I said “waking” daylight; light during the hours that most people are awake. For most people, this is a function of their work hours, which is typically not entirely within their control, so your suggestions aren’t realistic, or at least would involve far greater inconvenience than simply changing the clocks twice a year.
I live in the SE USA, and I have 25 animals in my care. They don’t give a damn about the time changes, probably because I deliberately do not stick to a rigid feeding schedule, and possibly because I don’t give a damn about the time change. Animals (and kids) take their cues from those who care for them.
I dunno, seems the degree to which “a majority do have issues” is not uniformly agreed upon. As to the extent of the majority, the seriousness of the issues and as to how much of an issue worth dealing with it is for each person.
Through my life have resided in US Northeast & South and non-changing locations in the tropics — the latter where there is really no sense to DST since the daylight variation is minimal.
Never found the actual change of official hour to be anything more than a minor passing hassle. More bothered by the overextension of the DST period into seasons where there is figuratively no daylight really worth “saving” so the shock of darkness before quitting time is more sudden.
I can never get over the people who say just wake up an hour earlier and do whatever it is then, or go to work earlier and come home earlier. Does everyone in their world have flexible working hours? Do they never have outside work that can’t be done at 5 am or activities where having three hours of light after work is great but moving one of them to before work is useless ? ( an hour of sunlight before work doesn’t help with my after work softball game)
Well, depends on your definition of “generally”. The latest Gallup poll on the subject has 54% of Americans wanting to get rid of it (but 40% in favor and 6% undecided). So, it’s a majority, but not all that much of one, and then you have the problem – as you note – that those people are going to be arguing which way to change the time. So it looks like whatever you decide on, you’re going to have a majority of unhappy people most likely.
For me, being up here in Chicago, I’m absoutely 100% pro-DST. If we had to choose one time, I think I’d lean towards summer time, but winter mornings would be brutal, and I do suffer from some seasonal affective disorder. I feel a permanent change in either direction is going to be annoying for me for part of the year.
This is the deep underlying point here.
The short days of winter provide an fresh insult to an old injury every year. The DST change very loudly calls attention to that injury. And like banging an existing bruise, or partly scraping off an existing scab, the reminder of the injury can be as bad or worse than the actual injury itself. Despite the reminder not being all that significant in and of itself.
Non-starter. Some of us like snow & hills/mountains much more than hurricanes & flat ground.
Exactly. Here’s a quote from an anti-DST sleep scientist from wguy123’s link a few posts up:
Daylight saving time is contrary to hundreds of thousands of years of human biology, as we evolved to wake with the sun, and go to sleep when it gets dark, Hasler says.
“It makes sense to me just to stick with that, rather than trying to monkey about with it,” he says.
Do these people think we’re hunter/gatherers? On the list of things that would make it difficult for a modern person to adhere to a sun-based sleep schedule, requiring sixteen hours of sleep a night during the winter, the existence of DST is not close to the top.
Exactly. It’s fanatics most of the way down. Or as I usually say it, a pebble of reality in a giant boulder-sized snowball of bullshit.
I will note that if you have the luxury of setting your own hours, it does not really matter what the clock says. Open your shop at 10 o’clock in the morning, or start working online at 2 a.m., whatever.
However, I looked up “office hours” on Wikipedia, and 40 or so hours per week (e.g. “9 to 5”) is still pretty common, despite promises that robots and A.I. would take care of everything.
I love this. It crystallizes some thinking I’ve been struggling with. A combination of a busy, modern life, coupled with no need (or desire) to sleep more than 8-9 hours a night means that no matter what a good chunk of my day in winter will require me to be awake while it’s dark. No amount of dicking with the clock will fix that, so to my mind, we might as well choose a system that puts the light where it’s most usable. From a sample size of me and my friends, that’s after work. We’re not getting together to go hiking, biking, sailing, whatever, before work.
I’m genuinely baffled by the thought that a one hour shift screws up people so badly. I mean, I don’t think any particular individual is lying, but I see supposed sleep experts say obvious bullshit as per above, and I gotta wonder. I’m not young, so I’m not biased by having the sleep flexibility I had when I was 20. I do work with people on the east coast and in the UK. Some days maybe every couple weeks I gotta get up a couple hours early for a meeting. I can’t say I love it but I don’t find it to be any kind of actual challenge. I don’t get the fuss.
An ex-coworker does most of his bicycle riding in the morning – and he is not the only one - he rides with a group (not 100% sure how many miles they ride pretty sure it is > 20 miles) This is before biking to work (which is only 2 miles for him) Early morning there is a lot less traffic. I used to bike to work fairly often (4.6 miles) and I hated around now when it suddenly is dark in the morning (yes I have lights)
For me being 6 hours form UTC just feels right. If we kept one time I would vote standard.
Brian
I don’t buy that the 16 hours of sleep - I won’t say people didn’t sleep 16 hours in the winter, but there’s also a difference between sleeping because you need the sleep and sleeping because there is nothing else to do in the dark. I’m pretty sure people didn’t go to sleep at dark after controlled fire became a thing.
My understanding is that those who study such things think that premodern people dozed on and off throughout the long nights, they didn’t sleep deeply for 16 hours. But people do seem to have pretty universally preferred to have light at night as soon as it was economically feasible to do so.
A couple-three years ago I started a thread on what I thought would be a good compromise between always-DST and always-ST: shift permanently to half-hour between the two. Based on the responses to that thread, this didn’t seem to be a popular idea, although I’m not sure why not.
People were alternating between eating beef and chicken. But some people prefer beef. Others prefer chicken. Still others prefer continuing to alternate.
You were suggesting sticking to fish as a compromise.
I want to emphasize something from the article I quoted above (Here’s the link
again so you don’t have to scroll back): whether you like or loathe DST, it still has deleterious affects on your body, including metabolic disorders like diabetes and digestive and endocrine disorders. It increases the likelihood of heart attacks and stroke. The article I referenced included links to scientific studies. I invite you to read those studies.
Some of the comments here refer to the fact we’re not hunter-gatherers any more. That’s true, of course, but it doesn’t mean we’re immune to the effects of light on circadian rhythms, which is well established. Of course there are variations from individual to individual. It’s not like all hunter-gatherers fell asleep the moment the sun went down. I once read in the WaPo (which I no longer subscribe to, so can’t give a link) that hunter-gatherers stayed awake an hour or two after dark and slept an hour or two after dawn.
Nope. I couldn’t find any studies that suggested a psychosomatic component. And as I said, social jet lag is a well-established phenomenon. It’s not some half-baked theory dreamed up by the woo crowd.
Changing time zones is not the same as resetting clocks within time zones. As Saint Cad said:
Yes, absolutely the clear and obvious deleterious health effects should be weighed against any increase in traffic deaths. Are there more in the evenings in standard time than there are in the mornings during DST? And do you have a cite? I’d be very interested in reading it.
Sorry, but your analogy is extremely poor. Shifting to a half-hour off is an exact compromise. There’s no such thing as an exact compromise between beef and chicken and even if there was a “sort of” compromise, it certainly wouldn’t be fish.
Shifting to a permanent half-hour between gets some of the advantages of each side while doing away with the semi-annual time change. It’s probably the best thing we can do.
Sure, in your opinion. But clearly there was significant disagreement with it from all around.
If a group of people almost all disagree with your personal take, no matter the topic, maybe accept the idea that it is the ‘best’ compromise is more of a heterodox concept than originally conceived and intended.
Pork. The Other White Meat! 
I suspect the split the difference at a half-hour is actually the best compromise. Admittedly, it is probably the one that will engender the most screaming from the greatest number of people when implemented. But also the one that produces the least harm from that day forward. And there won’t be grumbling at all 18 months later. It’ll just be one more aspect of the stable background of our lives.
Which brings up a point about human nature in general. Folks are for more likely to focus on the perceived difficulty of executing the change than on the balance of benefits between before and after. No matter what that change is. Which means a lot of real long term, even perpetual, gains are left on the table because of the deep-seated bias against perceived immediate inconvenience.