
100 Years Later, the Madness of Daylight Saving Time Endures - mkempe
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/100-years-later-madness-daylight-saving-time-endures-180968435/?no-ist
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eliben
These keep coming out, but I guess I just don't get it. Say, looking at it
from the POV of parents with daycare/school-aged kids. Let's say that school
always starts at 8, and kids wake up at 7. Full-day school/aftercare etc. is
done by 5 PM or so.

During the summer in California, with daylight savings, the sun will rise at
~6 AM and set at 8 PM. The morning sun is mostly useless, at least for me. But
3 hours of sun after school ends is nice for kids to be outside, it's warmer,
etc.

Without daylight savings, the sun would rise even earlier at ~5AM and set at 7
PM. So we've lost an hour of evening sun for an our of super-early morning.
Sounds like a bad deal to me, but what am I missing?

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jstalin
Just stay in daylight saving time, don't go back.

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eliben
The issue with this is the late sunrise in the winter. In mid-Jan in LA the
sun rises at ~7AM. It would rise at 8AM with daylight savings in winter. This
sucks terribly since it moves your whole commute into dark; kids walk to
school in the dark, etc.

It's pretty depressing to start the day in the dark, to be honest (with
apologies to folks living in very northern or southern latitudes)

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ant512
That's called out at the end of the article:

"But before the end of the first month of daylight saving that January, eight
children died in traffic accidents in Florida, and a spokesperson for
Florida’s education department attributed six of those deaths directly to
children going to school in darkness."

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bhauer
Since several DST articles have been posted this week as we approach a DST-
event weekend, I have found it interesting to read the comments on HN. My own
comment [1] on Florida's vote to use permanent DST (assuming the federal
government will allow it) expressed my sentiment as succinctly as I could.

But I want to make one more point to counter a sentiment I've seen in these
threads. Most of us who out of convenience characterize ourselves as "anti-
DST" don't much care if we have permanent standard time or permanent
"daylight-saving" (summer) time. The specific singular timezone we select is
inconsequential in my mind, as long as it is in fact singular. What _anti-DST_
means to me is being opposed to the twice-annual madness of changing every
clock in the nation. As I said in my other comment, these clock changes cause
countless small nuisances, immeasurable drowsiness and lost productivity, and
a non-trivial number of injuries or worse. So shift every state one timezone
eastward, but do so and be _done_ with clock adjustments once and for all.

And yes, there are bigger problems in the world. But unlike solving
healthcare, abolishing DST is just a decision. There's no hard problem to
solve—just remove it.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16547740](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16547740)

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BenjiWiebe
I personally don't care if the reasons are bad. I can't explain why, but I
look forward to daylight savings time and dread when it ends.

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0xcafecafe
I hope this gets done away with sooner rather than later. While I enjoy the
extra one hour in the weekend before the holiday season, the spring forward
generally causes me a headache lasting about a week.

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kevindqc
Because you're missing one hour of sleep? Maybe try to ease into it? 2-3 days
before it happens, start getting up 15 minutes earlier. Then 30 minutes. Then
45 minutes. Then when its daylight saving get up on time (which would be 60
minutes earlier than usual, but only 15 minutes earlier than the day before).

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seanalltogether
I remember how weird it felt the first time I visited Hawaii, where the sun
year round comes up around 6am and goes down around 6pm. You could feel the
cultural response to this. People were waking up earlier then I was used to,
out shopping earlier then i was used to, and eating dinner earlier then I was
used to.

Nowadays it makes sense to me how much our schedules have been dictated by the
effects of daylight savings. Going to work at 9am, eating dinner at 8pm, going
to sleep at 1am. It feels now like we need DST to function correctly.

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jstalin
The only redeeming quality of moving to Arizona has been the lack of daylight
saving time.

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fhood
> and even browned out lawns unaccustomed to so much daylight

...wait, what? What am I missing here?

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Tehnix
Is your question if lawns can brown out from too much daylight? Because they
certainly can, and e.g. in South Korea they were brown most of the summer. (in
reality, it's probably more a mix dry, warmth and light).

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fhood
Sure, but would daylight savings be the cause?

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hawktheslayer
This video is a must-share twice a year, especially for people who have moved
to Arizona to free themselves from the madness.

[https://youtu.be/k4EUTMPuvHo](https://youtu.be/k4EUTMPuvHo)

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joncrane
I remember reading somewhere that the whole switching time by an hour twice a
year thing literally kills people every year.

The premise was that on the days right after the switch to the later sunrise
schedule, sleepy people that were used to driving to work in daylight are now
driving to work at night, and there's a statistically significant increase in
traffic fatalities on those days.

My source has been lost to the sands of time, but it rings true for me.

My goal in life is to perform a us government sponsored cost-benefit analysis
for ending "daylight savings time" and have it come out as an overwhelming
positive.

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CDRdude
>My source has been lost to the sands of time, but it rings true for me.

I think it is mentioned in Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker.

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dennisdamenace
How much expense goes into software which needs to support daylight savings?
How many bugs have occurred because of it?

Personally I deal with this problem a lot. It is a pain and expensive. Of
course this is a problem because the time data my software ingests often
doesn’t include the offset or zone. So I have to work around it. All for
subtracting then add one hour for the year.

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l9k
How many bugs will pop up if we stop having DST?

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mkempe
Why is this marked "[dupe]"? this article is dated March 9 and was not
previously posted.

