That’s a change that can, and should, be made independently.
It's economics. People can't work if they have to stay home with their kids.
Right, wrong, or indifferent, that's 99% of the reason for the standard school day/hours. To fix the school problem, we have to fix our out-of-date 8-5 mindset toward work, first.
Timezones are an illusion. All you're actually changing when you change the clocks are people's cultural expectations, namely around when it's appropriate to arrive at work and school. Ergo, we should adopt the standard that has people start work and school later, not even earlier than they already do!
Starting school later sound good if you live a very privileged life, but makes life impossible if you need to leave a 3 to work.
Now, while companies often have absurd requirements of their employees' time, I specifically chose the Wal-Mart example to illustrate a non-absurd requirement: a site needs its store clerks present at opening time to be able to open at opening time.
Surely not every employee has to do school drop-off in the morning though?
They walk there, use a bus, etc.
Why can't we also adjust work hours?
And if we can adjust those as well, why can't we just be on Standard Time?
The problem isn't the clock. It never was the clock.
Highly educated, longest living, least depressed.
And the sun is out at midnight 76 days per year there.
Humans are adaptable. A -permanent- hour change would surely be less harmful than changing said hours twice a year.
But this is false equivalence as it's studying a different thing. Also it is very difficult to compare mental health studies across countries and attribute differences to single causes as there are so many confounding factors. In Norway there is a good standard of living, a social safety net, cheap healthcare and many other factors that are proven to be beneficial to mental health.
Humans are adaptable but sometime I think it's more accurate to say that humans tolerate different environments. We often don't adapt to them, we cope with them.
[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/psychological-medici... [2] https://bmcpsychiatry.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/147...
If you ask actual scientists who research this topic, you get a different answer:
"The authors take the position that, based on comparisons of large populations living in DST or ST or on western versus eastern edges of time zones, the advantages of permanent ST outweigh switching to DST annually or permanently"
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/07487304198541...
So, permanent standard time is better than switching, but switching is better than permanent summer time.
An actual example of this is Spain, which since WWII has been on the central European time zone, even though it is in Western Europe. According to this article, people in Spain should have more health problems and shorter lifespans, because their social clock is so much earlier than their body clocks. However as everyone who has ever been to Spain knows, the social clock in Spain does not have the same relationship to the wall clock as it does in other countries. In fact, relative to say the US, the social clock in Spain seems to be shifted a good two hours, for example with dinner at 9pm or 10pm. That seems like a very late hour for dinner, but relative to the sun that's more like 8pm.
If you already know what outcome you want it's easy to assemble evidence that supports that position, but it's not science, and this article is one of the best examples of that I've ever seen.
The paper is about the best option: "the advantages of permanent ST outweigh switching to DST annually or permanently".
My point was that daylight isn't guaranteed to send a country into disarray as OP seems to imply.
That's just an argument for a good social security system and says nothing about DST
1. Comparing the US (or any other country) to Norway is not valid because there are so many confounding variables. For one, Norway sinks in oil money and uses that money extensively to fund great social welfare programs.
2. What matters is relative within a country, not between country. The US had the choice between two time zones, and that's the question at stake here (not how the US compares to other countries, or how other countries deal with short day light periods).
(I'm a citizen of Norway)
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-norway-swf/norway-says-ma...
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/norway-raises-2022-spen...
You can't tell me that a society that burns, on average, five and a half hours daily on useless, mindless activities like television, sportsball, and social media is going to be even mildly perturbed by this. There's plenty of slack in the average person's schedule to move things around.
Compared to what? Anytime I speak to any Norwegian/Swede, they tell me how depression during winter is so widespread basically everybody suffers in one way or another. People in Norway, Sweden, Finland etc go into household lightning overdrive to help this a bit, but real sun is real sun.
Single most important reason why I never moved there, even above short summer.
Source please?
But Portugal, a sun-rich country which sits East of its timezone, gets the top spot. So, go figure.
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/e...
If this was true, seasonal affective disorder would occur in the summer and not the winter, don't you think?
And our ancient ancestors didn't evolve where it is dark. Nor did we evolve where the length of day changes much at all.
The fact that short days and darkness cause so many people problems in the winter tells me that amount of sunlight really matters to us.
And generally speaking, more is better, to an extent.
For the greatest part of our history we've spent our time outside, not sitting in artificial caves with artificial lights, hiding from the sun. If you want something that tells you why the sun is so important, take this instead.
If that doesn't work for you, remember that having enough exposure to the sun is vital for your body to function properly, both mentally and physically. We'd not be producing "Vitamin D" by being exposed for some time, if the sun wasn't an important factor in our existence.
If what you're saying is true, schools should start at 10a. We need to have those conversations.
I'm on one coast, my coworkers are on another, we gotta figure out how to sync our meetings. Same goes with when the supermarkets are open.
Most of us are not farming anymore. It's just about having a consistent meter stick to which to adjust our standards.
The problem is the "consistent yardstick" actually. People are accustomed to start work at "8am", and react badly to being told to start work at "7am". So we change the clock so that their yardstick "8am" occurs at solar 7am and people get out of work earlier. And people now are like "lets keep summer time" which is the exact equivalent of "lets always go to work at solar 7am".
Retail workers and shift workers of all kinds constitute an existence disproof.
"Next week you start at 5:30am, open at 6, finish at noon -- on Tuesday through Thursday, then you come in for 6pm to midnight on Friday. Welcome to Starbucks."
Source? I have seen dozens of explanations for DST. None of them well supported by evidence.
I mean if you work night-shift, morning shift, evening shift, you already have weird circadian rhythms, and out-of-sync school schedules.
And yet, somehow, they seem to function as humans. So maybe that 1 hour difference for 4 months a year won't actually result in the zombie apocalypse.
People will adapt just fine.
Winter in the northeastern U.S. is damn depressing because the sun sets at basically 3:30-4:30pm. If you sleep in on a weekend, you get max 4-5 hours of sunlight (feels like less because the sun is so low and thus long twilights). Kids coming home from school have zero after school time with sunlight.
I know various people who work in shifts. It's really bad for your rhythm. It takes months before people find a way to deal with the effects. It's worth it due to the additional money they earn, that's it.
But I worked blue collar job the first ten years of working, so 7 to 5, and for a while 5AM to 6PM (six days a week). I don't think many people on this thread understand what it means to wake up between 5:30 and 6:00 AM every day (depending on your commute) to get to work.
They also seem to ignore Arizona. 7.5 million people all happily living their lives without dropping like flies from seasonal-affective disorder.
Oh, and you're coming home for the day at 5 or 6p? Fuck you, here's some darkness. I can't understand how anyone would be against DST.
"Work is defined to start at 8am so lets have everyone call solar 7am '8am' so we can get everyone to go to work an hour earlier."
Now "high noon" will occur at 1pm and the middle of the night will be 1am. In Ohio (or west edge of any time zone) the middle of the day will be 2pm and middle of the night 2am. Sunburn zone in ohio? 12pm-4pm.
I suffered even with switching because no matter what part of the year we were in school was scheduled to wake me up in the dark.
I guess any form of coordination is going to be more convenient for some parties than for others. The question is whether we really need to coordinate our entire days to such an extent. Many companies already practise a "core hours" schedule which allows individuals to be flexible about when they start work. This seems like the right approach.
I'm not looking forward to having to make normie appointments on Summer time during the winter, though. Making my way to the doctors at 5am in winter isn't going to be fun.
Yes, the sun coming up an hour later means less light peeking into the room and more sleep cycle time. Big collective win for night owls.
As it's a struggle already, getting up an hour earlier is going to be harder for them
Times are changing, literally. Nice thing about all this remote work is you can be a night owl on the East Coast while everyone else is a morning lark on the West Coast. For me waking up is never an issue, I just get moving. But the night owl schedule is where everything naturally settles.
In Norway in December people wake up "in the middle of the night" because sunrise is at 10am: Humans can adjust easily to this stuff, it's just that we like to sleep "late" (as defined by the clock)
I argued that commenters who say permanent DST specifically favours night owls are incorrect about who it favours, because they (most of them) haven't considered the effect of the sun on sleep quality and daytime cycles.
My view is that most solar-affected night owls will have slightly worse sleep and daytime energy and metabolism, because clock-time social requirements will not change (that's the point of changing the clocks after all). Sunshine after will work will make people happier after work, which is reflected in economic activity, but I think the insiduous effects on health are being ignored. There is some scientific research to back up this point of view.
There are early risers here who don't like permanent DST saying "we're not all night owls like you", believing the change is designed to favour night owls.
There are night owls here who say permanent DST will be great for them because there will be less sun in the mornings to ruin their sleep. That implies they have a choice about when to wake, or they are thinking of Summer. They are in the minority even for night owls, because the change applies only to Winter, when most people are already forced by social requirements to get up when it's dark. There is no light streaming in that early in Winter. Permanent DST will only mean that it's dark for longer after they get up.
I think this is a very dramatic hypothesis you've presented here. If an individual or family is inconvenienced by this, adapt!
Places that already do not change for DST are doing just fine. e.g. Arizona
I think it's night owls and delayed-cycle teenagers attending school who will suffer most under permanent DST.
In the Winter, permanent DST means everyone has to get up an hour earlier for work or school's clock time, relative to the sun which regulates their body rhythm.
Someone pointed out virtually nobody sets when they wake by the sun. Fair enough. But the sun does affect how well and how long they sleep, how restored they are, how they feel when they wake, and energy and concentration through the rest of the day.
Night people already struggle with getting up early enough for clock-time social expectations. As it's a struggle already, getting up an hour earlier is going to be harder for them. (If the sun makes no difference, why is it already hard?)
Research (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30691158) suggests that overall, health will suffer, sleep will be shorter, and educational attainment in teenage years will reduce. Even brain development may be adversely affected.
But there will be more shopping (economic activity), so that's ok.