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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.

48 of 646 comments (clear)

  1. Morning sunlight is a waste by jimbolauski · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    --
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    P= W/t
    t=Money
    Money = Work/Knowledge so the less you know the more you make
    1. Re:Morning sunlight is a waste by fustakrakich · · Score: 5, Informative

      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!”
    2. Re: Morning sunlight is a waste by Vanderhoth · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    3. Re:Morning sunlight is a waste by arobatino · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    4. Re:Morning sunlight is a waste by xclr8r · · Score: 5, Insightful

      just move it 30 mins and be done with it.

      --
      Beware of those who profit off the docile and persecute the unbelievers.
    5. Re:Morning sunlight is a waste by mill3d · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Wouldn't that just push the problem further by a few degrees?

      --
      Nothing is enough for whom enough is too little - Confucius
    6. Re:Morning sunlight is a waste by Art+Challenor · · Score: 5, Insightful

      In many northern lattitudes, this is the norm, daylight savings or not.

    7. Re:Morning sunlight is a waste by Bill,+Shooter+of+Bul · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Have you ever heard of the land of the midnight sun? The number of daylight hours changes dramatically at high lattitudes, such a system would not be workable. With such variable light, your system woudl redifne the definition of hour through out the year. In the artic circle, an hour would range from 1 day to an infatesimally small amount. Doing buisness with any would be insane. Arranging for internatinal meetings and events would not work without detailed knowledge of the sun's position at that given point. It would be fairly chaotic.

      I thought you were going to propose something sensible for a second, like only using UTC everywhere at all times of the year.

      --
      Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
    8. Re:Morning sunlight is a waste by wavedeform · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Children walk to school early in the morning..

      Ahh the "think of the children" argument. I live in a relatively safe bedroom community near a major city. There's a grade school around the corner from me. I can say with some certitude that kids don't walk to school these days.

    9. Re: Morning sunlight is a waste by DahGhostfacedFiddlah · · Score: 5, Funny

      But Who decides which words Are capitalized?

    10. Re:Morning sunlight is a waste by SternisheFan · · Score: 5, Insightful
      And "falling back" in autumn usually happened just before Halloween. Lots of kids walking the roads in the dark were getting hit by cars due to this, especially in the beginning.

      Get rid of DST, it was meant as an energy saving idea during the energy crisis of the 1970's, and never really accomplished its intended goal.

    11. Re:Morning sunlight is a waste by vux984 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      so just let 6pm be sundown and 6am be sunup, no matter where you are or what time of year it is

      You do realize that the number of daylight hours varies over the year, and by latitude right?

      In winter at even medium latitutes (northern contiguous united states) there might only be 7 or so hours of daylight a day. So 6am and 6pm would be 7hours apart and then the time from 6pm to 6am would be 17hrs long? So the length of an hour would change depending on whether it was day or night?

      Go far enough north and there is no sun up in winter. At all. How does your system of time work if there is no rising sun for a full month?

    12. Re:Morning sunlight is a waste by jythie · · Score: 4, Insightful

      UTC everywhere would be wonderful. I am so tired of confusion over meetings across timezones...

    13. Re: Morning sunlight is a waste by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      Capitalists, obviously.

    14. Re:Morning sunlight is a waste by pla · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Children walk to school early in the morning. The brighter outside it is, the better parents feel

      Fuck how parents feel. The kids don't really care.

      And I don't give a damn about the candy industry or the amount of light on Halloween, either. We, as a society, need to move beyond pandering to the whims of these "helicopter" parents turning their "precious and unique snowflakes" into a generation of helpless losers unable to grasp the idea of "don't stand in the road" and "don't get into the van" and "don't believe Mr. Timmons when he says he has a roll of dimes in his pocket for you".

      And if you take this as humor, I feel sorry for you, you've already gone too far over to "their" side.

  2. NO. by fyngyrz · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:NO. by mattventura · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Lots of things are a pain in the ass. US measurement system, silly date notation systems, IPv4, the two party system, etc. Unfortunately none of those are going anywhere anytime soon.

    2. Re:NO. by Freshly+Exhumed · · Score: 5, Interesting

      UTC with NTP... that's the way to go. Goodbye local time forever!

      --
      I deny that I have not avoided attaining the opposite of that which I do not want.
    3. Re:NO. by pixelpusher220 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Indeed, but there's literally about zero effort to just not fall back. This is low hanging fruit on the pain-in-the-ass fruit tree.

      --
      People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people :-D
    4. Re:NO. by hawguy · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Must be rough having first world problems.

      All problems in first world nations are first world problems (by definition), but that doesn't mean they shouldn't be remedied.

    5. Re:NO. by fyngyrz · · Score: 5, Informative

      Whats wrong with the date notation? It matches the exact way dates are spoken.

      You say "March 8th 2013"
      That exactly matches 3/8/2013

      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.
    6. Re:NO. by Sique · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Your argument basicly is "a measurement system is fine if you are used to it". The same arguments can be said for metric units, and they are also true. I can double, triple and quadruple metric units the same way than imperial units. I know that my body temperature should be somewhere between 36 C and 37 C, and that I have to drive carefully if the temperature falls below zero. There are exactly zero arguments for imperial units if you are not used to them. There is no reason to learn them now if you grew up with metric units. You don't gain anything (beside talking points) by knowing imperial units additionally to the metric ones.

      --
      .sig: Sique *sigh*
    7. Re:NO. by hawguy · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

    8. Re:NO. by fyngyrz · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.
    9. Re:NO. by quarterbuck · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I've heard people say 4th of July more than July 4th.

      --
      http://slashdot.org/submission/1062723/Cheap-mobile-data-plan?art_pos=2
    10. Re:NO. by draconx · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I've advocated making all even months 30 days and all odd months except November 31 days with November receiving the leap year day. Simplifies things completely and never leaves people guessing, except for if it's a leapyear or not.

      If we're going to change the months, we should just have 13 months of 28 days each, a nice even 4 weeks per month. That has one leftover day per year (two on leap years), which would not be part of any month or week. We'll call those "nameless days" or something and would fall between saturday of the last week of the year, and sunday of the first week of the next year. Those days would be holidays and everyone can have a big new year's party.

    11. Re:NO. by jklovanc · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    12. Re:NO. by FuzzNugget · · Score: 3, Insightful

      How is that any worse than...

      OK, he's in two tone zones over, it's two hours later... or is it earlier? Or is he in one of those places that's only a half hour difference? Or is it an hour and a half? Err, wait, it's one of those places that doesn't do DST, so it's actually three ... no one ... no two and a half... oh, fuck it already, I'll just leave a message.

      No, life would be WAY easier without DST and timezones, where everyone was on UTC. Who cares if the sun sets at 1800 or 0300? It would be a little jarring at first, but eventually we'd realize just how nice it is that the time is what the time is everywhere.

  3. Is daylight savings time worth saving? by DarthBling · · Score: 3, Insightful

    No.

    1. Re:Is daylight savings time worth saving? by geekoid · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Yes.

      --
      The Kruger Dunning explains most post on /. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
  4. Just in time by mwvdlee · · Score: 4, Informative

    This article just in time for the yearly "Should we keep DST? No, but we'll keep it anyway" cycle.

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    1. Re:Just in time by Rob+the+Bold · · Score: 5, Funny

      This article just in time for the yearly "Should we keep DST? No, but we'll keep it anyway" cycle.

      I was starting to get worried that we weren't going to get to have this little twice-a-year bitchfest here on Slashdot this Spring.

      Some traditions are important. They help keep you grounded and define your culture.

      --
      I am not a crackpot.
  5. Electricty has made daylight savings obsolete by MrEricSir · · Score: 4, Informative

    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."
    1. Re:Electricty has made daylight savings obsolete by pixelpusher220 · · Score: 4, Informative

      Since 'most' people work 9-5, significant daylight time after 5pm is a pretty attractive concept. The farmer works outside, so as you say it doesn't matter when it's light to him.

      To the working stiffs, it does because if it's dark in the morning and on the way to work it doesn't affect them, but multiple hours of light after work is very beneficial.

      --
      People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people :-D
    2. Re:Electricty has made daylight savings obsolete by hawguy · · Score: 3, Informative

      When you're a farmer, this is easy. When you're an hourly worker in a corporation, or any modern office worker, this is impossible in most places. (unless you're lucky enough that yours allows flexible hours.)

      I'm with the crowd to keep DST all year.

      It doesn't really help the farmer either, since the cows want to be milked at the same time each day and they rarely pay attention to DST changes.

    3. Re:Electricty has made daylight savings obsolete by Obfuscant · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I can't think of anyone who couldn't find a job with a different work schedule.

      In the US, we currently have a large number of people who can't find a job with ANY work schedule, so I think it might be a bit harder to find another job with reasonable pay in your field with a different work schedule than you think. If it were easy, those jobs would already be taken by those who don't have any job.

  6. Missouri by CanHasDIY · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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
  7. As an Arizona resident by NaCh0 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  8. Screw DST by Tyler+Durden · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.
  9. a Native American Proverb by FudRucker · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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
  10. Health effects by jeffb+(2.718) · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  11. Re:Kill it by geekoid · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I will miss it, as well many people in the north.
    Some things you should probably consider:
    1) No one is trying to trick mother natures, if you think it's about that, then you are fucking stupid and STFU
    2) There is no indicator that, overall, money is wasted
    3) "In a modern world where clocks are set by the atom "
    This underscores how ignorant you small minded you are. It has nothing to dodo the the accuracy of a clock.

    More daylight in the evening is beneficial and enjoyable.

    Yo do know we live on a globe, right? and that northern states are impacted more by the shifting about of daylight? And there aren't a lot of places that get an exact amount of day and night every year? and that not everyone gets to pick there work hours? and people do more outside in the evening then in the morning? People use more electricity for lighting in the evening then they do in the morning?

    Most people get up just in times to shower, eat and then go to work. Not a lot of relaxing hang around tyime. and if there where it would be colder anyways
    Bunch of short sighted morons.

    --
    The Kruger Dunning explains most post on /. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
  12. No need to change it... by coldmist · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.
  13. This has been tried before by sjames · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  14. THsi would be a disaster! by VAXcat · · Score: 3, Funny

    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.
  15. no, this ancient ritual has to end by TheSkepticalOptimist · · Score: 3

    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.

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  16. The Russians did that, BTW by acroyear · · Score: 4, Informative

    A few years back, the Russians went to DST-365(.25) - locked the clocks forward 1 hour and stayed that way.

    --
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    -- Joe
  17. Exactly- spring forward AND HOLD FOREVER by markdavis · · Score: 4, Insightful

    >"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.