If people like Daylight Savings Time better than not, the real solution should just be to change normal work hours from "9 to 5" to "8 to 4". But that would be difficult to pull off as a culture without guidance, and the idea makes way too much sense for Congress to pull off. So we'll muddle along. At least we have the technology now that work schedules are likely going to be more flexible in the future, instead of less flexible.

If you ask me, though, we should just declare Daylight Savings permanent, then add another layer on top of it every year, until the entire country is using GMT. :)

If everyone has to shift their schedules earlier you might as well just change the time, that way you save people from having to scrape off and repaint their store hours on their glass front doors.

Anyone who wants an informed opinion about DST should read David Prerau's book "sieze the daylight" / "saving the daylight" (its US and UK publishers gave it different titles).

http://www.seizethedaylight.com/ http://www.savingthedaylight.com/

I think most people on hacker news would agree DST is insanity.

People who live close to the equator or in the middle of time zones tend not to see much point in DST. The day length doesn't vary much at the equator, and if you are in the middle of a time zone then the offset doesn't vary too much.

If you are closer to a pole or at the edge of a time zone, the offset is not ideal around the solstices. So, DST is welcome for many.

I've heard the arguments from people close to the equator that the curtains will fade and the men will get their morning erections while they are on the bus, etc. Of course it is different there in the sub-tropics.

If you accept that time should not be completely local (i.e. the local church tower clock is set to noon, as it used to be) and not completely global (i.e. we all run on UTC and Tuesday begins at 00:00:01 which happens to be late afternoon in location X) and so that we arbitrarily assign time zones according to the rotation of our planet, surely we can also adjust the time zones depending on the path of our planet around the sun.

Well, if it works for the locals, that is. Insanity seems like a strong word.

> If you are closer to a pole or at the edge of a time zone, the offset is not ideal around the solstices. So, DST is welcome for many.

I'm not quite sure what your argument is.

I can tell you that here, above 60˚, it's light enough the entire summer anyway (as in, it's only dark for about 2 hours a day), and in the winter the added light is too early in the morning but it gets darker earlier in the afternoon. Today, for example, the sun was up at 7:52 and down at 16:14 (4:14pm).

I suspect it's most useful for people around 35-45˚.

I also live above 60˚ north - today I had 2 minutes less daylight than you :(

I think some of the negativity towards DST here is due to failure to consider the local needs of other people. I guess that's my argument. The day is important, and you know the importance of things more when they are gone.

If your noon is true noon, then shifting the clock forwards will balance the daylight hours towards the afternoon and away from the morning.

If your noon is badly skewed from a wide timezone, then you'll get the problems you describe (too much light in the morning). Your problem is longitudinal, not latitudinal.

If you scroll down to the "Politics" section, DST was implemented as a way to save coal during WWII.

Don't underestimate the impact of how a single hour of time can impact the brain. Two timezone differences to the human body can be huge.

Also, sleeping in on Sundays doesn't help. By definition if you don't use the new time to control when you wake up on Sunday morning then your sleep schedule will not be adapted to the new schedule at all. All that will be different is you will have a stronger incentive to go to bed an hour earlier due to the time on the clock, though your body will still be set to fall asleep and wake up an hour later.

The crux of my conversation with him is that it matters where you are just as much when you are. The fact that America is two weeks off from the rest of the world caused no end of annoyances these past two weeks. It also ended up with lots of debates about how "wall clock time" has little do with the actual time especially when talking about past or future.

(Think 4pm in London 5 moths from now, what time will that be in NY? What about Brazil? Is that the same time of the day if it's 6 months from now?)

Too many internal systems have an incomplete vision of what time means to them and it rarely holds up. I could go on, but I leave it with this. If you can help it, store points in time in a unix timestamp (or at least UTC) and avoid having to write scheduling software.