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.

Comments

Re:I'm surrounded by morons

[Jamu]

What I'd hate most would be the fact that Greenwich would never be on Greenwich Mean Time!

Who cares if it makes sense,,,

[Eunuchswear]

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.

Re:Who cares if it makes sense,,,

[Noah Haders]

a pet peeve of mine is that when people quote a time like "1pm pacific time" but want to feel fancy they say "1pm PDT". about half the time they are wrong and should have said 1pm PST! When they're wrong I'm always tempted to show up an hour early or late and feign innocence, saying that I was just doing what they said.

Re:Who cares if it makes sense,,,

[Mal-2]

Someone of Native American descent once told me, "only white men could think you can make a blanket longer by cutting a foot off one end and sewing it to the other."

Sounds like a perfect description of DST to me.

Re:Who cares if it makes sense,,,

[Anonymous Coward]

I really hate meeting invitations sent by a well known tool:

> When: Friday, May 16, 2014 9:00 AM-10:00 AM (UTC-08:00) Pacific Time (US & Canada).
> Note: The GMT offset above does not reflect daylight saving time adjustments.

I cannot figure out how to interpret the note: Should I just ignore DST and go to the meeting at 9AM according to the current PDT/PST or should I adjust the DST myself?

The logic tells me to use 9:00 AM UTC-08:00 which is well defined and absolutely independant of DST. Unfortunately, the given UTC is wrong. To make things worse, I am in Europe so I have to convert them to my local time (with different dates of DST changes). Haaaaaaa!!!!!!!

Re: Who cares if it makes sense,,,

[Anonymous Coward]

the only argument we have about the time around here is whether we are stuck on CST or MDT.

Obviously you're on CST in the winter and MDT in the summer.

(I'm only half joking - taking that approach will help solve your "didn't you mean CDT?" problem.)

The right answer

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

So much fuss.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not losing any sleep over it.

Re:So much fuss.

[geminidomino]

You will in the spring!

Re:Ben Franklin's joke

[Greyfox]

Hopefully Franklin's takeway from this is that one should never make suggestions ironically because some incompetent twit will think it's a good idea and implement it.

Re:I'm not sure what bothers me more,

[aliquis]

So above the arctic circle they shouldn't go to school at all in the mid of the winters? =P