this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2023
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Sad to see North America isn’t the only continent stuck with this archaic ritual.
Yup. The worst thing is, while Europe has voted their intention to end it, and some American states are talking about possibly doing the same, in Australia our fight is trying not to get it introduced in those states who don't already have it. There seems to be very little talk about getting rid of it from the states that do it.
Which is so unfortunate, because it's more than just a quirky "archaic ritual". It has real measurable consequences—people die from daylight saving time. And it lacks any real benefits—prople like to talk about economic benefits, but studies fail to find them.
Can you throw some evidence/examples about people who have died from daylight saving time ?
It's not something where you can attribute a particular case to DST. It's more like climate change, where we know from overwhelming evidence that it results in an increase in problems overall, but not which specific instances wouldn't have occurred otherwise.
Specifically, it leads to notable spikes in traffic crashes, heart problems, and suicides, among other problems. It's been quite extensively studied from a variety of angles, and all of them come down on the side of DST being problematic. Here's a handful of them:
I'm particularly a fan of the penultimate one linked there, which states:
Doesn't get much clearer than that. I have to admit to being surprised at it though, because until I learnt that I actually had advocated for the possibility of permanent DST in some areas.
https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(19)31678-1
The US increase is inapplicable to Australia. There is no evidence of that DST affects traffic collisions here.