worse than changing clocks

[calimac]

I'm going to keep harping on this because it is so very, very wrong.

From a Washington Post article:

Sleep experts widely agree with the Senate that the country should abandon its twice-yearly seasonal time changes. But they disagree on one key point: which time system should be permanent. Unlike the Senate, many sleep experts believe the country should adopt year-round standard time.

“We do applaud stopping the switching during the course of the year and settling on a permanent time,” said Jocelyn Cheng, a member of the AASM’s public safety committee. But, she added, “standard time, for so many scientific and circadian rationales and public health safety reasons, should really be what the permanent time is set to.”

Daylight saving time “does not ‘save’ evening light at all, it simply steals it from the morning when it is necessary to maintain our healthy biological rhythms.” (David Neubauer, an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Johns Hopkins University)

Experts say circadian misalignment has been associated with adverse effects on cognition and mood as well as cardiovascular and metabolic function. “It’s really not a good thing to have your internal body clocks out of sync,” Zee said. “Imagine being in jet lag a lot of the time; it can’t be good for you.” (Phyllis Zee, chief of sleep medicine at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine)

The current enthusiasm for permanent daylight saving time is “grossly misguided,” said Neubauer, who predicted a return to “the extremely unpopular 1970s dark winter mornings with commuters going to work and children going to school long before sunrise, inevitably leading to injuries and fatalities.”

Zee said her “heart sank” when she saw the news of the Senate vote. Of the three potential time systems for the country to be on — permanent standard, biannual switching and permanent daylight saving time — she said, the last is “probably the worst choice.”

(And why am I writing about this and not Ukraine again? Because I don't have to write about Ukraine. The entire US Senate didn't just vote to support Putin, did it?)

Comments

[kevin_standlee]

Agreed. I already have to start work at 4 AM PT in order to be in synch with my co-workers in the Central and Eastern time zones. (Worse, I have to start one hour before they do because my job involves setting up our daily workload. In theory, I can leave around 1 PM.) But even so, I'd be for year-round standard time. If people really want to have more "evening daylight," they should try to get businesses to shift their hours in the summer.

A different view

[ranunculus]

In this particular case I completely disagree with you. I am not at all a fan of "standard" time. Every year it is a major depressant for me. When it arrives. It deprives me, and countless thousands, of time in the evening with some light, which is to say that (for most of my life) it deprived me entirely of natural light. Many of my horse pasture tenants never find time to be with their horse during "standard" time. After a 8 hour shift at work tthere -is- no light in the evening. Want to get up in the morning and groom your horse in the freezing cold? No, I'd rather do it in the late afternoon when it is as warm as it is going to get.
Just saying.

Re: A different view

[calimac]

That's a reason, yes.

But it's not standard time that's depriving you of most of your light in the evening. It's the axial tilt of the earth, which is what DST-lovers actually have a beef with. Midwinter sunset here is about 5 pm. DST would make that 6 pm, and that wouldn't really help much. Not when midsummer sunset is at 7:30 and that's without DST.

What's more: DST is actually a mental fakeout to try to convince you it's later than it really is. Make it permanent and we'll gradually get used to it and the advantage of the extra hour in work and other schedules will eventually disappear.

Re: A different view

[ranunculus]

Actually the difference between 5pm and 6 pm is a really, really big difference to a person who gets off work at 5 pm and then has to go deal with a herd of horses either in the dark or in the light. It is a HUGE difference for a person who gets off work at 4 and might have 30 minutes to ride in the light as opposed to 0 minutes to ride before dark. We all frequently ride, or work into full dark in the winter and minutes count. I have virtually never encountered someone who wants to get up at 4am so they have time for a 40 minute ride before going to work.
And yes, we all understand how axial tilt works.

Re: A different view

[calimac]

If 6 vs 5 pm is really all that significant, then you need DST in the winter but not in the summer. This is why I brought up the difference between sunset times. By the standards of "I can make it by 6 but not by 5," 7:30 is so generous that making it 8:30 would be superfluous.

But since there's at least an equal number of people who need that sunlight in the morning for equally compelling reasons, this is a tug of war which can't make everybody happy: this is why the real struggle is against the axial tilt. And I do wish that people who reputedly know how that works (and I'm not strictly referring to you here) would stop treating it in this context as if it were some kind of unfathomable mystery.