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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.'"
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.
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."
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
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.
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.
Maybe it's the one-hour shift to their sleeping-pattern, twice each year, they object to?
Who ordered that?
TV schedules? Like, from the 20th century? My grandfather read about those in a history book once! People use to schedule their lives around entertainment which was, get this, broadcast to everyone at the same time. Weird, right? It's true, the past is a foreign country.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
...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
Here in Melbourne, DST means my street is clogged with the parked cars of beachgoers in the evening, and yeah it definitely keeps the small shopping strip alive. Like many people in IT I have flexible working hours, neither I, or my boss, or his boss, gives a flying fuck what the clock says. However the vast majority of workers are not so fortunate, for them it's fixed hours or nothing. So if these people want to change the clock so more daylight is available after they knock off why should I care?
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
... 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.
We spent thousands of man years on making this shit work...
It doesn't work. It has never worked. It will never work. It is nothing less than one metric ton of pure unadulteraded idiocy, always has been and always will be.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
It's true, the past is a foreign country.
Or the current one, if you choose to avoid streaming and DVR-like devices. Funny how TV isn't even close to dead, and people like you are talking like it died out more than 2 generations ago. Unless....are you from the future? How is the year 2100 treating you? Have the monkeys taken over yet, or is there still just unrest amongst the macaques?
Why is the solution to change the time of everything instead of having school start an hour later? That's a perfect example of the tail wagging the dog. Also, just for reference, the children you see Monday will be getting on the bus at STANDARD time. So, if DST didn't exist at all, they would still be getting on the bus at the same time.
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