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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.
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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."
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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).
Presumably it's that springing forward makes people late more than falling back, which increases stress, thus the heart attacks. Falling back, likewise, makes people early and reduces stress. However, the effect is only for immediately after a clock change... so it makes no sense to "wait until we fall back". The only way that logic would make sense would be to fall back every year and never spring forward... of course that won't work for obvious reasons.
Personally, I'm in favor of abolishing time zones altogether. For most people, remembering "I'm in Britain, and it's noon so it must be 7am in New York" is no more or less difficult than remembering "I'm in Britain and it's lunchtime, so it's breakfast time in New York". I'd just have to get up at 11:30 and be to work by 13:00 instead of getting up at 6:30am EST and being to work by 8am EST.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Would welcome Standard Time. If only because it'd be UTC-4 for us permanently instead of having to flip twice a year.
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
>"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.
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.
In the depths of winter we get ~9 hours of daylight.
Major Commuting starts are 7AM in the morning. Major Commuting ends after 6 PM in the evening. That's 11 hours.
No matter how you fiddle with it, most people are going to commute in the dark in the morning, or the evening, or BOTH.
I wouldn't care if it is DST all year or Standard time all year, but the switch really should go.
The Switch is definitely killing people pointlessly (Increased heart attacks and fatal accidents).
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!