As others have said, B. is the answer to question.

But to add to that, the U.S. has 4 timezones[1]: Eastern Time, Central Time, Mountain Time, and Pacific Time. Each zone has a "Standard" time and "Daylight" time - that is, for the winter half of the year, California is in the Pacific Standard Time (PST), whereas in the summer (B., in your question), California is in the Pacific Daylight Time (PDT). It's a very petty pet peeve of mine when people confuse they two - when they say "Let's meet at 3pm, PST" to mean 3pm Pacific Time, but it's in the summer ~ so 3pm PST would really be 2PM PDT. I know, I know, it's petty... and normally I don't say anything and roll with it... but on the inside I weep.

[1] Note: 4 Timezones isn't exactly correct. There is Hawaii and Alaska of course, and the U.S. Island Territories too. And then there's Arizona, which is permanently on Mountain Standard Time (MST), so when the rest of the Mountain Zone jump ahead an hour to be in MDT, Arizona is still MST, which is the same "time" as PDT ~ is that a different timezone? Oh... and only most or Arizona avoids MDT - most (but not all) of the Native American Reservations in Arizona do observe MDT. WHY HAVE WE DONE THIS TO OURSELVES?!? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Thanks. That is helpful.

I am glad they made this change. The sun (or what we have of it) setting at 3pm in Seattle led to a lot of seasonal depression for me.

I never wake up before 7.30am anyway, so the waking up in darkness doesn't affect me.

Happy to help. Also, when I hear people advocate for "always be on Standard time" vs "always be on Daylight Savings time"... well, I don't think it's a simple matter of which is better or preferable per the individual's preference; when we hear these sorts of positions from people, we should also take into account their location within a times zone. The sun rises/sets about an hour earlier on the eastern border of a U.S. Timezone than on the western border. If you're in Seattle, then you and I are in the same Time Zone, but your sun rises about 20 minutes behind mine (and I'm even on the Pacific Coast! Not even inland!). There was an article on here the other day indicating that living on the Western end of a Time Zone is detrimental to one's health. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30690135

Is there a standard abbreviation for "pacific time" that doesn't specify daylight or standard? When I am telling my coworkers when we are meeting, I only want to distinguish between pacific or mountain (our two office locations). I clearly mean to use the current time, based on the date, so I have no need to specify daylight or standard, and don't want to have to think about which one I am in.

I've seen people just say PT before, but i don't know how standard it is. Pretty sure even on broadcast tv stations when they say a program airs at 8pm ET/7pm CT

Agreed. I don't know how "standard" it is, but it seems be common-enough parlance to be widely understood and avoids my pet peeve. :-). I agree, I see 8pm ET/7pm CT on television a lot (even while I'm in the PT!). I also often just spell out "Pacific Time" or "Eastern Time".

You left out a few time zones - there are 9 in the US: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_the_United_States

As others pointed out, some with the actual foresight have been in standard without switching.

No, the sun rises and sets when it rises and sets. All this means is that at noon the clock says 1:00pm. It's still noon.

People are so disconnected from the world that their abstractions of it become more real to them than actual reality. I don't think it is a good thing.

Why not just make daylight savings time go away and do things "an hour earlier"? You'd literally be waking up at the same exact time, just that the clock will say 6 instead of 7 or whatever. Are we really so far gone as a society that we will go to such great lengths to fool our brains? It's madness.

> People are so disconnected from the world that their abstractions of it become more real to them than actual reality. I don't think it is a good thing.

Goodness. The guy is asking a simple question. People shouldn't have to frame up everything from axiomatic principles before asking for some extremely basic information.

Yeah I misunderstood the question as a statement before responding. still, what I said is pertinent to the conversation so I left it as is.

That said, I do think decisions should be made based on axiomatic principles.

before anyone asks me what time is they better check their priors

OTOH, I find informative to know these little things and understand how things work below the surface :)

> People are so disconnected from the world that their abstractions of it become more real to them than actual reality.

Because my job starts at 9 am regardless of the position of the sun.

Changing your working hours means a talk with your boss and maybe HR. If we didn’t have DST maybe it would be a box you check when you get hired.

We spend so much on engineering systems that handle DST changes, there’s an increase in sleep deprived auto accidents, people die from heart attacks… All to avoid individuals asking for different hours at work?

Sorry, “changing” time twice a year is not a reasonable substitute for scheduling work appropriately depending on the season.

I'm betting for certain types of jobs schedules are not flexible, and for other types of jobs it doesn't matter. For my job, I skipped an important meeting this morning because they scheduled it at 8am and I didn't want to get up that early. Not sure anyone cared.

Their schedules are clearly flexible because they’re already changing them twice a year under the current system.

No, they're not. They keep the time the same. If they kept the sunlight percentage the same instead, they'd be doing those meetings at a different time each month, as the sunrise and sunset change throughout the year.

That is not true for wast majority of jobs where boss sets time ... and pretty often have reason for it. And schools won't adjust schedule just for you personally.

Nor clubs nor churches and even friends when they do party they set time.

They already change schedules though, we just launder it through the time “change” despite clear evidence of costs in both productivity and literal human life.

> They already change schedules though

Yes, because the rest of society also changes their schedules, in sync. Most people don't have the ability to unilaterally change when they work irrespective of everyone else. If they did, switching between DST and standard time wouldn't matter either—just tell your boss you'll be coming into work an hour "later" in the summer.

Clubs and churches will be based on when people can most likely make it. I think those things will sort themselves out. They already accomodate for things like weather, light, etc.

So then what's the point of any of this? If you live your life based on what the clock says, why change what the clock says in relation to the position of the sun at all?

The last few weeks before the DST switch in the fall are hell for me every year. The sun doesn't rise in earnest until ~7:30, but my job starts at the same time, so I always wake up groggy and feeling terrible. It usually lasts the whole day.

Now I'm going to have that for three months, while the sun rises even later!

I'm not in favor of switching clocks, but I'd rather switch than have permanent DST. This change caught me out of nowhere and I'm already dreading it, I'm going to be miserable all winter!

Maybe this will finally be the push that gets companies to change their start and end times in winter.

Won't this have all the same problems of the current DST switch? During the week of the schedule change, employees will be less productive and more susceptible to health problems.

The inherent problem is that we're switching the time by a full hour all at once. We could make the change more gradually, perhaps by a few minutes each week—but nobody wants to coordinate that!

If they did it all at once. But it would be totally reasonable for the company to say shift it 15 or 30 minutes a week or make other concessions like having everyone switch on different days based on a shift schedule or whatever.

They could also tie it to a vacation where people tend to shift schedules anyway. Like “new hours after the new year!”

That sounds extremely complicated to me! Now when I'm scheduling meetings, I have to consider a constantly shifting schedule! Are clients/partners/customers/etc also aware of this policy? What time do employees drop their kids off at school?

If we as a society wanted to adopt this solution (which admittedly requires societal agreement—I think you might need that anyway!), I actually think changing clocks would be the only way to make it work. Most clocks these days are or could be computers, so we could make them adjust themselves by 15 minutes every Sunday, and no one would have to think about it.

I think you’re over complicating it. Lots of businesses already change hours throughout the year (and even the week!). Think of a restaurant or museum. Different hours every day. Or places in tourist destinations that have long summer hours and short winter hours.

For most companies it wouldn’t be hard to say “no meetings before 9am from November to March”.

This is a problem we already have in the form of people taking lunch at different times. We can schedule meetings around lunch just fine.

At the companies I've worked at, people "dealt" with this by taking lunch when they didn't have meetings, not the other way around

Your argument is an argument against any time zones at all. It could equally apply to abolishing timezones and switching to UTC time everywhere (or maybe fractional Julian Day/JD numbers).

> People are so disconnected from the world that their abstractions of it become more real to them than actual reality. I don't think it is a good thing.

But then you do the same thing. :D There is never a jump of 1h: the "daylight" time changes gradually, so if you want to move 1h one way in 182 days, you only need to note how today, as you woke up at the same time as yesterday, it's now 7 - 1h/182... And it will be 7-2h/182 the day after, and... That's very confusing.

This is not an argument for DST, but an argument against any "artificial" adjustment (both DST and the one you propose where you wake up at the "same time" but it's suddenly 1h of a difference in wall clock time?).

Basically, it's easy enough for a region to decide on the most suitable timezone (eg. with or without DST of today, or even something entirely different), and keep that on for the entire year. If you end up waking up at night for work and that bothers you, make sure to affect that regional decision when it's being made. If, like me, you care more about having daylight hours after work is done, then vote the other way. Ideally, find work that will have flexible start times (this is generally hardest for institutions dealing with plenty of people like schools and government administration).

You're misunderstanding my argument.

"Noon" is when the sun is midway through its daylight cycle. We call that "12:00(pm)" for the sake of measurement.

Switching to UTC worldwide is just as bad as switching to DST, except at meridian.

Time does not change naturally; noon is noon is noon is noon.

I'm not proposing what you think I'm proposing. I'm saying the only sane solution to this is permanent standard time, which is what I think you want too, and that permanent daylight time is not more sane than switching twice a year.

You are misunderstanding my response too :D

As the other poster replied, time is continuous, and sunrise/noon/sunset changes as you move East or West gradually. There are no 1h jumps like with timezones.

So in any timezone, "noon is noon" holds only for a very limited set of areas exactly at the appropriate meridian. Move 80km/50mi East or West at the latitude of 45 degrees, and you are looking at 1 degree of longitude displacement, or noon being 24h/360 or 4 minutes off.

At the same time, in that same timezone, you'll have areas that have their astronomical noons off by 1h (and even more when timezone is not strictly aligned to the 15 degrees of latitude — in Europe, Western-most parts of Spain are almost 2h away from Eastern-most parts of countries in CET/CEST). But as you cross timezone boundaries, you might go 5km between towns, and have a time difference of 1h even though noon is at pretty much the same time in both towns. Any practical solution is going to be similarly "incorrect" no matter how you construct it.

So in essence, all of this is a convention on what time is most useful for a region: none of it is "sane" or, on the contrary, "insane". It is simply what majority of the people agree to. If you are in a minority that disagrees, yes, tough luck.

Finally, time is there to coordinate events between people. Timezones are there to coordinate our internal biological clocks (and some sunlight dependent activities) to the area we are in. While "continuous" timezones would be most correct, they'd be in conflict with time serving as a coordination tool. And not having any timezones would be in conflict with coordinating our internal biological clocks. Both of these are societal constructs to help with societal behaviour.

So 24 timezones (or 48 with DST on/off) is the middle ground, and while I can appreciate some people will struggle more to acclimatize to one or the other, neither is more correct or more wrong. I personally prefer permanent DST for the same reason others have raised: I like my post-work hours to have some daylight even in the winter, and it seems this is the predominant feeling which is why DST is "winning out".

Basically, all this is to say that you seem to be inventing an argument instead of simply saying "I prefer more daylight in the mornings when adjusted to the wall clock time of the society", which is a fair standpoint to have.

Are you proposing a standard solar time? Which shifts every day? There’s no such thing.

Standard time is just as arbitrary. I’m not a morning person and am much further east than the “center” of my zone, I’d much rather have a brighter/longer afternoon.

I think that's important to state what part of a timezone you currently live in when one states a preference: I am similarly in the very Eastern part of my timezone, and have the same preference.

Perhaps that's most correlated with the choice people might have? Esp since there are studies linked in this discussion that suggest people have better health outcomes (in a few very specific cases, but also winter depression) on the Eastern edges of timezones.

https://observablehq.com/@awoodruff/daylight-saving-time-gri... Nifty tool that takes in your preferences and tells you what will lead to the most optimal days.

There are still demarcations where we arbitrarily decide to switch over an hour. Seasons change, people live at different latitudes. Noon is not always "noon"

Future historians will write tomes about the efforts early man went through of adjusting the time (as if they had the power) twice a year.

Time is an abstract thing we have let rule us. I love the stories of indigenious tribes where they worked on a task until it was completed, not because some arbitrary shadow on a stick. When it was light, you worked. When it's dark, you don't work. Of course, we have electricity now so we've screwed ourselves with an easy time of day schedule.

It's also much easier to coordinate activities with others with clocks, especially if those other people live in other time zones. "Meet me at sunrise" is a wide window.

Except when part of the world undergoes a change in the clocks weeks before other parts of the world does, so now the world has to deal with the same change twice. So this makes it 4 times a year the world has to deal with the confusion, not just twice. Hell, I'm only familiar with US/UK, so maybe it's even more???

You might enjoy https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/11/03/the-witching-hour/

Wow, a website that gives HN a run for its money on "how small can we make a font?" type of styling. Although your linked site actually has style. <ducks>

Edit: otherwise, yes, this is kind of the style I was thinking. However, I was hoping less of a "religious" difference and more of an enlightened "idiots did that?" kind of thing.

> People are so disconnected from the world that their abstractions of it become more real to them than actual reality.

My friend, this is how all of human language works.

"Ceci n'est pas une pipe."

You know what they mean…

forgive my meme like reaction but,

Bruh....

B. We just entered DST, moving our clocks forward, so we get more daylight at the end of the day.

DST is "summer time", so the sun rises later but sets later too.

Before permanent DST, on 31 December in San Francisco, sunlight ran from 07:24-17:00

With permanent DST, it will instead be 08:24-18:00

B (relative to standard time)