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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.
This article just in time for the yearly "Should we keep DST? No, but we'll keep it anyway" cycle.
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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."
If we do away with daylight savings, we should shift all the time zones about 7 or 8 degrees farther west longitude. The sun sets too early in the eastern half (near the 'leading edge') of each time zone.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
How about because companies decide what core hours are, which tend to be relative to whether DST is in affect or not. I Know very few people that decide What hours they'll work when working forsomeone else.
I remember walking to the school bus stop in the dark when Nixon implemented year-round daylight savings time as a result of the oil embargo. It was just starting to get light by the time the bus arrived. From 1973 oil crisis :
Year-round daylight saving time was implemented from January 6, 1974, to February 23, 1975. The move spawned significant criticism because it forced many children to commute to school before sunrise. The pre-existing daylight saving rules, calling for the clocks to be advanced one hour on the last Sunday in April, were restored in 1976.
Doesn't sort well.
20130308 sorts perfectly. That's why, I suspect, that the standard way to express the date is "2013-03-08" (see the 1988 ISO 8601 standard), as it also sorts perfectly.
For that matter, date+time as 20130308120000 sorts perfectly. I use it in all my database work. Throw in some separators, viz. 2013-03-08 12:00:00 and it's perfectly human readable and makes sense right out of the gate, most significant to least.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Every time I have to deal with timezones I wish everyone was UTC I know for a lot of people including my self the next day would change part way through the day but it's so annoying to deal with as many time zones as we have today. While we are at it can we fix it so no month has less than 30 days or more then 31?
Things would be worse without timezones since it's not like everyone will go to have a 09:00UTC - 17:00UTC workday, they'll work based on the local solar time (which is why timezones were invented in the first place). So without timezones you'd have to remember "Let's see... it's 14:00 UTC here now and I just got to work, so is my west coast colleague awake yet? Hmm.. let me look up the sunrise. Oh yes, here it is, his local sunrise is at 14:30UTC so he's probably still in bed, I guess I better call him later. I wonder when he'll get off work...hmm...if sunrise is at 14:30, he probably starts work around 16:30, so maybe he'll be home around 01:30UTC.
Fixing the calendar is hard since (like timezones), years are tied to natural phenomena and 365 is only evenly divisible by 5 and 73. So you could have five 73 day months (plus a leapday), or maybe could go with 13 months of 28 days to give 364 days. Just make the extra 1.25 days a holiday.
If you don't understand why putting things in date time order is valuable, I'm certainly not going to attempt to teach you. Hey, aren't you missing an episode of "Lost" or something?
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
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
As for the farmers -- the people whom this was originally meant to benefit
Farmers ignore daylight saving time as they have to deal with animals who are governed by the sun and not a clock. Daylight saving time was instituted so there would be more sunlight in the evening and therefore lower resource use. Read a bit of ,a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time#History">history. Notice there is no mention of farmers as a reason for DST.