- Joined
- Aug 20, 2006
- Messages
- 13,000
I just think having to change the clock sucks, but people are always arguing about the supposedly profound impacts of DST, like how it creates health issues and increases accidents. The change is literally only an hour, so I don’t get it—do people normally sleep so well that they never lose an hour of rest? If you had a choice, which would you make permanent: standard time or DST?
The suffering of the spring time change begins with the loss of an hour of sleep. That might not seem like a big deal, but researchers have found it can be dangerous to mess with sleep schedules. Car accidents, strokes, and heart attacks spike in the days after the March time change. It turns out that judges, sleep deprived by daylight saving, impose harsher sentences. “Even mild changes to sleep patterns can affect human capital in significant ways,” two Cornell University researchers, Lawrence Jin and Nicolas Ziebarth, wrote (PDF) last year.Some of the last defenders of daylight saving time have been a cluster of business groups who assume the change helps stimulate consumer spending.
The suffering of the spring time change begins with the loss of an hour of sleep. That might not seem like a big deal, but researchers have found it can be dangerous to mess with sleep schedules. Car accidents, strokes, and heart attacks spike in the days after the March time change. It turns out that judges, sleep deprived by daylight saving, impose harsher sentences. “Even mild changes to sleep patterns can affect human capital in significant ways,” two Cornell University researchers, Lawrence Jin and Nicolas Ziebarth, wrote (PDF) last year.Some of the last defenders of daylight saving time have been a cluster of business groups who assume the change helps stimulate consumer spending.