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

Helping retailers

[jd659]

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.

Simple: Dumb

[Anonymous Coward]

Only the egotistical mind of a politician can fathom the ridiculous idea of starting and stopping the earths spin twice a year

Re:Simple: Dumb

[westlake]

Only the egotistical mind of a politician can fathom the ridiculous idea of starting and stopping the earths spin twice a year.

Standard Time, Zone Time, is a creation of the railroad.

Before then, people kept local solar time, with clocks changing about every twenty-five miles or so east and west.

Twenty-five miles is also about as far as you can travel comfortably in one day on foot, horseback, by stagecoach or the Erie barge canal.

Re:I'm surrounded by morons

[dgatwood]

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.

Umm... that doesn't change the time when people get off work. The reason most people want more light at the end of the day is so they don't have to drive home in the dark.

Ben Franklin's joke

[SternisheFan]

" Back in 1784, hanging out in Paris and heady with Enlightenment, Benjamin Franklin had an idea. Struck by the fact that Parisians were sleeping during sunlight hours and then staying up late at night by candlelight, he calculated the number of candles that were being wasted -- and came up with a very impressive number, 64 million pounds worth of them. Franklin therefore jokingly proposed a massive schedule change, noting that a fortune could be saved through "the economy of using sunshine instead of candles," and even suggested at one point that perhaps cannons be fired at sunrise to get everybody out of bed."

.... "The researchers also had the cooperation of Duke Energy, which provided a massive data set of monthly utility bills for nearly 230,000 Indiana residents, organized by their locations. And they had weather data, meaning that they could chart energy use against temperature fluctuations (which are obviously a very central factor in heating and cooling). And the results, at least for followers of Franklin, were shocking: Daylight saving time increased energy use in the counties that had just switched to it, by about 1 percent during the period when it was in effect. The overall cost translated into $ 3.29 per person per year -- nearly $ 9 million overall across Indiana. And on top of that, the added pollution resulted in an additional $ 1.7 to $ 5.5 million per year in “social” costs. Ouch."

Source : www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/10/31/daylight-saving-time-may-increase-your-energy-bill/

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

[Sene]

I have never lived in an area where DST is not used and so far I think it is utterly useless.

Re:I live in Arizona, and it's a pain

[PAjamian]

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.

Try living in New Zealand and having clients in California. Since NZ is in the southern hemisphere our summer is during your winter and vice-versa, so during our summer (and your winter) we are three hours apart* from US/Pacific, but during our winter and your summer we are five hours apart and in-between there is about a month where DST overlaps in both fall and spring and we are four hours apart.

* Actually 21 hours, but it's easier to think of it as us being a day ahead and three hours behind.

Re:I'll take that bait

[ArmoredDragon]

It's not national. Arizona realized how pointless and retarded the whole thing is 40 years ago, and hasn't done it since.

It's racist

[gelfling]

Also homophobic, islamophobic and misogynistic. I blame the Fucking Jews. Call me Lena Dunham.

Re:I'll take that bait

[Grishnakh]

Not exactly true. The Navajo Nation within Arizona uses DST, because the reservation spans 3 states (the other two of which observe DST). Oddly, however, the Hopi have a reservation completely surrounded by the Navajo reservation, and they don't follow DST.

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

[Rakarra]

Then start school later on the dark days. Why is there such an opposition to businesses changing hours with the seasons, rather than changing the clocks?

Because they WON'T. And they never will. They just will NOT have different hours for different seasons, especially if you work in a corporate environment like any desk job.

This whole kerfuffle happens because yes, it actually IS easier to change society's entire concept of the hour of the day rather than have businesses change hours as daylight changes.