Study suggests most Americans would be healthier without daylight saving time

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...

That is why you run your jobs on GMT/UTC and not display time.

> So why not "smear" the DST<=> ST transitions by having four half hour transitions, once each quarter?

Very easy answer: Because it's already painful twice a year, and that would be making it even worse.

That answer is similar to the one for questions like "why do we have wide time zones that are somewhat inaccurate, rather than setting every clock based on the exact position of that clock?".

If you present this as the alternative, I think there's a chance people might actually just get rid of it :)

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.

Hol up, don't fix time, there's a few guys in Seattle without curtains. Sorry everyone.

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 can have your own household clock.

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.

Plenty of countries have moved away from DST. Over half who previously used it IIRC.

No, that’s describing permanent DST, which was tried and failed, not lack of DST. Most people in the world live without DST and it’s fine. (The article also mentions this.)

Except it's not like Chesterton's fence, it was created at the edge of living memory for known reasons. If anything it's an example of the opposite effect, something like Chesterton's field, do we really need to build a wall here, it's been a field for a damn long time...

I don’t know, maybe someone should do a study on it.

It's an extra hour of potential outdoors activity before nightfall. Yes.

“This stupid thing we do that is worse for society than the perceived upsides is only twice a year. Why not keep doing it anyway?”

I live in Western Australia. for 3 years we trialed DST from 2006 to 2009. It was a nightmare personally, I was a sysadmin at the time and enterprise management tools were expensive and crap so we had to roll out DST file changes across our fleet manually. And because the change to allow DST for our region was a rushed job we then had to roll back after the 3 year unsuccessful trial.

Honestly, it was super stressful at the time. And DST that doesn't exist doesn't bother you in the slightest. Every day ends and flows into the next like the last. But the stress of a clock change twice a year doesn't have to happen, it's a choice.

Yes, we won't. It turns out that we're way too terrible at being rational way too much of the time.

For DST in particular: Even discussions where the participants manage to form something resembling a quorum to stop changing the clocks twice every year somehow manage to unilaterally get sucked into a seemingly-inescapable quagmire of differing opinions, wherein: The decision of whether to use standard time and stick with it or to stick with DST instead becomes an intractable impasse.

Accordingly, nothing ever gets done.

I have every expectation that I will be dead and buried before this issue is resolved.

I think US states aren't allowed to switch unless the feds decide to allow it

We don’t really get much of anything sorted these days.

Then get BC to change it back

Tough shit. I live on the eastern edge of Central Time, I don't want to be dealing with 3PM sunsets in December.