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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"
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 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.
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.
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
And the right latitude.
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/
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.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe it's the one-hour shift to their sleeping-pattern, twice each year, they object to?
Who ordered that?
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
...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.
Your solution doesn't go far enough! We should all switch to UNIX epoch time and refer to time in seconds from Midnight, Jan 1, 1970, GMT. I know POSIX specifies UTC, but they don't track leap seconds so they're just confusing everyone and can therefore fuck right off. Then at last there will be no relationship to the celestial spheres that drove the creation of Time to begin with! If you really need your antique ("Wahh how do I know when lunch time is?") you can just modulo the time by 86400 to get the number of seconds since midnight, divide your longitude by 15, multiply that by 3600 and add the result to the number of seconds since midnight and if you're somewhere close to 43200, you're getting close to lunch time. Or ask Apple to put that number under the main time display on your smart watch. Der!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Move to Iceland. Fun fact: it's the only country in the world that uses GMT. All. Year. Long.
OK, I guess parts of Western Africa too.
http://www.timeanddate.com/tim...
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.
A numeric designation of time is purely arbitrary in the first place, so adding an arbitrary adjustment twice a year seems consistent with the arbitrary nature of it. The main problem is dealing with more than 24 different times. If we could all agree to make the switch, using a single arbitrary time would make sense in our connected world. I expect that to happen soon after the USA switches to the metric system, which is also somewhat arbitrary, but oh so much more sensible than the totally insane system we use now.
It might be funny, but it's not true
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!
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.
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.
... 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.
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.
Actually, it's the opposite of what DST does. We're adding the extra hour of sun when we don't need it, and taking it away when the argument of "wanting more light in the evening" would suggest we keep it.
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.
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.
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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