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Is Daylight Saving Time Worth Saving?
Daniel_Stuckey writes "In politics, health, and academia, there are plenty of detractors that say daylight saving might not be worth saving. One vocal opponent is Missouri State Representative Delus Johnson, who wants to end the watch and clock switchery altogether. In short, he says we should spring forward this one last time, without ever falling back. He wants Missouri – and other states willing to join a pact – to permanently adopt daylight saving time and call it Standard Time. He's sure that it'll increase economic development in the later part of the year; giving people a little more daylight to do their Black Friday shopping. Matthew J. Kotchen and Laura E. Grant at the National Bureau of Economic Research have argued that DST has had adverse effects on energy spending. They calculate some extra $10-16 million spent by Indiana due to time changes. Their research concluded it's probably a much bigger loss in other states. A year ago, Motherboard's Kelly Bourdet reported on a health study that concluded DST might actually kill you. Chances of heart-attack were stated to increase by 10 percent on the days following the spring change, and to decrease by 10% after gaining the hour in the fall."
There's even a We The People petition about it.
Why is it so important to have sunlight in the morning, give me evening sunlight that I can enjoy after work. I don't need sunlight for my morning deuce.
Knowledge = Power
P= W/t
t=Money
Money = Work/Knowledge so the less you know the more you make
No! It's a royal pain in the ass. Get rid of it!
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
No.
This article just in time for the yearly "Should we keep DST? No, but we'll keep it anyway" cycle.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
I know it's only twice a year, but here we go again. A discussion on DST.
Oh, and we need to adjust our clocks by an hour, big deal.
There was a time when it was very, very dark at night, and it made sense to adjust the schedule so you could actually see.
But with electric lighting, it's pretty much never dark in areas where people live and work. The benefit to daylight savings is much less than it was 100 years ago.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
We should also call breakfast lunch, lunch dinner, and dinner breakfast when we do this. As it is, most high schools are so crowded the first lunch period starts as early as 10 AM. With permanent daylight saving time, it will still be dark or just breaking dawn in winter when this time rolls around.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Cut all the whiny human 'cry, cry, I'm all worked up about where the abnormally close star is right now' crap and just adopt TAI across the board. Now that is proper time.
>In short, he says we should spring forward this one last time, without ever falling back.
Since day light saving time starts this weekend, he is advocating of removing Standard Time and not Day Light Saving Time. So everybody move time zone by 1 hour.
>A year ago, Motherboard's Kelly Bourdet reported on a health study that concluded DST might actually kill you. Chances of heart-attack were stated to increase by 10 percent on the days following the spring change, and to decrease by 10% after gaining the hour in the fall."
So that's going to increase chances of heart attack for everybody.
The summary says that we should 'spring forward' without 'falling back.' However the end of the summary says that 'springing forward' increases risk of heart attack, so wouldn't it be better to wait till we 'fall back?' Picking the wrong one would mean a 2-hour shift (or maybe an overlap) between zones (somewhere over an ocean.)
--Welcome to the Realm of the Hawke--
I want to relate this to Yahoo cancelling remote work. Is DST so that way 7am will always be a certain amount of brightness all year long? So that way we can get in our cars and drive to work and be there by 8am? Why not measure productivity in a different way instead of keeping seats warm from 8am to 5pm?
One more vote for no more DST.
It's nice to see a mention of one of my great state's reps that, for once, doesn't involve them doing/saying something unspeakably stupid...
Yea, I'm talking about you, Todd Akin and Rory Ellinger.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
We should use seconds since 1970. Why 1970 you ask? Its really easy to implement, and as its a Friday afternoon I feel lazy.
Kill it dead, bury it in the textbooks of history and let daylight saving stand as a testament of the folly of man that he thought he might outwit mother nature. Incredible amounts of money and aggravation are wasted every year on this leftover from the age of agriculture.
In a modern world where clocks are set by the atom this archaic throwback to the days of the steam locomotive has gone from quaint to foolish expense. No one will miss it and society has long since moved on with these wonders we call light bulbs and headlights. We'll be okay, just like we are every other single night when the sun sets.
The time change is and always has been stupid. If we're going to "fix" this, then lets do it right and all jump directly to UTC/GMT. The number on the clock itself is arbitrary so we would be better off going with the true time standard once and for all.
Alex, I'll take keybindings not used by Emacs for $400....
If I remember correctly from history classes, the original purpose of it was to preserve daylight for farming. Think about how light it is during the summer time (at night).
However in the current "Non Agrarian" society we live in, it make no sense. Having a 23 hour day and a 25 hour day makes certain companies have a nightmare for their computer systems. Was that hour ending 02 the first or second hour ending 02 (on the 25 hour day) or "what happened to 02 on 03/10/2013 ? Oh yeah DST.."
It really doesn't help ANYONE at this time.
UPS Sucks
I can safely say moving your clocks is idiotic. If you want to work 8-4 or 9-5, it really don't matter at all. Just pick one and make it happen.
Just stop DST alltogether, don't go on it "permanently." That's just plain stupid. Businesses can have hours of 8-4 instead of 9-5, (or whatever) if they wish - but the government should just be out of it. DST doesn't save anything - it just screws with people's sleep patterns and causes missed appointments a couple of days each year
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Yes, it
's worth saving.
There, never ask it again.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I have lived with DST and without it ... if you ever live without having to pointlessly change your external and internal clocks you will not want to go back.
We should just use standard time as standard time. Seriously, it is nice living in a place that doesn't adjust. It is always UTC -7 here. Playing with the clocks is silly. If we want to get up earlier or later part of the year, just do that.
Also I really question if an hour either way makes any economic difference at all.
Seriously -- let's just all use GMT, and get rid of Daylight savings, and all use 24 hour time.
Want to schedule a meeting with your coworker 1 cubicle over? How about with your coworker over in the Paris office? Awesome: Let's meet on Monday the 22nd, at 17:34 via (insert voice/video chat system of choice).
Time zones?
Daily savings time?
AM/PM?
Ain't nobody got time for that!
coding is life
I would go with Ben's advice. He seems more reasonable, even if he doesn't get around much anymore.
Twelve AM was set up to be defined as the middle of the night; 12 PM the middle of the day. (Or 00:00/12:00 if you prefer the 24 hour clock). Don't like how dark that makes the usual active hours during the Winter? Fine - switch the hours that businesses are active. But please stop arbitrarily changing time-keeping.
Happy people make bad consumers.
Swatch internet time. Divide the day into 1000 .beats. No timezones. @100 in Moscow is @100 in London, New York and Beijing. They just start and finish working at different times.
Slight downside here - the whole concept is disturbingly 1990's "information superhighway" with '.'s and '@'s all over the place.
Chances of heart-attack were stated to increase by 10 percent on the days following the spring change, and to decrease by 10% "after gaining the hour in the fall" I've found a cure for all heart attacks! Set the clocks back an hour once a month! (I'll accept my Nobel Prize award in Bitcoins please).
For the interested.
For those who seek perfection there can be no rest on this side of the grave.
Why is it so important to have sunlight in the morning, give me evening sunlight that I can enjoy after work. I don't need sunlight for my morning deuce.
And what about those of us who enjoy the evening? Who enjoy sunsets and dusk, and would like some time afterwards? There are those who have decent access to more (semi-)rural areas as well, who would like to enjoy the stars without it getting too late.
I live in the city primarily, and I don't see how urban folk would limit their activities only to daylight hours. There are enough street lamps around that it's never truly dark.
Personally I think we should simply move back to standard time. It is, after all, what it once was before we starting futzing with it.
Let's slashdot the petition page! Well, not overload it, but get the signatures over 100,000.
only the US Govt thinks you can cut one foot off the top of a blanket and sew it on to the bottom of a blanket will make the blanket longer
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
So, heart attacks go up by 10% in the wake of spring-forward, but fall by 10% in the wake of fall-back? The solution is clear, then -- we need to adopt an official 25-hour day.
The twice-yearly clock shift really is a silly, silly exercise. Not so silly as a uniform, one-size-fits-all, year-around schedule for work, school, and entertainment, but silly all the same.
Someone thought it was a good reason and now we have it. Once we get rid of it someone will propose we adopt it again. Let's stop the nonsense of arbitrary change and stick with what we have.
The only time we talk about this is the few days around DST changing. No one actually cares enough to carry on the conversation longer than that. Replies to this are only allowed to include examples of people putting forth a real effort to get rid of it.
Sign it: Now!
Paul Lenhart writes words!
One vocal opponent is Missouri State Representative Delus Johnson... He's sure that it'll increase economic development in the later part of the year; giving people a little more daylight to do their Black Friday shopping.
LMAO.
Ignoring the fact people shop indoors, where there's this marvelous invention called electric lights and they can't even tell how dark it is outside oftentimes, the real Black Friday Rush people are either at home on their computers buying online or had to go out and stand in line at the store all through the night to get the doorbuster deals anyway.
DST, English meassures, pennies, road signs telling you how far it is to the next road sign...
My wife looked into this, from a legal standpoint.
Daylight savings is simply a federal standard for which days of the year participating states will change their times.
Read that again.
It's really a state-by-state issue, where any state can voluntarily not participate.
Talk to your state reps if you want to make a difference.
Don't steal. The government hates competition.
As a parent I say "stop the switch!". My kids will be very cranky next week and I can almost guarantee that one will end up with a cold due to the additional stress. The extra sunlight is nice yadda-yadda, but it is time to pick one and go with it.
..If everyone just forgot to do it.
Seriously, it actually takes some effort and planning to make it work; we just stop and poof, gone.
Interestingly enough, if Microsoft and Apple would just remove the daylight savings option from the clock it would take care of 90% of the effort.
We just need to go back to the pre-Bush extension start and end times.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Greetings from Arizona AKA AZT. Come on in, the water is fine.
If I had mod points, I'd give them all to you for that post.
Your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
This would split the difference between DST and standard time. This move would not be completely unprecedented. There are other timezones in the world here the time has been stepped in a 1/2 hour increment. Part of me wants this to happen just to watch all the linux machines handle the change gracefully with a simple timezone definition file update, while Windows XP machines will finally croak as microsoft won't push the service pack to handle it because that OS is now obsolete.
I don't see DST/CST going away. Seems there would be a lot of code in use that would need to be updated, thrown out, debugged, rewritten, trashed, etc. It would be worse than the y2k that wasn't.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
Come live in NewFoundLand Canada, where the province (Island) decided to set the clock one half hour of standard time, and to leave it there.
So it's 9:pm in New York, but 8:30pm in NewFoundLand. Yes, its done right here in the northern hemisphere.
Does NFD have the right idea. Instead of an hour, should we just jump a half hour? The cows canhandle waiting one half hour more before being milked.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
In January 1974, the U.S. went to DST early to conserve energy. It did mean we went to school in the dark. It also meant school kids had an excuse to play with flashlights (entirely unnecessary, but a good enough excuse and fun for the younger kids). It was a great novelty, and it was nice to have more sunlight after school when it was actually useful. Due to fear of kids getting hit by cars (in spite of the flashlights to make them visible), we went fell back again the next fall.
The question asks if daylight savings time worth saving but the summary says that abandoning standard time is the proposal.
Saskatchewan permanently went on DST, in most of its territory. Saskatchewan straddles the 105th parallel so it should be in the Mountain time zone, except for the easternmost strip. However, in 1966, it went onto mountain daylight time - and stayed there. (Technically, it went off but changed to Central time, where it has been ever since.) To this day Saskatchewan remains on CST year round.
In my city local noon is at 12:57 pm each day - solid evidence that we should be on Mountain time. But we aren't.
It's a huge nuisance, to be honest, since television schedules, airline schedules, and meetings between people in multiple time zones change (and the habit of people who are really on daylight time to continue to call their time standard time can be very confusing - witness the Winnipegger who tells a Saskatonian about an 11 am CST meeting when she really means CDT - the Saskatonian will be an hour late because he'll actually attend to the call at 11 am CST).
It would be a lot more convenient if the entire continent were ST or DT - but if there is all this evidence that DT has issues, maybe we should just, effectively, be on DT year-round.
The stupid thing is, if we had 8-4:30 workdays in winter and 7-3:30 in summer, we'd effectively *have* daylight time. But society apparently needs government to make that happen.
"In short, he says we should spring forward this one last time, without ever falling back." - So the problem is not DST, but the returning to the Standard Time....
"It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." -- Prof. Dumbledore
Just do away with time zones all together.
-- Stu
/. ID under 2,000. I feel old now.
How congress broke daylight savings time
A letter to my congressional representatives
http://world.std.com/~swmcd/steven/letters/dst.html
Everyone talks about how DST saves money. Fine then. Get rid of Standard Time instead. It is only for a few months every year anyway.
Imagine if we could actually have 24 hours in the day, all the days in the year, instead of one with 23 hours and one with 25. Imagine if every day had a 2:30AM, or if we never had one day with two 1:30 AMs. How I long for it.
DST is the one of the stupidest concepts ever created to "save energy".
You want to save energy? Build more efficient buildings with better insulation. Use better windows with better seals and better weather protection when closed. Use your fucking brain and open those windows on a breezy day for cooling and fresh air, close them if it gets too warm or the when the wind dies down. Have larger windows that allow in light and heat from that gigantic free glowing energy source outside, with good blinds when you need to block it.
Guess what? In winter, hot incandescent lights are a *good* thing (and they don't contain carcinogens, which is nice), and you'll use them more in winter when you naturally have less daylight anyway.
But in summer? There's enough daylight that you should really never even need to use artificial light in a properly designed building. One hour either way isn't going to make a shit of a difference.
DST is fucking stupid.
See how it works for Arizona.
There is a lot of bitching in the spring and fall. Here is the reality: with DST year around, it will start getting dark at 4pm around mid-December or first light will be around 5am in mid-June.
I'd like to keep DST forever, being on the western edge of a time zone.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
daylight savings time..... not worth it...
My lawn is dry enough already! With the extra hour of sunlight the whole year 'round, I'll never be able to keep it alive! ;-)
There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.
All measures of time are arbitrary and subjective. I kind of enjoy the idea of fucking with it twice a year just because we can. It sort of institutionalizes the fact that any specific point in time is represented by nothing other than whatever label we choose to attach to it.
He is absolutely right. We definitely should "spring forward" one last time, never "fall back" again. Call it whatever you want, just move to the "summer" hours and stay there. This time-changing nonsense is one of the stupidest things ever implemented by mankind.
The last time a bill was introduced to put an end to the time-changing nonsense, it was approached completely wrong. There was a huge outcry from the public on the issue, demanding that summer hours not be meddled with. Everyone was afraid of loosing the "extra" daylight during the summer time. IT NEEDS TO BE COMMUNICATED in a CAREFUL and COHERENT manner that the "summer time hours" is what we would be moving to and then kept, in other words, DST would not be "eliminated", rather it would be adopted, permanently.
This is not a hard concept to understand, but if not carefully approached, it will become completely misstated, misunderstood, and misinterpreted when combining politicians with the stupid masses.
Chance of heart attack = N
Chance of heart attack after losing an hour = 1.1*N
Chance of heart attack after gaining an hour = 1.1*0.9*N = 0.99*N
Adjust clocks daily and chance of heart attack approaches 0!
"Captain's log...."
not really ancient, but its the 21st century and we don't need to change time for stupid reasons like saving energy or for farmers. Actually the farmers need for DST is a myth as well, so nobody has a fucking clue why we still due this.
Saving energy is a farce because I live in Canada, so either the lights are on either in the morning when its still dark at 8am or at night when its dark at 4pm. Doesn't make a fart's difference in the amount of energy I use because we are screwed one way or another with DST. The majority of business and retail centers have lights on all day long, so who the hell is saving energy when dusk or dawn is pushed back or forward an hour?
Not to mention Apple still hasn't gotten DST working properly on iOS, nearly every time change my alarms get all screwed still after 6 versions of iOS, I am hoping with my new Nexus 10 Google figured out that if ( 8am alarm == 8am current time) then ring the fucking alarm regardless of what fucking timezone or DST option is enabled, Apple hasn't figured out that logic yet; iOS probably has 5000 lines of code involved in figuring out how to ring an alarm to ensure it doesn't offend some religious cult or something by not respecting the alignment of planets or some archaic calendar cycle or something.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Arizona has been doing fine with out it for many, many years.
Why move the clocks OFF from the actual noon and pretend that 1pm is actually noon?
Is there something sacred about rising at clock time of 9am rather than a clock time of 8am?
CCP Grey had a good piece on this: Linky
Only merit I see is newspaper opinion pieces about fixing droughts/global warming by ending the "extra" hour of daylight.
if (it != oneThing) it = another;
Would welcome Standard Time. If only because it'd be UTC-4 for us permanently instead of having to flip twice a year.
It cost this country *millions* to get all their software working and tested during the last change in the Bush era. I personally had to manage my company's conversion and testing, as we had to work with 3 versions of Windows, 2 versions of SunOS, 2 versions of Java to keep up with, 3 JDBC drivers, plus 2 versions of Oracle, each being patched every week in the lead-in as each had to determine if the other wasn't adapted/patched and had to work around it.
$150,000 for a simple 150 employee company to assign 5 people in development, QA, and IT, to keep up with it all for 2 months and hope like hell everything worked on the other side. And during all that time, none of the 5 of us could do stuff that really benefited our company and its product line.
Multiply that by every single small company, nevermind the huge companies like Microsoft and Oracle that had to eat all that cost of writing all those patches in the first place, and you get a wasted dollar figure so large that retail sales going up by 2% will NEVER make up for. We will never get that money back - the stock market slumped for a month in recovery.
And you want us to go through that again?
No offense, Mr. Johnson, but go to hell. I am not going through that again...
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
You could schedule work more reasonably without affecting everybody else.
Why is it that just because YOU want sunlight in the evening and can't get up unless the clock says 8am to get in to work at 9am, because if it says 7am, you cannot think it is morning?
oh, and of course all of that is even before getting into the issue of why he thinks high school students should be walking to school before the sun has come up...
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
I understand from your uid (almost as low as mine!) that back in your day you walked to school barefoot and uphill both ways, &c. &c., but in the intervening time we have invented this thing called a "school bus", which was capable of transporting me to school even before dawn!
A few years back, the Russians went to DST-365(.25) - locked the clocks forward 1 hour and stayed that way.
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
...or does this story seem to show up on /. about twice a year?
>"Representative Delus Johnson, who wants to end the watch and clock switchery altogether. In short, he says we should spring forward this one last time, without ever falling back. "
I have been saying this for many, many years. Go on daylight savings and then NEVER CHANGE AGAIN. Give us light when we can *USE* it in the winter.
The second best solution is to go on standard time and NEVER CHANGE AGAIN.
But remaining on this INCREDIBLY STUPID system of changing time twice a year is just INSANE. It does NOTHING to save energy. In fact, it does almost nothing positive at all. Yet it causes tons of lost productivity, sleep problems, irritation, confusion, and inconvenience.
And be done with it.
We now have this fancy thing call electricity, so we don't need to manipulate our day so we don't work in dark offices or drive down pitch black streets.. Its past time to end the stupidity.
The percentage of people who might perceive any benefit out of DST is well under one percent -- although I am extremely skeptical about any benefits they claim to perceive.
And a huge majority of people who are truly affected by the sun (such as farmers, for example) can simply start the day earlier or later as needed.
So the 99+ percent are inconvenienced because of something that might be perceived as beneficial to a tiny number of people.
This is a no-brainer, people. Kill it.
Next question: big endian or little endian? Eggs or bytes it shouldn't matter.
I hate having to deal with Windows date/time set and thinking (is it 7 or 8 hours?) PDT/UTC differences twice a year.
mfwright@batnet.com
If Pacific and Central both "spring ahead" one last time, and Mountain and Eastern do not, we could have just two timezones in the mainland US.
In the modern technology and knowledge econonomy, the time change is an anacronism at best and a potentially dangerous confusion at worst. In the fall, for 59 minutes and 59.00 seconds, you get duplicate time values in servers and databases tracking on local time and in the spring, you have an hour that never exists. That can cause havoc with time calculations on 24x7 systems. The most frustrating thing for me logically is how is distorts and confuses the already limited understanding thae average person has of the astronomical basis of time. It is staggering how many people who believe that somehow DST gives them an extra hour of daylight. Like somehow the earth's rotation is magically and instantly adjusted for their benefit. All that really happens is that they are simply getting up an hour earlier. The most insane thing I have yet seen is a proposal by a lawmaker (in Florida I believe) to make DST a year round thing. Huh? Wouldn't that just make it the new "standard" time and nonsensically destroy the historical significance of noon as (the equation of time and distance form the zimezone central meridian notwithstanding), the "middle" of the day and midnight the "middle" of the night? All for some fuzzy illusion that somehow time has bend made to bend and stretch for our comfort? It is all smoke and mirrors and it causes nothing but confusion and ambiguity. It blurs hard scientifc reality. It is everything we geeks profess to dispise.
I wont say more morning sunlight is a waste. I rather enjoy it.
But I get it by starting my day earlier. I dont try to coerce an entire time zone to take a trip to make-believe land and pretend it's later than it is.
Daylight savings time is just nonsense. Set the timezone and let it stay what it is. If your latitude is one where it makes sense to get up an hour earlier half the year (remember that many are NOT at such latitudes) then fine, get up an hour earlier. If you run a business, set seasonal hours. Open an hour early (and close an hour late) half the year if that makes sense, that's fine, just quit lying about what time it is, please.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
In districts with school buses, they have to have HS, middle school, and elementary starting at different times. Parental pressure for driving kids to school also requires separation.
High school has to start early in the morning so that the day is done early enough so that athletes can get to their games, preferably in the daylight (not everyone has "friday night lights", and for things like cross country, there are no lights anyway. This is a very bad time, physiologically, according to the research: 13-18 year olds do much better starting their work day at 9-10AM-ish. But, gotta finish by 2-230PM to get the athletes out on time. Count back 7 hours (6 hrs of instruction, 1 hr break) and you get start times around 7 AM.
Parents that drive their youngest kids to school want to drop off before 8, so the elemetary schools typically start around 8-830. They finish 2-3PM, so parents can schlep their kids to enrichment activities in the daylight (little league, soccer, etc.) and still be home in time for dinner and early bedtime.
Junior High/Middle school starts 9ish. Lots of 6,7,8th graders walk, bike, etc to school. It also has middle school let out late (4PM) which reduces the number of early teens swarming over the local shopping plazas, etc.
Not my *favorite* example of it (my favorite was a thread titled something like "Will Crysis 3 Run On Your Computer?" - NO!). Still, an excellent example of it. "Is Daylight Saving Time Worth Saving?" - NO!
Get the frack rid of it. Right now, preferably. Preferably *right* now, like before we lose an hour this weekend. But I'm aware these things take time. I honestly don't care one way or the other which side of the cycle we turn it off on, but please for the love of frell, just turn it off already, it's dumb.
Set your clock 1/2 hour ahead then don't mess with it.
Getting rid of DST is fine, but just stick with standard time.
We went through this under Nixon and it was terrible.
Girls got raped on the way to school and kids getting hit by cars on their way to school in the dark.
In the final analysis: It didn't save any energy, it did not lower any accident rates, it was at best a waste and a hassle. Dumping DST is fine, but just stick with standard time!
With this many comments both for and against DST on this site, whoever currently manages the TZ database had better keep a close eye on it.
Where I live, just north of the American border, sunrise could be as late as 9:05AM if daylight savings time was in effect year round. That would mean that most people would be commuting in the dark and children would be walking to school in the dim light of predawn. Both of those will increase accidents and deaths. Sunrise in San Diego would be 7:50AM. It would also cause the sun to be highest in the sky around 1PM instead of noon. One reason it is called standard time is that noon is approximately when the sun is the highest. If we are going to stop the switch I say we stay with standard time.
If you want to get up an hour earlier or later just change your alarm. Don't change time itself. Some industries can tell their employees to come to work at 8am instead of 9am. Other industries that don't care about sunlight can go on their merry way.
It makes no sense to fiddle with the clock. If you want more "sun" in the evening. Start one hour early or two and go home one or two hours sooner. The switching however result in a lot of extra cost an friction in the economy and the infrastructure. It is the most useless thing. Every year the whole society gets a minor jet lag of one hour. All for nothing.
Daylight Savings Time makes perfect sense at higher latitudes, where there is little value in having daylight at 3:00am or 4:00am so it would be worthwhile to move it into the evening.
But there is a cost and an inconvenience, and there are lots of places where the change in daylight pattern is not a sufficient benefit to justify it, and it's done mainly out of inertia.
Sadly, the time change dates in the US are hopelessly unsuited to Canada, but Canada imitated the US rules because too many people have lives that revolve around the schedules of US television.
If the argument for daylight savings time is to make more out of the limited daylight there is, then shouldn't winter be the season when we adjust the time, and not summer? Where I live, it's dark when people go to work in winter, and dark when they come back, and most of the sunlight is wasted during their work hours. Shifting that by 4 hours of so would at least make that sunlight available for outdoors activities. Meanwhile, in the summer, it is light the whole day and most of the night, so no adjustment is needed.
Doesn't the north get more than enough daylight in the summer? The further away from the equator you go, the longer the days in summer get, and the shorter they get in winter. So if anything, wouldn't you want to shift the clocks during winter instead?
I get the idea of more evening sun in the summer, but once you recognize that, what is the benefit of switching it back in winter.
In the winter I end up going to work in the dark and coming home in the dark anyway and when the day is long enough for it to matter, I would still prefer to go to work in the dark and come home in light.
Figure out the summer optimum, set it an leave it. The winter setting is nearly irrelevant.
I would prefer that sunset was between 9 and 10pm est time year round. During the winter months, getting dark around 530pm is just depressing. I want to work all day and still have 5+ hours of daylight to play in.
As a late riser living at 35 degrees latitude, I would personally prefer permanent shift to daylight savings time. It helps me to psychologically handle getting up earlier in the day.
I travelled north (in Australia) where there is no DST in late December and the sun set way too early in the day there for my liking, 6:15pm.
Maybe he doesn't think high school students are whiny bitches scared of the dark.
it isnt the students that worry me. it is the drivers not paying attention in the dark and on too little coffee.
i always lived within walking distance of any school i ever attended. the minimum distance for bussing in is generally 1.5 miles in the suburbs. some kids in rural areas have half a mile to walk just to catch the bus.
As an amateur astronomer, I find evening hours of sunlight a waste. I'd rather have it get dark sooner, to extend useful observing time earlier into the evening rather than later into the night.
What the article is arguing for isn't getting rid of DST, it's making DST permanent--the worst possible solution. To argue for getting rid of DST, which is what I would advocate, you'd have to stay in the "fall back" time and never "spring forward."
It ain't for you, its for kids waiting for the school bus
My calendar has an entry for this sunday for "life begins". Daylight savings time works. If you want to promote the shopping center, move Thanksgiving to the first of November.
As a Hoosier, our state ( Indiana ) used to be on exactly this kind of time. No "falling back". :) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Indiana )
We have only had daylight savings for a few years now and EVERYONE I know hates it. It's completely wrong for our geographic location and it was utterly moronic to implement it, but it was done through executive trickery and not voted upon by the people.
I, for one hope this measure passes and that Indiana also joins them.
( a wiki article, for those truly bored enough to read about it
Stop with the mind games and just have 1 fixed time. It should be a scientific metric not political mind game.
Above the 40 latitude lines it only gives weeks of sunlight before it is dark again.
The real problem is WORK HOURS. I remember the futurists of the 50s who besides the flying cars etc, were predicting people would work less hours per week as part of their better quality of life. Farmers were and are doing about 35 hours per week average; yet somehow with our non-agrarian societies that are supposed to have advanced, we work more hours than ever. The #2 death bed confession is regret about working too much and missing out of what is important in life.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Daylight savings is an anachronistic practice. The world runs 24/7 these days, why does it matter where the daylight is shifted within our time system?
Potatoes are friggin' magical. Can you power an alarm clock with a carrot? No, sir!
personally, i'd like to string up by their toenails the person who ever invented the idea of daylight savings time — it should be abolished. it never should have existed in the first place.
When told the reason for daylight savings time, the Old Indian said, 'Only the government would
believe that you could cut a foot off the top of a blanket, sew it to the bottom, and have a longer blanket.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
In New york, for instance, you'd be looking at most kids generally having to walk to school before the sun even comes up in the winter months, unless you also pushed all schools to start one hour later to compensate.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
some, not all, do not use this switching the clock ahead or back crap. Other countries stopped doing it all together I read aobut it some years back so I cannot give any citations, but they found out it was only driving energy usage up drastically. And in the end that is all this is about, I do not see how cutting the DST out is going to improve the economy when energy consumption will drop, it would be good to save resources, and help the environment out. Captain obvious says in doing so you lose money..
I always thought it would be more of a benefit to have more evening time, seeing how people do not get home until the evening, or do any activity till evening.. Residential energy would drop, but businesses use 24 hour lighting anyway.
Not even a little bit.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
I grew up in Alaska. You literally can't imagine what the daylight changes are like. When you get four hours (or less) of daylight, DST doesn't matter a damn bit. It will be dark by the time you're done with school, let alone work. Address that 'short sighted moron' comment a little closer to home, would you?
The fucking northern states. Sheesh.
A year ago, Motherboard's Kelly Bourdet reported on a health study that concluded DST might actually kill you. Chances of heart-attack were stated to increase by 10 percent on the days following the spring change, and to decrease by 10% after gaining the hour in the fall."
That sounds like it leaves your chances of dying in any given year pretty much unchanged. Not exactly the swarm of killer bees you want us to think it is, is it?
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
No
Short answer: No.
Long answer: No no no !
Springing ahead permanently will eventually have the same result as staying back permanently - after people and companies adjust. Of the two choices, I'd rather have 12:00 in the middle of the day or night. (I'm also a morning person who wants the golf courses open after work) If you wake up in the daylight, you are not saving any daylight.
The real reason we switch time twice a year is to keep the populace disoriented. All the better to control the great "consumer" hordes. Do you think the sociopaths who run our country bother with such stuff. They sleep the same amount every night, their golf tee times are the same, It doesn't matter if they get to the office an hour later or earlier. Nope it's all just to fuck with your heads. All the crap about energy savings and keeping the kids safe from walking to school in the dark is pure BS.
That's is why we will be stuck with this kind of crap unless we take all the crooks that run (or ruin) our country and throw them in jail, or chop off their heads.
.
Die, die, die!
It's a programming nightmare, a disaster. Get rid of it!
I advocate a system of completely local time! This is a lot like our current time zones, but rather than being zoned, times are completely continuous! Watches and cellphones merely need to make use of GPS to discover where the user is located, then adjust the displayed time accordingly.
Simple, effective, and not at all likely to lead to widespread confusion. Not at all.
char*f="char*f=%c%s%c;main(){printf(f,34,f,34);}";main(){printf(f,34,f,34);}
For a geek site, I'm astounded at the number of people who are tying their lives to an arbitrary number (time).
>"the sun set way too early in the day there for my liking, 6:15pm."
The sun rising and setting is a natural phenomenon. The sun setting too early doesn't even make sense.
Honest question: Why don't you just live your life according to how much light there is, and not according to what the politicians decided what time it is?
I have a feeling the answer for a lot of people is "TV schedules". But for most geeks (Netflix, etc.) that shouldn't be a problem.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
The real problem is that we perpetuate customs, practices, and beliefs without examining them, without evaluating their continued benefit or worth. Even if some do figure out that the practices are no longer adding any value, they have such momentum, its impossible to stop them. DST is but one of many of those things that can be eliminated.
DST can be observed by those states/prefectures/provinces/territories, just leave the rest of the world out of it. You do know we live on a globe, right? The "northern states" don't make up the entirety of that globe.
Glad someone has finally agreed with what I've been saying for years, that countries/states should just move the hour forward and remain there in that time zone. I'm pretty lucky to live in a state which kept rejecting daylight savings, because it was just being pushed by politicians who wanted it for business. Our state is already half an hour further forward in time than it should be, so the benefits were minimal as it just meant we woke up in the dark and went to bed when it was still daylight.
Sure enough, the cow costume was hanging up next to the superhero outfit and sailors uniform. (S,Spud)
A quick search on /. reveals the debate of this issue goes back years:
http://slashdot.org/story/06/11/01/2312222/prepared-for-next-years-time-change
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/07/03/12/1024226/is-daylight-saving-shift-really-worth-it
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/08/03/04/0241218/daylight-saving-time-wastes-energy
http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/03/12/1758215/is-daylight-saving-time-bad-for-you
The data is clear -- we only get 10% fewer heart attacks when given a longer weekend.
Seems like the start of any work week should be 1 hour shorter on the first day.
Instead of a 40-hr "standard", make it a 39-hour standard, with companies that don't comply paying out a proportional hazard pay for the increased mortality chances.
I.e. high risk jobs that shorten careers due to serious or fatal injury are usually accompanied by higher salaries as well as higher death benefits. If you look at the statistical evidence, you'll find that the highest number of heart attacks are on Mondays anyway -- it's obvious that its the act of starting a work week that is stressful.
We don't need, and many of us that live on the western edge of a time zone deplore, DST. I have lived 38 years, at various periods of time, w/o DST, and I never missed it. Still did lots of outdoor activities, and in April, late Sep, and Oct, liked seeing daylight when I went to work. And studies have shown that the alleged energy savings are negligible or non-existent. Supporter tout energy savings through electricity, but the real issue is fossil fuels, and because there is more daylight in the evening, people drive more, burning more fuel. Only a small amount of electricity is generated by oil.
Everybody will be happy to switch time forward, if it happen Friday in the middle of the day.
http://www.anekdot.ru/an/an0403/j040330.html#15
I suppose if americans can't understand daylight-savings then something like metric must be pretty complex.
Dyson Sphere. Would solve the problem of varying hours of daylight by geography.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
"Only a white man would believe that you could cut a foot off the top of a blanket and sew it to the bottom of a blanket and have a longer blanket."
-- Old Indian in response to Daylight Savings Time
I work from before the sun comes up until after it goes down. I could give a rats ass what time you call it.
Granted this is focused on the US, but hey, I live here.
https://www.facebook.com/UTCintheUSA
I also understand there is about as much chance at this as getting Metric in the USA, but it makes me feel better to try to fix the problem instead of only bitching about it!
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
That is all.
It would be fairly chaotic. LF353
Seriously. I always wanted one of those watches with the metric time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time
Ingredients: Turkey, Mechanically Separated Turkey, Water, Salt, Flavour.