While I agree with your sentiment, in practice that’s a harder goal because it means changing millions of people’s daily rituals and businesses schedules. Everything from daily meetings, times of worship, business opening hours, class schedules, shared spaces (eg conference rooms, hired gym spaces for yoga, karate etc)...everything would have to change and everyone would be required to make that change themselves for it to work.
There is no “just” in “just stop the DST keeping the natural local time”.
Intentionally making time be permanently stupid is a bit stupid, IMHO. Lots of existing scientific standards that are stuck with old cruft that makes things annoying (like the definition of electrical minus/plus poles), why add more cruft?
It's all just conventions anyway. Why does it matter if solar noon doesn't match with wallclock noon? The perception of the solar time varies wildly with season, latitude and even weather (how 6pm feels like nighttime in January but the end of the afternoon in July for instance). Sundials are not exactly in widespread uses these days.
There's also plenty of precedent for countries and blocks of countries using "unnatural" time zones for convenience. Warsaw is currently in the same timezone as Berlin, Paris, and Madrid. I mean look at this map, many countries are already offset by one hour from their natural time zone, DST or not: http://www.trbimg.com/img-56c3a997/turbine/la-fi-mh-your-tim...
That's true for a big chunk of the USA too.
I'm also in favor of keeping DST full time, I think it's the pragmatic choice. That being said it's been pointed out to me that part of the reason I like DST is because I don't have kids since when you have children going to school you typically need to get up earlier to prepare them and bring them there. Having DST year-round would mean that it would probably still be night time when the kids arrive to school.
> It's all just conventions anyway. Why does it matter if solar noon doesn't match with wallclock noon?
Why does this thread exist? Because some scientists/doctors studied this very question and concluded that there are negative health and safety implications to continuing to do what we are doing. Conventions have consequences.
The problem is with the change and transition, not the fact that solar time doesn't inherently match wallclock time.
Even the actual position statement doesn't have a strong argument for which one should be the permanent time, and is worded as a hunch:
> Although chronic effects of remaining in daylight saving time year-round have not been well studied, daylight saving time is less aligned with human circadian biology — which ... could result in circadian misalignment
I’d already answered why. Because the “stupid” solution is achievable whereas the “smart” solution is not.
As mentioned elsewhere, we drifted into this over decades of laziness so it’s unreasonable to expect a swift (or even any) change if it’s left to those same people to rollback that lost hour.
The smart solution is just as easily achievable. One hour to and from affects nothing, as people already work half the year at this schedule, so no change is needed regardless.
Should one then wish to place work hours more optimally, which is just a general improvement unrelated to DST, then such one-off change is still much less work than biannual clock adjustments, and can be done at any time. No "swift" action is needed.
So, no reason to pick a stupid standard.
(Also do remember that different employments and businesses already have wildly different work hours, with many starting and ending outside the time of sunlight anyway. Being one hour off is already a luxury.)
Your description of the smart solution is that nothing changes at all, and that isn’t what is being proposed as the “smart” solution. Instead that’s a 3rd option where people moan that things need to change but nobody actually makes any effort to change it.
I’m not meaning to be argumentative when I say that. I’m just being pragmatic based on the fact that we’re in this “time-shifted” state because of people’s laziness so expecting people to make a conscious effort to change for an idealistic goal (as sensible as that seems on paper) simply isn’t going to happen.
Not to mention that people’s personal timetable is often dictated by multiple parties (as I examples earlier: gym classes, sprint stand up, times of worship, school hours, etc). A change like that couldn’t easily be drip fed to the masses as everyone’s schedules have already been designed around the current “time-shift” and a persons schedule isn’t generally a solo calendar without dependencies.
For example I could start work an hour earlier but my sons childminder and daughters nursery isn’t opening an hour earlier. So I can’t change my behaviour. Everyone needs to make the change together if it’s going to work. Hence why changing timezones “works” for time-shifting. (I say “works” because it accomplishes it’s goal of time-shifting a populous but obviously different people might disagree it’s a solution to the larger problem of natural day light hours).
No, my suggestion is that there are no blockers for doing things right.
I suspect you are under the impression that work hours are standardized.
Nurseries don't open aligned with people's work hours, and people have to show up late and leave early as a result already. People have commutes and might also need to drive far to reach nurseries. Night shifts exist, and bakery employees show up at 5:30 AM to prepare for opening at 6AM, as the bakers go home after having baked during the night. The world isn't 9-5.
Indeed, maybe you'll be pushed out of the lucky zone temporarily by such a change, where others get pushed in. Work hours are organic, and nurseries follow suit. This is true regardless of the choice of hours, so pick the one without hacks.
> For example I could start work an hour earlier but my sons childminder and daughters nursery isn’t opening an hour earlier.
Have you tried asking the other parents if they want it to open sooner too? If most of them want, I'm sure they will, and if they don't it's you that is wrong (but you can always go looking for another place that will open sooner).
You’re focusing too much at the micro level and missing the wider problem I’m describing. The change being discussed requires everyone in the country to agree to the change in unison. Having a few parents pick different daycare isn’t going to instigate the change that is being recommended at the start of this tangent. Hence why I keep saying it is an idealistic but ultimately unrealistic premise. If this kind of change were to happen organically like you described then it already would have and thus this conversation would be moot.
Why wait for DST to be removed? If you and some like-minded neighbors got together and refused to change your clocks, surely others would be forced to adapt for you?
Change aversion doesn’t magically go away if you removed DST. Saying things don’t already happen organically because of DST is unfounded wishful thinking.
It's not stupid though. Solar noon is already only noon noon only twice per year, so we already don't have a noon-based time system anyway. What does it really matter if solar noon is now at 13:00 twice per year instead? The times are all arbitrary. If you want to know when sunrise/solar noon/sunset are, you already always have to look them up anyway since they're different every single day. Personally, what matters most to me is sunset, not sunrise or noon, as sunset affects whether I'm biking home in the dark or not. And yes, I like daylight saving time because it makes sunset later, so it can be at 20:00 instead of 19:00 in the summer (neither of which is a more or less natural time than the other to have the sun set).
Solar noon is only that in the middle of a timezone, isn't it? And if you live on the east or west border of a timezone its not. So arguments for some "natural" time would need some kind of dynamic time zones, which the world had before trains where invented and needed timezones for their timetables, IIRC.
The variation throughout the year is not caused by your relative longitude within the time zone. It's caused by the rotation of the Earth and Earth's orbit.
You're talking about a separate issue which does also exist, but that global time makes worse. Right now solar noon is always roughly somewhat close to local time noon, rather than noon being, say, 02:00Z.
Just because a something is stupid it doesn’t mean every solution to the problem isn’t equally stupid.
For example I’ve not even gotten into the financial cost of expecting everyone to change their documentation, advertisements, etc to reflect an earlier hour.
Sometimes the “worse is better” and in this case the “stupid” solution is actually the better one.
Can you give me one good reason why you need to change time at all? Because you have been doing it for hundreds of years isn't a good reason. You can always wake up early if you need to do so. In today's day and age it makes no sense to change the time to suit your needs.
You may have had a valid reason to do so long ago.
No we don’t. We change timezone, not the time within that timezone.
The former is government mandated and our clocks are changed. The latter is governed by ourselves and we have to change all schedules to reflect a new time 7am (etc) instead of 8am while the clocks remain the same.
Whether you change timezone or change time is largely inconsequential. The effect is nearly the same, and it's not like it hasn't happened several times in the past. Society progresses. In an increasingly 24-hour world, it isn't going to matter. And in a society that has increasing concern about the health of its citizens, what the clock says won't matter as much as what our bodies say.
There is no “just” in “just stop the DST keeping the natural local time”.