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Ask Slashdot: Where Do You Stand on Daylight Saving Time?
New submitter gbcox links to this article about how the switch between Standard Time and Daylight Saving Time can be dangerous, but writes Personally, I favor year 'round DST — I like the extra sunlight in the evening... but regardless, I just wish we'd pick one and stop futzing with the time twice a year. As it is right now, we only have about 4 months of standard time as it is... is it really worth the effort to switch the clocks for only four months? I think not. Where do you stand? If you have a strong opinion, it would be nice if you start your subject line in comments with "For it!" or "Against it!" If you think that the yearly clock-shifting is a good idea, when do you think each shift should occur? For those not keeping score, tonight is the switchover time for most Americans.
I don't care what the offset is from GMT, just leaveitthehellalone. If businesses need winter hours, they can have those.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
We don't celebrate DST in Tucson, but all my distant suppliers etc. do, so I have to adjust my mental clock to deal with their different offsets.
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
DST or the people who constantly whine about it.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
I like the extra sunlight in the evening...
Then wake up earlier! Futzing around with the clock doesn't change the length of the day. I loose a little more respect for the entire human race every year when I have to hear "more sunlight in the evening" again.
Interesting interview on the reasons behind the DST was on NPR with the author of "Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time". "The upcoming shift in the daylight-saving time change is designed to help retailers — and is a substitute for a genuine energy policy, says author Michael Downing. Congress moved the time shift up this year. Melissa Block talks with Michael Downing, author of Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time." http://www.npr.org/templates/s... No DST is fine with me.
There's no such thing as "illegal download"
Seriously, I don't.
All my devices, clock and what not change their time automatically, I don't have to do anything. Other than the first day where I feel like I lost an hour of sleep, I don't even notice it. Stop fussing over something so minor just because you're lazy.
Daylight Saving Time is an awful idea, compounded by the fact that the rules change from location to location and can change from year to year. In computer systems, it gets even worse when you consider that different systems have different rules still, and talking to two of them at the same time can lead to irreconcilable differences which cause all kinds of headaches.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
"only four months"
How many months does this person think there are in a year?
Four months is one third of a year. Just like eight hours is one third of your day. Does the amount of time you spend sleeping not matter?
"Only a white man would believe that you could cut a foot off the top of a blanket and sew it to the bottom of a blanket and have a longer blanket."
I'm a white man, and I approve of this message. Fuck Daylight Saving Time.
p.s. Also, Fuck Beta.
Only the egotistical mind of a politician can fathom the ridiculous idea of starting and stopping the earths spin twice a year
A real pain in the ass it is, we should abolish it completely.
Who care's if it's light out at 7 AM? I want it to be light until at least 6 PM..
Make it DST year round. Daylight in the evening is much better than the mornings. You're going to work in the morning anyhow, who cares how light it is? You get out of work and still have daylight left, awesome.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
There is actually a website with a proposal getting rid of the time change which seems fairly well thought out and logical: http://www.standardtime.com/pr...
Because I hate losing that hour!
For a saner alternative to Eastern Daylight Time, I use Atlantic Standard Time. AST is the same as EDT year around, and many countries (e.g. Dominican Republic) don't observe Atlantic Daylight Time.
http://www.timeanddate.com/tim...
Although I use AST at home, my schedule is still heavily influenced by everyone else outside. Go figure.
I once had a signature.
In a global world, everyone gets confused what time it is somewhere else. So we should simply all use GMT. If we want winter hours to be different, we change starting hours. That way, my school opens at 13:00 GMT, and in the winter at 12:00GMT, and that's it -- anyone the world over can call and not get confused. Of course, now we have email, so who cares anyway? We all work from home.
That's so she "won't be late." Daylight savings time is every bit as useful.
If companies want to have summer and winter hours to adjust to light and darkness, fine, but to give an entire country a little jet lag for a bogus "saving" of daylight is ridiculous.
To the overall economy ?
I am personally aware of it forcing the update replacing of no longer supported operating systems in solutions that were date time dependent. (Everything pre XP/ various versions of unix and I would guess lots of old mainframe code). But that isn't from daylight savings time but rather the legislature playing games with when it went into effect.
As far as I can see now it just screws with people's sleep cycles and schedules to no particular effect.
P.S. I have heard the safer for the children argument concerning going and coming to school. It seems it would be simpler to change the schools hours of operation.
A random offset would provide a perfect excuse for missing meetings.
Statistics show that the heart attack rate shows a small but significant peak following the weekend DST is activated. You're fucking with the biorhythm of people in ways that are only rivaled by forcing them to travel from east to west coast twice a year and having to adjust the time accordingly. And for what? "More sunlight hours" in the Summer (because, yes, the NORMAL time is the time you have in WINTER!)? So more time that I have to deal with screen glare, yeah, that's what I want!
4 out of 5 people are "night" people, i.e. people who have less trouble adapting to staying up later than they have to getting up early. And why the fuck are we catering to the 20%?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
A Plan To Fix Daylight Savings Time By Creating Two National Time Zones
No? Because that is why we started daylight savings time. To save candles. Because people would come in early in the day or stay later at night and you'd have to light a candle which could be expensive if everyone was doing it.
But... we don't use candles anymore. We use LED lightbulbs and nuclear fucking power.
So... DST is obsolete. Retire it.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Having to switch my biological clock is much more important to me, than the sun being out, or not.
disclaimer: I live in the UK
I run all our servers at every company on UTC (not GMT but similar), I'm up for just altering our mind sets about time, when we break them social attitudes will change.
When I've got a meeting at 4PM, especially around this time of year between the EU DST switch and the US one, that's a nightmare. And then when you're trying to compare logs between countries with retarded timezone differences throughout the year between changes!! ARGH!
I'd be happy to get up at 8PM and work through the daylight and go to bed at 12PM, I'd quite happily have have UTC move 5, 12 15, whatever hours out just so we could all live on the same time world wide and just adjust our work and living hours around that... "business hours between 12AM and 9AM" sounds fine to me.
Currently we use normal time (as in time where 00:00 is approximately the middle of the night) in the winter, and move if away from that correspondence in the summer. If anything, the opposite would make sense. In summer daylight is plentiful anyway, it's winter where daylight is limited and one could make an argument for tampering with our timekeeping to make the most out of that limited light. The current system is backwards. But I'm not in favor of winter-daylight-saving-time either. What I've read on the subject indicates that the switchover comes with significant costs in the form of extra accidents and worse health in the days just after the switch. These are admittedly small effects, but then, so is the argued benefit.
Worse than either of these systems is the proposal of permanent daylight savings time. Here one breaks the logical basis for our time system (the position of the sun) for the forseeable future just to save oneself from a one-time transition period of updating people's schedules, which would have the same effect without messing with our clocks. It is a bit of a dirty hack rather than a proper fix, and only makes sense from a short-term perspective. If one is going down this route, why limit yourself to one hour? Wouldn't it be nice if the sun were still up when you get home from work in the middle of winter at northerly latitudes, and lasted long enough to enjoy the sun with your family? At, say, 60 degrees north, the sun sets around 15:00 in winter. So just add 5 hours to the time, making it set at a comfortable 20:00. And then, in the year 2150 when a child asks why midnight occurs at 05:00 and noon at 17:00, they'll be happy to hear that it was because people 6 generations ago couldn't be bothered to change their actual schedules.
On the other hand, our time system isn't exactly a work of beauty to begin with. Perhaps one more wart won't matter. Especially when we already have a nearly equivalent one in the form of the current temporary daylight savings time.
We spent thousands of man years on making this shit work, so if anybody proposes getting rid of DST I will send teams of rabid ninga weasels to gnaw their putrid dicks off.
We had to suffer, why should others not know the pain.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Source : www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/10/31/daylight-saving-time-may-increase-your-energy-bill/
Switching the time backwards and forwards sucks. Just get rid of it.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Take a breath, people. DST exists for a perfectly good and simple reason: to use daylight a bit more effectively than we would if we used a schedule that never changed with the seasons. Sure, if you live in or near the tropics, that's a non-issue, but for those of us in the rest of the world, DST is a good thing. And if you're one of those people who uses their smartphone as their alarm clock and pocket watch, you never have to worry about the adjustment; smartphones and computers make the adjustment automagically, *and* they even alert you that this happens. (Even back in the day, adjusting my clocks never took me more than five minutes; totally worth it for the improved quality of life that comes with more sunlight when it does the most good.)
I absolutely hate changing my clocks, it's a pain in my @$$. I say once we change it tonight, we never do it again. Oh, before someone says buy a new clock, just know that I have VCR's that the stupid changing of the date for the DST made that impossible on and no I wont give up my VCR's. And yes, I do have a DVR as well.
There is no point in DST in Finland. Maybe in middle Europe it is a bit bigger deal but here in north it's useless. Our summer is so bright that the change of timezone doesn't make a difference really. It might be nice for a week or too, but the days get longer so quickly that it really doesn't change much. If I decided we wouldn't have a DST here, it's just an annoyance when we must change clocks twice a year. I'd love to have UTC+2 all year round.
It's funny that all those complaints against DST only happen when it's turned off in autumn and (almost) never when it's turned on in spring. It seems people don't care about DST so much but really want to abolish winter. Good luck with that.
Messing with sleep is reason enough. If you get people out of step they're more likely to:
-make mistakes
-work less/put less effort into work
-be angry/experience negative emotions
And the list goes on. All of those lead to significant economic losses in aggregate.
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
There are only two rational choices: switch between the two for the perceived benefits, or remain on Standard year-round. If only one were observed year-round, people and organizations would adjust their schedules to be at what they consider the optimal actual times of day. Some might even have summer and winter schedules. They could and would as easily do this with Standard time as with Daylight. All else thus being equal, only an idiot would suggest that it is better to observe the time of the time zone one hour to the east. Any aliens visiting a planet on which everyone set their clocks one hour off would surely conclude that there is no intelligent life there.
Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
I've always wanted to stay on DST year round. I've never seen the point in getting up to go to work in the dark, and it getting dark before leaving the office. Why not go to work in the dark and have some time outside at the end of the day? Why have "high noon" occur way before noon? (Admittedly, if you live on the tail end of a timezone, it'll be closer to noon when the sun's highest.) OK, so there were some farming rationals back when we were an agricultural nation, or energy saving theories and stuff, but nowadays, let's just be practical.
Same as everything I guess. Fuck daylight savings time.
Move all the time zomes seven and a half degrees to the west, and leave it alone dammit! Do the math, you'll understand.
Above say, 40 degrees latitude north and south DST might have a purpose, but to do this in the tropics is beyond absurd. And celestial noon should never occur before noon on the clock, never.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
It's, at best, outdated and, at worst, costing the US economic losses.
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
When you have to deal with the realities of multiple young children in your household abstractions such as time zones matter a lot less to you. The master clock/s in my home are roughly synchronised peristaltic ones.
If it turns your crank, get up an hour early. But DST is a hangover from the stone age and should be abolished.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Set the whole darn world to Zulu time and leave it alone. No more of this "my time or your time?" or dateline hassles.
I have nothing but pure hatred for clock switching.
So I don't do it....
If I ran for office, my platform would be to kill clock switching and pennies. Fuck Pennies!
Unlike most of the US Eastern time zone, DST causes Floridians to have to get up in the dark. That's completely ridiculous. The whole premise of daylight saving time is that you have an extra hour of daylight in the morning, which Florida never had. Because Florida is the southernmost state in the Eastern time zone, and also because Florida is west of most of the Eastern time zone, 6:00 AM EDT is ALWAYS before sunrise everywhere in Florida. Florida needs DST about like we need snowplows. My first choice would be for the Florida legislature to exempt Florida from DST (which they can do). The rest of the country can do whatever. I'm also heartily sick of changing the time on like a dozen gadgets twice a year. I have seen one plan for year-round DST which I can support. It also re-aligned the time zones, putting Florida into the central time zone. This results in Florida staying at GMT +5, which is the same as EST now. For most of the country, DST might make a certain amount of sense -- in the summer. In the spring, fall or winter, it's just silly. The rationale that DST saves energy is probably obsolete -- especially in Florida. In the old days, the primary energy consumption was lights. Now it's air conditioners. When people come home early in the afternoon, it's hot, and they run the AC more. It's very likely DST is wasting energy. DST has picked up a weird constituancy over the years. Many people have never lived without it. A lot of people believe either literally or emotionally that DST is responsible for nice spring weather and longer summer days. Belive it or not, the days were as long, and the weather as nice without federal legislation.
Computers obey me.
the theoretical amount it saves is outweighed by the recurring adjustment cost it incurs.
they should string the guy by his toenails who invented this ridiculous aberation.
I don't think the confusion is in regards to what time is displayed on the clock in the zone they're calling, I think it's where in that region's circadian rythm are the residences.
Ergo, nobody in tokyo gives a shit that New York's clocks read 4pm...they care that when they call the people in New York aren't dead asleep in the middle of their night. so unless you convince half the planet to be nocturnal...GMT doesn't actually solve anything.
I left the US, renounced my citizenship, and settled in the Eastern Caribbean just so I could live under the sanity of AST and be rid of DST forever.....well that and the whole police state/fascist thing.
The root cause here is that the length of the day, and the relative start and end times, shift over the course of the year. Instead of working around that, we should address it directly.
We need to get some research money devoted to the stabilization of the Earth's orbit, so that the days are uniform all year round. While we are at it, we can slow the orbit down just a hair and get rid of leap year.
The most frustrating aspect of human behavior is this uncompromising desire to work around problems rather than just solve them.
All my calendars, clocks and phones adjust automatically, even when traveling. Why is this even an issue?
The daylight to dark ratio is approximately constant only in the tropics. There is gets light about 6am and dark about 6pm year round and with almost no twilight between the two. The further north you go the greater the difference between daylight and dark hours becomes until you reach the arctic circle (I left out the southern hemisphere intentionally -- there is very little land at the higher southern latitudes) where there is about 6 months of daylight and six of darkness. The whole thing about DST is so artificial anyway. Until the rail roads set up standard time zones in the US each town and village had its on time based on local noon by the sun.
However, I know that in my case sunlight in my bedroom window makes me wake up more easily and feel more refreshed than being awakened in darkness. This seems to be at least somewhat invariant as to the actual number of hours of sleep I got within limits. Since I inhabit the temperate zone in the Northern hemisphere I would much prefer to just hibernate through the 3 to 6 months of winter (depending on latitude) we have here and not worry about changing from DST and back.
I think daylight savings time should be abolished. It's an anachronism from the days when America was mostly an agrarian society. Now we justify it so that kids have more light for when they wait for the school bus. We justify it in the name of safety. I loved not having to deal with daylight savings time when living in Arizona.
I hate daylight savings time. There is no need for it - we can manage just fine without it, thank you very much. If business is so affected by the changing sunrise and sunset times, let them change their hours! Like they often have to do anyway, because DST messes up the day!
Good riddance, I say!
Pick one and stay with it. Don't care if it's normal time or DST, just leave it the fark alone.
Remember a few years back when the congress clowns decided to futz with the DST dates? I've got 3 clocks that automatically change the time. Based on the old dates. So now I have to manually set my clocks, then a few weeks later do it again. I swear at congress the whole time I'm futzing with them.
It is stupid as well as most of Indiana being in the the Eastern Time zone being stupid as well.
I don't care whether it's DST all year or standard time all year, but I hate switching back and forth. It's responsible for so much loss of life and productivity. I feel that DST switching is a twice yearly reminder that our "betters" in Congress are in charge and easily capable of messing with our lives. Until it's eliminated, I'll continue voting against my local Representative and Senators.
Have a nice time.
As far as I can see now it just screws with people's sleep cycles and schedules to no particular effect.
You don't think that bright sunlight streaming into bedrooms for an extra hour all summer won't screw with peoples' sleep cycles even more?
Before clocks, people probably naturally implemented daylight savings time by waking up at sunrise. Now that our whole lives are tied to external schedules, not having DST is more artificial than having it.
One of my reasons for moving from Sydney to Brisbane in 1990 was to escape living in a DST regime. I have never heard a good reason for daylight saving ever. It just fcuking sux. I had 20 years with it and I have now had 24 years or so without it, and No DST wins hands down.
I prefer Classic Slashdot.
Complexity isn't your friend.
Whatever historical value DST may have had left the building with Elvis.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
I say if you can't stick to one time, either the local time zone, or even just UTC, the whole year round, then let's abolish all this newfangled railway time and go back to local solar clocks. ;-)
I think it's completely pointless.
At the latitude where I live, the sun sets after 2100 PDT in the summer. That would still be 2000 PST, with an hour and a half of twilight after that. What more do people want?
In the winter the sun sets at 1600 PST. Even 1700 PDT wouldn't buy much, particularly since that would mean sunrise at 0900 PDT.
...laura
Because it's dark at fucking 4pm.
You can type more than that for your comment.
I like the change! (Change is good). Seriously it adds some flavor to the year - going on DST is great for those long summer evenings, and coming off of it gets you ready for the Christmas holiday season.
And for those who have trouble adjusting their body clocks for a 1 hour time change (really?), then lets stay on permanent DST.
Holy crap! I can't believe that there are as many dumb asses in the USA as we have in South Africa and Queensland, Australia. The clock, 24 hours in a day, etc is artificial. We made this shit up! So who cares what your stupid time piece says.. If the sun is up it is daytime. You have not lost or gained shit. Your kids will not get more skin cancer and your curtains will not fade... FFS get a grip!
Has safety and productivity costs, doesn't save energy in modern society, ultimately pointless. Just leave our sleep alone.
If you have ever worked on software that stored data hourly, having one day of the year have twenty three hours and one day of the year have twenty five hours is enough to make you weep in frustration.
I like having another hour of daylight all summer. Yes, there are people that get up at 5 AM and it does not matter to them, but that is not typical.
The original idea was to get more out of the extra hours of daylight. But that was suggested before the introduction of electric lighting.
These days it seems like mucking with numbers for no good reason.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
Move the clocks 30 minutes one time, and never change them again. It is an annoyance to go through this change.
Daylight Savings Time can suck my dick!
First time I've ever been early for work. Except for all those daylight savings days.
Most linux users don't know this, but the man pages were named after Chuck Norris. Chuck Norris fsck'ing hates noobs!
Just get rid of the stupid thing. Unlike the high costs that are associated with changing when it is, which we got to witness only a few years ago, the costs of abandoning it entirely should be minimal. Even on any automated systems that are set to automatically adjust for DST when it happens, it would typically only involve disabling a setting that specifies that you want it to use DST in the first place.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
DST known throughout the world as the USA zombie Daylight Savings Time should be assassinated ASAP.
USA is the Laughing Stock of the World on this right in the butt crack of UK.
Give it UP.
Get it RIGHT.
Stop the INSANITY!
I have doubts. BIG doubts.
If changing the time by one hour gives you a heart attack then you were really a time bomb to begin with.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
I work in an office all day and I don't care if it's light or dark outside while I'm at the office. Already today it's sunrise at 8AM and sunset at 4PM and in the darkest part of the year the sun gets up at 10 AM and goes down at 2:30 PM. In other words it's dark when I go to work and dark again when I leave, it's depressing and I'm basically never out in the sun except on weekends. Whether I work or am at home while it's dark doesn't matter, as I use roughly the same amount of lights anyway. If it was light outside when I was off work I'd have a lot more interest and opportunity to be outside which would be much better. Personally I'd like the standard working day to shift to nights like what is 1AM to 9AM today, the day 9 AM to 5PM to be the new "evening" and 5PM to 1AM the new "night" when people sleep. The important hours of daylight are no longer the work hours, it's the leisure time hours.
I guess that's a bit unpractical for those who work outdoors and want natural light, but they're starting to be such a small part of the workforce that they should either get floodlights or work "evening" shifts when the sun is up. For office jobs, schools. hospitals, retail jobs, factory jobs etc. I don't see the big problem, maybe in agriculture, construction and transport it's more annoying but the days here are so short they'll always work some of the time in the dark already. And the transport industry I hope gets taken over by autonomous vehicles soon anyway.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Changing clocks twice a year is nuts, nuke this insanity from high orbit.
Let's use random.org each time to decide. This will bring fun into it. All the world will be watching.
I'd like to see DST disappear, and a system of time zones based on lines of longitude. Every 15 degrees of longitude from the IDL being an additional hour of timezone offset.
Knowing the timezone for a particular place would become dead simple. Know the location and you know the timezone.
"Lame" - Galaxar
...is in a place where, after 15 years of /., I am sick and tired of having this very same, and pointless (since nobody ever changes anybody's minds here), discussion twice a year, every year, like clockwork.
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
I'm not losing any sleep over it.
Set the clocks ahead 1/2 hour from standard time, then leave them alone. We'll get the benefit of some of the extra daylight in the evening, but not have to put up with the asinine changing twice a year.
We all just move to UTC.
...there would be no DST. There wouldn't be any time zones either. We'd all go Zulu (UTC). 12 hour clocks would earn you time in jail. If someone on the opposite end of the planet says call me at 19:30 then you would call them exactly when they had expected to hear from you. You wouldn't need to worry about what time zone they are in, if they even have DST in that country or whether they meant morning or night. It would be hell to get used to, for our generation, but kids growing up with that wouldn't know anything else and it wouldn't be any more difficult for them to learn. I know my generation would have to get used to their bank being open from 15:00-01:00 which would be normal daylight operations and people would b***h about it as being the worst thing ever for 5 years, maybe 10 (except military folk who are used to keeping 24 hour Zulu time ), but we'd adapt and avoid all sorts of issues with our fragmented and bi-annually adjusted time. I've also heard +/- DST times severely increase depression so there's that to. Vote for me as world leader if you like what you've heard.
ROFL. Weakest argument EVER!
It's one hour difference and it happens over a Saturday night/Sunday morning. Yes, some people work on Sundays but I would say it is a fair bet that more people do not work on Sundays than do. If you can't recover from having your sleep shifted by one hour by the following Monday morning you need to see a doctor because there is something very very wrong with you.
Perhaps you've heard of this great new invention. I think they call them "curtains".
DST is not only completely useless for its "intended" purpose (saving energy), it is actually *harmful*. It doesn't save energy at all, in fact it uses MORE energy. And every time they "extend" it, it uses more energy still. And that's not counting the health problems it causes. In my case it doesn't harm me *that* much since I can just go to bed early on that one night. But other people are not as sleep flexible as I am. I can pretty much change my internal clock on a whim, but not everyone can do that. And it has been proven to cause a *lot* of health issues (due to stress and lack of sleep due to a lot of people NOT being able to adjust their internal clocks). So in short...not only does it not do what it's intended to do, it does the OPPOSITE (cause people to use MORE energy rather than saving it), while cause major health issues for a sizeable number of people at the same time. It needs to be done away with, the sooner the better.
Or Beat Time. I loved it back in 1998. I still love the idea. Simple, decimal, universal time.
Swatch Internet Time
I have never seen a good logical reason as to why the whole world can't be on a single time zone. I mean, airlines and airplanes already operate on UTC (Universal Time Co-ordinated, which is just GMT but without the DST adjustments)
Will it really be that jarring if sunrise occurs at 6.PM wherever you are? It will get rid of this entire timezone mess altogether.
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
TZ
Daylight Saving Time is a thing that is imposed by Americans to countries that do not need it. Down here in my country (Mexico) we already have enough sun hours in winter and summer and maybe it would useful only for the northern states behind USA border. Also this measurement was valid when people used to read paper books, children played outside and Pop and Mom stayed in the porch talking while the pies cool off in the window. That was nice 1940s-1960s.
Nowadays, people use phones, videogames, tablets, internet, e-readers and watch netflix, etc. And these things always need energy or even you cannot use them outside in the sunlight (duh!). Not matters you use it one hour later or soon, the battery won't give you bonus energy for move your clock. And no, don't come with tales about that everybody can purchase a solar battery because they are still expensive or hard to find or not have enough power for fill a house full of modern devices. Think now in the Internet of Things, add more devices that must be ON for get their bits and bytes form the Internet for do their work. Things in future won't be better.
So this silly thing just remain like a excuse to say that we care about the planet and we are a "friendly country".
Perhaps you've heard of this great new invention. I think they call them "curtains".
Window treatments are generally not that effective unless you buy expensive and ugly "total blockout" versions. Why should I have to do that just to appease DST whiners?
Stay on GMT - so here we would start work at midnight and work until 0900. If you travel somewhere you figure out in advance what time they start work/stores open and you're fine. Too easy.
Nothing to do with DST, though. But that's probably because this xkcd makes sense, and DST does not.
http://xkcd.com/1335/
Forget changing the clocks twice a year, let's do it twice a week. On Friday Night, 3pm will magically jump to 5pm, then Saturday and Sunday will both be 25 hours days where each day of the weekend gets ONE EXTRA HOUR EVERY WEEK! WHO HOO!
The stock market can just close an extra hour early on Friday.
I also have a plan for a METRIC DAY! This whole 60 seconds in a minute thing is ridiculous, it should be 100 metric seconds in a metric hour in a 20 hour metric day. Who ever came up with the stuff just wasn't thinking.
24 hours in a day... BAH!
Honestly, every year, twice a year, the DST haters come out of the woodwork, because apparently adjusting your clocks twice a year is soooooo difficult. ... And if you're one of those people who uses their smartphone as their alarm clock and pocket watch, you never have to worry about the adjustment; smartphones and computers make the adjustment automagically, *and* they even alert you that this happens.
You're an idiot (from Greek: "idios," meaning someone thinking only of yourself). Just because you find it so relaxing to change your clocks on cue like an animal in a circus, doesn't mean I want to do that.
There's nothing magic about the clocks in smartphones and computers. Those things take a lot of human labor to build and maintain, and frequently the humans make mistakes. Which you can't fix because with all that "magic," they leave out the manual controls. Or have you forgotten how iPhones sometimes make people late to meetings, or how Zunes used to die completely, or how every new program that deals with local time acts weird during the time switches, or how your unpatched system would show you the wrong time for about a month ever since this latest time switch?
I hate experiencing anxiety every time I get a new gadget that has a magical networked clock, wondering whether the clock will change correctly, or whether I'll unnecessarily wake early in the autumn or come to work late in the spring. That's on top of the general misery of changing my biological clock, and knowing that all this hassle is scientifically proven to be wrong and counterproductive but still it continues.
I don't mind having more sunlight in the afternoon. I hate changing the clock.
Have a nice time.
At a prior company I had all of the systems my department used set to UTC, they were not user-facing devices but sure made our jobs easier, there would always be a big hoopla about going in to and out of summertime settings in all the other areas--and massive headaches for everything that didn't work right--meanwhile our staff just relaxed. Even set our wall clocks to UTC for easy reference.
Obviously, the length of an hour should be scaled to the latitude.
We have the technology now - with GPS.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
I hear a lot of complaining about daylight savings time, but I really don't hear much in the way of support in favor of it.
That's because people tend to be loud if they don't like something but tend not to say much if they either like it or don't care. After all - what's the point of cheering for DST since that is what we already have? Yea for the status quo?
Personally I wish we would go to Daylight Saving Time year around. I want as much time with sunlight after work as possible. When we shift back to standard time I go to work when it's dark and come home when it is dark. With DST I would at least get an hour or so of daylight in the winter.
Statistics show that the heart attack rate shows a small but significant peak following the weekend DST is activated. You're fucking with the biorhythm of people in ways that are only rivaled by forcing them to travel from east to west coast twice a year and having to adjust the time accordingly
It's just one hour "zone time" change, remember.
Coast to coast would be three hours. USA Time Zone Map - 12 Hour Format
When researchers in Sweden examined the impact of daylight saving time on heart attack rates in that country, they discovered that people had slightly fewer heart attacks on the Monday after they set their clocks back in the fall and slightly more heart attacks in the days after they set their clocks ahead in the spring.
The effect of the spring transition to daylight saving time on heart attack rates was slightly greater for women than men, and the fall effect was more pronounced in men than in women. And the effect was consistently more pronounced in people under age 65 than for those 65 and older.
Daylight Saving Time May Affect Heart
So more time that I have to deal with screen glare, yeah, that's what I want!
It sounds like you're suffering from separation anxiety whenever you are away from your desktop, smartphone or tablet. You might want to cut back on the caffeine and spend more time outdoors.
You don't think that bright sunlight streaming into bedrooms for an extra hour all summer won't screw with peoples' sleep cycles even more?
Unless you go to bed before 9PM that is a non-problem. And yes I LIKE it to be light out as long as possible in the evening. Where I live sundown is around 9PM during the summer solstice and I love it. What I don't like is having it be dark when I go to work AND when I get home. That's just depressing...
we dont' do DST. It's so nice. Short time differences are the WORST to deal with. I'd rather deal with 12 hour time differences, then some 1-2 hour nonsense.
At the very most, you must be 25 years old. Since you cannot seem to see beyond your own limited horizon let me tell you: its getting harder as you get older.
If it turns your crank, get up an hour early.
What good will that do? It's dark when I get up and without DST it's dark when I get home too. I don't get to pick my work hours and DST maximizes the daylight I do get.
But DST is a hangover from the stone age and should be abolished.
Daylight Saving Time is a less than 100 years old. The first implementation was in 1916 in Germany.
I have analog clocks in three strategic locations in my studio apartment: bathroom, kitchen and office. I can look up and see the time from anywhere in my apartment. When DST was roughly six months, I switched out the AA batteries before changing the time. Alas, Congress changed DST to eight months. Some clocks drift more so than others between battery changes. PITA!
I *HATE* changing time and pretty much everyone I know hates it too.
It is stupid, outdated, and without merit.
It wastes resources and time.
It causes scheduling nightmares.
It is a serious health problem for many people.
We need to just either stay on summer time or winter time and leave it the hell alone. My vote would be summer time.
I'm against it, that's all. That's all you wanted, right?
Studies have concluded DST is more expensive than standard time in energy costs (http://www.nber.org/papers/w14429.pdf), the last rule change, extending it by another month was estimated to have cost the US between $550M and $1B and may adversely affect accidents and medical conditions.
Do away with the time shift and set it to standard permanently, or set it to saving time, but stop the incessant back and forth, it's just plain silly.
Some days it's just not worth
chewing through my restraints.
The whole premise of daylight saving time is that you have an extra hour of daylight in the morning
Umm, no. It is so you have an extra hour of daylight in the evening. Spring FORWARD. That means 8pm becomes 9pm. Without DST the sun would set where I live at 8pm instead of 9pm. I will happily sacrifice an hour of darkness in the morning to gain it after work where it is actually useful to me.
This results in Florida staying at GMT +5, which is the same as EST now.
That's because Florida IS in the east. Except for some of the panhandle most of Florida is east of Michigan which is in EST and even the most western parts of Florida are no further west than Chicago which is close to the eastern edge of the Central time zone.
I'm also heartily sick of changing the time on like a dozen gadgets twice a year.
All my clocks except for the one on my microwave adjust automatically. All my computers, phones, wall clocks, etc. Time to upgrade I guess.
Belive it or not, the days were as long, and the weather as nice without federal legislation.
Believe it or not our clock system is arbitrary so we should set it to the way that makes us the happiest.
...effect by declaring everyone get up an hour early and shift your day schedule. Or not, its up to you. The entire thing is nonsensical. Daylight time is pointless.
I think it's completely pointless.
I agree. We should go to DST year around.
At the latitude where I live, the sun sets after 2100 PDT in the summer. That would still be 2000 PST, with an hour and a half of twilight after that. What more do people want?
I want exactly that. I want it to be light as long into the evening as practical.
In the winter the sun sets at 1600 PST. Even 1700 PDT wouldn't buy much, particularly since that would mean sunrise at 0900 PDT.
It would buy me an hour of daylight during my waking hours in the winter. It's depressing going to work when it is dark and coming home when it is dark again.
I'd like to see DST disappear, and a system of time zones based on lines of longitude. Every 15 degrees of longitude from the IDL being an additional hour of timezone offset.
That causes even more problems. You get weird effects like half of a town being on one time zone and the other half being and hour different. If you think that isn't a problem I can introduce you to some folks who live right next the the border of a time zone. Trust me, it's a problem and it's a bigger problem if it doesn't follow municipal or preferably state boundaries. I used to work at a company that had a plant in Indiana back when the state was bisected between EST and CST. It caused no end of headaches.
Knowing the timezone for a particular place would become dead simple. Know the location and you know the timezone.
I don' t know a single person aside from a few surveyors who could tell you what their longitude is. That's not something anyone who isn't a pilot or ship navigator pays attention to.
On the contrary, it's bad design that leads to irreconcilable differences which cause all kinds of headaches.
Correctly handling time in computers is trivial from a (new) design POV, simply store everything in UTC and translate it to whatever the local display requires, if the original local version of the UTC timestamp is important then you also store the tz offset and dst flag, best to do this anyway since unimportant things have a habit of becoming important soon after release.
Unfortunately the kind of implementation you allude to is far to common in the commercial world, worse still it's software "engineers" who are to blame because their original design either failed to consider different time zones or believed they were unimportant. As developer's we can promote an understanding of UTC, so next time you're writing code to display tz information, suggest that UTC should also be displayed. Online video games are a prime example of what I'm talking about, events are advertised for US time zones, would it really hurt to add UTC for the already neglected customers down here in Oz who understand what it means wrt to their local time? "Simplifying" UTC for customers is the root of the problem, you can't do that without losing information or making the display conversion horrendously complex.
In other words - "teach a man UTC and he will eat fish fingers all day" - or something like that.
Accurately maintaining the official tz table is another thing altogether, it's accuracy is at the mercy of political whim, and there's nothing in the known universe more baffling than whim.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Drive home in the dark? Surely not from work, because if that were the case DST does nothing to help the 5-7pm commute since you're already in daylight at that time of year anyway.
Not where I live. On the winter solstice sundown is at 5:04pm where I live. That means I'm driving home in the dark without DST.
If you don't want to drive home in the dark then you would be best to simply advance your time zone by one hour permanently so you get an extra hour of daylight in Winter, when you actually need it.
In case you hadn't noticed, that is exactly what DST does.
The earlier you go to bed, the *less* of a problem it is.
??? That makes no sense. Going to bed earlier doesn't affect the amount of daylight available to me between the end of work and sundown. I do not control either when sunrise or sundown occurs nor when my shift at work starts or ends. The only thing going to be earlier might accomplish is to help me be more rested but the only impact it could have on the amount of daylight available to me is to reduce the amount of time I enjoy it.
But most people go to bed somewhere around midnight or a little before.
Most adult people I know go to bed somewhere between 9-11PM because, you know... jobs. Not sure what orifice you pulled the "around midnight" bit from. Doesn't describe very many people I know who are past college age.
Lol omg wtf BBQ.
There's no benefit to changing the clocks. None whatsoever. We know this because one state recently switched. Mine. Every single pro argument for daylight savings time has now been measured and found to be false.
So we're left with "well, everyone else is doing it" as a reason to do so. And in case anyone decides to logic themselves out if it for some reason there's always someone like you. "What do you mean you find it hard to get up? What are you some kind of pussy?"
I rather have more sunlight in the evening. Otherwise there is very little sunlight at 5PM, that you can't do anything outside. I also hate the sun rising early and waking me up.
Being stupid is more dangerous then a time change.
If there are specific groups that need to vary their times for doing things depending on season, it should be up to them to simply change the time *they* do them, not force the rest of the country to screw with wasteful time changes twice a year.
Pick a time zone and just stick with standard time.
Many countless hours dealing with time related stupidity especially when developers were originally obliged to use local time on the legacy system.
I think the whole concept of DST should be scrapped, and I think we should just all use UTC and have midday at whatever time that happens to be in UTC.
It would not take too long for the world to get used to it..
While we are at it, can all computing platforms standardise on the Unix timestamp in milliseconds please.
Both the timezones and the DST are obsolete, confusing, error prone, useless and completely unnecessary pieces of crap that bring more harm than good. Somebody has even registered "getridoftimezones.org" already :-)
P. S. Where errors and confusion can be too costly to bear (aviation, military, ...) people got rid of those things long ago.
Now, mod me down freely. My karma can't get any worse...
... and there is no answer.
My vote - ditch the daylight savings time, and ditch the time zones. Lets make some timezone global, and everyone uses that timezone. I wrote a comment in Treehugger (http://www.treehugger.com/health/forget-just-getting-rid-daylight-saving-time-lets-get-rid-time-zones-and-go-local.html) 8 months ago, on the previous clock move discussion, and most of it I'll copy here:
For the last 5000 years humans are thought that sun is high in the sky at midday. Only way to detect time were sundials (even if old Romans had hourglass or something like that, they must be watched over constantly so they were not an option for reliable timekeeping). In the last 500 years we have mechanical clocks and we defined parts of day more precisely - hours, minutes, seconds. Timezones are here only in the last 150 years, and daylight savings time in the last 70 (and most people despise daylight savings time as it's not natural).
And daylight savings time is the argument against keeping timezones. Humans chose time measurement according to Earth rotation around the sun. On spring and autumn solstice (equinox) there is 12 hours of light and 12 hours on night. Why didn't they chose 12 as a number of hours, and not 10? Or 8? But as it is, we have hours, minutes and seconds, and our whole physics and other sciences revolve around those units.
So what is time? Or local time? It's just a number which we, humans, decided on. There is another example of time we humans decided: Unix timestamp or epoch. Used in computers it measures number of seconds since January 1st 1970 at 00:00:00 UTC.
What does daylight savings time has with it that's an argument for making time global? The answer: why are we moving clocks back and forth, to accommodate a system which should help us, to natural change of how long does a day and night last. Because our laws, work contracts and everything similar (again, human tools which could be changed) state the beginning and ending of an activity. And instead of changing those, we chose to move the clock?!?!?
I agree, in global time nobody would like to go to bed at 14:00, and go to work at 23:00, because everybody thinks that 14:00 is in the afternoon and 23:00 is in the middle of the night. But for some, if we used a global time system, that 14:00 would be middle of the night, and 23:00 would be the morning. 14 is just a number, a tool. For those whose time would become global, the number would stay the same, for others it would change. But everything would change - Google calendar could not expect that 13 o'clock is time for lunch because in your region lunch is now at 4:00 (and in reality it's somewhere around noon)
And there is another reason to change to global time real soon - space travel. When first colonist go to Moon, Mars and other planets in our solar system, how should they measure time. Locally? To the clock of some nation (first to colonize)? Should they use an Earth second or a Moon or Mars second? Should they still use a second, but set up a different number of seconds for a minute or an hours, and then use a standard 24 hours/day calculation?
We need a global system of time NOW. Used reasonably, with changes in work laws, school calendars etc. But we need IT. Is it Swatch Internet Time, is it UTC time or anything else.
Forces of habits are tough to beat. Only loss in global time is that 12 o'clock is not high noon, with a sun high in the sky. Oh wait, even now that's not the case if you're in a big timezone!
So forget the dayligh savings time, forget the timezones, forget that the time on your watch has a special meaning. You'll wake up in the morning, you'll go to sleep in the evening.
You do realize that Daylight Savings Time was created by battery manufacturers in a bid to sell more 9V batteries. They have used tried and true FUD tactics to scare the sheeple into replacing the batteries in their smoke detectors unnecessarily. It worked well too. Battery sales, specifically 9V batteries, increased 38.3% the year Daylight Savings Time was introduced.
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
I am in Queensland, Australia and having daylight saving would be a good thing. Firstly it would mean Sydney and Melbourne wouldn't be an hour ahead. And secondly it would mean more daylight in the evening (meaning less use of all forms of artificial lighting) and less daylight in the morning (so you dont get woken up by the 4am sunrise and then have to get back to sleep again like I was this morning)
It also means more time after work for people to swim in pools and beaches and engage in other outdoor activities.
And it means people aren't traveling in the dark so much when comming back from work or from those activities.
Yes it might cause issues with it being hotter at different times of the day than it is now but that's why Willis Carrier invented air conditioning :)
Set the Clocks up or back 1 half hour and leave it the Fuck Alone
I wish we would switch to "daylight savings" all year round. It's my favorite. I want the dark to come as late as possible and I hate the short winter days, it's depressing.
Also homophobic, islamophobic and misogynistic. I blame the Fucking Jews. Call me Lena Dunham.
We are no longer the agrarian society that was in place when DST was put in place to appease the farming community.
DST never had anything to do with farms. Farms operate when the sun is up which is unaffected by DST. In fact farmers have often opposed DST for fairly minor but practical reasons.
Got any other nonsense arguments?
For the same reason, schools should not have "summer holidays" -- the farm kids no longer work the farm in the summer
Apparently you do. What does that have to do with DST? That's a completely separate issue.
i like the 4 seasons of the year. and less light is seasonal too. i dont like to change time like that. messin with things for me. just wake up the fuck up if you want the most light.
Why should we fiddle with the clocks just to appease people that can't figure out how to sleep when it's dark? And I don't want to hear about work - change your work hours. Not the clock. Don't have that flexibility at your job? Guess what! Curtains it is. Now you have them to appease your boss.
http://xkcd.com/673/
We get it.
The Americans don't like DST. Fuck knows why, maybe not smart enough to figure out how to change a clock? Perhaps you live in a rural area and you're a farmer or something? Christ fuck only knows but the rest of the world has to deal with this idiot topic every year.
From Australia, all the 'civilised' states love the shit out of it.
I get to finish work with an hours more sunlight, period. I'm not even an outdoor person and I like it. If you have kids, dogs, hobbies, exercise routines, gardens to maintain, shopping to do, socialising and a fucking plethora of other activities, summer is vastly superior with an extra hour sunlight (yes, I know it's not an "extra hour" but it's an extra hour I can use.
I have no issue with it being slightly darker in the morning, when I'm in the shower or on public transport on my way to work, or eating breakfast. I can't COMMIT to anything in the morning, because I have to get to work (or some of us school or whatever) - but I do like when I finish, I see a bit more of the world.
I am continually baffled how many Americans dislike DST. Perhaps it's just a vocal minority of whiners on slashdot? Maybe a large amount of US citizens also love it?
I wish the clocks were forward an hour or two ALL year round, not just summer.
(Face it, we're not going to convince the world that a normal workday should be 8 till 4, so let's just fiddle with the clocks to emulate it)
Loving DST right now, will continue to always.
And don't change it ever again!
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I don't give half a shit about the clocks changing, it seems trivial. What seems important to me is the fact that we can do it. We can just willy-nilly change the clocks up or down, and not everyone has to be involved in this!
So often these days many people are talking about what needs to be done in order to make the world a better place, and they stop short of concluding, a lot of times, because they feel that it'd be to difficult to orchestrate. So always remember that changing the clocks as we do, isn't just some minor thing, and yet we can do it! Think of all of the other things that could actually be done.
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
...on not caring one bit one way or another.
Changing the clocks is so utterly arbitrary. If businesses or schools want to change hours during different seasons. then they should knock themselves out. Changing everyone's clocks is lunacy.
Too bad slashfagots spend more time talking about abolishing daylight savings time instead of the Federal Reserve.
This is why you will forever be slaves.
Change the government office hours, don't change the clock moron!
Lucky that my home Hong Kong has abolished that since long ago.
Daylights Idiot time,
a bad idea, no merit just a waste of resources working around this crap.
Energy savings none, School kids going to school in non-darkness => depends on where you live.
Overall this madness should stop.
Then why is it still the law? Politicians are, above all things, good at figuring out what their constituents want. I suspect that the reality is, most people are either neutral, or do like it. Those who don't like it, complain loudly twice a year; those who do like it, just stay quiet because they already have a system they like.
This Spring, move the clocks forward by one-half hour, then LEAVE THEM THERE ALL YEAR!!! I hate the time change - it messes me up for days, sometimes even a week or more.
If the powers that be feel the need to dick around with time, they could at least do something useful by making 24 hour time and ISO date-time format truly universal. No more "is that AM or PM?", and no more confusion over whether 11/06/14 refers to the eleventh day of June or the sixth day of November. (And in that same spirit of good sense maybe the folks responsible for the GTK file chooser could get rid of that fscking "Today" and "Yesterday" BS).
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
As far as I can tell, there has never been any statistically significant evidence that redefining time twice a year saves any energy, or has any other net benefit at all.
Meanwhile, it continually wastes the time of people who have to deal with the problems that it causes; moreso than ever since the world started depending on computers, and since international interactions have become common.
Just get rid of it, please. Forcibly playing games with people's clocks in the name of pretending that seasons don't exist is just stupid. Let businesses adopt winter hours if they want to align with daylight.
More sunlight with permanent DST. We also have strong evidence of accidents and heart probems caused bu the time changes every year. It's a STUPID idea to have to switch time every 6 months - for what? Complacent people who don't go outside, anyway?
There's no such thing as "normal" time. "Standard" time is...wait for it....STILL COMPLETELY ARBITRARY. The only thing that makes it standard is "we've been doing it that way for a longer time than DST", which is pretty weak in the grand scheme of things.
TLDR: winter time is no more "correct" than summer time.
I lived the first 45 years of my life in states that followed daylight savings time. I didn't like it when I had kids, because it seemed for a couple of weeks after the switch, they were all messed up.
Now I live in Arizona, where we leave the damn clocks alone, and I love it. It's a minor inconvenience occasionally when relatives back east are three hours ahead instead of two, but it's great not having to deal with the time shift directly.
As for people wanting DST because they get more daylight in the evening ... why don't you just get up earlier. It's the same amount of daylight either way, it's only YOUR schedule that doesn't allow you to enjoy it.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
China is huge but is on Beijing time, however in regions far from Beijing people set their work times by what is sensible and not by the numbers on the clock.
Most businesses around the world open more than 5 days already have different weekend opening and closing times. Why not different summer and winter operating times?
If you are ranting against DST but never address the equation of time, then you haven't even figured out what the problem is let alone have solved it.
I have heard several reasons for which people support the use of DST:
1. It creates jobs
2. It gives farmers and others an extra hour in winter
Whoever thinks that they will get an extra hour by using DST are sadly mistaken. It's a waste of time and money. People should stop being lazy and get up an hour earlier in winter if they want a longer day
What on earth is happening to slashdot? Why in the past few days have I seen editors suggesting how our responses are phrased?
It's almost like some new product manager had an idea in the shower on how bring in people who don't like to read, came in and told the editors this would be greeeat because then xyz people could skim and get the gist in 5 seconds, or they could run a script and repackage the responses, or they've subconsciously decided they don't like how their commentators talk amongst themselves.
I'm honestly confused, as this isn't April 1st.
Lol omg wtf BBQ.
There's no benefit to changing the clocks. None whatsoever. We know this because one state recently switched. Mine. Every single pro argument for daylight savings time has now been measured and found to be false.
So we're left with "well, everyone else is doing it" as a reason to do so. And in case anyone decides to logic themselves out if it for some reason there's always someone like you. "What do you mean you find it hard to get up? What are you some kind of pussy?"
I'm just responding to the "I find it hard to get up." "Changing the clocks makes people tired" arguments. Pussy arguments just like you listed.
If 1 hour of sleep makes that much difference in your life that you whine about it every year at this time, the problem is you not switching the clocks.
We are on standard time only about 4 months out of the year. So, why do we bother? Why not either stay with standard time or daylight time and forget this ridicules change twice a year? It just makes no damn sense!
I refuse to get up before noon. Winter days are extremely short and dark. Go back to two hours of daylight savings everyday so I have time to see outside. The world looks strange with the sun from the east. Should be afternoon all the time.
Sleep all day, party all night,
Do I even know what time it is?
Wrong. The premise is you have more daylight time in the EVENING! After work, cooking outdoors, doing yard work, golfing, committing armed robberies, raping, pillaging.
Stop this idiotic fuster-clocking.
Why even mess with it? A clock is an instrument to indicate the time of day. Do I want a ruler where everything is offset by 1cm or a speedo that is offset by 10mph? Of course not. Instruments should do their best to tell things the way it is.
When growing up at 15 degrees North in the Caribbean where we do not do DST, it was awkward at times to arrange business calls with the States... but no big deal, I couldn't understand why folks would want too go through all that twice a year.
Now I live 34 degrees North and see what the big deal is. I am on the road to work at 6:30am and come Monday I will not be seeing children walking around, crossing streets and standing around in the dark.
Anything that makes kids easier to avoid while driving in large portions of the continent is fine with me. All those other reasons like saving energy (NOT) can go stuff themselves.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Just deal with it. It's going to be darker in the winter and lighter in the summer,,,You go to bed an hour earlier or later, who the F cares?
As far as I can see now it just screws with people's sleep cycles and schedules to no particular effect.
Not "no particular effect" - the incidence of heart attacks spikes; that one can be debated whether they would have happened later anyway (probably not all of them, but there is some number).
But the incidence of fatal car wrecks right after the time change is unmistakable. This policy literally kills people, a modern "stab them in the fucking heart at the alter of central planning" ritual, and people _still_ ignore that and wonder if there might not be extra time to mow the lawn.
We're surrounded by sociopaths, by the millions.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
There are other studies from other countries that tried this, and there are studies from US sources (I dont have the citations right now) that claim to US consumes 30-40% more energy from daylight savings time.
Considering most people get up at 5-6 AM and dont get home to 4-6 PM where are you saving "energy" when your using energy practically all morning/evening, times when you should be "saving energy". Businesses leave their power running 24/7 or cut down when they are not in business hours.
I would insult you, for the funny ninja weasels joke. But I dont see how your life was complete misery before DST? And I'm curious as to how it would have?
Get rid of it.. And while we are at it... Standardize EVERYONE to UTC time. I'm totally cool with giving up my PST/PDT for UTC.
Lined curtains work just fine. Plus they increase insulation when drawn over unlined ones so you don't use as much energy heating your house in the winter (when it is dark more, so they are more likely to be drawn). Think of the curtains in Victorian times. They were thick material for a reason.
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
Do daylight savings time here. Good riddance!
Cows don't come down an hour early to be milked. Eggs still come out relative to the same time for daylight, computers frequently don't update and I'm called into fix the b#@$%@#$&^'s! .. hate hate hate! Stab!
get rid of timezones while we're at it. who cares if you work 9-5 or 11-7 or 3-11. one time for one world.
DST is not really an idea which I condone. Rather get up an hour early if you want that extra hour of sun you lazy bastard!
I prefer something international, like e.g. http://www.newearthtime.net/
AM/PM is crap.
60 is crap compared to 100, but at least the linked 360-hour system is easy to 'mental sync' with GMT.
DST etc. is crap.
urd
Russia switched to permanent DST for a few years but then recently decided to switch back to changing their clocks, why i dont know. Anyway some of the stupidity in this thread is mindblowing. Whatever time zone you're in I say just abolish standard time, stay on savings time and call it a day.
It's called a standard for damn good technical reasons.
SAVINGS is just some concocted political anti-standard bullshit that makes no sense at all.
Partly because I'm now posting on Slashdot at 5 am but mainly because it was a silly idea to begin with. As if pretending that it's an hour later than it actually is would improve the lives of the majority.
....Slashdot would be down two articles every year.
Just move it half and hour forward next spring and stop futzing with it!
They did the same thing in the 1970's for "saving energy". Didn't work then, and it most certainly doesn't work now. Personally, I would prefer to use GMT. They do it for the black boxes in the airline industry, why not let the rest of the world utilize it? The reason the airline industry uses it: that way, no matter where the airplane is if something should happen to the craft, it is much easier to track the events that lead to the problem anywhere in the world.
That is true. But the reverse is also true. When DST is switched to normal time, deaths decrease for awhile after. Not that I am an advocate of DST.
I just got an extra hour of sleep and it was great.
OR ---
We make watches that arbitrarily adjust to the amount of available daylight. So, in the winter months when there is less daylight, they burn through the hours of, let's say 6am to 6pm. Then they drag through the long nighttime hours. So workdays are shorter in the winter, and longer in the summer.
Wait, uh,...
... is Daylight Savings Time longer than any other country in the world. That's because our politicians just HAD to screw around with it.
Instead of starting like everyone else, going from the last Sunday in March to the last Sunday in October, the US politicians (who were more afraid of their kids walking in the dark on Halloween) decided to implement an 8-month DST, starting with the first Sunday in March and ending on the first Sunday in November. This throws a wrench into a lot of things (such as financial systems, shipments, schedules, etc.). It would be fine if we'd use the same dates as everyone else, but no, America's gotta be different, all because a few Congressmen think they can dictate time.
Me? I'm happy with straight normal time.
Ok, let's leave the clocks on DST time and we can talk about what I good idea it was during the winter solstice when sunrise isn't until 9am. Or let's do away with DST altogether and talk about it at the summer solstice when first light is 4am and last light is 8pm.
What I really want is for everyone to leave the dates alone! I have lived through to 2 changes in the dates. The first time was to save oil but I never saw evidence of that and hated going to school while it was still dark. I remember the problems I had doing gas measurement. Every spring, we got complaints because there was an hour of zero flow. I had to explain that we had an hour in our flow history that didn't exist. But a 23 hour day was easier to log than a 25 hour day! Our log was indexed by timestamp and ever fall, we had 2 different records with identical timestamps.
9 years of speaking english and still learning...
Try living someplace where the length of the day is changing by 5 or 10 minutes every day that time of year *and* having your clock shifted an hour on top of that.
It's a pain in the ass, and my saying so does not make me some kind of misfit or weakling. KGFY.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
I'm in Japan. When I move here from the East coast of the US I wanted to throw a party because I didn't have to change the clocks or adjust my time schedule. Changing the clocks sucks. period.
But I raise poultry for eggs and I want to collect the eggs before I go into work... but that's because sun rise triggers them to lay their eggs.
It's a waste of time. My current work schedule has me going to work in the dark summer and winter. Which is awesome because I'm usually home from work at the same time as the kids get home from school. The only thing that DST does for me is screws up my sleep schedule twice a year.
Here is a convenient BASH alias I use to perform timezone conversion
tz () {
local D T tz
D="$*"
[ -n "$D" ] || D=now
T=$(date -d "$D" +%s) || return
for tz in "Europe/Paris" "America/Chicago" "America/Los_Angeles" "Asia/Tokyo" ; do
A=$(LC_ALL=C TZ="$tz" date -d "@$T" +"%c %Z (UTC%:z)")
printf "%-20s %s\n" "$tz" "$A"
done
}
Give it any time specification supported by the 'date' command and it will print the local time in all selected timezones:
# tz tomorrow 10:00
Europe/Paris Mon Nov 3 10:00:00 2014 CET (UTC+01:00)
America/Chicago Mon Nov 3 03:00:00 2014 CST (UTC-06:00)
America/Los_Angeles Mon Nov 3 01:00:00 2014 PST (UTC-08:00)
Asia/Tokyo Mon Nov 3 18:00:00 2014 JST (UTC+09:00)
# tz now
Europe/Paris Sun Nov 2 14:49:34 2014 CET (UTC+01:00)
America/Chicago Sun Nov 2 07:49:34 2014 CST (UTC-06:00)
America/Los_Angeles Sun Nov 2 05:49:34 2014 PST (UTC-08:00)
Asia/Tokyo Sun Nov 2 22:49:34 2014 JST (UTC+09:00)
# tz dec 24 23:59
Europe/Paris Wed Dec 24 23:59:00 2014 CET (UTC+01:00)
America/Chicago Wed Dec 24 16:59:00 2014 CST (UTC-06:00)
America/Los_Angeles Wed Dec 24 14:59:00 2014 PST (UTC-08:00)
Asia/Tokyo Thu Dec 25 07:59:00 2014 JST (UTC+09:00)
Output is a bit screwed up by Slashdot.
I'd love to get rid of time changes and just have Standard Time all year, but we don't need to settle for that unimaginative answer. We now have the technology to do better.
When everybody's carrying around a smart phone -- effectively, a computer with a GPS -- then it should be easy to calculate the actual local time, solar time, any place on Earth. If you have local solar time, and you have GMT (Zulu time), then you have everything you need to coordinate the vast majority of human activity. Then time zones become redundant, and time changes would make even less sense than they already do now.
I way for the military and business social planners to come up with something for no damn good reason, and inflict it on our animal psychology and mess up our biorhythms and internal clocks. Just set two clocks, one a half hour in between, one conventional. Never change the one and sleep and rise and eat lunch by it.
Noon is always 12 o'clock. Arrive and leave work and keep appointments by the other.
It's the same everywhere
Instead of our current system where work/school starts at 8:00 and we adjust our clocks to compensate for the season, it would make more sense for schools and businesses to adjust their hours based on the season
I'm all for stopping the change but the OP lost me at the point he said he doesn't care which side we stop on. Leave it to our government to be stupid enough to stop the clock changing on the wrong side and leave us in darkness every afternoon! Go to work in the dark and leave home in the dark. I look forward to the studies indicating a spike in suicides. (Seriously)
Most modern lives revolve around clock-time, so DST/summer time makes some sense at middle latitudes -- more natural light when lamps otherwise would be burnt in the early evening (less in the morning when fewer are burnt).
DST make no sense at all at lower latitudes with little change in daylight hours with the seasons. Nor at very high latitudes with extreme changes.
A bigger question is whether the benefit is worth the circadian disruption -- world-wide jetlag. This is similar to countries deciding to be on half-hour time zones -- is the benefit worth the confusion? There will always be differing values, so differing opinions. No answer unless we can set 1h jetlag = XX kWh . You can try with money as the scale, then I suspect the answer is NO DST even at middle latitudes.
I've never had a problem with it personally.
All the clocks that I actually use switch automatically anyway.
... an NTP server away.
I always have been. Cutting off the top of the blanket and sewing it on the bottom doesn't keep me warmer. Businesses don't all start at one time, and we're moving to a global economy anyway where even time zones don't mean much. (China is on one time zone). We don't save energy. Use flex time instead.
This is funny:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4EUTMPuvHo#t=21
with the submitter. DST should become the year round standard and switching times twice a year should go away.
I takes the body 1 day to adjust to a 1 hour change. So in the Spring change, just go to bed an hour earlier the night of the change.
The effect of the change is based on your latitude, and your local sunrise or noon offset from your timezone's meridian.
Close the the equater or close to the poles, it probably doesn't make that much difference. When close to the equator, the times of sunrise and sunset don't
change much. When close to the poles, well you can have 24 hour darkness or sun, so it really doesn't matter what time it is. In between, though, it can have a big effect.
Also, the more west you are in your timezone, the later sunrise and sunset occur.
Where I am, in mid-summer, the sun sets at 10pm local time, and rises at 4am local time (DST)
In mid-winter, the sun rises at around 8am local time (or after) (Standard Time), and sets around 5pm.
If we were to stay with DST all year round, then the sun wouldn't rise till 9am in mid-winter - an hour after I get into work, after kids start school, etc. Yes, we'd get a slight longer evening, but I prefer some sun in the morning. And I believe the primary reason was so that children wouldn't be going to school in the dark.
If we were to stay with Standard Time all year round, then the sun wouldn't set till 11pm in mid-summer, which is after I go to bed. (It wouldn't be dark until after midnight).
So, yeah, I'm all for shifting the clock. We shift here on the last weekend of October and March, and that's about right. I don't see any reason to change it.
...just leave it on savings time permanently. I'd rather have the slim chance of light when I get home, as it's going to be dark when I leave in the morning for a good chunk of the year anyways...
If you need more time in the evening, then petition your boss to have differing hours of work. There's no real reason why you can't wake at dawn, be at work shortly after sunrise, lunch at local noon, and finish work and have hours of daylight left to play with.
- This sig deliberately left blank. Nothing to see, move along.
This is a historical argument that really hasn't changed its tune in a long time.
Personally, I think DST should be universally abolished. Pick one time, stick with it. This reminds me of an older post that recommended sweeping, simplified changes to our timezones here in the US, which I thought appealing.
DST is a fascist ploy to make more money from the proletariat. In the spring, they "borrow" an hour of our time, and then give it back in the fall. Time is money. Borrowed money earns interest. Do they pay us interest on the time they borrowed from us? Nope. For each of us individually this is a paltry sum each year, but year after year for all of us it really adds up.
I also really hate waking up before the sun comes up.
Is a maniac.
There are too few benefits compared to the hassles created by DST, especially as it varies between countries. UK changed clocks last weekend and I got in a terrible pickle trying to figure out when to call people in Canada. I'd like to see it phased out with all current DST zones in agreement.
Let's see, let's see...
02:15 AM cron job that did not run one Sunday, some important scheduled payments thingy, with other things then running expecting it had run, oh lord the manhours cleaning up and correcting after that disaster. Yep, servers were in US/Pacific, nice little time bombs left laying around for months until the pointless time wobble sets them off...good luck testing for that, hence the modern "just put it in UTC" to eliminate that class of problems. Alas, many servers still get placed in stupid timezones, or being so cannot be fixed (risk too high, bitrot, etc).
Then, at another company, the on-call got woken up each and every DST wiggle, because, you know, credit card latency was now 3600.00049996 seconds, or something, and hey! send pages! at who knows what hour; can't fix that software, legacy stack you see. On a positive note, the next version did run everything in UTC, thank goodness, but not after a few years of pointless, stupid, dumb pages.
Finally, there was the 2005 or so "energy savings" act, when they changed when the time wobble happened, and then everyone was spelunking around all the codebases, finding out how many custom date-time libraries had crawled into the systems (hint: lots) that all then needed updating. Maybe they found 'em all? Who knows, some reports might still be off by an hour, sometimes. Worst was the Exchange system, good fun post-change as they eventually threw up their hands and said "here's your new, empty calendar, good luck" and then 10,000+ folks were scavenging through old email invites to try to figure out who had been going to what meeting that was no longer there.
Probably seemed a good idea at the time. Isn't.
But even stupider would be to stick to your guns while the rest of the country did it.
If I got to be Benevolent Dictator for a Day, I'd split the difference and move Standard Time in the US ahead 1/2 hour and leave it.
Just use global time (UTC) and set your schedules based on that. Does it reallt matter if lunch is at 12:00 noon or 07:00?
The root cause here is that the length of the day, and the relative start and end times, shift over the course of the year. Instead of working around that, we should address it directly.
We need to get some research money devoted to the stabilization of the Earth's orbit, so that the days are uniform all year round.
The orbit is fine, just need to shift the rotational axis 23 degrees
While we are at it, we can slow the orbit down just a hair and get rid of leap year.
I think it would be more appropriate to speed the earth's orbit, otherwise that is just making more problems having to change every reference to 366 (and honestly who want's to have to by a new version off office because Office 365 stops working one day a year)
actually let's speed the orbit up so we can drop those extra 5 days and make the year a nice round 360 days over 12 30-day months
I would love to see the opposite, there is way too much daylight in the summer, but very little night sky for someone trapped in first shift like I. In the winter it would be nice to have at least an hour of sunlight when you get home for snowblowing.
Hear hear! In the summer we have more light and less darkness, so why do things to make awake-while-dark time even more scarce? (How much of the demise of drive-in theatres can be laid at the feet of the government-mandated imposition, and increases in the period of, Daylight Savings Time?)
I have for years been proposing Nightlife Savings Time as a fix: If the government MUST muck with the clocks, set them BACK in the spring, so those of us who want some dark time don't have to wait until the ground is covered with snow to get it.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I think we should stop switching and keep one time only.
All year DST is preferred from my end, but it would at least help to switch DST at the same dates like the rest of the world.
I think the whole world should switch immediately to UTC. People say they wouldn't be able to get used to waking up at 1400, but it won't be long before they realize that it's just a number.
Counting not only obvious clocks but also the timers on our thermostat, garden irrigation system, blood glucose meter (I have type 2 diabetes), TV and DVD/VCR (which have separate "clocks"), the gas and microwave ovens, and controller for lights on front walkway, I had to reset 18 timing devices this morning.
But this is not merely a twice-a-year effort. Failing to do proper preventative maintenance on its system, Southern California Edison can have an electrical outage at any time of the year; weather is rarely a factor. Every time there is an outage, I have to reset 7 devices and check three more to make sure their internal battery backups did not fail. Then there is the tall-case clock (also known as a grandfather's clock); if I forget to wind it before it runs down, I must then reset it. And there are two battery-driven clocks that occasionally need new batteries.
Why is this an "ask slashdot" rather than a "slashdot survey"?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
DST is a abomination and should be killed dead along with the ones
that support it
11
In the 1980s I hosted a huge Halloween party every year on the Saturday when DST started. I met my late wife at one of my parties. Around midnight, we would set back the clocks one hour. People stayed later and enjoyed the party longer.
It speaks to the hubris of a government which would like to control even the position of the sun in the sky.
Yeah. Indiana didn't change for the longest time, wasn't that bad without it. The issue came up when Indiana decided to join the greater majority of the country to observe it and then some brainless twit gave Indiana the option of what Time Zone they wanted to be in instead of allowing the Time Zone to be set by GEOGRAPHY as every other state does, so not only do we have DST we are now the only Centrally located State to be in the Eastern Time Zone. What does it matter you may ask? Children waiting on the schoolbus in the dark before the sun actually rises, not to mention quite a number of school starting time delays because of weather events that wouldn't be much a problem after the sunrise.....
Why not meet in the middle - 30 minutes permanently.
Does 30 minutes really make a difference?
The only possible justification for DST in modern times might be it being more convenient/safer for grade/middle/high school students to get to school in the morning. But at a cost likely in the hundreds of millions of dollars to prevent a few additional injuries & an occasional death or two there are FAR more worthwhile places where we cold be expending the resources (extra curricular activities, improved nutrition, etc) to do much more good.
The people against DST are probably from the south, where it doesn't matter. The further north you live, the longer the day is in the summer. I would rather have the standard day shifted earlier, so I can use the rest of the daylight after work. (This is why they call it Daylight Savings Time.) In the summer, the evening stays light until 9:00pm. In the winter, even with the day shifted to the middle of the lighted part, I'm driving home at 5:00pm in the near dark. Notherners get so little warm weather. Let us enjoy what we can.
The reason it needs to be a standard is so the stores and other places of business are all on the same clock. We want everyone synchronized so the public transportation doesn't have to run at half capacity for a longer commute period. It saves having to keep a list of which businesses are open late, and which let their employees out early. Imagine driving a delivery route where you have to run it twice, once for each set of early or late customers. If you get it wrong, there is no one there to take the delivery.
The further south you go, the less the length of the day varies, and the less you need DST Y'all need to shut up, 'cuz y'all can go outside in February. Arizona decided not to participate in DST. Lobby in your state, if that's what you want. Leave those of us who benefit from it alone.
The Old Indian, when Daylight Savings Time was explained to him, said:
"Only a White Man could believe that cutting a foot off the top of the blanket and sewing it on the bottom would make the blanket longer."
No stinking DST. I have lived 38 years w/o DST, 33 years years with. I like daylight when I wake up, which I don't have in Mar, April, and Sep, Oct. I like to sit on my deck, listen to the cicadas while it is dark. In Jun, Jul, and part of Aug it isn't dark until well after 9. The country tried all year DST in the 70s, it was a disaster, and was stopped. One argument put forth to have DST was energy savings, but several studies have shown this to not be fact, in fact, oil consumption rises due to people driving more with the extended evening daylight.
We will continue to have DST, because 98%+ of the population has not known anything other than DST, and think it is a good thing.
It is a royal pain in the arse. I prefer recognizing the seasons, rather than trying to hide them. It also mucks with our normal sleep pattern during the switch over.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
The timezone schedules are contain countries that that are off by non-hour increments (ie: India), and not everybody switches at the same time if they observe a DST switch. When governments simply decree a new DST start time, you then can't tell time with a computer without knowing timezone and schedule. I was up in the air on an international flight during one such newly decreed DST changes, and we got an announcement that something went wrong and lunch was an hour late. A lot of embedded systems (ie: watches, car, plane parts) are not updateable. You have the schedule in the OS, and the schedule in the runtime system (ie: Java), etc. Did I mention leap seconds? Ideally, DST would be eliminated. But perhaps we should just stop messing with it. There are some computer systems, using algorithms involving truncating 'today' to midnight milliseconds, that are very sensitive to situations where the timezone schedules are not exactly aligned (ie: between OS, PHP, database, application code that assumes that days are 24hrs in length, or some integral number of hours in length).
in the dark...
every fucking year slashdot, every fuuuuuucking year. sort it out jesus fucking christ.
I like switching to have more early morning light in the fall (and, back to DST in the spring).
However, I wish we could go back to the times when it used to be - two weeks earlier in the fall, and two weeks later in the spring. My mornings are *really* dark for the last two weeks of October. Having light in the morning makes it *much* easier to get up. I'm more productive when it's light in the mornings, get more done. So my personal contribution to the GDP will be higher... :-)
I want DST year round. I like daylight when I get off of work. DST year round all the way!
If Bill Gates had a nickle for every time windoz crashed he would be rich. Wait a second he does.
The time you go to work, or go home is just a number. I've been a pilot for years and it's very easy to switch to knowing I wake up at 1200 UTC and I usually get home from work about 0000 UTC. What's difficult is all this messing with the clock. If you call a company on the other side of the country, imagine how much easier it would be if they just could give you the UTC time you're use to thinking in terms of for their hours of operations? It really just works, everyone has to just let go of the idea that work starts at 9AM and ends at 5PM. The time your work starts and ends should be a function of where you live around the globe (and perhaps if you work night shift).
I totally agree, your servants at the shops should work silly hours to please master. No sense in letting them go home to their families at the same time, or enjoy culture. Thoughts like yours is why the US has such a fractured broken culture. It sounds great to me the shops are closed Sundays, and everyone is off at the same time.
Just a aside here. It's just an excuse to "use a expert in Europe" and "a consultant in India" to save a few pounds in the latter and not train and invest at home in anyone long term in the former. No one has a sense of community. And is adding to the pollution with all the air travel. Not just the business flights but the people who move about chasing jobs then have to fly all over to visit family "back home". I am not even for long commutes. People should train or bike to work. The Boeing 707 really wreaked havoc with England's districts. I know it seems silly to be against technology on a technology web site but there you go.
Moving back to Arizona I am...
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
In China, there is one single time zone (Beijing Time, UTC+8), and there is no daylight savings time. This means that for all of China, throughout the entire year, everyone is on the same time and never has to monkey around with adjusting the time. Coming from the U.S. where we have multiple time zones plus daylight savings time, I feel like the simplicity of time here in China is a nice little luxury. The only time I ever have to worry about time changes or time zones are when I'm contacting people in foreign countries.
For the extreme west, Tibet and Xinjiang, there is an unofficial time zone (UTC+6), but this is just a common local practice, and Beijing Time is always the official time. During the Republic era, China actually had 5 time zones, but they learned their lesson and realized simplicity is a virtue.
Systemd: the PulseAudio of init systems
Are you a guy who is lifting bricks into place to make a building when the sun comes up in summer and makes you too hot to continue?
Are you there milking the cows to get us some milk when the sun _doesn't_ come up in winter and it's so freezing you can't move your fingers?
Nobody gives a fuck what _you_ think about what time it is, office boy, and after reading these all comments, I thank fuck for that.
It's OK Bender, there's no such thing as 2.
Ben Franklin was the first person that I know who suggested it as a way to add daylight hours at the end of the day. Then, the idea remained dormant until The First World War when it was adopted by both sides to increase production and save illumination fuel. One origin of the term "Wartime". It kicked in again for WW-II, of course. Then, somebody added two months to it during the "Energy Crises" in the mid-Seventies which had mothers escorting their children to the school bus with flashlights due to the darkness. Crazy! When I was flying, it didn't matter because my watch was set to Zulu and never changed. So far, three places don't buy into this foolishness. NE Indiana, Arizona, and Hawaii. The idea of dropping it like yesterday's garbage has been proposed in Utah which would align us with Arizona. Time to call my legislators and do some suggesting.
I live in Queensland Australia, we do not have daylight savings. WOW servers run on Sydney NSW time, so when DST comes along raids start an hour earlier. I cannot start an hour earlier, wife, kids etc. An 8pm raid would be starting during dinner time causing much aggro - I am not a tank and that time of the night I am in cloth and very few self heals so chances of survival are not that great. My one or if I am lucky two raiding nights has more or less gone down to zero.... so now compared to all the other elite ( just ask them ) WOW players I am relegated to disdain and contempt by these same elite players. So I am hugely in favour of Daylight Savings, I would vote for any government that would bring this in no matter what their other policies.
I'm against it. That's why I made a petition to end it. If you want more daylight in the evening, you don't need to change everyone's clocks! Just get up earlier, and come home from work or whatever earlier.
https://petitions.whitehouse.g...
--- wad
The stated purpose is to conserve energy, but the numbers show that it has the opposite effect.
For an apples-to-apples comparison, look at Indiana when they were a partially "fast time" and partially "slow time" state. Then look at them after they became an entirely "fast time" state.
Summer energy usage in the regions that had formerly been ignoring DST saw a dramatic increase after converting to DST. The regions which had already been observing DST did not see a similar year-over-year increase in the same time period.
This, coupled with the 48-hour spike in heart attacks and traffic accidents after shifting the clock forward, is just stupidity.
Stop screwing with the clocks.
Who escaped from a mental institution so many years ago, and made up DST stuff.
My fiance is currently living in the Netherlands and they switched off of CEDST last weekend, and here in the US we just switched from EDST. I have few problems mentally calculating time differences as I had to do it constantly when I was assigned to Korea in the military in the medical field...watching the docs come in in the middle of the night for a mandatory conference call with the CDC (we used experimental STD drugs) or with Medical Command HQ (in San Antonio TX) was fun. They had no clue what time their meetings were, so we had to learn quickly as our command and South Korea did not observe DST. My fiance still has trouble with the time shift, so she will tell me "call me at X" knowing I can figure this out. I will be glad when her visa goes through so I don't have to timeshift for a chance to Skype with her and the 4 times a year I have to recalculate for a week or two our time difference.
"If stupid things work...then they are not stupid."
It is midday when the sun is dierectly overhead. We conventionally call this 12:00. Likewise at 00:00 the sun should be directly below our feet.
Before the invention of rapid transport, the train, every town run on local meridiam time so there was a 10 minute difference in time between Bristol and London http://wwp.greenwichmeantime.com/info/bristol-time.htm this caused significant problem with train timetabling. However that's just lazyness in my mind, there's no reason we can't have meridiam time everywhere and watches with gps to compenstate as we move east and west.
Even if we stick with Timezones, there's no reason to budge things by an hour ever. If people want to get up an hour earlier for some part of the year, they're welcome too, just leave me in bed!
foo
DST itself is bad enough, but the geniuses in the US congress and Canadian parliaments also changed the start/stop dates a few years ago so that the North American DST schedule is different from just about everywhere else in the world. So now the time offset between, say, San Francisco and, say, Berlin, might be 8, 9 or 10 hours depending on what month it is and which city is or is not on a "summer" timezone. For people in the US who do business with the many countries in the world that are not the US, this is an added insult beyond that standardized absurdity.
Fuck you, we don't do that shit.
It is a gimmick, and it fails just messes things up.
Want to have more time after work/school? Then go to work earlier and leave earlier. Nuff said.
I grew up on a farm and changing time was disruptive. The animals have their own clocks - so chores done at 5:00 am had to be done at 4:00 am & vice versa.Of course, most people are urban dwellers nowadays, so farmers don't have much of a voice. Changes in time also affect kids - especially when you have to get them up early as most people do. It can really be a challenge getting a kids internal clock to go with the plan. Finally I always have a week or two of "jet lag" after the time change - so don't think its good for me.
As we have only about 4 months of standard time now, it seems a pretty good indication that while there are lots of points of view, most people are pretty happy with DST. The reason is pretty simple. The vast majority of people are fully awake and busy in the evening and so can use the extra daylight, while comparatively fewer are up and at 'em before 6 or 7 am. And at any rate, you're either driving in the dark in the morning, or driving home in the dark at night. . . so that zero sum tradeoff is worth the hassle of everyone changing their clocks? No.
And yeah, it seems a lot more reasonable to encourage those people and organizations to shift between winter and summer business hours if that ends up suiting them, rather than make every last one of us shift their entire lives. I think it would end up being relatively few that would end up shifting.
Its nice in the UK to have the extra evening hour of daylight. However, in the winter people would end up whining around saying that it was too dark in the morning and they cant get up. But overall it would be a change for the better.
A big problem is that the UK has Greenwich, as in Greenwich mean time. It would no longer be very relevant if we permanently moved to being an hour ahead of GMT.
First, the noon is the middle of the day. So don't fuck about with it.
Second, the whiners complaining "The evenings are so short" are fucking hopelessly lost. The problem IS NOT that the nights draw in early, but that the working day STOPS TOO LATE.
Middle of the day; 12 Noon
Middle of the working day (9-5) 1 O'clock IN THE AFTER NOON
If your working day is mostly in the afternoon, and you want more light after work, THEN GET THE WORKING DAY CHANGED. DON'T shift the clock about just so you keep the 9-5 clock hour.
DST means that businesses ALREADY DO have winter hours. They just make the clock lie rather than have their opening times change, but no matter how it's done, THEY HAVE CHANGED THEIR OPENING HOURS.
I haven't met anyone who does. All the conversations I've had about it over the years, there seem to be two major camps:
1. It's awful and I really wish we could abolish it. (I fall into that one.)
2. Meh, whatever, it's not that big a deal.
So if half the population hates it, and the other half doesn't care one way or another... why is it still a thing? (Honestly, I'm asking, I have no idea.)
If people like an extra hour of daylight after work, then why not start work an extra hour early and get off an extra hour early? Then in the evening instead of being asleep by 10pm, why not be asleep by 9pm instead? Or even 8pm? See.... many Americans can't do it. There's no concept of "delayed gratification" for most people. So, "Daylight Savings Time" was created to force people to get up an hour early and sleep an hour early, for what used to be 6 months out of the year. Now the powers-that-be have increased it to - what - 8 months?