
Why Daylight Saving Time Should Be Abolished - jamesbritt
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2011/11/04/why-daylight-saving-time-should-be-eliminated/
======
joeyh
Last winter I tried as an experiment setting up my own personal time zone, and
not "falling back" an hour. Since I live in an offgrid cabin, having the sun
still up at 6 pm in midwinter is especially useful -- it means an extra hour
when I'm using direct solar power while working and not draining batteries.

It was occasionally confusing to visitors that clocks were not at the time
they expected. Otherwise, I didn't have many problems with scheduling; I work
with people in many timezones anyway so having to adjust times is standard
practice. If I forgot to make an adjustment, I'd arrive early. Restaurants
were occasionally annoying when I wanted lunch and they were still finishing
late breakfast service, but they tend to have some crossover time anyway, and
I don't mind a 1 pm lunch either.

I'm planning to do it again this winter.

BTW, tech-wise, it's easy enough to configure a personal time zone, at least
on Linux. Just set TZ=JEST+4. (And be happy not changing the remaining dumb
clocks. The only clock I had to manually adjust was on my android phone.)

~~~
vinhboy
You live in an "offgrid cabin" with an android phone and internet?
Interesting... do tell...

~~~
__alexs
Presumably he's referring to the electrical grid (hence the PV and batteries)
rather than trying to avoid WiFi so he doesn't get migraines.

------
danboarder
As I recall, Russia has done just that this year and abolished the practice in
Moscow, switching to GMT+4 year-round. Quote:

“Every fall and every spring we are swearing at this system,” Medvedev said.
“Our biorhythms are damaged. We are all angry. We either oversleep and turn up
late for work or wake up too early and don’t know what to do with this free
time. Let alone poor cows and other animals that can’t understand why they
should have their meals or be milked earlier or later.”

Here is a story on it: <http://rt.com/news/daylight-saving-time-abolished/>

~~~
anigbrowl
What he said. First Daylight savings time, then Centigrade and the metric
system. These three changes would give our economy a significant boost IMHO.
Using outmoded metrics is an insidious and wasteful form of protectionism.

~~~
philwelch
I don't see how centigrade would actually help. I agree that it's better for
scientific measurements (if not as good as Kelvins) but the typical Fahrenheit
range is much better suited for weather conditions than centigrade from a
usability standpoint. The typical weather conditions on the inhabited parts of
the earth don't range much further than 0-100, whereas centrigrade can't
represent any kind of legitimately wintry conditions without resorting to
negative numbers and everything above 50 is completely unused. From a
usability standpoint, it makes sense that typical temperatures should be
distributed along a 100 point scale, and that only genuine extremes should
exceed the ends of that. Fahrenheit meets that requirement; centigrade
doesn't.

~~~
henrikschroder
If you live in a climate where you have real winter, then being able to tell
the difference between freezing and not freezing is very important. -1 means
snow from the sky, ice on the roads, lower humidity. +1 means rain, wet roads,
and higher humidity. It's a very important divider, which is why it's at a
prominent place on the Celsius scale, unlike the Fahrenheit one where it's
between 32 and 34.

I don't think it's a coincidence that Anders Celsius lived further north than
Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit. :-)

~~~
philwelch
I'm not fond of the tradeoff between not having to remember the number 32 and
having to use a sign bit for half the year. Frankly you're not totally safe
from ice until 35 or so, and it's useful to have a marker around 0 or so that
just says "your face will fall off". Likewise, it's nice to have a convenient
marker around 100 for "your face will melt off". 0 and 100 are good for
extreme ends of a range, not so much for middle values.

------
exDM69
Greetings from 60 degrees northern latitude. We just turned our clocks back an
hour a week ago. That means that there's an hour more sunlight before I wake
up and it's dark by the time I'm out of work. I have to say, I don't really
like the arrangement of daylight saving time.

Today the sun rises at 07.52 in the morning and sets at 16.14 at the
afternoon. It's going to be getting worse for two more months and that means
it's 4 months before it's any better than today. For a six month period most
of my life is walking through these orange tunnels that appear when sodium
lights illuminate wet asphalt and concrete. The first symptoms of limited
sunlight exposure are starting to show around this time of the year and
supplemental vitamin d has to be taken or wild mood swings start to appear.

When I used to live at a student campus, I had a period of "hibernation" every
winter. I lived an ascetic lifestyle in the one square mile around the campus
and the uni. I only left to go home for xmas. I re-emerged when the catkins
started appearing on the willows.

In these latitudes, it would make sense to be in permanent daylight saving
time ("summer time"). During the summer and the winter there's really no
difference since the sun is practically constantly up or down. It's the fall
and the spring that make the difference.

And if anyone knows of good software engineering career options a little
closer to the equator, drop me a line :)

~~~
sophacles
Have you considered going to a tanning bed? I have heard this works very well,
improving mood and general outlook during the dark times. I plan on doing this
1-2 times a week when the winter gets going hardcore here as an experiment.

In reading up on this subject, just a few minutes is all that is needed, the
point is not a tan, just exposure to UV and brightness.

~~~
log6
Let's see how your mood is when diagnosed with skin cancer! Not that I would
wish it in anyone, but intentional exposure to damaging UV when there are
safer alternative treatments for SAD does not seem like a sensible course of
action.

~~~
brc
A few minutes exposure to UV isn't harmful, and is on balance likely
benficial.

Put it this way - I would get more UV collecting my mail in summer than you
would on a tanning bed for a couple of minutes. And I haven't dropped dead.
But a bright sunny day does make my mood brighter.

Vitamin D deficiency and depression are much bigger issues than UV over
exposure.

------
SeoxyS
I'm Swiss. Back in the day, the Swatch group had an experiment where they
tried to invent a new unit for time. They came up with the `beat`, also known
as Swatch Internet Time. The unit represented a 1000 beat cycle centered
around midnight on the Swiss meridian, ie. UTC+1. There'd be no daylight
savings time.

All in all, it's a really cool idea, and I owned a watch for many years that
reported beat time, but it was essentially useless. This is perhaps the most
gigantic of chicken-and-egg problems, the mere fact that it is currently
useless ensures that it will forever be useless.

More at: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time>

~~~
chrisfarms
I used to have a watch that gave beats. Totally useless other than annoying
friends by constantly converting any meeting time into beats.

I think it will take colonising other planets before the world is ready for a
new unit of time and at that point the whole concept of 'day' is kind of out
the window.

~~~
cpeterso
Colonizers on new planets will probably still use minutes and hours because
that's what they're used to culturally. Especially if they have to collaborate
with people on Earth.

This Wikipedia artile about timekeeping on Mars is fun reading. The Mars rover
operation teams used work schedules (and watches!) based on Martian time
because they need to be available when the rover had daylight.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timekeeping_on_Mars>

------
TomOfTTB
DST is an example of how stuck in our ways humanity can be. In addition to the
evidence in the article there have also been studies that have shown increased
car accidents, lost productivity and all kinds of other problems caused by the
cognitive impact of a whole society trying to wake up earlier then their body
is expecting.

As far as energy usage is concerned I could see the argument being true if we
could pick when the time changed each year to correspond with temperature
fluctuations. But since weather tends to vary from year to year and we change
the time on a set day the effort seems moot.

~~~
kiba
Who the hell is responsible for much of the DST insanity?

I think most people on hacker news would agree DST is insanity.

~~~
cromulent
I don't agree that it is insanity.

People who live close to the equator or in the middle of time zones tend not
to see much point in DST. The day length doesn't vary much at the equator, and
if you are in the middle of a time zone then the offset doesn't vary too much.

If you are closer to a pole or at the edge of a time zone, the offset is not
ideal around the solstices. So, DST is welcome for many.

I've heard the arguments from people close to the equator that the curtains
will fade and the men will get their morning erections while they are on the
bus, etc. Of course it is different there in the sub-tropics.

If you accept that time should not be completely local (i.e. the local church
tower clock is set to noon, as it used to be) and not completely global (i.e.
we all run on UTC and Tuesday begins at 00:00:01 which happens to be late
afternoon in location X) and so that we arbitrarily assign time zones
according to the rotation of our planet, surely we can also adjust the time
zones depending on the path of our planet around the sun.

Well, if it works for the locals, that is. Insanity seems like a strong word.

~~~
rue
> _People who live close to the equator or in the middle of time zones tend
> not to see much point in DST. The day length doesn't vary much at the
> equator, and if you are in the middle of a time zone then the offset doesn't
> vary too much._

> _If you are closer to a pole or at the edge of a time zone, the offset is
> not ideal around the solstices. So, DST is welcome for many._

I'm not quite sure what your argument is.

I can tell you that here, above 60˚, it's light enough the entire summer
anyway (as in, it's only dark for about 2 hours a day), and in the winter the
added light is too early in the morning but it gets darker earlier in the
afternoon. Today, for example, the sun was up at 7:52 and down at 16:14
(4:14pm).

I suspect it's most useful for people around 35-45˚.

~~~
cromulent
You probably aren't sure about my argument as it is not aimed at you. DST is
useless at the equator, and useless at high latitudes. However, it's useful at
middle latitudes, and that point is often missed by many. I would agree with
35-45˚.

I also live above 60˚ north - today I had 2 minutes less daylight than you :(

I think some of the negativity towards DST here is due to failure to consider
the local needs of other people. I guess that's my argument. The day is
important, and you know the importance of things more when they are gone.

~~~
kiba
Some people don't really care about daytime and nighttime at all. To them, the
DST is just a mindless insanity.

------
dreeves
I view DST as a clever hack to solve an otherwise intractable coordination
problem: getting everyone to shift their schedules to not waste all that extra
morning daylight in the summer.

As for the proposal of permanent DST, I would like that personally but I think
that too many people would have a problem with kids going to school in pitch
darkness in the winter and whatnot.

The theoretical ideal would be that standard business hours continuously
adjust so that they always start soon after dawn. That maximizes the amount of
after-work sunlight, without sacrificing daytime sunlight. Despite the
existence of people who prefer early morning daylight, I think that maximizes
social efficiency.

Of course it's not (currently) practical to continuously adjust, so DST is a
coarse approximation.

I do appreciate the ridiculousness of changing the clocks instead of changing
our schedules. But I think it's impossible to coordinate the change in
schedules. You'd have too many defectors and the whole thing would fall apart.
Think about the massive interdependence: work schedules, daycare, trains,
social activities, etc etc. It really has to happen all together en masse or
it doesn't work.

Whether it's worth the hassle (and, yes, the real cost in lost productivity
and sleep disruption) is of course still debatable but I think those declaring
it pure insanity haven't fully thought it through.

PS: Interesting exception that proves the rule: Arizona opts out of DST
because it gets so hot in the afternoon and evening that people actually
prefer the early morning daylight.

~~~
orangecat
_But I think it's impossible to coordinate the change in schedules. You'd have
too many defectors and the whole thing would fall apart._

I'd think that if all government agencies including schools switched their
schedules at the DST point, most companies would quickly fall in line. And
ideally lots of companies who currently have fixed hours would realize they
don't actually need them.

At the very least, stop mucking with the changeover date every few years and
breaking millions of software installations.

~~~
dreeves
That's persuasive. You might be right. It's a tough sell though: Come on
everyone, time to start waking up earlier! Up and at 'em! Daylight's
a-wastin'!

(Yeah, imagining that collective groan has brought me back from the brink of
changing my mind! It could never happen without the clock-shift hack.)

I agree about not changing the changeover date; that seriously compounds the
hassle of it. Any clock that auto-adjusts on the old schedule has to be
manually adjusted 4 times per year!

~~~
morsch
And of course, if you manage to do it without the hack, you still end up with
many of the downsides, disrupted sleep schedules and whatnot.

------
carsonm
I definitely prefer the light later in the evenings (DST), I'd just like it to
stay that way year-round. (i.e. let's stop the madness, but it would be a pity
if we stuck with Standard Time year-round, we should stick with DST year-
round).

~~~
ctdonath
You want more evening light, you get up earlier.

I want more morning light. Can't stand getting up when it's night, don't care
when it gets dark later in the day.

How about we just agree that "noon" means "sun straight overhead" (within a
half hour for time zone position) and each get up as each sees fit, with no
thrashing over forcing strangers to adhere to an unwanted deviation at
arbitrary dates.

~~~
philwelch
Not everyone can just roll into work, lunch, dinner, meetings, dates whenever
the hell they feel like it. People have to coordinate their schedules.

~~~
ctdonath
YOU try "coordinating schedules" with a couple of toddlers who now are up and
raring to go at 5:00AM, thanks to a conspiracy of complete strangers to #^*&
with my clocks.

As of this morning I hate DST 10x more than ever.

------
dhx
The real answer to this problem is to recognise that different people have
different chronotypes
(<https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Chronotype>).

Flexible working arrangements allow workers to adjust their lives to match
their circadian rhythms and other biological needs. Productivity increases due
to workers shifting their workloads to the optimal times of day.

Perhaps some workers perform better over the span of a day if they take a 4
hour break in the middle for a main meal, quick sleep and some social
activity? Perhaps others perform better if conducting their work in one
contiguous block?

Some people like ordered, repeatable and structured schedules. Others prefer a
flexible schedule where the order of their day may be completely different
each day of the week depending on what commitments they have planned and what
opportunities suddenly become available.

Daylight savings and fixed 9-5 working hours are deprecated concepts in a
modern "high-tech" society.

------
yurylifshits
Russia just did it in 2011.

It will no longer have time adjustments twice a year. Last one was in Spring
2011.

~~~
usaar333
Wait.. so it is now permanently on Daylight Savings time? (e.g. sun at highest
point at ~ 1pm every day?)

~~~
burgerbrain
Not a bad idea really. Since it gets dark muuuch sooner in the winter, it
always made since to me that we should just stay on daylight savings time year
round.. so effectively bump everybody over one time zone permanently. I'd
rather have sun after I work than before it, leaving work in the afternoon and
seeing stars is absurd.

~~~
adestefan
The time of sunrise/sunset is dependent on the latitude you're at. For those
living closer to the equator the time differences don't have much of an
impact.

------
techdmn
I don't know about energy savings, but I know DST has cost plenty in developer
time, including mine. :)

~~~
tristan_juricek
Oh man I had so many stupid problems caused by developers who made two
decisions:

1\. "hey let's store times in the local time zone in the DB" 2\. "oh the user
wants their local time, I'll just use an offset"

This comment just brought back the memories...

And no, I'm no longer at that company.

------
zdw
Why stop there? Abolish time zones. Everyone should be using UTC directly.

This would solve more problems than it causes.

~~~
majika
I vehemently disagree. I think the problems that this causes are larger than
the current solution.

Timezones aren't a human construction. Humans have only offered a series of
approximations that are accurate enough.

Cognitive dissonance: What time is the business day of Shanghai? What time
should I arrive in New York to get there in the morning? What time will my
American guildmates be online? People would still have to memorise the major
timezone offsets, and this would negate any purported advantages. If we're
still going to have to memorise timezone offsets, why bother?

Rather than asking "what's the time in New York?," I'll be asking "what part
of the day is it in New York?" The latter will be asked in place of the other,
but it would also be harder to answer due to no localised New York time.

"What's the time in New York?" can be answered by knowing that American EST is
GMT-5. My local timezone is GMT+10, and it's currently 1300. Hence, I now know
that it's 12 PM in New York, which means it's dark, which means that
businesses there are shut and it's a bad time to call friends there.

I'll admit that DST makes things harder, but I can still calculate a good
approximation on the fly. 11 or 12 PM - it doesn't really matter. If it does,
well, I know that the northern hemisphere will be at the end of Autumn, so NY-
local DST is probably over.

With one global timezone, how do I answer "what part of the day is it in New
York?" Well, I still have to remember that New York's "timezone" is -4 GMT,
and I still have to remember that my local "timezone" is +10 GMT. I still have
to do a calculation, but I have to have a mapping of times to the state of the
day in my head to know where New York is in relation.

It's so much more complicated.

It also makes it hard to know "when" a certain place is. Say I arrive in
London, and it's overcast. I'd actually have to calculate what part of the day
it is, by working off my home time->day-state mapping. That's so wrong.

~~~
muuh-gnu
> Rather than asking "what's the time in New York?," I'll be asking "what part
> of the day is it in New York?"

Except that the current time zones dont really tell you that, sice most of
them are decided politically, not by mapping to sunrise/sunset as closely as
possible. The world time zone map is a irrational mess, including time jumps
of 2-3 hours when crossing a land border, or time zones changing backwards
becuse of convulted political borders.

[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ad/Standard_...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ad/Standard_time_zones_of_the_world.png)

~~~
majika
Actually, yes, the current timezones do tell me that.

The time known as 7 AM is early morning everywhere. 11 AM is late morning
everywhere. 2 PM is early afternoon everywhere. 8 PM is mid evening
everywhere.

By their definition, timezones are 100% accurate for telling the "part of the
day".

They're inaccurate in the sense of telling where the sun is in the sky - not
too big of a deal, really. But even then, they're close enough for casual
purposes.

------
wallflower
China has a single time zone, Beijing time

[http://www.usno.navy.mil/USNO/astronomical-
applications/astr...](http://www.usno.navy.mil/USNO/astronomical-
applications/astronomical-information-center/world-tzones)

------
stdbrouw
Am I the only one who at least subjectively likes DST? I hate waking up in the
dark, which DST doesn't help with, but the alternative, namely moving clocks
one hour ahead the whole year through (effectively bumping up a time zone)
would make me feel downright miserable. Also, I just love being able to sit
outside in the sun until 11 P.M. in the summer.

That said, I _did_ just miss a meeting this morning because the EU switches to
winter time at the end of October whereas the US switches early in November.
Makes it even more confusing.

------
zeroonetwothree
Yes, we should 100% make it permanent. It's simply better to have more
daylight in the evening than in the morning.

~~~
joelmichael
Do you think it's better for the sun to rise at 8:25 am? Because that would be
the situation during the winter solstice in San Francisco if DST was made
permanent. Not much fun to wake up and go to work in darkness.

[http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/astronomy.html?n=224&#...</a>

~~~
fiblye
Most people seem to have bigger issues with getting out of work/school and
going back in the dark. Leaving work at night is just depressing because you
have the feeling of no free time, whereas it doesn't matter in the morning
because you're probably just having breakfast and getting ready to leave.

------
shwa
When posed with the question, if there were one invention you could erase from
human history, what would it be-- the only erasure I could think of that would
have a wholly positive effect was dst. What other fixture of American (others
too, I'm sure) life is so colossally pointless?

------
saraid216
I think I agree. I can see lots of semantic problems, but I can't think of
anything that would be an actual problem. After all, we already have Zulu
time, Unix time and UTC being used in various places. Maybe I'm just not being
imaginative enough?

~~~
msbarnett
> After all, we already have Zulu time, Unix time and UTC being used in
> various places.

Tangential, but "Zulu time" is just another name for UTC.

~~~
aaronblohowiak
I hope you never have to care about this, but Zulu is synonymous with GMT, not
UTC. UTC includes leap seconds, whereas GMT does not.

There also used to be differences with some measurements of GMT starting the
numbering at noon instead of midnight (madness!)

I am the creator and maintainer of <http://the.endoftimezones.com> and an
amateur time historian.

~~~
adestefan
Zulu includes the leap seconds. Zulu just comes from US Navy denoting it as
Time Zone Z and all US Navy time zones are based on offset from UTC.

~~~
aaronblohowiak
Ah, thank you. I suppose that is the amateur in amateur time historian ;)

------
ricardobeat
Still don't buy it.

The article that it points to, where it's said that energy consumption is
reduced by a mere 0.2-0.5% is talking about total consumption - in my
understanding the most pronounced effect of DST is a reduction in _peak_
consumption.

In peak hours (around 6-7pm, when everyone is getting home), the extra energy
is provided by coal plants, which are expensive and polluting. A 5% reduction
in peak consumption might mean that dozens of coal plants are kept shut during
that time.

And even a 0.5% reduction is _huge_ when you talk about a whole country...

------
ctdonath
All these posts on HN about DST with no mention of impacts on systems?

DST sucks on embedded systems, especially when the change dates are changed.
Not knowing the local DST standard, or not being able to update fielded
systems when legislation changes the DST dates, means a system may be on the
"wrong" time for days, weeks or months. Many are opting to abandon automatic
time changes for "hour+1" user settings, or ignoring DST altogether.

Could be amusing to compute how much worldwide total storage and CPU time is
devoted to handling DST.

~~~
delinka
My opinion goes like this: all computer systems should track time in GMT and
not care in which timelines the humans live. Your admin (or his software) in
NY can convert to local time when he needs it. Your backup admin in LA can do
the same thing. Why a system at this point in tech history needs to keep local
time is beyond my understanding.

~~~
ctdonath
EMBEDDED systems. There is no admin who can just tweak a field for hundreds or
thousands of devices out, not networked, who knows where.

~~~
delinka
I still don't see why an embedded system cares about timezones. It measures
ticks. That's all.

------
Symmetry
I was rather annoyed this last week at trying to schedule meetings with people
in Europe who have a DST that started a week before ours did in the US.

------
shaggyfrog
> You can also thank railroads for time zones—geographic swaths of the globe
> set to the same hour.

Or, more specifically, Sir Sandford Fleming.

<http://www.histori.ca/minutes/minute.do?id=10182>

------
dave1010uk
Here's my comment and the following discussion from a while ago about having
just one time zone: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2528354>

------
T_S_
While we're at it...

13 months, 28 days each = 364 days Plus 1 or 2 special days at the beginning
of the year. Much easier to figure out the day of the week for your next
meeting.

We could name the 13th month Jobsuary, or you pick.

~~~
joeyo
Eastman Kodak used this calendar internally for over 60 years. They called the
extra month Sol.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar>

------
lutorm
Is really the twice-a-year DST change significant compared to time changes
while traveling? I mean, what fraction of Americans do not travel to another
time zone at least once per year?

~~~
hdctambien
Probably a large fraction. Most people I went to high school with never leave
the city we grew up in, let alone the time zone.

I didn't leave my timezone until after I had graduated college... and almost
all of those times were to go to PAX .. which is now also on the east coast so
I haven't even done that in 2 years.

------
drdo
I don't think anyone needs to be convinced that we should stop with DST, or
the whole timezones thing for that matter.

------
zerostar07
In the process why don't we also redefine the second and split the day to 1000
minutes?

~~~
ernesth
It's been tried before:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_Calendar#Deci...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_Calendar#Decimal_time)
and it lasted even less than the republican calendar. And retried
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time>

------
joelmichael
Daylight Saving Time is great. It helps us have more sunlight during the
spring, summer, and fall. Everyone is happy when it is enacted in the spring
and they get to have sunlight when they go home from work. And in the fall,
you get an extra hour of sleep. It's win-win.

------
WalterBright
Go all the way and everyone switch to GMT!

