While insufficient sleep might cause physical discomfort and contribute to long-term health problems, if their job weren't highly physically or mentally demanding, I suspect that most people could get through the day with negligible detriment to their short-term economic output after having a cup of coffee.

As a side note, the study also says that short afternoon naps increased productivity.

Anyway, I get by through a combination of sneaking naps, trying not to sabotage myself by eating/living poorly, and catching up when I can.

I suspect the people in this study do the same. They probably doze when on public transportation, or trying to get the kids to sleep, you'll lay down with them and sleep a little. These stolen moments add up. Also, learning to recognize the signs of mental fatigue - if you can't get rest, then, you have to slow down and double check everything, not get irritable, and defer major decisions.

I can write new applications (atrociously) on basically no sleep, so I'm pretty skeptical "sit at this desk and enter these things" swings one way or the other (or even has much of an ability to quality check - at least the compiler will yell at me when I'm egregiously wrong).

I'd be far more interested if these people could be trusted to run heavy machinery on that schedule, or engage in a creative or hands on task like carpentry or welding. I suspect the results would be quite different.

Same here. While writing the GP comment, I considered using that exact example as something that I wouldn't expect to be heavily impacted by moderate sleep deprivation.

The nights there are extremely warm too. I wonder if that's a factor in ensuring that 5.5 hours of sleep is no worse than 8?

Do they, though?

You shouldn't, and a great many in the US don't.

Personally I hated it at the time, because getting up early is not my thing, but now I appreciate the time I got to talk with my parents on my way to school thanks to that schedule arrangement.

Also to offset this early getting up, we jus went to bed earlier, like at 9pm or 10pm max, so not sure it really made a difference on anything.

> The combination of changing sleep patterns in adolescence and early school start times leaves secondary school classrooms filled with sleep-deprived students. Evidence is growing that having adolescents start school later in the morning improves grades and emotional well-being, and even reduces car accidents. Opponents cite costly adjustments to bussing schedules and decreased time after school for jobs, sports, or other activities as reasons to retain the status quo. While changing school start times is not a costless policy, it is one of the easiest to implement and least expensive ways of improving academic achievement

https://wol.iza.org/uploads/articles/181/pdfs/educational-ef....

Of course, most kids lived on farms, some even had chores before going to school, and early to bed, early to rise was normal.

We had a few antenna TV stations, no cable, VCRs weren't around for the average family, and of course no Internet.

We also didn't have city street lights / ambient light, street noise, the sound of neighbours.

People have gotten up early to do farm work for aeons, and go to sleep early too. In fact, to be more precise, staying up past 8 or 9pm is an urban / modern aberration.

Point is, staying up late is the problem. Nothing more.

Now of course, society has changed, so maybe change is needed. However, there is also a lot of counter literature on even TV as a sleep depriver. And now we have phone in bed, with a glowing screen, keeping a mind active.

My point? OK, change the time. However, will kids just stay up even later?

Or, as they do now, will they think "I should go to sleep now, or I will be tired tomorrow, but just one more text..."?

Stealing hours later is a lot easier, because any amount of sleep will still break up the day compared to none.

The other reason of course is that the real trick is just staying up longer then your parents: that's the only truly unsupervised freedom you have as a kid.

Eating too much, borrowing more money than you should, eating junk food, staying up too late, being addicted to your phone, texting whilst driving, perhaps these are all the same problem?

And like any animal, we need to be trained to control ourselves, when young, for our own good?

I mean with most clocks also being internet connected computers it wouldnt be too hard to make a system where you measure time in hours after average sunrise in a tike zone.

That is where I live right now it's sunrise +3.

I'll reschedule the daily 'standup' to SR+3.5, the banks open at SR+3 and close at SR+11.

One major consequence I can see is that now we have north south timezones on top of east west.

This would break in the extreme north or south where there are days without a sunrise.

At no point did I cite biology. Instead, I validated that different wake-up times have existed in the past, and in fact still do.

When does the garbage man, the builder, the mechanic get up? The blue collar man? It isn't 8am, that's for sure. People I know in these professions of start work at 7am. Or earlier. I see them get to sleep by 9pm.

Get to sleep sooner, discipline yourself, as with anything else, it's just that easy.

Or that hard?

In France kindergarten and primary school starts at 8:30 and ends at 16:30. Mid and high school at 8 or 9, never earlier.

This is very early for children and teens, really not physiological.

My high school started at 08:10 (I think) and elementary school at 08:15 and those were the earliest starters in the neighbourhood. University luckily started around 9.

In terms of salary a school teacher would make less or the same as McDonalds worker.

For example, McDonalds Ukraine pays an entry level worker -14 000 UAH ($500) monthly for 40 hours per week. School teacher makes minimum 5000 UAH ($180), +bonus(10-60%). Teacher who was awarded a "highest category" certification (that would be a very experienced one) and who will get all the possible bonuses and raises will make around 14 000 UAH, roughly.

Workers, cleaning personnel would make in the same ballpark 9000 - 14000 UAH ($300-500) at least in Kyiv. Selling phones in the store, work at supermarket also has a similar remuneration.

Average doctor salary (not nurse) is 9000 UAH, at least officially.

The reason is - most those highly skilled and highly educated workers that I've mentioned are paid by the government which does not have funds and desire honestly to treat these people well. They are remnants of decaying public infrastructure - Ukraine has de jure free universal health care and a very big amount of government-funded seats at state universities. Still it is better to work at school than at the factory probably.

You just have a stereotype of how certain things work, everything is not like US/Western Europe structurally. Higher education is not a ticket to a better life everywhere.

How's the new president doing? At first it seemed like a joke, but the little concrete things i've read about him post-election seemed OK.

New president I think is a bit better than the previous three but the whole situation kind of shows two things: 1) There is not much you can do in the country where oligarchs control everything. 2) There is still not much ideas for the future except some sort of a neoliberal 'reaganomics', further privatization and generally disengagement of the state from any meaningful public good iniatives.

1. They are different chemicals.

2. They are administered by different means (inhalation is vastly more impactful than swallowing a tablet).

3. The doses for pharmaceuticals are much lower.

By repeating this argument you create prejudice against those of us who live with ADHD and rely on medication to function normally.

That's rich. Here's a prominent psychiatrist's view (who btw, supports and does prescribe amphetamine adhd medication):

"There's a lot of confusion around the difference between amphetamine and methamphetamine. On the one hand you have anti-psychiatry activists who will say that using Adderall for ADHD is exactly like giving kids crystal meth; on the other you'll have people who say that obviously normal amphetamine is okay, but meth-amphetamine is a demonic substance that will hijack your brain and destroy your life. The truth is more complicated.

Methamphetamine crosses the blood-brain barrier more effectively than unsubstituted amphetamine, but I'm not sure how much that matters since people take different doses of both, and a high dose of unsubstituted will end up with more reaching the brain than a low dose of meth. It seems to inhibit the dopamine transporter more effectively, which might matter, but I'm not enough of a pharmacologist to know how much. Meth takes effect more quickly, which seems to increase addictiveness in a sort of behaviorist sense where the sooner a stimulus gets reinforced, the more rewarding it will feel.

I think there's been a little bit more research since then, but the general takeaway - that the science doesn't support the vast gulf between these two drugs in the popular imagination - still seems true."[0]

[0]https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/know-your-amphetamines

Note that you are also creating prejudice against an already marginalized group of people, a subset of whom may have undiagnosed ADHD.

I wonder how much research was done at the time and has been done in retrospect.