It's "standard" for a reason. Humanity settled on these numbers long ago because they work best. It boggles my mind why anyone would choose otherwise since what we do at any given hour is arbitrary.

> I would have preferred permanent standard time to permanent daylight time.

Do you have children?

In past HN threads, the preference largely comes down to whether you have children (and want more early morning light for safer trips to school) or not.

My dream world would have 86400 time zones, one per arc-second of the globe, so we can all sync our clocks at high noon.

My favorite depiction of your dream world: https://qntm.org/abolish

But if we abolish time zones how will we keep trains from hitting each other on the tracks?

Time zones are a pain, but it might be too much to fix.

Now, 13 month calendar with each month 4 weeks, on the other hand..

> Humanity settled on these numbers long ago because they work best.

Absolutely not. It was a compromise tempered by practical and political considerations.

The article, however, says 93% wanted daylight savings in the linked public engagement report.

> It's "standard" for a reason

The reason is that with standard time, solar noon coincides with local noon, so the day is approximately symmetric about noon, not regarding atmospheric refraction lengthening the day. It wasn't done on a whim.

The US decided (and Canada followed) that daylight time was more correct for the larger portion of the year, presumably it's easier to transition the remaining 4mo to daylight than it is to move 8mo to standard.

But also, all the opinion polling (business and individual) was like over 90% in favour of year-round daylight time, so here we are.

the reason was valid 50 years ago when most people didn't work 9-5 in front of a computer.

We don't use standard time because it works best, we use it because it's "correct" relative to the position of the sun.

Now, standard business hours (9-5 or whatever) were probably chosen for working well in the circumstances where they became standard, and it might be interesting to watch for whether tweaking the clocks leads to tweaking the nominal time of things...

A lot of people hate standard time in winter because the sun sets at 4 or 5, and they want the sun to instead set at 8 or 9 like it does in summer. DST in winter doesn't actually give you the 8 or 9 sunset, it gives you a 5 or 6 sunset (which doesn't get you all that much) combined with moving your sunrise to 8 or 9, which causes its own set of issues most people don't think about.

The last time we went to year-round DST, we stopped almost immediately because people experienced what winter DST was actually like and went "wait, this sucks."

I won't complain about the NDP for at least 3 days after this one. This is cause for celebration!

My dream world is we apply time zone logic to every other unit of measurement.

1 metre can be 100cm or 200cm depending on the season and your location

Sounds good on paper, terrible idea in practice.

They worked best when everybody were farmers and had to get up early and go to bed early. Now most people don't live their lives centered around noon, our free time comes after our work is done at around 17:00, so having more light in the evening instead of worthless light in the night makes sense.

Where I live, in winter it's dark in the morning (and also the evening depending on the length of the school day) with and without DST, and in summer the sun is also up either way.

I have children and I’ve never heard any arguments for DLS that make any sense.

Most of the time people conflate longer summer days with DLS.

The situation with dark mornings is winter not standard time.

My children are already waking to school in daylight this time of year prior to the switch to DLS.

As others have said. I would rather permanent standard time but I’ll take permanent DLS. Moving the clocks twice a year is insanity.

Conversely, I'd rather my kids have more daylight after school so they can explore outside.

Selfishly, I just want as much daylight as possible, which has very little to do with how a government selects a time range for legal reasons. The rotation of the globe has not been yet controlled, as far as I'm tracking.

Sadly, this isn't really right. Humanity settled on solar time. For somewhat obvious reasons.

Alas, I don't see my preferred method of changing the clock by 10 minutes every month taking hold. Basically ever. :D

I also don't think this is nearly as important for places that are not further away from the equator. If you are on the equator, you are almost certainly fine with no change throughout the year.

thank you for sharing, I was trying to find something similar that explains why UTC everywhere is such a bad idea!

Obviously(/s) the solution is to change to a sunset centered day. new day starts at sunset so people can get up late and enjoy the maxim number of daylight hours.

I always find it strange how particular people are about the numbers attached a purely astronomical phenomena(myself included, but I am pretty hard in the "let the sun figure it out camp"). If they want more "daylight" hours then get up at a time to enjoy them. But people would rather bend over backwards fiddling with the numbers as if that is going to change how long a day is.

12 oz of alcohol would obviously be larger in the winter the closer you get to the poles. I think I like this idea.

I don't have children and I prefer permanent Standard Time because I have the apparently weird belief that noon should be at noon.

(i.e. the time 12:00PM should be when the sun is overhead)

I'm not a "capitalism gives you brain worms" kind of person, but the idea that it is somehow better to literally change the location of the sun in the sky because the holy hours of 9-5 are sacrosanct is so strange to me.

I’d guess that there is less of a need for light at the beginning of the day since most people don’t farm. Personally I prefer more light at the end of the day.

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day!

Nah, it also sounds terrible on paper.

That's a myth.

Farmers have to wake up early because their animals wake up at sunrise and some tasks are best performed at that time. So they wake up before sunrise regardless of the clock time.

Human, like farm animals, are better off if they wake up at sunrise and go to sleep in full dark. At the equator that's easy, wake at 6, bed at 10PM. And standard work hours are 7-3 or 8-4.

As far north as BC is winter just doesn't have enough daylight to think you can get everything done with sunlight. Maybe Arizona has enough - but they don't do daylight savings time (one of two us states)

As a child, there was nothing worse than getting out of school at 3pm and then having the sun set at 4:21pm. I barely got home before it got dark, forget about playing outside. Morning time was useless, since school prep ate that up.

9-5 aren't sacrosanct. When the 9-5 song came out approximately nobody worked from 9-5. Standard working hours were 8-5 with an hour for lunch. Starting at 7 was far more common than starting at 9.

The song is about a secretary who didn't get a lunch hour, so started an hour later than her boss.

Tech workers generally start at 9, but that started decades after the song came out.

Farmers don't care about clocks, they do the work whenever needed. Roosters crow whenever they want. There's literally no point in talking about farmers in this debate.

I don't get that argument. The numeric time is just a measure for the state of the sun in the sky. When you choose your day to have ended is completely independent. There is already a high enough variance of people deciding when they go to sleep, that DST is hardly relevant. Some people have dinner at half past 5, some do at half past 8, the hour daylight saving time can't possibly make that difference.

Another falsehood programmers believe about time. A stopped clock is only right twice a day if it is a 12 hour clock and only if it’s not set at a leap second or at a skipped time during the shift from standard to daylight time.

I'll correct myself: it sounds good for about 5 seconds before you think about it and realize it's an unworkable idea which creates more problems than it solves.

So, it sounds like you're actually arguing that the numbers are just a construct and that we should all just use UTC and set appropriate work hours to the times that most correlate to the solar day in our region rather than adjust the clock approximately 1 hour per 15 degrees around the equator and have an International Date Line.

I think this would make way more sense, when they say the Olympic Opening Ceremony start at 18:00, its 18:00 for everyone around the world. No one as to work out which TZ Italy is in or scheduling meetings with Tech Support in far flung locales does not require knowing IST is how far ahead or behind.

Right? I literally never once cared if I have to walk/ride to school in the relative dark. But I did care pretty much every afternoon how much time I have to enjoy the rest of my free time. Being able to go out with my friends and enjoy the daylight made a huge difference. It's soooo long overdue to put this stupid system in the past.

Right, but where I live sunrise is in the middle of the night in the summer (around 03:30). Using standard time in the summer gives me one less hour of useful sunlight in the evening, and while it doesn't technically disappear it gets moved to where I can't use it because that's when I sleep. It's the same for people further south as well, another bright hour in the early morning before they wake up is a wasted bright hour that would make more sense in the evening, when most modern humans are awake. The argument "noon should coincide with solar noon" is nonsensical to me, the clock is a social construct and should make sense for how most of us live our lives.

> winter just doesn't have enough daylight to think you can get everything done with sunlight

That's the perfect way to say it.

The other piece that a lot of people are missing is the whole larks (early risers) vs owls (late risers) divide. I think the best illustration of that is to ask, if you got your pick, which shift you'd take, based solely on your own body and habits: 8-4, 9-5, or 10-6 (or perhaps even further in one direction)? My guess is that the answer to that question predicts your desire for Standard or Daylight time pretty well.

Exactly, here in Spain we have lunch between half past 2 and half past 3 on workdays, which can extend up to 5pm in the weekend and I usually finish dinner at half past ten.

Why? because they decided to be on the same timezone as our eastern neighbors in Europe. The eastern part of Polonia is on the same timezone and probably have probably the opposite with much much earlier lunch and dinner than we do.

It's not just a measure for the state of sun in the sky, it's also a measure for the state of society on the ground. It's an arbitrary number in a sense, but it also strongly influences my schedule.

And yes, we could have all the schools and everything else open later in the winter than the rest of the year, but it turns out it's easier to change the clocks.

I will readily admit that I'm an idiot, but I've thought about it for literally multiple minutes, and I still love it. It even still seems workable!

I was being generous. Which wasn't really justified considering Eby's track record.

Yes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandford_Fleming ( https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/sandf... )

> He promoted worldwide standard time zones, a prime meridian, and use of the 24-hour clock as key elements to communicating the accurate time, all of which influenced the creation of Coordinated Universal Time.

The one bit where this would be problematic would be "what day is it?" When does today become tomorrow?

There are a lot of systems that we've built that depend on that distinction. Things like business days and running end of day so that everything that happens on March 2nd is logged as March 2nd. I've encountered fun with Black Friday sales where the store is open over the midnight boundary and the backend system really wants today to be today rather than yesterday (sometimes this has involved unplugging a register from the network so that it doesn't run end of day, running EOD on the store systems, and then plugging the register back in after it completes and then running a reconciliation.).

Other than that particular mess of banks and businesses... yea, running everything on UTC would be something nice in today's world.

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This is also kind of what happens in China (with a complicated history). https://github.com/eggert/tz/blob/main/asia#L272

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_China UTC+08:00 is observed throughout the country even though it spans about 60° of longitude.

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Aside on the "changing clocks" and realizing my flexible schedule privilege at a company I worked at I switched my schedule from 8-4 to 9-5 with the change in daylight savings so that I maintained a consistent "this is the hour I wake up".

> arguing that the numbers are just a construct

Yes.

> and that we should all just use UTC and ...

No. that does not follow. Abstraction is useful. Having commonly understood terms (in this case hours of the day) that share certain traits regardless of where you happen to be in the world facilitates communication.

I have all my clocks set to UTC. Works for me

But the social construct of work hours shifted later by more than that one hour during the last century, so this is not what people actually prefer by their actions.

My guess is that both owls & larks get their preference logically backwards.

My guess is that owls will say they prefer permanent daylight time and larks will say they prefer permanent standard time.

But their revealed preference is the opposite -- owls wake up well after sunrise and go to bed well after sunset. Yet permanent daylight time will shift it so they'll be waking up closer to sunrise and going to bed closer to sunset.

Larks revealed preference is more like permanent daylight time yet I think they're more likely to say they want permanent standard time.

Optimizing for summer is silly. Summer gets lots of daylight already. We need to optimize for winter.

The timezone centered across Görlitz made a lot of sense for the German empire, because it was nearly in half longitude wise and 15° away from Greenwich. It is still somewhat centered in Europe. If you wanted to divide it again, you would need to decide whether the border should be between Germany and France or France and Spain. If you place it between Germany and France, which side will the BeNeLux countries be on? France still has some parts that are nominally in +1 and we don't want to disturb the German-French "friendship", so maybe place it between Spain and France, where there is at least a mountain border? Would that be acceptable? Railways connections between Spain and France are also much less and concentrated than between Germany and France.

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https://vividmaps.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/time-zones-...

The old borders aligned with the sun a lot more, so we can blame that on WW2 as well.

But the school schedule does already shift and it shifts later, so in the opposite direction. The policy trend is going in the opposite of what you want to achieve with year-long DST, you could instead vote for the status quo and have the same effect.

I also did that for some time, I just don't perceived clocks to have a single point that is up and mentally rotated clocks all the time. The hours just lost their meaning beyond their numerical value.

People disagree on whether to prioritize mornings or afternoons in the winter. For the summer, only very few people care if the sun rises at four or five (or whatever), but most people like having long summer evenings. Therefore the summer tips the scales.

Do BC schools have a different winter schedule? That's not how it is where I live, at least. It seems like it would be pretty annoying to have to reschedule activities around getting to/from school twice a year.

Then they are also social activities that you just need to wait for in summer, because they can only happen after sunset. Viewing a movie (outside), sitting around a fire, having a party all just really happen after sunset.

I can only comment on some parts in Germany, and no I don't know of different seasonal schedules. I meant that the general trend is for the school day to start later, so that the teenagers get more of their precious sleep. Year-long DST would get them to get up earlier again compared to the sun. This trend is the same for office hours and working shifts, they become later, since people just want to sleep longer. (Which is obviously bullocks.)