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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.
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.
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.
Eh, I just set everything to UTC and don't worry about weird things, like cron jobs between midnight and 1am running twice or not at all every once in a while.
Of course, my last major employer has everything set to PST/PDT, since that's where their major data center is, even though they have rather large branches in every major timezones. And because of some stupid thing in Oracle 10/11 of all things, all of the new data centers in other time zones /also/ are running in PST/PDT, because it's the only way to get Oracle's XDCR to work.
Which means their new international data center in China will not only be on PST/PDT, but will enjoy 4 DST transitions per year, since China switches their clocks a few weeks off from North America.
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.
You will in the spring!
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.
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.
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