternoon sunlight hours benefits more people.
The government wants everyone to have more daylight hours after work, since that's correlated with higher economic activity.
From the government's perspective, they cannot force all companies to shift their working hours, but they can shift the clock. They're changing the abstraction once instead of changing all concrete implementations.
This change doesn't make a difference for most of us in tech, since we can usually set our own hours. But it does make a difference for shift workers.
But 6am is a made up construct. It's an artifact of the logistics of getting kids to school before the parents' working hours and accommodating those kids' after-school jobs.
If you move school an hour later then typical working hours also have to move an hour later and nothing actually changes.
Our children will say it is unnatural for teenagers to wake up at 7am.
Thats is the reason, permanent DST won't "work". Childrens wake time is highly dependant on the sun. So, if it already makes sense to start school later, then it only gets more so, if there is permanent DST. Which means, most work times have to start later as well.
This would be better for kids, actually. An hour less of school even would be better. Kids are given too much garbage in school rather than concentrating on core education.
What do you mean they can just leave work earlier? There are tons of jobs where the shift hours are defined, eg 9-5 or 8-4 and you can’t simply leave earlier.
I see this as ultimately a conflict between morning people and non-morning-people.
I am not a morning person, and so naturally I welcome this trading away of brighter winter mornings to get brighter winter evenings. But I recognize there are many, presumably yourself included, who prefer the opposite.
I don't have a good solution to suit everyone, and I certainly don't want to gloat at having "won." If anything, perhaps just as workplaces are sorting into remote-first and non-remote-first to address different employee preferences, the same will happen with times of day.
I'm a morning person (I sleep from 9:30 to 5:30), but I generally like daylight saving time. If it's dark when I get up, I get to enjoy the sunrise, and I love wrapping up the day outdoors in the evening.
But I also don't have any kids in school, and I don't have a 9-5 job. Maybe that flexibility makes the difference.
I prefer to wake up at the perfect time to get ready for work. Personal activities happen after work. Most people I speak with seem to have the same schedule. The hour of light from 5:30 to 6:30 is already wasted, really more since I wake up at 7 most of the time.
As someone who lives in the north. During the winter standard time is absolutely brutal. You drive to work in the dark and by the time you leave its dark. At least that's the case for most people. Moving it an hour forward may alleviate this at least a little bit.
I know people will say it's too hard to change habits and (clock) work hours, but with permanent DST you will have to change that anyway, when people realize how dark winter mornings will be. I predict a lot of people will want to move school start to a later hour then.