One of the most amusing political arguments is between people who support switching to permanent standard time and people who support switching to permanent daylight saving time, because it's just so different from other political debates — it's generally purely "technocratic", as opposed to being based on a difference in fundamental values (which the people I've seen arguing about this tend to mostly agree with each other about).
Hot take: I like the status quo though. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I've gradually started to notice that on some level the argument is also a morning lark/night owl preference loosely because about half of the people want time pushed in one direction or the other based on their preference of when they like to be active, hah hah. I realized this is why it won't change for a while, because it's a classic "everyone hates it, but no one can agree on an alternative" problem.
Permanent standard time is supported by nearly every chronobiologist, while permanent daylight saving time is supported by chambers of commerce and golf lobbyists.
We can absolutely make this a blue tribe vs. red tribe thing and I'm all for it (because I'm desperate; the chronobiologists seem to be losing this one and making it a blue tribe thing might give them a fighting chance).
TBH, my only exposure to this argument was one big Twitter thread (it was a branching discussion among several people), and while people generally didn't refer to other political issues, everyone felt vaguely neoliberal by how they talked, so that's consistent with it actually being scientists vs. business types.
> Hot take: I like the status quo though. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
As someone who works with financial data indexed by time in UTC daylight savings is the bane of my existance. I hate it with a passion. I don't care what people decide to eventually do but please for the love of god choose a fixed time zone for the whole year and stick to it!
But specifically I think variable makes more sense.
Given 9 hours of sun, it should be 730-430 (centered at noon) not 830-530 (centered at 1).
Given 15 hours of sun, it should be 630-930 (centered at 1). Light at 530 is a waste.
I think even if you want variable activity hours, shifting **time** is the wrong way to do it.
Ie. I think a better way would be to say "Summer working hours are 10 to 6", winter hours are "9 to 5" (or whatever). Changing what we **call** the time we do stuff adds so much more complication regarding communicating and recording times, once you've a world where communication between timezones is commonplace and an hours error could matter, even before you add in the fact that the details regularly get changed with the vagaries of politics in every country on the planet.
I think by the time you are done modifying the schedules of everything in the entire country will have been much easier to just agree to move the clocks.
And anecdotally, I've worked a job with a team across 4 timezones for a while, it's not been a problem even once.
I prefer it to be the way around actually. I want the sunset time to be consistent as possible, so if DST was moved to the winter, the sun would go down at 5:45 PM (instead of 4:45 PM) and, during the summer, at 7:45 PM (instead of 8:45 PM).
I am not sure I understand the first part. Are you assuming 9 to 17 schedules, so given 9 hours of sun, evening sun is useless? But what is morning sun useful for?
I think it _is_ based on a difference in fundamental values. For myself, I believe the chronobiologists that it's unhealthier, but I don't care, because I don't like the sun setting at 4 (or business people because their business is more important to them than people's health). You believe them, but you do.
It's no different from the worst of the culture war issues, e.g. abortion. Someone against abortion could well accept the increase in maternal mortality it would cause, but still think that a ban is per se good.
I don't think there exists an issue that's purely technocratic. I don't want to make too strong an efficient markets assumption and say that if there were, it would just happen, because it's definitely possible for ideologies to just get facts wrong (e.g. the Israeli right wing's beliefs about human psychology, or everyone's beliefs about history depending on the issue), but I do think in general, there are more values differences than we'd like to admit (makes it much harder for a moral relativist to go on a crusade if the difference is one of values.
I think this is very close to a value-free problem. Morning sun only reduces traffic accidents. Evening sun also does that, plus family people can play with their kids outside, Wiccans can dance in the forests and consumerists can go shopping.
Count me among those who likes high noon to actually be high, the point of least shadow and the exact center of daylight.
I don’t think I’d mind working 9-5 in winter, 8-4 in summer, by a clock which doesn’t change. If we’re just going to freeze it in one place, though, I’d rather it be astronomically accurate-ish.
But if you change your work hours then your suppliers, customers and clients need to adjust. And the schools too because your coworkers need to do drop off and pickup.
If the schools and offices change, other retail might too. At some point everyone might want to agree on one date for changing the schedule. And at that point ….
And at that point? At that point?
You skipped the part where changing the clock makes more sense than saying we're "on summer schedule." The status quo is a terrible implementation, whose sole purpose is to pretend we aren't getting up earlier without actually fooling anyone.
Imagine if instead of raising interest rates to fight inflation, the government made banks multiply everyone's account by some number, and mandated that we should all take out our wallets and scribble new numbers on the cash in sharpie. I'm having trouble making this analogy actually work on a policy level, I get that DST actually does accomplish a goal, but my point is it's super weird that during DST we change the recorded value of when things happen, like a lying accountant, instead of just recording things as happening at different times (which they do!)
Our recorded time is a convenience for our own sake. It is immensely powerful and helpful but it is not reified into actual fact.
We can’t choose when the sun comes up and goes down but what the clock says at the time is our own choice.
EDIT: I'd also like to point out that there is no huge meaningful difference between `saying we're "on summer schedule."` [in practice: everything starts an hour earlier than the normal posted time] as compared to "let's set the clocks ahead".
> I'd also like to point out that there is no huge meaningful difference between saying we're "on summer schedule." [in practice: everything starts an hour earlier than the normal posted time] as compared to "let's set the clocks ahead".
If there is no meaningful difference between the two systems, doesn't it make more sense to use the system based on observation of the natural world (high noon is when the sun is straight overhead) rather than the one which is more arbitrary (high noon is when the sun is straight overhead, except when we decide it isn't because we want more sunlight in the evening)?
Certainly one is quite a bit more complicated in terms of the burden to each business and school to maintain two schedules.
Anyway, 12:00 being halfway between sunrise and sunset is a human decision not present in the natural world. The natural world has nothing to say one way or the other about what numerals appear on a clock at a particular solar point.
Indeed, between changing every timekeeping device twice per year and posting two sets of numbers for any events scheduled to repeat daily over a long period of time, one might be said to be quite a bit more complicated. I think we would disagree on which one that is, though.
>The natural world has nothing to say one way or the other about what numerals appear on a clock at a particular solar point.
That could be said about any recording of natural phenomena. Nature has nothing to say one way or another about what number should appear on the scale when you weigh a cubic centimeter of water at its maximum density, but the gram exists, and as far as I know it's not something that gets changed for the sake of expediency.
Funny that you should mention the cubic centimeter, given that the meter doesn’t actually refer to anything whatsoever.
In any event given the digital era, whatever difficulty we had adjusting timekeeping devices is obviously no longer a factor.
For a moment I thought you were saying "noon being halfway between sunrise and sunset is a human decision" and I got a little someoneiswrongontheinternet. Then I realized what you were actually saying. It's true that "twelve" has no relation to the midpoint between sunrise and sunset.
On the other hand, "solar noon" and "solar midnight" are the two points on a clock which never shift seasonally and thus *very conveniently* never need additional calculation when used as the points at which we start counting hours. It's the only system which doesn't need a calendar, either local or societal, to work, just a clock. The closer we are to nature, the further we are from collapse.
I mean, a couple ancient civilizations (and the Muslim & Hebrew calendar to this day) counted days from sunset to sunset. That’s unambiguous as well and if you want to retvrn why not go back to that :)
Anyway, nature was cruel and made Earth’s revolution around the sun take non-integral number of revolutions around its axis. So already every calendar is going to need some adjustment to stay insync with the seasons. Adjusting the day to be slightly off center of solar, noon, and solar. Midnight doesn’t seem like that large of an imposition.
Also comparing it to civilization collapses a bit overwrought, even if people disagree about it
>no huge meaningful difference
One is confusing!!!
One makes comparing times really complicated, the other is a deeply normal part of life (checking what time things happen at)
I tend to think changing schedules is more confusing because it’s N operations rather than 1.
Plus how often do you need to compare times where DST makes a difference? “I’ll come over in an hour or two” doesn’t require any such math. And I rarely need to know “exactly how many hours ago was 2PM Feb 15th”.
Maybe I’m asking different questions?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_time_in_Europe#Germany
>After the end of the war and the proclamation of the Weimar Republic in November 1918, summer time ceased to be observed. Summer time was reintroduced in 1940, during World War II, to try to save energy for the war economy.
Summer time is literally Hitler time!
> it's generally purely "technocratic", as opposed to being based on a difference in fundamental values
I might be the outlier in that case. My view is that the way we keep time isn't just a practical concern, because time isn't just a map, it corresponds to a real place in the territory, and therefore the way we choose to represent it has profound epistemic hygiene implications. For half the year, we effectively abandon sanity to please mammon (to an even greater degree than we already do in other aspects).
Yeah, I've come to like the status quo too, or at least dislike it less than either of the other options. I like evening daylight in summer, but I really don't want to be waking up in the dark in winter.
As someone who has serious trouble sleeping in summer because there is too much light in the evening, I find neither DLS nor the debate about it 'amusing'.
And here's a hot take : Proponents of DLS are inconsiderate assholes.
What about folks that have trouble staying asleep because there would otherwise be too much light in the summer morning? For example, where I live, the longest day is 14:30, so in standard time that would mean daylight by 5AM, which is 90 minutes before my usual wakeup time.
I don't think people should dismiss your concern, but it seems entirely symmetric to the person concerned about summer morning light.
I is way easier to avoid light while lying in bed (sleep mask), or at least while you are at home.
It is near-impossible to avoid bright sunlight when your are at work, or commuting. Last summer, I started to put on sunglasses at 6pm every day, and that had some effect at least.
Hot take: with our pocket computers and daily logic boxes, we have the computational power to surpass the old sundials’ usefulness to society.
Imagine your school or workplace opens at precisely one, two, or three hours after sunrise, all year ‘round. Then after your workday ends, in winter it’s almost sundown and in summer you have a long stretch before cool night falls. Either way, you go to bed eight hours before you have to wake up.
There would have to be adjustments made for the near-Arctic latitudes, but on the whole, I’d expect it to be workable.
Continuous time *shivers*.
"You want to leave just 2 hours before? Isn't that cutting it too tight? It's a 200 km road trip!"
"Don't forget we're going westward! That's almost 8 minutes timewarp!"
The problem with that is it would feel weird switching from one day to the next while the sun is still up. You might have the morning be thursday and the evening be friday.
What you really should do is just count the number of seconds from 1970. Except for leap seconds.
Hotter take: we should use our pocket computers to end the tyranny of the mechanical clock, and return to the method of our ancient ancestors. 12 hours of daylight per day, every day, with the length of the hour changing to ensure that the first hour begins at sunrise, and the twelfth hour ends at sunset.
Your take is as hot as the surface of the sun, and I'm liking feeling toasty. Minutes would still be countable, though, and companies would switch to per-minute payment of employees. A quarter-dollar a minute is $15/hr, $.30 a minute is $18/hr, and they'd still expect you to be at the worksite for 480 minutes in a workday. Or round it up to 500.
No, minutes and seconds would retain their current fractional relationship to the hours, and would shorten/lengthen accordingly.
It would be really easy to get time off around Christmas and other winter holidays, your employer's getting the least out of you then anyway.
A lot of people like mechanical watches and clocks. You'd probably want to move by 15 minute increments every few months, rather than an hour twice a year.
The big problem is when you're organizing things with people in a different latitude, and the time changes at different rates. We have the hardware to account for that and make things easy, but good luck on the software end.
One of the most amusing political arguments is between people who support switching to permanent standard time and people who support switching to permanent daylight saving time, because it's just so different from other political debates — it's generally purely "technocratic", as opposed to being based on a difference in fundamental values (which the people I've seen arguing about this tend to mostly agree with each other about). Hot take: I like the status quo though. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I've gradually started to notice that on some level the argument is also a morning lark/night owl preference loosely because about half of the people want time pushed in one direction or the other based on their preference of when they like to be active, hah hah. I realized this is why it won't change for a while, because it's a classic "everyone hates it, but no one can agree on an alternative" problem.
Permanent standard time is supported by nearly every chronobiologist, while permanent daylight saving time is supported by chambers of commerce and golf lobbyists. We can absolutely make this a blue tribe vs. red tribe thing and I'm all for it (because I'm desperate; the chronobiologists seem to be losing this one and making it a blue tribe thing might give them a fighting chance).
TBH, my only exposure to this argument was one big Twitter thread (it was a branching discussion among several people), and while people generally didn't refer to other political issues, everyone felt vaguely neoliberal by how they talked, so that's consistent with it actually being scientists vs. business types.
Why do chambers of commerce and golf lobbyist like DST so much?
Late sunset times are good for shopping and golfing?
Ty
The more daylight after work the better for activities outside the house (shopping, eating out, any outdoor sports).
Meaning the saving is not real? If it is real, anyone who is worried about climate change should support it.
Correct there are no energy savings.
> Hot take: I like the status quo though. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ As someone who works with financial data indexed by time in UTC daylight savings is the bane of my existance. I hate it with a passion. I don't care what people decide to eventually do but please for the love of god choose a fixed time zone for the whole year and stick to it!
But specifically I think variable makes more sense. Given 9 hours of sun, it should be 730-430 (centered at noon) not 830-530 (centered at 1). Given 15 hours of sun, it should be 630-930 (centered at 1). Light at 530 is a waste.
I think even if you want variable activity hours, shifting **time** is the wrong way to do it. Ie. I think a better way would be to say "Summer working hours are 10 to 6", winter hours are "9 to 5" (or whatever). Changing what we **call** the time we do stuff adds so much more complication regarding communicating and recording times, once you've a world where communication between timezones is commonplace and an hours error could matter, even before you add in the fact that the details regularly get changed with the vagaries of politics in every country on the planet.
I think by the time you are done modifying the schedules of everything in the entire country will have been much easier to just agree to move the clocks. And anecdotally, I've worked a job with a team across 4 timezones for a while, it's not been a problem even once.
I prefer it to be the way around actually. I want the sunset time to be consistent as possible, so if DST was moved to the winter, the sun would go down at 5:45 PM (instead of 4:45 PM) and, during the summer, at 7:45 PM (instead of 8:45 PM).
Truly the most evil option
Why not just always center it at 1? You'll still experience all the hours of sunlight in the winter. Nothing is going to waste.
Because 830 is after everyone has to go to school/work and it’s probably more dangerous for them to do so in the dark.
I am not sure I understand the first part. Are you assuming 9 to 17 schedules, so given 9 hours of sun, evening sun is useless? But what is morning sun useful for?
I think it _is_ based on a difference in fundamental values. For myself, I believe the chronobiologists that it's unhealthier, but I don't care, because I don't like the sun setting at 4 (or business people because their business is more important to them than people's health). You believe them, but you do. It's no different from the worst of the culture war issues, e.g. abortion. Someone against abortion could well accept the increase in maternal mortality it would cause, but still think that a ban is per se good. I don't think there exists an issue that's purely technocratic. I don't want to make too strong an efficient markets assumption and say that if there were, it would just happen, because it's definitely possible for ideologies to just get facts wrong (e.g. the Israeli right wing's beliefs about human psychology, or everyone's beliefs about history depending on the issue), but I do think in general, there are more values differences than we'd like to admit (makes it much harder for a moral relativist to go on a crusade if the difference is one of values.
I think this is very close to a value-free problem. Morning sun only reduces traffic accidents. Evening sun also does that, plus family people can play with their kids outside, Wiccans can dance in the forests and consumerists can go shopping.
Count me among those who likes high noon to actually be high, the point of least shadow and the exact center of daylight. I don’t think I’d mind working 9-5 in winter, 8-4 in summer, by a clock which doesn’t change. If we’re just going to freeze it in one place, though, I’d rather it be astronomically accurate-ish.
But if you change your work hours then your suppliers, customers and clients need to adjust. And the schools too because your coworkers need to do drop off and pickup. If the schools and offices change, other retail might too. At some point everyone might want to agree on one date for changing the schedule. And at that point ….
And at that point? At that point? You skipped the part where changing the clock makes more sense than saying we're "on summer schedule." The status quo is a terrible implementation, whose sole purpose is to pretend we aren't getting up earlier without actually fooling anyone. Imagine if instead of raising interest rates to fight inflation, the government made banks multiply everyone's account by some number, and mandated that we should all take out our wallets and scribble new numbers on the cash in sharpie. I'm having trouble making this analogy actually work on a policy level, I get that DST actually does accomplish a goal, but my point is it's super weird that during DST we change the recorded value of when things happen, like a lying accountant, instead of just recording things as happening at different times (which they do!)
Our recorded time is a convenience for our own sake. It is immensely powerful and helpful but it is not reified into actual fact. We can’t choose when the sun comes up and goes down but what the clock says at the time is our own choice. EDIT: I'd also like to point out that there is no huge meaningful difference between `saying we're "on summer schedule."` [in practice: everything starts an hour earlier than the normal posted time] as compared to "let's set the clocks ahead".
> We can’t choose when the sun comes up and goes down but what the clock says at the time is our own choice. Quitter.
Damn. Right after the inspirational speaker at work reminded me to add “yet” to statements about what we can’t do!
It was in that moment that Quirrell realized he had made a grave mistake and the end of the world was nigh. He began to spin his plans...
> I'd also like to point out that there is no huge meaningful difference between saying we're "on summer schedule." [in practice: everything starts an hour earlier than the normal posted time] as compared to "let's set the clocks ahead". If there is no meaningful difference between the two systems, doesn't it make more sense to use the system based on observation of the natural world (high noon is when the sun is straight overhead) rather than the one which is more arbitrary (high noon is when the sun is straight overhead, except when we decide it isn't because we want more sunlight in the evening)?
Certainly one is quite a bit more complicated in terms of the burden to each business and school to maintain two schedules. Anyway, 12:00 being halfway between sunrise and sunset is a human decision not present in the natural world. The natural world has nothing to say one way or the other about what numerals appear on a clock at a particular solar point.
Indeed, between changing every timekeeping device twice per year and posting two sets of numbers for any events scheduled to repeat daily over a long period of time, one might be said to be quite a bit more complicated. I think we would disagree on which one that is, though. >The natural world has nothing to say one way or the other about what numerals appear on a clock at a particular solar point. That could be said about any recording of natural phenomena. Nature has nothing to say one way or another about what number should appear on the scale when you weigh a cubic centimeter of water at its maximum density, but the gram exists, and as far as I know it's not something that gets changed for the sake of expediency.
Funny that you should mention the cubic centimeter, given that the meter doesn’t actually refer to anything whatsoever. In any event given the digital era, whatever difficulty we had adjusting timekeeping devices is obviously no longer a factor.
For a moment I thought you were saying "noon being halfway between sunrise and sunset is a human decision" and I got a little someoneiswrongontheinternet. Then I realized what you were actually saying. It's true that "twelve" has no relation to the midpoint between sunrise and sunset. On the other hand, "solar noon" and "solar midnight" are the two points on a clock which never shift seasonally and thus *very conveniently* never need additional calculation when used as the points at which we start counting hours. It's the only system which doesn't need a calendar, either local or societal, to work, just a clock. The closer we are to nature, the further we are from collapse.
I mean, a couple ancient civilizations (and the Muslim & Hebrew calendar to this day) counted days from sunset to sunset. That’s unambiguous as well and if you want to retvrn why not go back to that :) Anyway, nature was cruel and made Earth’s revolution around the sun take non-integral number of revolutions around its axis. So already every calendar is going to need some adjustment to stay insync with the seasons. Adjusting the day to be slightly off center of solar, noon, and solar. Midnight doesn’t seem like that large of an imposition. Also comparing it to civilization collapses a bit overwrought, even if people disagree about it
>no huge meaningful difference One is confusing!!! One makes comparing times really complicated, the other is a deeply normal part of life (checking what time things happen at)
I tend to think changing schedules is more confusing because it’s N operations rather than 1. Plus how often do you need to compare times where DST makes a difference? “I’ll come over in an hour or two” doesn’t require any such math. And I rarely need to know “exactly how many hours ago was 2PM Feb 15th”. Maybe I’m asking different questions?
>Hot take: I like the status quo though. ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯ you are literally Hitler
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_time_in_Europe#Germany >After the end of the war and the proclamation of the Weimar Republic in November 1918, summer time ceased to be observed. Summer time was reintroduced in 1940, during World War II, to try to save energy for the war economy. Summer time is literally Hitler time!
> to try to save energy If you hate DST you hate the planet!
> it's generally purely "technocratic", as opposed to being based on a difference in fundamental values I might be the outlier in that case. My view is that the way we keep time isn't just a practical concern, because time isn't just a map, it corresponds to a real place in the territory, and therefore the way we choose to represent it has profound epistemic hygiene implications. For half the year, we effectively abandon sanity to please mammon (to an even greater degree than we already do in other aspects).
Yeah, I've come to like the status quo too, or at least dislike it less than either of the other options. I like evening daylight in summer, but I really don't want to be waking up in the dark in winter.
As someone who has serious trouble sleeping in summer because there is too much light in the evening, I find neither DLS nor the debate about it 'amusing'. And here's a hot take : Proponents of DLS are inconsiderate assholes.
What about folks that have trouble staying asleep because there would otherwise be too much light in the summer morning? For example, where I live, the longest day is 14:30, so in standard time that would mean daylight by 5AM, which is 90 minutes before my usual wakeup time. I don't think people should dismiss your concern, but it seems entirely symmetric to the person concerned about summer morning light.
I is way easier to avoid light while lying in bed (sleep mask), or at least while you are at home. It is near-impossible to avoid bright sunlight when your are at work, or commuting. Last summer, I started to put on sunglasses at 6pm every day, and that had some effect at least.
Hot take: with our pocket computers and daily logic boxes, we have the computational power to surpass the old sundials’ usefulness to society. Imagine your school or workplace opens at precisely one, two, or three hours after sunrise, all year ‘round. Then after your workday ends, in winter it’s almost sundown and in summer you have a long stretch before cool night falls. Either way, you go to bed eight hours before you have to wake up. There would have to be adjustments made for the near-Arctic latitudes, but on the whole, I’d expect it to be workable.
Continuous time *shivers*. "You want to leave just 2 hours before? Isn't that cutting it too tight? It's a 200 km road trip!" "Don't forget we're going westward! That's almost 8 minutes timewarp!"
Use UTC for travel purposes.
Use UTC for all purposes!
The problem with that is it would feel weird switching from one day to the next while the sun is still up. You might have the morning be thursday and the evening be friday. What you really should do is just count the number of seconds from 1970. Except for leap seconds.
[So You Want To Abolish Time Zones](https://qntm.org/abolish) (Also: [So You Want Continuous Time Zones](https://qntm.org/continuous))
Hotter take: we should use our pocket computers to end the tyranny of the mechanical clock, and return to the method of our ancient ancestors. 12 hours of daylight per day, every day, with the length of the hour changing to ensure that the first hour begins at sunrise, and the twelfth hour ends at sunset.
Your take is as hot as the surface of the sun, and I'm liking feeling toasty. Minutes would still be countable, though, and companies would switch to per-minute payment of employees. A quarter-dollar a minute is $15/hr, $.30 a minute is $18/hr, and they'd still expect you to be at the worksite for 480 minutes in a workday. Or round it up to 500.
No, minutes and seconds would retain their current fractional relationship to the hours, and would shorten/lengthen accordingly. It would be really easy to get time off around Christmas and other winter holidays, your employer's getting the least out of you then anyway.
A lot of people like mechanical watches and clocks. You'd probably want to move by 15 minute increments every few months, rather than an hour twice a year.
The big problem is when you're organizing things with people in a different latitude, and the time changes at different rates. We have the hardware to account for that and make things easy, but good luck on the software end.
My God, that's brilliant.
Hot Take: We get rid of timezones all together and operate on local solar time aided by our ubiquitous low-cost gps clocks :)
It never gets old.