
Making daylight saving time permanent could reduce crime - akg_67
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2015/10/29/the-case-for-year-round-daylight-saving-time-just-got-billions-of-dollars-stronger/
======
douche
I've always lived far enough north that the difference in daylight between
summer/winter is very significant. In June, the sun is up at 5:30 in the
morning, and doesn't set until after 9. In the winter, it's sometimes not
light by 9AM when I go to work, and it is pitch black again by 4:30. It
doesn't help that it is cold as hell at the same time that it is dark all the
time.

My sleep cycle tends to be very sunlight dependent, so I'm seriously dragging
all winter, since my body wants to still be asleep when I have to get up, and
by the end of the day, I'm already shutting down. Daylight savings time screws
things up even more - turning the clocks back in the fall isn't terrible, but
those first weeks in the spring are _brutal_.

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im3w1l
And yet other research says we should start studying/working later. Can't have
it both ways.

[http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/08/why-
sch...](http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/08/why-school-
should-start-later/401489/)
[http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/shortcuts/2015/sep/0...](http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/shortcuts/2015/sep/09/why-
you-should-start-work-at-10am-unless-youre-in-your-50s)

~~~
Natsu
Better off just abolishing it. It's also been linked to more car accidents and
such. If you want to set summer hours, fine, do that, but it's just silly to
play with the clock to do so.

~~~
msbarnett
There's no meaningful difference between _abolishing DST_ and _making DST
permanent_. It's really just a question about whether you'd permanently like a
little more sun in the morning, or the afternoon.

In the Northern city that I live in, in the winter, a permanent DST would be
preferable. We're already in the preferable situation 8 months of the year. No
reason not to just extend it the other 4 months, permanently.

~~~
riffic
You do realize that the amount of hours of daylight one gets in one day is an
immutable property of the rotation of the earth?

Calling 3:00 pm "Four O'clock" does not magically make the day longer, nor
would it give you more sun in the afternoon.

~~~
blackguardx
Yes, people realize that. Usually people must conform to societal norms which
require one to do things at a certain time, which may not be synced with the
natural time.

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ScottBurson
It's possible that the 2007 DST extension reduced evening crime because sunset
was still late enough for the difference to matter. I'm not sure that will
remain true all winter. That is, even if DST ran all year, in the depth of
winter it might still get dark early enough for the street criminals to come
out between 5 and 8 PM.

The link (near the bottom of the article) about how DST causes problems for
farmers is baffling. Surely if any enterprise should be run on solar time
rather than clock time, it's a farm! Why can't they just adjust their
schedules so the DST change is irrelevant??

~~~
scrollaway
> Why can't they just adjust their schedules so the DST change is irrelevant??

Because it's known to be bollocks. Lowest grade quality article.

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akg_67
> Most street crime occurs in the evening around common commuting hours of 5
> to 8 PM

Instead of mucking with Time, which we may later find out have some
'unintended' consequences, why not businesses, schools and workplaces change
their open and work hours? This will change the timing of the "commuting"
hours and spread over longer duration potentially also reducing the rush hour
traffic issues.

~~~
intopieces
>Why not businesses, schools and workplaces change their open and work hours?

It's far easier to legislate DST than to to regulate every business, school
and workplace. In Indiana, DST and Time Zones are already political sore
spots. There would be absolute revolt if they attempted to tell everyone to
change the time they operate and everyone certainly wouldn't do it of their
own volition.

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riffic
Stop playing games with time. Instead of year-long daylight saving time, I'd
rather we stick with standard time all year long.

~~~
qyv
Invariably when I am trying to setup some kind of international conf call I
cant help but think that communication would be easier without timezones.
Imagine the ease of coordinating world-wide tele-meetings if everyone just
understood and used UTC. Yes technology often uses it under the hood, but if
used it societally things would be so much simpler.

~~~
hugh4
Though then you're just swapping that for the problem of remembering stuff
like "Is 2am GMT a good time to call Japan?"

~~~
kuschku
Japan will be around +10 hours, so it’s 12h – sure, noon.

Remembering which country is where is standard in school, roughly estimating
timezones from that is easy (US varies from -8 to -4, most of europe is 0 or
+1 or +2, as is most of Africa, Russia is +3, middle east is around +3 and +4,
china is +8, just like singapore and japan; australia, new zealand are between
+10 and +12; I have no idea what the actual data is, just saying what I
remember based on knowing the world map)

As everyone knows GMT, and everyone knows the world map, the issue is solved.

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acaloiar
> In 2007, Congress increased the period of daylight saving time (DST
> henceforth) by four weeks, adding three weeks in the spring and one in the
> fall. "This produced a useful natural experiment for our paper,"

My knee-jerk reaction to reading this is that their paper's conclusions must
be based on a single observation.

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gruez
Call me a traditionalist, but shouldn't 12pm be when the sun is directly
overhead? (by definition)

~~~
eridius
Time zones already mean that's not true.

Pretty recently there was a post (I think here on HN) that shaded the entire
world to show how far off from 12pm they are when the sun is directly
overhead. There were some pretty serious gradients on a lot of time zones
(where the left edge is far off in one direction and the right edge is far off
in the other direction). And there were a lot of time zones where the entire
zone was offset in one direction.

Unfortunately I don't remember enough to find that post again.

~~~
jjp
Think you probably mean this map - [http://blog.poormansmath.net/the-time-it-
takes-to-change-the...](http://blog.poormansmath.net/the-time-it-takes-to-
change-the-time/)

~~~
eridius
Yeah that's the one.

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robbrown451
And when people get used to it, shift the time forward by another hour?

This makes as much sense as those people who set their clocks forward by 15
minutes so they aren't late.

~~~
esrauch
It doesn't, because the numbers of time have an independent meaning that
people follow that is unrelated to the sun, which is the entire reason that
daylight savings time even works: people don't just ignore it and work 9-5
this week and 8-4 next week even though those are the same natural times.

~~~
bendykstra
One interesting consequence of this is that the further west that you look
within a timezone, the less sleep people tend to get.

> Examination of ATUS activity logs shows that workers experiencing earlier
> sunset also go to bed earlier and that this correlation between sunset and
> bedtime persists even if the worker goes to bed well after dark. Coordinated
> work start times translate this earlier bedtime into longer sleep.

Time Use and Productivity: The Wage Returns to Sleep, Matthew Gibson and
Jeffrey Shrader

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thought_alarm
If it were up to me North America would only have two time zones, and no DST.

I stopped changing my clocks years ago and I've never been happier.

I'm on the west coast and I set all of my devices to "Phoenix, AZ" time zone,
which is Mountain Standard Time year round (or Pacific Daylight Time year
round). Most calendar software works fine with multiple time zones. Set your
appointments in Pacific Time, and they're shown in Mountain Standard Time.

There's really only 3 weeks of the year where mornings are unusually dark. The
interesting thing is I naturally wake a little later during the dark mornings,
and naturally wake a little earlier as the mornings become lighter. I enjoy
it.

I don't have to deal with the shock of losing an hour sleep in the spring, or
the shock of the sun suddenly setting at 4:50 PM in the fall.

The only negative is that Colbert is on an hour later than normal for a few
months.

~~~
JeffreyKaine
How do you communicate with the rest of the world? Do you often make the
mistake of setting a meeting up an hour off, and are you ever an hour off from
other people's expectations?

~~~
thought_alarm
For formal appointments, you use your calendar software and enter your
appointments in the local time zone. The software will automatically convert a
3:00 PM pacific-time appointment to your preferred time zone (Mountain
Standard Time).

For informal appointments, you get used to "7:00 PM your time, 8:00 PM my
time" for the 4 months. In rare cases you may get it backwards and you're off
by two hours, but those errors are usually caught quickly.

The only time it's a real problem is when someone on the street asks you the
time and you don't realize that you've put them off by an hour until you've
walked away.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
I'm not clear how any of this benefits you directly.

~~~
chillwaves
Daylights savings time is a fiction and I refuse to be ruled by it.

~~~
rev_bird
But your solution only works if you have a flexible schedule. You say, "I
don't have to deal with the shock of losing an hour sleep in the spring," but
that's only because, presumably, there isn't a manager standing at your desk
at 9 a.m. wondering why you are showing up to work an hour later than everyone
else all of the sudden. People aren't ruled by Daylight Saving Time, they're
ruled by schedules.

The actual number doesn't matter at all -- I go to sleep at 11 p.m. in
whatever time zone I'm in because it's about 8 hours before I need to wake up
and jump into my schedule. Saying "11 p.m." is really "10 p.m." doesn't change
the fact that I'm 8 hours away from waking up.

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avdempsey
I made an IPython notebook awhile back exploring the advantages and
disadvantages of various DST proposals for my lat/long (you could download and
plug in your own). (Please forgive the attempts at humor in the notebook, they
were sloppy).

[https://github.com/avdempsey/IPython-
Notebooks/blob/master/D...](https://github.com/avdempsey/IPython-
Notebooks/blob/master/Daylight%20Savings/Concerning%20Daylight%20Savings%20Time.ipynb)

------
nommm-nommm
Canada changed their DST hours to coordinate with the US a few years later. Is
there any data of this type from Canada?

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DarkLinkXXXX
Wouldn't it be better to increase the timezone by one, and abolish DST, so
that it wouldn't be so confusing?

~~~
msbarnett
In what meaningful way are these two acts any different?

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melling
Could? Are we playing with statistics again? Yesterday I learned on HN that
you're 8x more likely to be killed by a cop than by a terrorist. This also
turns out to be the same odds as being killed by your furniture.

[https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2015/10/29/youre-8-times-
more-l...](https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2015/10/29/youre-8-times-more-likely-
to-be-killed-by-a-police-officer-than-by-furniture/)

~~~
xixi77
Well, if you actually look at the article, they, for example, find a
statistically significant 7% drop in robberies (with up to 27% in a specific
hour).

~~~
thaumasiotes
That's nothing -- if you _do_ observe daylight savings time, you'll see a 100%
drop in crime (and everything else) during one specific hour.

------
Houshalter
There's no such thing as permanent daylight savings time. The point of
daylight savings time is to shift everyone's routines forward during one
section of the year, and backwards during another.

If you don't shift, and the new times are fixed, then people will get used to
it and just move their routines back 2 hours. People will treat new:6:00 as if
it's really old:5:00, because it is. Nothing will change besides the numbers
on paper.

~~~
intopieces
I don't follow. How are people moving their routines back 2 hours? Shops
aren't changing their hours and my work starts at the same time. I don't do
anything according to the sun, I do everything because other people are doing
that thing at that time.

~~~
Houshalter
I meant 1 hour. But anyway that is the point of daylight savings time. The
actual time doesn't change, just the number on the clock. Causing everyone to
move their routines back 1 hour, so that they have more sunlight in the
afternoon. Daylight savings time would work just as well if everyone decided
to go to work from 8-4 during half of the year, and keep the clocks the same.

~~~
intopieces
How do you propose getting all workplaces to change their schedules to 8-4,
nevermind the places that don't run those hours? Legislation? This solution
keeps coming up and the practicality of it seems nonexistent. Any legislation
of business is riddle with exceptions, there would be end to them for such a
move as changing working hours.

~~~
Houshalter
What are you talking about? I never suggested that was a good idea. I just
said it would have the same effect. I was trying to explain the purpose of
daylight savings time, because you didn't seem to understand it. My original
comment was just saying that "permanent daylight savings time" is nonsensical.

Since you bring it up, I do find it absolutely horrifying that we rely on the
government to mandate that people miscalibrate their clocks once a year.
Instead of businesses and stuff doing the right thing and moving their
schedules back so people can have more afternoon time. But unfortunately
that's the world we live in.

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angmarsbane
Am morning person. Must not be a criminal.

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nakedrobot2
Can we just go ahead and put the clocks forward 3 or 4 hours then? Mornings
are not worth living anyway, and we could have glorious evenings where the sun
sets at 8pm in the winter, and at midnight in the summer. Wouldn't that be
lovely? :-)

~~~
darkhorn
Seems like China.

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de_Selby
The article seems to be making a lot of assumptions. For example another
explanation could be that crime is just seasonal.

People who are less well off would probably be able to survive on less during
summer when they don't have heating costs. Or maybe they're just in a better
mood.

~~~
jedmeyers
"[The increase of the period of daylight saving time by four weeks] produced a
useful natural experiment for our paper," authors Jennifer Doleac and Nicholas
Sanders write at Brookings, "which helped us isolate the effect of daylight
from other seasonal factors that might affect crime."

~~~
de_Selby
Ah ok, it seems I skimmed over that bit! That makes it more interesting.

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daveloyall
This is why we can't have nice things.

