med.stanford.edu

Study suggests most Americans would be healthier without daylight saving time

andsoitis · 80 points · 95 comments · 4 小时前
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reedf11 小时前

It's pretty astounding to me the number of pro-DST advocates in this forum. If you had hundreds of daily jobs on your platform and you happen to have some regular requirement to change them in unison, if a junior engineer said "let's just change the system clock to adjust for when we want the jobs to run", you would say no, because while it might be easy compared to changing the config for each of the jobs, the risk of ongoing errors, side effects, introduction of jobs that need to fixed in absolute time that you have to make the inverse change... It's a system nightmare.

apexalpha25 分钟前

I live in the Netherlands. In the summer the suns up at 5 am. But at 5am I am asleep. I could get up earlier but that's pointless since school and work doesn't start until 8.30. So in stead of having an hour of sunlight before school and work we all change our clocks to have an hour of extra sunlight in the evening in stead, which fits our cultural preference for social activities. We could also, as you say, change every single sign, post and display of opening hours for every school, business and organisation at the same time to achieve the same effect. But in the real world changing the clock is simpler.

f33d51731 小时前

It's a fairly trivial change. We already have timezones, which exist to deal with the fact that the sun comes up at different times in different parts of the world. We already have to design everything around the assumption that timezones can change, since people sometimes move to different parts of the world. All we do is cause, for an entire timezone, that it becomes a different timezone at one point in the year, and switches back later. This ensures that the sun continues to come up at a consistent time. The main issue it causes is to make the lives of programmers slightly more difficult, which I am sure they can cope with...

fmajid48 分钟前

Thee golfing industry is one of the big proponents of keeping DST and lovbbies hard for it.

artisinal1 小时前

That is why you run your jobs on GMT/UTC and not display time.

reedf11 小时前

I guess that is what I'm trying to show in the above example. You could technically shift your UTC jobs by running your own NTP server and desyncing it from UTC by the offset you want. It would work, but it would be nightmare fuel. And possibly this is an even better example of what DST is doing.

kuboble34 分钟前

Well, it's not that obvious. Some jobs should run every day at 8 am (e.g. torn on the temporary speed limit on front of the school), vs tasks that should actually run every 24h (e.g. feed the bacteria in exact time intervals)

edoceo1 小时前

The jobs need to run at midnight, local time. Which shifts from UTC. How to handle?

defrost58 分钟前

Why does it need to run at that time? * If it's being run to scrap data from a source that's available at some time, adjust the job if the source changes its time. * If it's being run "when its dark and no one is around" then it'll run at some part of the dark bit regardless of DST changes.

Retric56 分钟前

Sometimes you minimize downtime by running something while some other system you don’t control is down.

ssl-31 小时前

Use UTC, and stop faffing about with changing localtime twice every year so the offset is a constant?

anal_reactor49 分钟前

Imagine having a solution that already works with changing system clock but then some very big very important very senior very developer shows up and launches a multi-year project to redesign this, potentially opening pandora box of endless bugs. PhD in Job Security, typical shit I see in corporate.

reedf143 分钟前

To be clear if I showed up to a company running their own company NTP server that they desync twice a year to make timings work - I would absolutely try to migrate them away from that. Now if they are doing that there is probably bigger fish to fry... but it would be on the list.

tristanj2 小时前

Do the anti-DST people understand what they're advocating for? Have a look at the sunset/sunrise graph for northern parts of the US https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/seattle In Seattle, without DST, sunrise happens at 4:11am. Because of DST, it's pushed back an hour later to a more reasonable 5:11am. I am not awake at 4am, I have no use for sunlight at 4am, and I don't want the sun appearing that early. That hour of early sunlight is wasted for me. Plus with DST, the sun sets an hour later, at 9:11pm, a time I am actually awake, and I can actually go outside and use the extra sun. And, with permanent DST (which is what many people are advocating for), then in winter sunrise is at 9am in Seattle, which is far too late. I do not want to drive to work in the dark, before sunrise. So I want standard time in winter, pushing sunrise an hour earlier to a more reasonable 8am. In both situations (summer and winter), modifying the time via DST benefits me and gives me better use of sunlight.

AngryData1 小时前

Why should the clock be set to those arbitrary points? If you want sun in the morning, wake up later, it you want sun in the evening, wake up earlier. If your issue is when work is scheduled, well businesses set their own hours, not the government.

seanmcdirmid1 小时前

Then we should have timezones based not just on longitude, but also latitude. So northerly locales can get some sleep in the spring/summer/fall. > If your issue is when work is scheduled, well businesses set their own hours, not the government. Ah, someone who doesn't have kids in school/camp/some random activity yet. We know how this goes in China (one time zone, no daylight savings time). Coming home from the bar in Beijing with the sun showing up at 4 AM was quaint back then, but I'm definitely glad we have DST in the states.

captainmuon1 小时前

Beijing is a bad example, because all of China actually has Beijing time. It gets confusing in Xinjang, which is 2 hours in the "wrong" timezone. But that doesn't mean that people start work at 8:00 in complete darkness, they just start at 10:00 wall time. I think the talk of daylight savings time is a distraction, in the end it is arbitrary what the clock says. As a society we need to negotiate when (in celestial time) we want to do certain activities. For example, there are a lot of studies that school starts to early (relative to sunrise and the average bed time of teenagers). But the school starting time has to be decided politically. And reduced working hours or later start times have to be negotiated by trade unions, politics etc.. That's a lot more messy than just shifting wall time.

seanmcdirmid1 小时前

Urumuqi actually delays store openings/closings (department stores open at 11AM, for example), so it isn't that bad. Beijing time in Beijing should be accurate, but without DST, the sun rises way too early in the morning. But even then the schedules are still fixed, just the Chinese enjoy their night life, so the sun setting at 6-7PM in the summer isn't really a big deal. Our school schedules are set by weird rules involving when school bus capacity is available. But in general, 9AM is about when school starts (for my son's K-8, its 8AM here for K-5s), or summer camp session starts, or whatever. My schedule is so influenced by my kid these days, it happens to correspond to rush hour, which sucks, because everyone else's schedules are intertwined (so traffic). I WFH and can definitely set my own work hours. Which is why its 12:30 AM and I still haven't gone to bed yet.

ssl-31 小时前

How many school kids are coming back from the bars at 4 AM in Beijing?

seanmcdirmid56 分钟前

That was before I had kids, my point is that I’m familiar with life without DST even at a lower latitude can get weird.

user439281 小时前

Working hours will not change. I will fight tooth and nail against attempts to take one hour of daylight from me in the evenings for half of the year.

reedf11 小时前

"Working hours will not change". Except they have in most countries where they have got rid of DST...

socalgal21 小时前

They have? Which countries are those?

artisinal1 小时前

> businesses set their own hours, not the government In plenty of countries the government decides the opening hours of shops, restaurants and sometimes even offices. Labour laws and nighttime pay are coupled to the hours on the clock. Hours you can make noise is decided by government. Germany has the mid-day resting hour (Mittagsruhe).

jonplackett1 小时前

Businesses don’t care how much sun you get

AngryData1 小时前

The government doesn't set the opening hours of businesses though either.

okanat1 小时前

They do with DST.

ekidd1 小时前

Yeah, as someone who lives in Vermont, you could talk me into permanent DST. That would move the winter sunset from, say, 4:21pm to 5:21pm, which would mean I'd get enough twilight for a short walk after work. And Maine is even further east and north in the same time zone, so they have an even earlier sunset. On the other hand, Vermont's standard time sunrise around 7:20 is reasonable enough. Parts of Vermont have traditionally coped with this by having an 8-4 workday instead of 9-5. But the reality is that Vermont gets only about an hour of daylight outside working hours, depending on local customs. People have extremely strong preferences about how that hour gets split up.

jsdalton51 分钟前

Permanent DST is just a synonym for "let's all agree to wake up an hour earlier." The same change could be affected by e.g. schools and businesses agreeing to open at 8am instead of 9am. (Of course that would be wildly unpopular so permanent DST is just way to trick people into swallowing the pill.) But would behavior change in the long run? Countries like Spain where solar noon differs wildly from clock noon just end up aligning their rituals accordingly (e.g. eating dinner at 9pm).

snowe20102 小时前

Yeah, it’s insane. Along with that, any permanent gains in the morning will be lost as soon as it becomes normal. Businesses will just open that much earlier. And this study assumed bedtimes of 10pm, which is not the average anywhere on the planet from what I remember the last time I looked into this. The average is like past midnight.

wpm1 小时前

More tyranny inflicted upon the rest of us by morning people

reedf11 小时前

Hol up, don't fix time, there's a few guys in Seattle without curtains. Sorry everyone.

tchalla1 小时前

You can have your own household clock.

kortilla2 小时前

This just seems like a backwards justification. There is nothing wrong with a 9am sunrise or a 4:11am sunrise. People in Anchorage deal with both just fine. > I am not awake at 4am, I have no use for sunlight at 4am Most people aren’t awake at 5am either. Your use for the sun when there is an excess of it that goes well past your bedtime if you get up at 5am is irrelevant.

tristanj2 小时前

My work starts at 9am, therefore I wake up around 7am. My work start time does not adjust based on the seasons. Any sun before 7am is wasted for me. Under DST, at summer solstice, the sun rises around 5am, giving me 2 hours of wasted sunlight. Without DST, at summer solstice, the sun rises around 4am, giving me 3 hours of wasted sunlight. I enjoy having additional hours of sunlight when I am awake, so for me I actually prefer having DST vs without it. Similarly, in the wintertime, under permanent DST, sunrise is around 9am, and I don't want to drive to work in the dark.

zokier1 小时前

You can still wake up earlier and enjoy your sunrise even if your working hours are fixed.

hnfong1 小时前

I still don't understand why you don't just wake up earlier. It's not like without DST you have to work so late that you don't have enough hours for sleep, right?

toxik1 小时前

I can see the DST argument for people where the shift kinda sorta works out, but many places (like Anchorage!) it's completely unnecessary. I live in Sweden and it's just the twice annually "ah shit the clock moved overnight."

suddenlybananas2 小时前

4am sunrise seems ludicrously early to me, but then again, even a 5am sunrise is awfully early.

reedf11 小时前

Ever lived at high latitude? It's normal.

zokier1 小时前

You realize that you can change your own sleep patterns seasonally if you want to? Heck, you could do that even gradually instead of those abrupt 1 hour changes. That is your choice, we don't need to fiddle with clocks for the whole society for that.

sharts1 小时前

Every few years these studies are published. Nothing changes. Unfortunately policy isn’t dictated by science, facts, or optimal outcomes for all.

YossarianFrPrez1 小时前

Between this and the "Sunset time and the economic effects of social jetlag: evidence from US time zone borders" paper [0], it seems like the issue is the size of the discontinuous jump in time, not necessarily that we change the clocks. So why not "smear" the DST<=> ST transitions by having four half hour transitions, once each quarter? [0]https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31030116/

JoshTriplett1 小时前

> So why not "smear" the DST<=> ST transitions by having four half hour transitions, once each quarter? Very easy answer: Because it's already painful twice a year, and that would be making it even worse. That answer is similar to the one for questions like "why do we have wide time zones that are somewhat inaccurate, rather than setting every clock based on the exact position of that clock?".

nerdsniper1 小时前

I’d be okay with every day having a different # of seconds. That way we slowly adjust with no discontinuity, but the nominal start time of school/work stays the same. While this feels would be a disaster for other reasons like: “How many seconds are in an hour?” -> “Depends, no one knows.” … that’s already the case with our existing leap seconds.

zokier1 小时前

> that’s already the case with our existing leap seconds. Which we are also in the process of getting rid of.

ben_w1 小时前

News to me, but apparently so: https://www.bipm.org/en/-/resolution-cgpm-27-4 (This sounds like kicking the can down the road to me; making the maximum discrepancy a minute could take 50-100 years and then you need a leap-minute or equivalent).

raz32dust1 小时前

If you present this as the alternative, I think there's a chance people might actually just get rid of it :)

ssl-31 小时前

I like where this is heading. To that end, I'd like to propose 12 transitions. These should happen on the 16th day of every month, at precisely 05:14:33. Let's take our seasonality more seriously.

kubb2 小时前

This isn’t going to get fixed in my lifetime, and that’s sad. Countries have lost the ability to act.

JauntyHatAngle2 小时前

Plenty of countries have moved away from DST. Over half who previously used it IIRC.

lnsru2 小时前

Please name some of these countries. Europe is stuck with this nonsense and there is no hope in sight despite yearly polls showing majority people being against it.

rrr_oh_man1 小时前

> Please name some of these countries According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time_by_countr... since 2000: Paraguay 2024 Iran 2022 Jordan 2022 Syria 2022 Fiji 2021 Samoa 2021 Brazil 2019 Morocco 2018 Western Sahara 2018 Namibia 2017 Tonga 2017 Mongolia 2016 Turkey 2016 Azerbaijan 2015 Uruguay 2015 Russia 2014 Libya 2013 Armenia 2011 Belarus 2010 Falklands 2010 Argentina 2009 Bangladesh 2009 Mauritius 2009 Pakistan 2009 Tunisia 2008 Iraq 2007 Guatemala 2006 Honduras 2006 Nicaragua 2006 Sri Lanka 2006 Georgia 2005 Kyrgyzstan 2005 Kazakhstan 2004

worthless-trash2 小时前

Queensland Australia, a single state moved away from it. It is glorious.

tristanj1 小时前

https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/australia/brisbane Queensland Australia is relatively close to the equator, and the length of day does not change dramatically between summer and winter. DST is intended for places at higher latitudes.

kuboble2 小时前

I really wonder about the methodology. The article didn't mention it. Did they get several cities to participate?

userbinator2 小时前

It was tried 52 years ago, and no one actually liked it, so we went back to DST again: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanent_time_observation_in_... Possibly another example of the old Chesterton's Fence.

tumult2 小时前

No, that’s describing permanent DST, which was tried and failed, not lack of DST. Most people in the world live without DST and it’s fine. (The article also mentions this.)

tristanj1 小时前

The majority of the planet do not live at higher latitudes, where implementing adjusted summer/winter hours actually makes sense.

reedf11 小时前

Except it's not like Chesterton's fence, it was created at the edge of living memory for known reasons. If anything it's an example of the opposite effect, something like Chesterton's field, do we really need to build a wall here, it's been a field for a damn long time...

keiferski2 小时前

Of all the things that cause obesity and sleep loss, is an hour change twice a year really a major issue?

pimlottc2 小时前

I don’t know, maybe someone should do a study on it.

scns37 分钟前

There are measurably more heart attacks and traffic accidents after the switch.

keiferski32 分钟前

Which switch? 1918?

MisterBastahrd2 小时前

It's an extra hour of potential outdoors activity before nightfall. Yes.

keiferski1 小时前

Do you think the average person is already spending the maximum amount of time outdoors to begin with?

kortilla2 小时前

“This stupid thing we do that is worse for society than the perceived upsides is only twice a year. Why not keep doing it anyway?”

tanin44 分钟前

With DST, there are actually 2 new concepts: ambiguous time (if the clock rolls back) and invalid time (if the clock jumps forward). Java and Ruby work differently. Java would simply round the invalid time to the closest valid time IIRC. Ruby would accurately raise the InvalidTime exception. Same behaviors for an ambiguous time. Chile is actually the country that will cause tricky issue in a system because they adjust DST at midnight... so there is one day a year where its midnight is considered invalid time. If we are building a system that depends on a day's boundary, then we will encounter this nightmarish issue where one of the days must start at 1am instead of midnight. I really hope DST is going away soon.

_ZeD_2 小时前

And the rest of the world people? would it be healthier? the doubt is striking me

plugger1 小时前

I live in Western Australia. for 3 years we trialed DST from 2006 to 2009. It was a nightmare personally, I was a sysadmin at the time and enterprise management tools were expensive and crap so we had to roll out DST file changes across our fleet manually. And because the change to allow DST for our region was a rushed job we then had to roll back after the 3 year unsuccessful trial. Honestly, it was super stressful at the time. And DST that doesn't exist doesn't bother you in the slightest. Every day ends and flows into the next like the last. But the stress of a clock change twice a year doesn't have to happen, it's a choice.

ssl-31 小时前

The US extended DST by 4 weeks in 2007. We managed that well-enough. We can manage a similarly-sweeping change again. (Sorry about your nightmare. It was easy on the systems I took care of at that time.)

plugger56 分钟前

Obviously I would have forgotten most of this given the change was 20 years ago but IIRC DST config on Solaris at the time was statically coded. You could modify the timezone config as a hacky fix on Solaris 8 but the permanent fix involved recompiling zic.

mikestorrent2 小时前

Are you Yanks seriously not going to get this sorted out before winter? BC has moved - can at least the rest of Cascadia get their asses in gear? Come on, California, I do not want to be dealing with a north-south time zone difference with my coworkers

ssl-32 小时前

Yes, we won't. It turns out that we're way too terrible at being rational way too much of the time. For DST in particular: Even discussions where the participants manage to form something resembling a quorum to stop changing the clocks twice every year somehow manage to unilaterally get sucked into a seemingly-inescapable quagmire of differing opinions, wherein: The decision of whether to use standard time and stick with it or to stick with DST instead becomes an intractable impasse. Accordingly, nothing ever gets done. I have every expectation that I will be dead and buried before this issue is resolved.

evilfred2 小时前

I think US states aren't allowed to switch unless the feds decide to allow it

mixologic1 小时前

US States aren't allowed to have permanent DST, but they can have permanent standard time.

kortilla2 小时前

Arizona doesn’t have it

nerdsniper1 小时前

We don’t really get much of anything sorted these days.

frollogaston2 小时前

Then get BC to change it back

wpm1 小时前

Tough shit. I live on the eastern edge of Central Time, I don't want to be dealing with 3PM sunsets in December.

anal_reactor1 小时前

My controversial idea: midnight should be where current 4AM is because 04:00 is the lowest point of human circadian rhythm. Currently we have nonsense like "1AM is technically a part of the next day but for all practical purposes it's still the previous day". Also, 24h clock should be the standard so that we can avoid discussions "is 12AM noon or midnight".

sixothree2 小时前

I really don't want the sunrise time to be 5:00 in the morning and still not have any daylight to do errands after work. I don't care what the reasons are, but if seasons change the sunset time, what's so wrong with changing it a bit more?

andrepd2 小时前

> the researchers estimate that permanent standard time would result in some 300,000 fewer people having suffered from a stroke and result in 2.6 million fewer people having obesity That 2.6 million people are obese because of a 1h shorter change night in one Sunday a year is an extraordinary claim. I would love to understand how they got to this result.

b1122 小时前

"Study by people who hate daylight savings time and have great bias against it, suggests that..."

kgwxd2 小时前

Assuming they don't get hit by a car walking to school.