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Alternatives to Daylight Saving Time?
Wellington Grey writes "Daylight saving time almost upon us. The arguments about its possible benefits and drawbacks come up twice every year. Does it save energy or lives? Possibly, but it does definitely cause a great deal of inconvenience. My question is this: what do you think would be the best possible system to replace DST with? What is the best way for humans to deal with the inconsistent amount of light over the year and still foster coordination over disparate time zones?"
We don't do DST in John McCain country.*
*Unless you're an Indian, in which case you might.
Why does it need replacement? Just get rid of it altogether...
Nightdark Wasting Time ?
"9-5" business hours is a convention because there's no easy way to do anything different in a pre-wired world.
Now that we have or are about to have ubiquitous Internet everywhere, companies should publish smbmeta files at domainname.foo/smbmeta.xml with their hours in it, and have every useful directory service (Google Local, Yellowpages.com, that iPhone thing, etc.) understand a linkage between a domain name and store (oh, and the phone thing too, which can usually be used as the 'foreign key'). Good VOIP phones could easily do the same. The cost is practically nil for everybody and we get past the need for conventions.
Of course there are clustering reasons to coordinate business hours on a geographical basis, but individual businesses can make those decisions and either profit or lose business by them.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Do away with DST. If people want/need to get up earlier or later to take advantage of the daylight then JUST GET UP EARLIER OR LATER! There is no good reason to change the clock backward and forward. Lots of places don't do it and they don't have any problems. STOP DAYLIGHT SAVINGS TIME!
See subject. Then make everyone talk in UTC. That should do it.
That is all.
> "What is the best way for humans to deal with the inconsistent amount of light over the year and still foster coordination over disparate time zones?"
Russia has a dozen time zones and fares just fine - as does China, with only one. This business of claiming that 'light' is a problem needing a solution is the only issue here...
Actually, DST is coming to an end. The summer is when the hours are artificially moved ahead. The winter time is the actual "accurate" earth time.
My ask slashdot question is this: what do you think would be the best possible system to replace DTS with?
A system just like the current DTS, but with a monetary fine for whiners.
Come on, how hard is it to set a damned clock? Just do it.
...move to Arizona. Problem solved.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
What is the best way for humans to deal with the inconsistent amount of light over the year and still foster coordination over disparate time zones?
Turn on a lamp.
Attention all planets of the Solar Federation! We have assumed control! - Neil Peart
Actually, we are in Daylight Savings Time right now. We are getting ready to go back to Standard Time.
The issue with DST is not that it's inconvenient, it's that it's insufficiently precise! We should be changing the time every day (at least!) to make sure our time is as accurate as possible to the length of the day. Every day, 12 noon should be when the Sun is directly overhead, no matter where you are.
Sure, this means changing time zones almost continuously while travelling, and at least daily while remaining stationary, but at least we won't have to deal with the confusion that comes from discovering that the Sun is directly overhead at 12:00:34 instead of 12 noon sharp! How can we call ourselves intelligent beings when our time system is so woefully inaccurate most of the time?
So, scrap daylight savings time and replace it with a system of several thousand time zones, each updated daily based on the predicted "high noon" for that particular day at that particular location. If the prediction ends up being off by a few microseconds on a particular day, just change the time to correct it right then and there! Sure, wristwatches will become orders of magnitude more complex, but it's the only way to have a truly sane and accurate system of time measurement. And after all, isn't that what we all really want here?
DST becomes unnecessary.
You're a farmer, or construction worker, or anyone who does his business in daylight. During the months of short days, you are up and ready to work at sun up every day and need to work for 8 hours. In the summer, you can still get to the bank and do your business. But in the winter, without DST, you're stuck at work until 5:00pm and can't. DST isn't baseless. It caters to a small group of people that can't adjust their hours.
Whale
Here's my favorite anti-daylight savings time page:
End Day Light Savings Time
I don't like Daylight Saving Time, or as I call it "Pretend it's an hour later than it is," and will be glad when the clock in my car doesn't make me do addition to remember what time it is (I refuse to adjust it for this nonsense.) This silly dance we do every year twice.
My alarm clock is a self-adjusting atomic model (not internally of course, it readjusts itself via radio signal from the U.S. Atomic Clock in Colorado).
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
Nah, I think we should use Swatch Internet Time. Did you know that sales of Swatch Internet Time watches doubled between 1998 and 1999? If these trends continue, the lame 12-hour and 24-hour clocks will go the way of the dinosaur.
As others have pointed out (http://irc.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/pubs/fulltext/nrcc49212/nrcc49212.pdf), Daylight Savings Time likely doesn't save us any energy. This, of course, makes sense as if people are getting up earlier to avoid it being dark when they get home, they're still using electricity in the morning which is now dark. In short, the only way that daylight savings time in the modern day is beneficial to anyone is people who want to play sports or do something else outdoors after work. Not only that, but studies have shown that Daylight Savings Time often actually costs companies money due to needing to change clocks, employees who show up late/early to work during time changes and computer errors resulting from time changes. The solution, is to abolish Daylight Savings Time and save us all some time, money and bother.
I replaced all my DTS with SSIS.
Here are a few real alternatives to daylight savings time:
-Daylight wasting time
-Nightlight saving time
-Dayheavy saving time
-Some permutation of the above terrible puns
what do you think would be the best possible system to replace DTS with?
I think DTS disappeared with the release of SQL Server 2005. I'm pretty sure it's all .NET code now...
Daylight Savings Time has enormous costs and very little value in return.
We should get read of it and say, "Good riddance..."
If there are issues with available daylight in a particular area, then the times of events should be adjusted accordingly. If it is to dark at 7 AM for kids to go out in order to reach school at 8 AM, then push back the start time of school, etc., to 9 AM.
In reality, this is what Daylight Savings Time does, but at much greater cost.
...although some will call me one. I couldn't care less, this arguement comes up twice a year, and twice a year I don't really care. I've heard all the arguements and everything, but truth be told, the switch doesn't bother me that much. The only day that really concerns me is the one where we turn time back, the extra hour is always nice. The winter time is just a pain because I like to leave work and still have some daylight - but that's just me.
In the interest of Getting Things Right, I'll point out that it's "Daylight Saving Time" not "Daylight Savings Time".
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
Southern hemisphere will be coming into summer soon and lots of countries appear to use DST in our northern winter months.
http://www.timeanddate.com/time/dst2008b.html
we need to remedy that tilty-axis-syndrome that the earth has and straighten that crap up.
Alternately, a mission to Jupiter that will trigger the monolith's sun conversion program.
I see what you did there: Twice nothing is still nothing! Genius!
Did you know that sales of Swatch Internet Time watches doubled between 1998 and 1999?
So they sold eight instead of four?
Simple answer: abolish it. I lived in Japan for several years and they don't adjust their clocks. Guess what? I didn't notice! Well, except that I didn't have the hassle of changing all my clocks, and throwing off my sleeping rhythm twice a year.
Frankly, I don't see the point of DST anymore. So many people work in giant window-less buildings now, what does it matter? The lights are on the same amount of time regardless. And if you desperately need consistent daylight, move closer to the equator. Or you could invest in some full-spectrum light bulbs (they help me quite a bit).
Meh, just my $0.02.
Disco Stu spins his disco disks to Internet Time, so should you, baby.
I am not a crackpot.
That depends on the lights. If I stand under my roomful of 1000 watt grow lights that I use to grow my...um tomatoes...that light is actually quite good for you.
Moved here from Michigan 5 years ago. I don't miss DST at all. I just know that when I wake up at 5am, during the spring/summer, it's nearly broad daylight and in the colder months it's pitch black out. Right now, it's pitch black at 5am, at 5:30, I see some sunlight, by the time I get in my car at 6-615:am, it's daylight.
Right now, I see the idiodicy of DST. You don't actually get more daylight, we just fool you into thinking you do.
Fifty watts per channel, baby cakes.
That sounds like a great idea. Let's get together and start planning the transition, tomorrow at noon.
Are you adequate?
I have always found it a funny topic. The politician like to think they have so much power by implement DST or not. Has anyone ever told them they can control the real number of hours of sunlight through legislation? I remember one local politician saying DST would give farms an extra hour of day light! Wow I thought - how could they have such power over the cosmos.
My Sig indicates the end of the comment I posted.
I'd love to get up at 5am every day, and work from 6am to 2 or 3pm.
That way I could have a ton of daylight when I come home, which is when I need it.
Do you think you could talk to my boss for me?
Most people work in cubes or offices, or at least inside. What use is daylight to most of us of before say.. lunchtime??
I say we spring forward 3 hours and just stay there all the time.
WTF do I need daylight for on my way to work, just so I can wander around my yard with a flashlight at 6pm? We're not farmers anymore.
Operator, give me the number for 911!
One of my schoolteachers suggested this back when most clocks ran on 60Hz synchronous motors. Speed up time during the work day, slow it down at happy hour.
I'm sure the curators of the history museums (the only places that still have VCRs) are annoyed by this task.
Four words:
One time for Earth.
120 characters isn't enough to explain it.
The idea of an 8-hour day (and the 40-hour week) has only been around since about the beginning of the 20th century. It's mainly originated from workers' demands in response to conditions in which many factory owners required people to work 12 or more hours a day. Later, it was reinforced by legislation requiring overtime for hours in excess of 40 in an attempt to reduce unemployment. Before industrialization, there was little concept of a "standard" workday. Farmers worked however many hours were necessary to maintain their crops and livestock, even if it meant working from sunrise to after sunset. Shopkeepers in town set their hours according to their needs.
If DST weren't an issue, wouldn't it have been more natural to set an 8-hour workday to run from 8 AM to 4 PM rather than one hour later? In the northern tier of the contiguous U.S., it's common for the sun to set between 4 and 5 PM in the winter. And the sun is almost always up before 8, except for some places close to the Canadian border or near the western edge of a time zone. A workday ending at 5 instead of 4 would have made things somewhat more complicated in a society where electric lighting hadn't yet become ubiquitous. Does anyone know how the hours 9-5 got chosen rather than some other 8-hour span?
Daylight Saving Time really only works (if it works at all) for a narrow range of latitudes.
Too far south and the sun sets at the same time all year anyway. Too far north and the sun sets ridiculously late in the summer, and sets very early in the winter. Few of our southern hemisphere friends live far enough south for this to be an issue. Anybody here from Ushuaia?
Even here, in southern Canada (49 degrees north), the sun sets at 1600 in the winter. If we didn't mess with time zones the sun would set at 2000 in the summer, and it isn't really dark until nearly 2200. How much later do you want it to set?
...laura
...move to Arizona. Problem solved.
I did, but problem not solved - now I can't remember everybody else's time.
"Ten percent of nothin' is, let me do the math here... nothin' and a nothin', carry the nothin'..."
the original clock was when the sun actually rose and set on the horizon of the earth.
but we wanted to know exactly how far through that period we were.
so when clocks were invented - we very linearly divided the day up into 24 parts,
and then (based on ancient sumerian base 60) -- divided the 24 hours into 60 smaller parts.
we still linearly divide our day (despite the fact that every day changes sunrise / sunset times), and we still use ancient sumerian base 60 in our measurement of time (minutes) today -- omg, its amazing we don't still use Cubits & Fathoms to measure things...!
so, we can carry on with using base 60 for minutes, and medieval linear ideas of time, or we can take advantage of our understandings of science to create something more rational. so here are two proposals to take time measurement out of the medieval dark ages:
1) 0:00 HOURS = SUNRISE. everything has a chip in it nowadays - you can't find a watch that doesn't have a chip in it. and if you have a chip in it -- computation is easy. we no longer have to use the medieval linear way of dividing up the day -- finally, we are able to have clocks that dynamically adjust for sunrise and sunset -- like SOL. the length of a day continually gets longer & shorter -- so should our watches. since all our watches have a chip in them already -- the sunrise/sunset computation should not be an obstacle. we propose the elimination of the terms of 'noon' and 'midnight' -- and always start counting 0:00 hours at sunrise.
2) DECIMAL TIME. we no longer want to use 24 hours (why 24!?!?) and 60 minutes (base 60!!) -- instead, we use decimal time -- 10 hours in a day, 100 minutes per hour. the resulting 'minute' will be 1.44 of our existing old-style minutes.
so there you have it -- no half-way medieval measures -- sunrise = 0:00 hours, there are 10 hours in a day, and 100 minutes in an hour. businesses always start at 2pm (2 hours after sunrise) -- ALWAYS, and people go home when it gets dark ALWAYS -- the business day will grow and shrink with the seasons, and all will be much more sensible, and in acccord with the natural rhythms of nature, while being easier to measure, because its all measured in decimal.
2cents from toronto
j
I never understood how DST saved anything anyhow. However, I do know that it causes a lot of intricate bugs, especially when programs contain time based loops. In most of the SDKs and Frameworks the default DateTime.Now returns the local time. A lot of software applications fail during DST switching because of loops in the code that compares two different times returns wild and unexpected results. I even had to mandate using DateTime.UtcNow in the code all the time.
Is to get you to buy stuff. The initial intent was good - to save on candles and kerosene. These days DST simply doesn't make sense and the only reason it exists is because retail lobby wants it to exist. See, you're less likely to go out shopping when it's dark outside. So they make you adjust the clock, so you'd go shopping in the evening.
The only real solution is to network all clocks and have them auto adjust by say 10 min a few times during the year. Give it 5 or 10 years and it'll be fixed. Personally i don't have much of a problem with the way it is now, i just miss an hours sleep once a year to get an extra hour of daylight in the afternoon to sit on the veranda and drink beer, but to each their own i guess.
This is a joke. I am joking. Joke joke joke.
Better yet, Hawaii!
No, really -- I hate daylight savings, with a passion. And by passion, I mean "fucking passion".
....
Twice a year, my sleep cycle is systematically deranged. It's a goddamn kick to the head, and I don't mean that in a good way -- it's like the entire country gets a massive injection of jet lag extract.
Maybe society wants to keep its members from operating at peak efficiency, so let's pull the rug from under everyone's circadian rhythms twice a year, keep 'em off balance
-kgj
Morning suck anyway. Let's go on DST permanently.
An area of Indiana around Lafayette (and Purdue University) doesn't observe DST. They stay the same all year while the areas around them switch back and forth. They suffer no ill effects from not changing their clocks twice a year. The further suffer no ill effects due to different amounts of light and darkness compared to their stable time system. Like the rest of the planet, those that need to resort to a world-wide time standard use Greenwich/Zulu. Once again, no ill effects of keeping the same time difference between their time standard and Greenwich/Zulu have been observed.
I mention no ill effects because my ex-wife, who ran a substance abuse treatment center in Lafayette, and I, running one in Virginia, compared daily intake numbers for three years. Every fall, the weekend after time changed in Virginia, we had a 250% increase in admissions. She saw no such change. As to whether a sudden smack to the diurnal rhythm forcing one into crisis and so into treatment is an ill effect or a beneficial effect remains open for discussion. The vast majority of the people in the Lafayette area will continue to not care.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Hammer time?
Say, like simply freedom and the stimuli of letting electrical rates change and be variable so utilities try to flatten their demand?
If you look at the map of where DST is used, you'll notice that it's used more the closer you get to the poles (where there's a larger swing in the length of the day between the seasons). Now, when you realize that, then it dawns on you that there's no particular reason why there should just be a 1-hour shift for everyone in the US regardless of latitude.
Why doesn't California have a 1-hour shift and Washington have, say, a 2-hour shift... and Alaska have an 8-hour shift? Seems asinine, right? Well, then why even have a 1-hour shift, then? It's a slippery-slope argument, but it's difficult to argue that, as sub-optimal as a "1 hour fits all" approach is, that it's any less optimal to scrap the whole thing completely.
So, I'd can it. However, if you *really* still want it... how about this? With so many devices (computers, phones, etc.) syncing their clocks to servers, lets just have a national conversion to server-sync'd house clocks (kinda like the upcoming switch to digital TV) and then, if you really want DST, just have the servers gradually slew it in, day by day, as the sun moves toward solstice.
A little known fact: Working from 8 to 4 (or 8 to 5, or 9 to 6, etc, etc) does NOT cause spontaneous combustion in humans! In fact, studies have proven that going to work at the same time every day doesn't even depend on what arbitrary number is being pointed to on ANY device, be it a thermostat, clock, or even altimeter.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Not to stereotype Slashdot readers or anything, but I notice nobody sees any difference between sunlight and electric light. If you go outdoors during the day, you may be surprised to find daylight has many ambient properties not provided by your basement's fluorescent bulb (warmth, happy feelings, etc).
I should buy some cement.
We should. Either way you have to do the math to figure out what time it is at the Dell help desk in India.
I like how they are doing us a favor by helping "humans to deal with the inconsistent amount of light over the year".
Didn't we evolve on this planet? Shouldn't we probably be used to it by now?
DST should be eliminated. We're in a global economy and out of sync 1/2 the year with most of the planet. DST does not "Save" a single minute nor does it add a single minute to the amount of daylight on any day of the year. For those worried about outside activities during the dark hours, they should adjust their own schedules. Kids should not walk to school in the dark. There are carpools and buses for many. while schools could easily adjust their starting hours. There is nothing more Socialist than forcing the entire American society to conform to the fears of some parents and the inflexibility of many school administrators.
A good solution would be to just have businesses and schools decide when they want to open. The TZ stays the same all year round. If a business or school wants to open early, or late, it's their decision, and their responsibility to advertise the timings.
Can't see Hindi?
duh.
if businesses want to change their hours to take advantage of light differences, fine, but there's no practical reason to change the damned time.
"Only a white man would think that cutting off the top foot of a blanket and sewing onto the bottom would result in a longer blanket."