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A Plan To Fix Daylight Savings Time By Creating Two National Time Zones
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Allison Schrager writes in the Atlantic that losing another hour of evening daylight isn't just annoying. It's an economically harmful policy with minimal energy savings. "The actual energy savings are minimal, if they exist at all. Frequent and uncoordinated time changes cause confusion, undermining economic efficiency. There's evidence that regularly changing sleep cycles, associated with daylight saving, lowers productivity and increases heart attacks." So here's Schrager's proposal. This year, Americans on Eastern Standard Time should set their clocks back one hour (like normal), Americans on Central and Rocky Mountain time do nothing, and Americans on Pacific time should set their clocks forward one hour. This will result in just two time zones for the continental United States and the east and west coasts will only be one hour apart. "America already functions on fewer than four time zones," says Schrager. "I spent the last three years commuting between New York and Austin, living on both Eastern and Central time. I found that in Austin, everyone did things at the same times they do them in New York, despite the difference in time zone. People got to work at 8 am instead of 9 am, restaurants were packed at 6 pm instead of 7 pm, and even the TV schedule was an hour earlier. " Research based on time use surveys found American's schedules are already determined more by television than daylight suggesting, in effect, that Americans already live on two time zones. Schrager says that this strategy has already been proven to work in other parts of the world. China has been on one time zone since 1949, despite naturally spanning five time zones and in 1983, Alaska, which naturally spans four time zones, moved most of the state to a single time zone. "It sounds radical, but it really isn't. The purpose of uniform time measures is coordination. How we measure time has always evolved with the needs of commerce.," concludes Schrager. "Time is already arbitrary, why not make it work in our favor?""
The title contains a pet peeve of mine: it's Daylight Saving Time, not 'savings.' It's not a bank where you deposit an hour and get it back in a 'savings account.'
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Time may be arbitrary, but not when the sun rises and sets.
I volunteer Allison to live in the areas of the country where the sun rises at 3:00 in the morning.
Wahh..its a different time than it is in New York. Wahh wahh, resetting my clock when flying to hipster douchebag towns like Austin is too fucking hard! WAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!
Can't we just standardize with 1 time zone and shift our schedules to conform to that?
Or, how about all of use move to the UK, Portugal or one of the W African nations that are on 'zulu' time? That would fix things.
I just wish my car clock were correct more than 50% of the year.
time zones exist because the sun sets later in the west than it does in the east. It was a fact I knew but didn't fully grasp until I moved 400 miles east along roughly the same latitude in the same eastern time zone. We were sitting outside enjoying a camp fire on the summer solstice when some one asked when the sun would set. Having spent many a summer outside at my previous place I knew it would roughly be 9pm. however I didn't take into account the difference 400 miles makes. The sun really set 30 minutes earlier.
Now in a corporate world time zones only matter in relation to when other people will be at their desks. However in the real world, where one has kids, and after school sports, hell even trick or treating, it makes all the difference in the world. Those on the eastern edge will always be screwed by things shutting down earlier. As so much just can't be done after dark, and it gets really expensive to light up every field, park, and body of water just to be able to live life after work.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
The reason for timezones is to somewhat coordinate daylight with when we are up and about. Obviously this can be shift a bit each way and the seasons certain screw with that, but on the plan OP posted, the west coast would be light until after 1am in the Summer and remain dark until about 10am in the Winter.
If you'd want to do two zones, they should be at least two hours apart from each other.
I say just do away with daylight savings time altogether! All we really need is two time zones: one for east of the Mississippi and one for the west. Simplicity is underrated.
Is to abolish it. It serves no legitimate purpose anymore. Standard time for all!
You should move to Scandinavia. Then you'll realize how silly is is for Americans to bitch about when the sun rises and sets in the extreme months.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Go ahead, do whatever you want to the time system. Give each country its own zone, move us all to UTC, switch us over to .beats, whatever. I really don't care. Just make sure my sys-libs/timezone-data is updated and that you don't break NTP while doing it.
I'm rarely in a meeting where more than half the people are on the same hemisphere, let alone timezone. If you're going to make time correspond to anything other than the position of the sun, then why don't we all just swich to UTC?
Seems some busybody wants to change the status quo every few years, which leads to a lot of patches. Stop it already. Take a vacation during switch or something to acclimate to the new hours.
Daylight saving time is a pain, that I would like to see eradicated. I've lived in areas that adhere to DST and I've lived in areas that don't, though they have all been in lower latitudes. In those lower latitudes, no DST is a far superior system. I'm uncertain how it would feel in upper latitudes.
But, two time zones is ridiculous outside of fantasy land.
http://romanvoices.wikispaces.com/Roman+Timekeeping
With computerized everything, we can just alter the days in perfect sync. And once we kill television schedules and make everything on demand it won't matter "when" something comes on!
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Do something more productive, instead of jetting back and forth between time zones and causing Global Warming just take a pill or something and chill out.
And less so now when most clocks are set automatically, and the few that aren't have 'dst' switches. Get to work an hour earlier or an hour later. It is just one of those costs of living in society. I know some people are very compulsive, and this causes stress, but I see DST no more inconvenient than speed limits. If there is a real problem it is that instead of just going with majority rule on something that is largely trivial, some communities are boneheads and want everything their way.
That said, I think most of the reasons for DST have diminished with time. While switching is easier now, the world is different. The fact that the US is now completely linked with instant communication and many people are now no longer primarily part of one region is a factor.
At some point a rational discussion on this will be possible, and it will likely end. Some of this going to be generational. While some of the world have been using DST from the early 20th century, in the US has only been widespread for maybe 50 years. This means that some people who are very attached to it are still alive.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Why can't a conclusion be phrased as a statement instead of as a rhetorical question?
Half a year you go to sleep with one hour difference. People change their sleeping activities more frequently voluntarily.
This change doesn't show statistically.
Putting more of the morning commute for schoolkids in the light is a good reason for DST
Part of the proposal here is to reduce the U.S. to two time zones. The Eastern time zone would be on the same time as what's now Central Standard Time.
I'm in Boston, MA. Under the proposed change, sunset in December would come at 3:11 p.m. Um, no, thanks.
.. which is time zones in the first place. They stem from the times when circumnavigating the globe took months if not years, and even back then it was not really useful. Time zones in general bring more harm than good and they only exist in order to feed our habits of having specific digits on the clock when we do various things. Whenever there is a need for something unambiguous and not susceptible to errors people learned long ago that the only way is to use single time description for the whole planet. Aviation, military and many other services use the only reasonable, unambiguous time description: "Zulu time" aka UTC. When you really think deeply and throw away the "that's impossible" prejudices about time zones - there is really nothing that we would lose by throwing away them completely and saving lots of confusion, unnecessary dealing with them, unnecessary handling of errors with them, etc.. There is only one thing that would be very difficult to adjust ourselves to: New Year would have to start in full sun in some places...
Now, mod me down freely. My karma can't get any worse...
"The actual energy savings are minimal, if they exist at all."
Blah, blah, blah...She obviously doesn't know if they're minimal, because she doesn't know if they exist. You can love or hate it, but at least if you're going to argue for one side or the other, present some fucking facts.
Just another day in Paradise
The only thing more wasteful than Daylight Saving Time is all the time people spend griping about it and pushing some great plan to eliminate it.
An hour difference in my sleep has the affect of a couple drinks on me.
I wake up groggy and tank up with caffeine - which results in an attention span of a gnat.
And I'm driving on the road with you.
I can see so many flaws in the thinking here it's just not funny.
But hey, journo's can say what they like and not really correctly weighted references to their reasoning.
'There's evidence that regularly changing sleep cycles, associated with daylight saving, lowers productivity and increases heart attacks'
So how regular is twice a year? This entire line makes me wonder where these people get their PhD's from.
... they abolished Standard Time and kept DST.
Really, they did.
It's absolutely true. Every day that clocks go back an hour, heart attacks increase by approximately 4%. In fact, the incidence of many phenomena seems to increase by 4% on these strange days. What an enigma.
Yes, China's 5 time zones operate on a single time zone, which works great if you're in Beijing, but sucks balls if you're one of the poor schmucks in Urumqi who has to get to work at 3am.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
When the Bush-era change happened, I supervised the change in my company, having to track the dozens of updates of Windows, Java, and Oracle (often because each one had to incorporate a patch to detect if one of the other two had not actually been patched). This amounted to basically $50,000 of my companies dollars wasted for no actual benefit - $50,000 just to say we still worked.
And the worst thing about it all was that even after all that money on our part, and on the part of Microsoft, Sun, and Oracle (who saw even less money relative to the efforts it took), nobody would be able to say 100% that it was "right". There still could have been one stupid little detail that would have gotten it wrong on the day of the switch or projecting forward to the switch-back.
Current estimates is that the DST change of 2005 cost the economy $5 billion in expenses *just to keep working at all* - that's 5 billion that wasn't spent on improvements, or new features, or anything actually giving new value to their customers. It simply ceased to exist, for the illusion of savings in other markets (energy and retail) that never materialized.
And I still saw most of my local trick-or-treaters after dark, so saying an extra hour of light for Halloween also was a pointless exercise.
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
"People got to work at 8 am instead of 9 am, restaurants were packed at 6 pm instead of 7 pm"
People wake up at 9am to work in New York and eat their dinner at 7pm?
I'm Canadian, in the same timezone(EST) and we generally wake at 6AM to work at 7AM and eat between 5~6PM here... What is wrong with you americans?
"daylight saving [...] increases heart attacks."
Especially in the group of people that regularly get angry about daylight saving.
What does it matter if we happen to live somewhere where the clocks say 7pm when the sun rises? I say one global time and you just use common sense when calling people far away ... like you got to do now when calling overseas anyways. I don't remember when daylight savings kicks in in Germany but I know they are ~4-6 hours away so sometime before noon seems okay.
Heck we could even schedule things with the sun like people that work for themselves (farmers, construction etc) already can. You go to work sunrise + 1hr and work whatever number of hours that are expected. Everyone gets some daylight hours to themselves sure more in summer than winter but you aren't trying to dance the time around so that you can try to get some daylight only to epically fail in the northern latitudes: I live near Toronto sunrise in the winter is ~8am and sunset around 5 so you can literally commute to work in the dark and it is dark by the time you live the office seeing the sun for 0 hrs a day isn't a good thing if for no other reason than sometimes you need to do something outside where you can see what you are doing.
I fight this in the office all the time and I don't see why cross office/company interaction needs to be any different: we need to remove the dependency on concurrent interaction. People send email and then knock on the door 10 min later and ask if you've seen it. We need to get in the habit of planning work enough that we can wait a couple days for a reply almost always and then learn to wait patiently not block waiting to make progress because we insist on dealing with things one at a time regardless of if the necessary person has time at the moment.
. . . then at the end of the year, I have a few days to myself.
- Steven Wright
"Lost time is not found again."
1. Human beings don't need daylight. Evolution disagrees with you. 2. Americans schedule their day based on television. The trends towards time shifting the medium are increasing. The television audience is decreasing due to competing forms of entertainment. 3. It would be easy. Our infrastructure is built around the current framework. Who here has seen bugs from moving DST this week? I know I have. 4. States would cooperate with this plan when we have two that ignore the established system. We have states that enjoy flaunting less intrusive national laws that effect far fewer individuals. 5. Congress can't even pass a budget. They have important issues that need to be addressed that they are unable to resolve. The ineptitude and inefficiencies are dragging down our economy, our reputation and our elected representatives seem to only be concerned with their own jobs. If you want to fix something, let's start with something that is actually broken.
You think it might happen because it would be good for the economy in general? Did you learn nothing from the recent government shutdown and threats to limit the debt ceiling? Our "representatives" in congress don't give a shit about the economy at large, only their own personal economies.
The only way this could happen is if there was a huge financial player interested in it happening. Why would one of those guys spend money and political capital to push something like this through congress if they aren't going to make a decent financial return on it? It can't/won't happen until someone figures out how to make a boat-load of money from the change. Until then, forget it.
There is only one real fix - abolish time zones completely. As the summary states, time is arbitrary. Duration may be based on something concrete (like the decay of a particle or something), but the actual time itself is indeed arbitrary. Let's just agree that everyone uses UTC and call it done. Can you imagine the benefit? When is that world cup football (US: soccer) match on? Oh, at 17:00. Who gives a rat's ass where it is now? It is on when it is on. No, hmm, it is in Brazil, that is x time zones from me - wait am I forward x or back y from that - heck, when the fuck is it on! Just one time. World wide. Why does it matter if we get up at 23:30? It is arbitrary. If your boss then expects you at work at 2:00 - fine. Later in the year, if they want to change that to 3:00, no problem. But the time itself is just a referent. There is absolutely no reason that it cannot be 14:00 in California, Singapore, and the UK at the same instant. Who cares where the sun appears to be if you look up at that same instant? It doesn't matter. What matters much more is being able to coordinate things easily on a global scale. Get it done!
The article seems to state that the problem is the constant changing of the time forward and backward due to DST. The proposed solution involves one final change at a regular DST interval, then no longer using DST. However, that change also involves redefining our four US timezones into two as well. I understand that it may be easier to make major timezone changes all at once, but I'm not sure the second is really related to the first.
I've seen other suggestions about simply not using DST anymore. It sure seems to me that today's modern technology and 24x7 scheduling make the idea of shifting daylight hours to different parts of the clock seem a bit outdated. Do we really save that much electricity on lighting to counteract the issues of dealing with changing the time around every six months?
Something I read previously suggested switching to Summer time and no longer using Winter time. Here in Michigan, it starts getting colder and darker earlier, then the DST change hits and it's suddenly dark pretty much as soon as you leave work. I'm not a fan of the author's suggestion to switch to Winter time (even if it is the "Standard" time) permanently. I'd much rather deal with dark mornings and have a little bit of light after work during the winter. I'm at the later edge of Eastern Time, so this effect should be even worse for those on the East Coast who would be seeing sunrise and sunset before me.
The author seems to make some reasonable points about people matching their activities to other timezones. I don't have enough experience to say whether that's really true for the majority of people, so as to justify converting the whole timezone. If we were to do this timezone rearrangement, the DST change might be a good time to do it, since people are already accustomed to moving their clocks an hour. However, I don't think it really has anything to do with the DST change, and personally I don't like the idea of my timezone moving to Winter time permanently.
Humans are diurnal (dI-UR-nal).
It means we sleep when it's dark and wake when it's light. (compare nocturnal)
The primary purpose of DST is to keep our scheduled wake time (as determined by school, work, etc) close to sunrise.
Everything else (energy savings! more shopping hours!) is just confusion and wishful thinking.
The controlling factor isn't east-west, it's north-south.
The further north you go, the more sunrise time varies with the seasons, and the more an adjustment like DST helps.
Stuffing the whole country into two time zones is a non-fix for a non-problem.
See also
How congress broke Daylight Savings Time
http://world.std.com/~swmcd/steven/letters/dst.html
Well, if you are going to go as far as the Shrager suggests, then why not just eliminate all time zones. Let people on the West Coast get up and go to work at noon and go home at 8pm? Or you could go the otherway and people in New York get up and go to work at 6am and go home at 2pm but using the standard clock in CA. Or, you could pick the midwest as the middle and let both costs, were the majority of people live either go to work and school in the dark or come home that way.
If you don't like Daylight Saving Time, fine lobby to abolish it or to make it permanent. That is a totally different case than eliminating time zones.
I've never given a crap whether the sun rises or sets a little earlier or later. It's winter anyway and not really all that sunny, so I don't actually give a damn whether it's dark or not and from what I can tell neither does anyone else.
We should just move to a single time zone and be done with it.
Rather than wait for the goverment to tell us what time it is, why don't we all just establish our own new time zone (one for the whole country would be nice) and use it exclusively. Eventually the govenment will have no choice but to follow along.
If I, and every person and business I associate with use a single time zone, then it really doesn't matter what any law says. I don't think I can be arrested for what time my phone/watch/clock says it is.
In this integrated globalized World, having one time zone for the planet makes perfect sense. We are all on 24/7 schedules anyway, so what difference does it make if I'm getting up 6AM local or 11AM UTC? It's just a number.
And if I had a store job, they're hours could just be 12PM to 12AM or whatever.
It would be wonderful to be able to say to someone in India "The meeting is at 1500" and not worry about time zones.
Sigh ... it'll never happen though because my fellow old people wouldn't be able to adjust. They'd put up some sort of fight and we vote more than the rest of you.
Time zones were useful when we worked with clocks and dead-tree calendars. Those are antiquated.
Modern comms make schedule adjustments easy and business "operating hours" would be more useful to all concerned if posted in GMT. If I need to contact a different country I don't have to figure out their time zone.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Or "we the people" could just start using a single time zone and fuck what time the government says it is. They'd be forced to follow along.
Since we're introducing new concepts here, I propose something I call "Daylight Wasting Time." We all get up an hour later and go to bed an hour earlier regardless of the time of year. To heck with the lawn, having time to shovel snow, etc. And oh, yes: leave the clocks alone.
WHy not use TAI? It *has* an epoch defined and a rate. It has no leapseconds, so those HFT folks worrying about their transaction posting on the wrong day will be happy. The zero time is 1959
China is a Totalitarian Communist society where you can be shot if you complain too much... especially if you're a poor peasant who, working on the land, might be most affected by the inconvenience of a wide divergence between local time and "sun time" and isn't a great fan of Mao.
Alaska is composed of few cities and 100,000's of square miles of (mostly) uninhabited back country... the Unorganized Borough. Moose and caribou don't care about your lack of DST, man. They follow the sun anyway.
Please try again.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
Crackpot changes to daylight savings time and time zones get proposed all the time. Every once in a while, the changes actually get implemented, usually to everyone's detriment -- year round DST (US, since repealed), double DST (UK, also since reversed), moving the dates around a few weeks, etc.
For some reason it's easier to mess with time than it is to mess with schedules that depend on time. Which is why this proposal is a dumb one. It puts Central and Mountain permanently one hour ahead of solar time (which was terrible when Carter did it). It puts California permanently two hours ahead of solar time.
If some dictator were to appear and demand this happen, of course eventually schedules would be adjusted, but once that happens, you lose the benefits anyway -- if your East Coast office work hours are 9 to 5 Eastern, and your West Coast office work hours are 11 to 7 Western, that's no different than it is today.
And once we kill television schedules and make everything on demand
I don't see how that can happen. There's a strong preference for watching sport telecasts with a delay of less than thirty seconds after the action happens. Cable companies have realized that this is their big advantage over "over the top" VOD-over-IP services such as Netflix, with Xfinity (Comcast's home brand) advertising that it has "the most live sports."
Nobody will take that away from you. Period.
The trends towards time shifting the medium are increasing.
Let me know when people start time-shifting Sunday Night Football or Monday Night Football.
Wow, nobody tell them that the light actually does hit the planet at different times in different parts of America. Apparently the author didn't realize that.
I just use Daylight Saving Time all the time. I'm fine with everyone else being wrong, as long as it gets dark at 5:30 on the shortest day of the year instead of 4:30. Dark at 8am? So what, 8am sucks anyway. Worried about school kids? Set their schedule so they have an 8 hour day that always has daylight in whatever region you are in.
DST is an anachronism from the German Reich in the two World Wars. A generation from now, when DST has finally been relegated to history and people no longer take it for granted, governments forcing their citizens to lie to themselves about the time will seem just as perplexing and absurd as other fascist traditions already seem to us now.
Using for Messing up everyone else's time just to serve the interests of the East Coast is a terrible idea. That they use China's subjugation of western provinces as an excuse for this "time zone imperialism" is again reminiscent of the fascists.
Even if we conceded the utility of collapsing the US from four time zones to two, the Atlantic writer's proposal would certainly not be the way to go. One desirable characteristic of setting time zone boundaries is to minimize the difference, whether positive or negative, between the clock and solar time. If it didn't matter, she might as well have picked any two random zones in the world. She clearly is aware of that principle, but she blew it in the application. As her proposal stands, Central and Eastern would always observe Eastern. Okay. But Pacific and Mountain would observe Central! Think about it. Central does not get to observe its own true time, while two other time zones do observe it, with one of those having a two-hour offset! The obvious solution is this: Pacific and Mountain observe Mountain. Central and Eastern observer Central. Now you would be using the two time zones most central to the country, with no zone offset more than an hour from solar. And two of them would have no offset.
Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Speaking on behalf of the rest of the world, we are very thankful that the USA has timezones. I'm too scared to think what Windows would be like if it was written to support a single timezone.
I don't see why we don't look into tilting the Earth's axis back perpendicular to the plane of the ecliptic. Bam! Problem solved. And none of those pesky seasons either.
Those of us who are lucky enough to live in Arizona (the Navajo nation notwithstanding), know the benefits of not having to deal with Daylight Savings. But we also know the downsides. People who live east of us are regularly calling at 7am before we open for business instead of 8am thus disturbing our sleep cycles.
I hate the "think of the children" argument, but this really fucks up a lot of people with developmental disabilities. My cousins with downs? 3 weeks of pain. Autistic son? 3 weeks of pain, twice a year, when his habits get fucked up for nothing.
Oh by the way, NYC is not all of EST. Much of the country on EST starts work at 7:00 or 8:00, not 9:00.
It would be easy for your employer, and for schools to simply adjust the time at which people are expected to arrive. If some employers did it and others didn't, or some did it by different amounts or on different dates, it would also thin traffic at rush hour and lunch which could save lives, but cost more in labor for places that are only open at those times. If I were an employer I would have the work day begin after sunrise by the amount of my employees average commute, plus some margin. So your start time is different each day by a minute or two. I would rather have them mix up now and then and be a little late, than wake up in the dark and be groggy for a few hours.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
interesting proposal. but article not mention Alaska, Hawaii, Guam, U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa, Northern Mariana Islands?
I know a lot of people hate what may seem to them to be random adjustments of the time. Personally, I like the way the time ends up aligning with daylight better after the adjustment, but I hate the way it's a big jump, all at once, twice a year. I would really like to see continuous adjustment of the time, such that noon is always the time at which the sun is at the highest point in the sky. Yes, this would be a pain for people who still wear watches, but I'd think we could manage it for all the core infrastructure (i.e. networks and stuff). TZ
This skews time to work to the benefit of the coasts rather than the heartland. Not my idea of fair.....
Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc
I am up for this ALL THE WAY!
I have worked almost my entire professional Engineering career in the electrical power generation industry and NEVER have understood why UTC is not the "standard" for all "time stamps" - sure would make dealing with the [expletive deleted] USNRC and their [expletive deleted] attitude that NOTHING exists in "fly over land" between their artificial boundaries of 150 mile of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans (dumb-ass ex-nuke navy pukes!). [Lord, I apologize for that one there, and please be with all the starving Pygmies down there in New Guinea! Amen! ]
I am working on my siblings and remaining parent to understand that is why I have all their computer clocks set to UTC for the "time zone".
IF I may, however, the "unions" would NOT like this, because it means that they lose the [expletive deleted] B.S. issue of what is considered to be "normal working hours", in an 'industry' that runs LITERALLY continuously.
that changing what time your clock says has nothing to do with how long the Sun is visible, right?
There's a petition to get the White House to consider her change. http://wh.gov/lWFgg
Move the clock back 1/2 hour...done.
I found that in Austin, everyone did things at the same times they do them in New York, despite the difference in time zone. People got to work at 8 am instead of 9 am, restaurants were packed at 6 pm instead of 7 pm, and even the TV schedule was an hour earlier.
Uh, yeah. TV shows are going to run an hour earlier. Network and cable television channels are run on two different station feeds, one runs on Eastern Time, the other runs on Pacific. People who live in Central Time are going to be given the Eastern feed since it more closely meets the intended broadcast time of the shows. Television, while the content itself is pre-recorded, is shown live from the feed. A local delay of an hour on all programming wouldn't even be an option on satellite since the same dish up in the sky is being used for multiple time zones. So the famous line "Film at 11" referring to the nightly news is for ten o'clock news over here.
Reducing the number of time-zones is a very good idea, especially in the modern era of telecommunications and broadcasting.
I suspect this is why the USSR operated all on Moscow time and why modern India is on a half-hour timezone to fit in. I'm not sure anything explains Venezuela, still less Newfoundland :)
I actually like DST, but if we're going to mess with it let's just dump time zones altogether, they don't really serve a purpose anymore.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
Repeal Obamatime!
People do NOT get to work in Austin at 8 AM.
With all the other B*S we have to deal with in our country he wants to inject such a mandate. This sounds like something that the current Administration would try pulling!!! SO why stop there??? Make it one F*ing time zone? F* me, F*ckity, F*ck, F*uck!!!
A clock is a coordination tool. Splitting time up into different zones only hinders coordination. Just set everything to UTC or some other arbitrary mark and do away with DST.
The parent is being facetious, but this is still a valid point. In some countries, office hours start at 09:00 or even 10:00. In others, everyone is on deck at 07:30. Why do people in the US think that all office workers have to work 8 to 5? Even in the current system, it would make sense for places on the East edge of a zone to keep different times than places on the West edge. Why are people so slavishly tied to the numbers on a clock?
Why watch live and be force fed commercials?!?
So that you know the final score the moment it becomes final without spoiling the rest of the game. As far as I can tell, it's OK to DVR it and fast-forward past the downtime and commercials between plays, so long as the viewer has caught up to live by the fourth quarter's two-minute warning.
The proposal in the article sounds stupid and is certainly not less confusing.
My suggestion- STOP F'ING WITH TIME. Just STAY on Daylight Savings time all year long and stop changing it. Done
No more adjustments. No more confusion. No more going to work in the dark AND getting home in the dark.
Just stop. Mind you, I'd be happy with a country-wide single-time-zone if and only if either I were at the western edge of it, or if we just pushed the clock ahead 2-2.5 hours ahead before standardizing it.
All of the "just change your schedule instead of the time" arguments come from a naive understanding of what it's actually like to hold a regular job like most people have: your employer is pretty much the one and only determiner of your schedule for the majority of your week and your life. "Hey, I'm just going to come into work a few minutes later each day in the winter, and I'll start to float back the opposite way once spring kicks in" presumes the corporate world gives a damn about your scheduling needs. Most of the working world does not have the luxury of a job that, if they arrive 30 minutes late as a regular basis, they will not be fired from. Many people who work in workplaces with a time clock will get fired if they're a few minutes late from the employer-mandated start time more than a few minutes per month.
Also, many detractors of DST obviously don't have to schedule their work life with the starting times of their children's schools. "Well, if everyone floated,they could all float the same!" That's simply not happening. Workplaces like standardized time for a reason: because it places the burden of scheduling the workplace on the employer without having to have complicated time shifts every day (or every few weeks). If you have a job and children, and they shift time expectations in blocks independent of one another, the problem persists.
Many DST-detractors also seem to presume that, if you have children, getting them to school is simply a matter of getting them up in time to catch the bus, or to walk. Most areas of the country either do not have dependable public transportation where children can learn to commute themselves, nor live within walking distance of their school, and an increasing number of parents have to drive their children to school every year precisely because tight education budgets means something has to get cut, and school busing is one of the first to go - and it's easy to justify, because the logic is that if the parents don't approve a busing millage, they're the only ones who will be inconvenienced by it, anyway. Admittedly, this is a political failure where the citizen is somehow given collective veto power over the funding of schools, police, and fire services, but can't disapprove "millages" for any meaningful government spending such as corporate tax breaks and military weapon systems.
As far as California goes, some of its tech service sector effectively works from 5 to 5 precisely because they have to serve the needs of a country whose major business hubs are either in Eastern Time, Central Time, or Pacific Time. Mountain Time is said to exist, but I have deliberately chosen to forget it does.
Moving to one time zone wouldn't be impossible, of course. China does it and they are, roughly speaking, as wide as the mainland US.
Whatever the solution is, if it means that most Americans who leave work after 5PM get almost no useful daylight time for much of the year, it's a dead letter, and that won't change regardless of how many slashdotters who make their own hours tell them to "just" adjust their schedules.
I always hear about how DST was about "giving farmers more daylight to get their farming done to keep America's breadbasket full".
That's so stupid. I've lived and worked on a farm. You tend to get up early enough that it's dark out any way. You tend to go to bed when the work is done whether it's still light out or not. We have electricity and light, these days. For the most part, work gets done early and you tend to go to bed while it's still partially light out, either out of exhaustion or because there's nothing to do and you'd like to be well rested for the morning. The clock often doesn't get switched to daylight saving's time until a day or two later when somebody gets back from town and remembers to mention the clocks are all different. Everybody's too busy to sit down and fiddle with their clocks. Daylight savings, whether forward or back, is immediately met with ridicule and complaint.
I've read about some really rustic farmers who still get up at "the crack of dawn", sandwiching wake-up somewhere between the rooster's call (which can be at 3am, you never know) and the beginning of sunrise, as long as a look out the window shows some light. I don't think they give a rat's ass about daylight savings time, either.
And if you aren't a farmer, how much does one hour of daylight savings save you? Save you in terms of what? Save you from a boring life where time is reliable and routine is, well, routine? I've never met one person, my whole entire life, who felt that Daylight Savings Time should be maintained. Especially while I've lived in Michigan, where the concept of daylight is sort of a joke. Nobody here in Michigan would care if the beginning and end of the day shifted back and forth, and in my opinion most people would be slightly more intelligent because they would benefit from a direct relationship with the real nature of astronomical time, of light and the effect it has on the seasons due to axial precession. Shifting the frame of reference back and forth robs people of this natural adjustment to their latitude, and attempts to stuff them into a weird and artificial day.
Granted, most people would just get up when they felt well rested and felt like doing things, and would just go out and hunt and gather, if left entirely to themselves. But, we work according to a clock. But shifting the clock back and forth under command does, as I pointed out, rob a person of the ability to experience the regular, back and forth shifting of natural light. I think people would find it very worthwhile to get to experience how driving to work at 8am means driving under a different ambient light at different times of year, and that the degree of change is different depending on what latitude they live in. It would be a decent trade-off for living on a clock.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
Switch to GMT and be done with it.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
>> I've never met one person, my whole entire life, who felt that Daylight Savings Time should be maintained. Especially while I've lived in Michigan...
I should have corrected that to, "and the sentiment against DST is Especially strong in Michigan", because I was already speaking in an absolute term. I have never met anybody who supported DST and thought it was a meritable exercise, but I have met people who "never really thought about it". In Michigan, I've met very, very few people who don't have some strong opinions about Daylight Savings Time and how it needs to be put where the sun doesn't shine.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
Switch the entire world the Zulu Time - We no longer have any need for Timezones. All that you would then need to communicate is that my office is open from 2200-0600 and everyone around the world will know not to bother calling at 0800 since no one is there.
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
Actually the tv schedule has three time zones not two. Central and Eastern combine, but there are still two more. And the Alaska example is ignorant; being so close to the north pole makes the longitude span meaningless. But abandoning the summer/winter time shift is a good idea. At least it would be one less thing for people to bitch about twice a year.
Sure. Just go changing the time zone rules again. Good luck patching older versions of Java you're stuck supporting if you don't have a paid Oracle support contract that gives you access to the TZUPDATER utility.
See here: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/timezones-137583.html#tzu
Sun used to provide that tool for free. So did Oracle (until about a year ago.)
No need for the officious, wasteful daylight savings time. Get the government out of my clocks! Just zulu time would work for me.
Sunset in California winters at 4:00pm or earlier.
Standard stupid east coast idea just because they can't figure out if they should add or subtract 3 hours to get to Pacific time. Why not be like Russia and put everyone on Moscow time?
In the Great White North, there are two daylight zones: Mosquitoes and Winter. It's completely in tune with the environment and no one has to adjust a clock when the changeover comes.
*** Don't be dull.***
Consider the Obama Care web site. Don't it all at once, have pilot projects. This is great idea, but lets try it one part at a time. Personally, I would love to vanquish Day Light Savings, because it doesn't save me anything.
The article contradicts itself. On the one hand it says that people in individual cities already adjust their time locally to cater to the environment there. (Sunrise time, weather, trading partners, culture, etc). On the other hand it says that changing the clocks will allow more collaboration and trading time with cities that were previously in different zones.
If it acquires resources on instantiation like a duck, then its a shared_ptr<Duck>
I wish they would just leave the time alone. In the USA, we had it a little around WW1, then during WW2, and then it pretty much stayed during the made up energy crisis of the 70's. In today's 24/7 world, there really isn't any "savings". I agree that (at least in the USA), we have pretty much run our lives around the schedule of television programs, but, I think that is also disappearing. With Tivo, Dvr's, time delay etc...who watches tv around what the idiot networks say? I wish they would just leave it either on DST or standard time and leave it alone. The only "real" issue with playing around with the clocks now is going to work in the dark & coming home in the dark, when they change it to standard time.
Every time someone messes with time zones and clocks it causes temporary confusion and additional work for systems not field upgradable now needing to be manually screwed with.
Nothing measurably good comes of it as people adapt to underlying reality regardless of what time the clock says. Your brilliant reason why x is better than y is an illusion it does not matter. It never did.
Last time DST got moved to "save energy" **surprise** no savings had been measured.
It is akin to changing the form of 110v outlets to make them "better". Disruptive change which solves nothing is simply a waste of everyone's time.
The Atlantic example of China's time zone is misleading. Most of China's population is crowded into 10% of its arable land space on its east coast. More important is reconciling Russia's time zone problem spanning the distance from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok.
Time is NOT arbitrary. Noon should be close to when the Sun is on the meridian. I don't have time [sic] to read the 350 comments on this article, but I hope someone made the point. We have already yielded so much up to "commerce". NOT time. Fuck commerce. The economy exists to serve human wants and needs. Humans do not exist to serve the economy. This article is absurd and disgusting.
Just get rid of that whole shifting times twice a year completely and stick to just one time for a given location.
I'd suggest just keeping DST for the whole year, but that is carries more logistical problems for people in more northern locales than keeping the "standard time" throughout the year.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Americans seem to HATE the shit out of DST, why I don't know - it baffles me.
There's always these debates, every year same old arguments each time.
Fact is we lead mostly 9-5 lives. You can argue all you like that if I want more daylight, I should get up earlier and leave work earlier, that's never going to happen - life isn't going to change like that.
I love the shit out of DST, it's beautiful, every Melbournian I know loves it, in summer we get these awesome awesome long evenings of light, peoples moods are better, you can go out and so and enjoy stuff for hours. If you're fortunate enough to finish work around 4-ish you can really get a lot done in peak summer. It's cheery and it's great.
If anything, winter should be moved to DST too :/ I don't care if I'm going to work in the dark but coming home in the dark is gruesome and depressing.
As for the complexity of it, my PC's all do it automatically, my phone does it automatically, I need to change the time on my wristwatch, microwave and house clock. This is not a major issue.
3 DST
I have mixed feelings about this.
On one hand, I hate when it gets dark early, because it takes me an hour or more to drive home from work instead of 35-45 minutes.
On the other hand, I live on the east coast, and if we were forcibly moved to Central Time & businesses maintained traditional 9-5 hours, it would be like getting to work from 10-6 with no strings attached. That's actually a big deal, I have DSPS, and my "fall asleep naturally" time is pretty solidly between 2-3am (EST) and 3-4am (EDT). It's remarkably stable, and I have to be sleep-deprived almost to the point of death AND on Ambien to sleep earlier and REMAIN sleeping past 2-3am (otherwise, I'll crash & burn at 9pm, wake up around 1 or 2, then be wide awake until I'm suddenly crushed by sleepiness right around dawn).
1000 86-second ticks per day. Same time everywhere, every day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time
The whole idea of "time zones" was so that the mid-19th century populace, who was accustomed to setting their clocks (such as they were) to 12Noon at Sun transit (which is the definition of "noon" anyway) could all be persuaded to agree on whatever time the railway station master said it was - and all the railway station masters had to agree on what time it was to keep from banging trains together. So "time zones" are entirely artificial contrivances.
The best description I ever saw was a cartoon back in the early 70's; Richard Nixon in a rocking chair, explaining that he was going to make this blanket longer by cutting a foot of the blanket from one end and sewing on to the other - just like daylight savings time did, you see.
The British had (used to have?) "Summer time", which was like DST. The Bermudians didn't bother to change the clocks; they had "summer hours" for most businesses. from like 7AM to 3PM. It accomplished the same thing.
I see three practical options.
1. Do nothing. It ain't broke, so don't try "fixing" it. We're mostly accustomed to the quirks of DST, so who cares?
2. Set a single "American" time zone, and set all the clocks to it. Businesses and schools can set their opening/start times and closing/end times to whatever they want. Two time zones would be foolish.
3. Switch everything over to GMT. We're a global economy; we ought to have a global clock. Besides, what relevance does sunrise or sunset have when you're on the Moon, or in a space habitat? After all; Arthur C. Clarke wrote "If man survives ... then for all but a vanishingly brief instant near the dawn of history, the word 'ship' will mean 'spaceship.'"
C'mon. Everyone is bitching about DST. Let's really just admit time is an illusion* and embrace it! I say we just insert an extra hour every weekend (and never "give it back"). I also propose a single timezone for the whole world and using a 10 hour day (metric time). But I'll settle for an hour inserted every weekend.
*Lunch time double so.
For fuck's sake, don't change the freaking time change AGAIN! How many "automatically changing" clocks ended up in the landfill due to them needing adjustments 4 times a year (instead of them autocorrecting) after the first change... *Sigh*
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Wibbley Wobbley to me.
Of course this wasn't the only genesis, but some folks attribute daylight savings time as a joke started by Benjamin Franklin who off handedly suggested that one way to save money on home lighting costs at night would be to force everyone to get up earlier in the summer. For the record he apparently wrote this in French as a suggestion for Parisians, no farmers involved. That whole farmer thing is a crock.
As with most jokes, nobody took this seriously until WWI when Germany decided to actually attempt this to help conserve energy for the war effort. After Germany did this, nearly every country involved in WWI followed suite (including the US).
Like many crazy things that require a massive societal change, it took place during a war. You might blame Americans for making the joke, but I choose to blame the Europeans for falling for the joke and dragging the rest of us into it.
Americans on Pacific time should set their clocks forward one hour.
Seriously, fuck that. My employer expects me to work the usual 8 to 5, and I doubt that would change under this proposal. I'd much rather have more daylight at the end of the day than at the beginning so I can do things that take a variable amount of time during the daylight. Or, do I need to do winter yard work under construction floodlights? Or take a day off to enjoy an after-work drink in the winter sun?
No, thanks. I'm not interested in this proposal. In fact, I'd rather do the opposite that we do now and spring back/fall forward.
I live on the west coast and I'm so sick and tired of being woken up by east coast motherfuckers (usually indian recruiter types) that never heard of time zones.
Apples/Oranges! Regardless of the number of time zones, any system that includes DST will require a twice yearly adjustment to clocks by exactly the same number of people.
Generally, only frequent travellers are affected by time zones. The vast majority are largely unaffected in their daily life.
Fewer time zones will mean a larger difference in the time of sunset and sunrise from one edge of a time to the other edge. With one hour (15 degree) time zones, there is a one hour difference. Two hour time zones (30 degree) will mean there is a two hour difference within a time zone.
Guys, guys, guys. You're all totally missing it. What color is the ribbon going to be for the One World, One Time Zone campaign and how many if you are with me to changing your location to UTC. /sarcasm
Ok seriously, wake up with the sun and sleep when its dark. I'm confident there are people in the world with no internet access or time keepers who would look at us strangely with the 'move this time here, no there, then here' mentality. I'd prefer we just get rid of changing clocks but don't see the point in combining timezones its kind of set in our brains now, 24 timezones, 24 hours to make a revolution. Just like imperial vs metric systems, you just won't ever get us Americans to use metric and that's just the way it is.
We'll have to wait for the next President, because we all know WHO will say it's wrong and evil, will lead us into complete darkness (no pun) if President Obama we're to try and approve this change.
We stand a better chance of eliminating DST than moving to a two time zone system. And since 280 million Americans have never experienced the pleasures of no DST, it won't happen. The debate over energy savings is superfoulous, the system is too ingrained to change. I envy the lucky people in AZ.
Best I understand the DST is really an enhancement to timezones and we do not need timezones. Do your research and then ask why the kids do not have wristwatches.
From this I am reminded of the old MIT computer labs. Maybe we each need our own personal timezone.
Time zones of 1 hour are a remnant of the 19th century railroad time table sync problems. Up to then, everybody followed the natural (sun) local times. For centuries it did not seem to cause any problem because travel times were much slower than sync times. Now we are the other end of the spectrum, we can bridge time zones at a speed that makes arbitrary one-hour divisions kind of quaint. Here is my proposal: there is no problem whatsoever having actual sun time to the millisecond- network time everywhere. Anybody can post their actual time online and make it clear that they open or close at their actual time. Time translation apps are a cinch, as we all know. If I can do business with a West coast store from Indiana with 3 hour shift, what exactly is the problem doing so with a, say, 2h47 shift? Besides, by having a continuous actual time, there will be no zigs and zags to the time maps. An ordinary gps unit will be all that is needed to tell you the local time. So, when you finally adopt the metric system, consider adopting modern time management?
^^^ Actually, you don't loathe and despise DST... you loathe and despise STANDARD TIME. To shift the clock so the sun sets later during the winter (when it's cooler and you WANT to golf after work), you'd want daylight saving time to be the normal time ALL year.
It could be worse, though... you COULD live in California, which gets *completely* screwed by being in Pacific time rather than Mountain time (especially Los Angeles). I dare *anybody* to look at the sunrise/sunset times for Los Angeles in June & December and justify it being 3 hours behind New York instead of 2. Without even getting into travel logistics or flogging the energy horse, it's obvious that LA is in the wrong time zone, period, unless you're a vampire who likes having a few extra hours of darkness to go shopping before stores close at 9.
Seriously... in the summer, the sun comes up in LA around 4:45am, but still sets a little after 7pm. And people in Las Vegas get even MORE screwed by being in Pacific. At least in LA, they get to enjoy about an hour of twilight as the sun sets. In Las Vegas, the sun drops behind the mountains to the west, the city gets engulfed by the shadow, and that's *it* -- early twilight to total darkness in something like 5 minutes. The first time I ever went to Las Vegas, it totally blew my mind. I walked into a 7-11 my first day right as the sun was starting to set, and walked out 3 minutes later into pitch-black night.
If anything, it might make sense to abolish Pacific time AND permanently split the difference between MST and MDT (creating a new "Pacific/West" timezone that was permanently UTC-6.5), which would have the effect of shifting times in what's now Pacific Time to an hour and a half hour later than they are now (so that in the summer, sunrise/sunset would be around 6:11am/8:38pm, and in the winter it would be around 8:28am/6:24pm). In the worst case, Summer/Winter sunrise/sunset times for Seattle would be 5:45am/9:30pm and 9:28am/5:58pm. In exchange for driving to work in total darkness (instead of pre-dawn darkness), they'd at least get to see real sunlight while driving home.
Likewise, a case could be made for Central merging with Eastern into a new East/Atlantic timezone that was permanently UTC-4.5 (splitting the difference between EST and EDT, shifting what's now Central back by 1/2 or 1-1/2 hours), the only big city with REALLY crazy sunrise/sunset times would be Minneapolis (9:51am sunrise in the winter... but 6:11pm sunset in return). If Minnesota really hated it, they could move into the new Pacific/West timezone at UTC-6.5), which would make their sunrise/sunset times almost exactly the same as New York's. I suspect, though, that they'd just stay in East/Atlantic and enjoy the late winter sunsets.
Of course, some might object that the creation of two new timezones (East/Atlantic at UTC-4.5, and Pacific/West at UTC-6.5) on the grounds that they'd be oddball half-hour timezones compared to the rest of the world... but fuck it. India got away with it, and we're at least as important globally as they are. Not to mention the fact that Europe would probably do the exact same thing with CET once the soft taboo was broken.
At least for the lower 48. China does it. If under the Schrager plan more than three fourths of the population will be an hour off of local solar time, why would it be so bad to have them be 2 hours off? If you picked GMT-6 (Central Standard) as the base time, the West Coast would be 2 hours off solar time, but they would be on the same time as NYC and Chicago for business purposes. Of course things that are local and need some coordination with the sun like school starting times would seem odd. But, people would get used to them.
As for TV network times. They are rapidly becoming obsolete. The times for sporting events should be set for the comfort and convenience of the players and spectators, not the TV networks. News is now 24 hours. And, dramas and other contrivances can be made available any time.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
Fuck you people. Most of my clocks are on NTP.... the few that aren't are easy to adjust..... DST/DT is what it is FFS it is not a big deal.
I like having my day shifted by an hour twice a year so I don't have to go to work in the dark and return in the dark half the fucking year.
I think it's time to abolish time zones all together. In reality most of the world works off of UTC. Displaying different offset times only confuses things. Maybe it made sense in the 1800s but not anymore with the global economy.
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Abolish-Time-Zones/218240794869421?ref=hl
Zoid.com
The same people who predicted the ice age coming in the 1970's, the same people who are predicting horrible, dire consequences for Global Warming, climate change, what ever, are the same people who stuck us with Daylight Savings Time... And there are legions of people out there who religiously believe everything these people say we need in order to save ourselves from certain destruction.
Maybe the problem is... these people, not the time zones.
Murphy was an optimist
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There is one interesting thing that the summary touches on that I don't feel has been fully addressed. That is the effect of New York being in the Eastern timezone.
The summary notes:
I found that in Austin, everyone did things at the same times they do them in New York, despite the difference in time zone. People got to work at 8 am instead of 9 am, restaurants were packed at 6 pm instead of 7 pm, and even the TV schedule was an hour earlier.
That is true, but a major reason for that is that east-coasters have complained for more than a century how hard it is working in New York. They live two states away and have to commute in by train that takes an hour. They have to commute that same hour back. And employers have gone along with it. The trouble is, New York is not nearly so special as it likes to think. People in Atlanta, Austin, and Chicago also have hour-long commutes. They just don't get slack from employers like they would in New York. (I know of at least one large corporation -- name withheld -- that granted New York employees a paid hour for commuting, theoretically because they could working on the train. Their financial people also had a running bet on how long it would take someone in Chicago to figure that out and demand the same hour off.)
I suspect this is the main reason New York is an hour off from the timezone. I also suspect that -- New York being the labor sync that it is -- this applies to a lot of the Northeast. I would be curious to see if this applies to D.C. as well, and to the communities near the metro line that funnels laborers into D.C. every day. Finally, I would be curious to know about the Carolinas and Florida, who I suspect do not generally demonstrate the hour shift.
Robbers prefer dark where there is not much light to spot them, and are not early morning people for the most part.
Thus, DST is a plot to increase Crime in America.
P.S.: Canada just installs better LED streetlights btw.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
The American Indians have a saying about Daylight Saving Time:
It is like cutting a strip off of one end of a blanket and sowing it onto the other end, and thinking you have made the blanket longer !
(All "white men" are crazy, no matter what color they are !)
How does giving each section of the US its on rules on how to adjust for DLS make things simpler? Keep it or get rid of it, stop trying to make things more efficient, it just confuses people...