cashew | OK, Americans need to stop being stupid about Daylight Savings (Reply)

Am reminded it's once again the annual "let's shift everyone's clock one hour ahead of the natural sleep-wake cycle", aka Daylight Savings Time is kicking in.

And it's deeply stupid.

Credentials? I spent my graduate career studying this shit. It is terrible. Permanently shifting the social clock to de-synchronize with the light cycle leads to all sorts of health complications, such as metabolic diseases, obesity, cancer, cardiovascular diseases, and decreased attention. (And we really don't need any more sources of attention attrition because smartphones have already eroded our ability to focus.) We have literal decades worth of data supporting these conclusions. I mean, I'd link papers, but just do a quick search on PubMed and it should give you plenty of review papers on this subject and they all point in basically the same direction: Get rid of Daylight Savings, it's terrible and bad for human health.

You know how China handles the different time zones? Everybody uses the same clock and starts the day during different hours depending on geographical location. More Western locations start the day later (such as 9:00am or 10:00am) while Eastern zones start earlier (such as 6:00am or 7:00am). And then you stick to the same time all the time. Unified clock and flexibility for local differences plus avoidance of having to deal with changing clocks twice a year.

Seriously, Americans, it should not be this fucking hard.