I don’t buy that at all. I get up at the same time every day of the year, even if I don’t set my alarm. It is always already light out. And I go to bed way after it gets dark. An hour either way makes no difference whatsoever. Maybe if you work out in a farm that could be applicable.
I’ve seen credible research about upswings in medical issues such as strokes and heart attacks and in car crashes around the switchover. It’s not just a trivial nuisance, it’s an actual health/safety problem.
Granted. So is the mismatch of when the Sun is up versus the silly numbers we like to see on our timepieces when we do collective stuff like go to work and school.
DST is dumb in lots of ways. It’s just the least-dumb solution we’ve found to sticking an unnecessarily rigid society-wide schedule on top of the inevitable natural annual variation in quantity of daylight and the clock time at which it begins.
It’s going to depend to some extent on the sport and the league but when my kids were in sports and even further back when my siblings and I were in sports even as adults, practices would typically be weekdays and games/meets on weekends. Baseball and softball fields don’t typically have lights - when I played in an adult softball league practice started at around 6 pm ( people needed time to get home from work and get to practice ) and in late April, sunset would be around 6:50 pm standard time. And when my kids were young , kids practices also started around 5:30-6:00
Part of the confusion is that the name “Standard Time” is non-indicative now that it is in effect only one-third of the year.
I will confidently predict that those who oppose switching permanently to one system will, in the main, continue to oppose your suggestion, which does have the disadvantage of putting us out of synch with the rest of the world. If your idea had a prayer of persuading enough of them to come over to your (and my, and most sensible people’s) side on this, I’d support you, but I don’t believe they would see it as a fair compromise or a sufficient concession to their position. They will continue to complain it still makes them get up too early, or keeps them driving home in the dark, or is a burden on their children, or messes with their internal clock or the thousand other personal inconveniences that a simpler system of timekeeping subjects them to.
OK, it’s Monday so I’m dense[r than usual]. You’ve seen people do what? Not arguing, just confused!
Great posts throughout by LSL.
I sure haven’t seen anyone point out these horrible repercussions from changing the clocks. Yesterday morning, it took us less than 5 minutes - was done before the coffee was ready. Here I am one day later - and what differences/inconveniences am I supposed to be experiencing? Sure, it was dark when I woke up this morning - but no darker than it is when I wake in December, and it will soon be getting lighter.
I agree with whomever suggested the greatest supporters of DST are likely retailers.
As LSL says, it conveys some benefit, and the burden is minuscule. I don’t see what the problem is.
Not permitted.
Wiki:
(my bold)
So it’s either follow DST, or keep permanent standard time.
You (and probably LSL but I can’t confirm that at the moment) personally don’t experience much of a burden. Others clearly feel differently.
Whether or not the burden is sufficient (by number of people involved or the severity of what they experience) to change the system is a separate debate and one that’s been going on for several decades to no real conclusion, but using your own example to generalize to everybody is a terrible way to go about that debate.
Medical researchers have:
deleted to review links in simulpost
Upon consideration, I do not care to stake out too strong of an opinion on this topic, as I have previously acknowledged that I really don’t care about it.
This is a good point, though of course, the “What about the children?” side is about safety, which for many people, trumps sports. But how realistic are those safety concerns? I don’t have national stats from 1974, but within the first month (so January), eight Florida children were killed when hit by cars in the early morning darkness (as opposed to only two a year earlier), six of those deaths directly attributable to the darkness. That on stat seems to have had an outsized impact on public perception. Was 1973 a year with unusually few such deaths? How many such deaths happened in February, 1973? 
I don’t have any stats on whether school sports teams did better in January to September of 1974. It’d be interesting to see whether DST changed practice schedules/improved performance in those months. In those states that had year-round standard time after WWI and before WWII and/or after War Time ended in 1945, how did that affect practice/performance?
The quote in my earlier post from a neurology in the sleep medicine division at Harvard Medical School:
I guess you’d have to raise that with the sleep experts. I’m guessing there aren’t enough outliers to change the data they used to arrive at their conclusion.
Since I posted, I’ve changed my mind about the probability of us going to perma-DST. I thought since the Senate apparently had enough votes to pass the Sunshine Protection Act (Gotta love that name!), the House eventually would, too. After reading this Business Insider article, I’m not so sure:
In fact, the bill’s passage in the Senate was something of an accident, according to a report from BuzzFeed. Rubio had asked for unanimous consent to pass the bill, a move used to pass non-controversial bills that no one in the Senate opposes. Senators sometimes use the measure performatively, asking for unanimous consent on partisan or otherwise controversial bills or nominations with the expectation that another senator will object, preventing passage.
Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas would’ve done just that, but was not informed of the vote by his staff…
After reading how divided Congress is, I now predict we’ll still be arguing about this in a year’s time.
ETA: @Dinsdale two posts up …
Agreed.
Certainly there are some percentage of all people who are highly adversely affected by time changes. And some larger percentage are somewhat affected. And some larger percentage yet who are negligibly affected.
Each of us would love to be an exemplar and would like for our personal experience to be the commonplace general case. It might be, but not necessarily. Like most matters of individual variation, it’s hard to truly “get” something you have no experience with.
In my life, at 2am I may have just finished a shift an hour ago and now be crawling into a strange bed in a strange city. Or equally at 2am my alarm may have just awakened me from an equally strange bed in a strange city to get cleaned up and start a shift an hour from now. That’s admittedly an extreme case of circadian variability vs. most people’s lives. I don’t thrive when I have to switch back and forth the full extreme within just a few days. But I sure can do it and recover from it in another day or so. Others are not so flexible (or have such a crappy job timewise) as I.
Time for a more radical suggestion I periodically make. The problem is expecting the clocks to synch to daylight in some way for everybody everywhere, so that we all eat lunch around “noon” whether we’re in New York City or Timbuktu.
Instead, do away with time zones all together, everybody just start using UCT, and adjust the hours for activities as convenient for your locality. Here, “business hours” would settle down to something like 1 AM to 9 AM. So what. At least I wouldn’t have to translate time zones when I read that somebody’s phone support hours are 8:00 AM to 6:00 PM EST / GMT / WTF-is-this-T or whatever. They would read 3:00 AM to 1:00 PM or something like this. If businesses or organizations want their hours of operation to line up with sun differently at different times of the year, they can change their hours twice a year, not the clocks. You would still have issues concerning convenient times when dealing with somebody in another part of the world, but you wouldn’t have to translate anything, you would both be using the same scale.
Yeah, AM / PM now no longer have their intended meaning, but that sort of thing is hardly unique. And we could easily remedy that by taking the opportunity to also universally go to 24 hour clock times, WITH a zero hour. Basically, the whole world goes on military zulu time.
This is essentially how it works in some parts of China. The whole country is on a single official time zone (based around Beijing, of course) but local customs can vary because some people find orienting their day around the sun can make more sense, even though hours for government offices and schools and such may be shifted by quite a bit.
The people involved all know this. 18 states have passed bills on the subject, all of which are currently preempted under the Supremacy Clause, or expressly don’t take effect unless and until Congress acts. The federal law doesn’t prevent states from enacting their own laws, it just prevents states from implementing the changes.
Cite? Why do you think the largest group is “negligibly affected”?
Here’s Five Thirty Eight’s article, which has some interesting data, including polling numbers, and a tool that lets you see the effects of the various options nationwide.
Using that tool helped me see why year round Daylight Saving Time is particularly popular.
I’m in favor of year round Standard Time, but my second choice is to just pick one and stick to it.
I used to live in Norway, and winters are just dark. And on midsummer’s night, the sun doesn’t set. No way of setting the clocks is really going to help when you only have a few hours of daylight. Where I live now, not as far north as Norway, it’s still pretty dark in the winter generally, and light in the summer. Going with either choice doesn’t matter that much to me.
ETA: I must have seen the tool somewhere else. If I find it, I’ll link it.
Oh, god, that would be a nightmare here in Indiana - we already have multiple time zones in this state (some counties are Eastern time, some Central). If people could actually vote on it? {{{{shudder}}}}
It would kind of have to, wouldn’t it? Or are you doomed to be chronically “off” because you were born under the sign of DST?
Possibly.
Taken to the extreme, the same thing describes shift work disorder. Some adjust to night shifts better than others, but there’s pretty solid evidence some people never fully adjust. Seasonal affective disorder is somewhat similar in some respects, as well.
How much a 1 hr shift affects people is a different matter, of course, but one of degree rather than of kind.