Slashdot Mirror
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?""
But we do deposit an hour in the spring and withdraw it in the fall. The 0% interest rate just really sucks.
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.
Who gives a crap what the clock says? We could all just use Coordinated Universal Time. On the east coast I'd wake up at 1000 UTC have lunch at 1700 eat dinner at 2200 and go to bed at 0300.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
No, we borrow an hour in the fall and pay it back in the spring, at 0% interest. So it's really free time!
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
Would "Affordable Timecare Act" excite you more?
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
I hate that bloody time change. If we just get rid of it, we don't have to worry about what it's called at all.
"To stop the terrorists."
I once read a long pointless diatribe against standard time demanding that we make Daylight Saving's Time permanent - that's an hour of my life I'll never get back...
(Rimshot)
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
As a native Arizonan now living in Texas for the past 8 years, I still am not accustomed to the time changes, and am quite annoyed at the completely unnecessary practice.
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
And less so now when most clocks are set automatically, and the few that aren't have 'dst' switches
Which of course was broken when Congress and the President decided to move the time changes in the fall and spring for no reason. Many of those automatic clocks now don't work correctly and can't be reprogrammed. So yes, it is a big deal. Also, you still see cases of DST causing problems in computer systems and mobile devices.
Here's the rational discussion: there is simply no need for DST. Anyone attached to it is not being rational. Whether we have two, four, or six time zones is meaningless to me. But moving time around arbitrarily is complete nonsense.
It would certainly help those who have preexisting daylight saving time. But I would rather have a single-time system.
Obamatime doesn't let you use choose time from across state boundaries, most people lose more time than they gain, and nobody can find out the time because of the http://timecare.gov/ fiasco. Besides, the President doesnt even participate in it; he gets to keep his own time zone.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
Just don't call it Obamatime, or they'll shut down the government again.
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.
The fact is that multiple studies have tried to document the extent of the alleged savings, and the conclusions vary from 0.18% at the high end, to an even more minuscule increase at the "low" end of the savings. Therefore her statement that "actual energy savings are minimal, if they exist at all" is a completely accurate summary of the facts.
They would "have to go to school in the dark"? Why is that? Shift the time school starts instead of changing the clock.
I don't have children, why am I forced to reset all my clocks twice a year to cater to your need to have a consistent clock time when school starts?
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.
Could use some math lessons too.