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Daylight Saving Time Change On Sunday For N. America
An anonymous reader writes Just a reminder that DST starts this weekend for most of North America. The majority of people feel that DST is a bad idea and want it to stop. If that was done, the main question would then probably be whether to go to Standard time year-round, or "summer" time year-round (more). For the latter, there is some evidence that it helps reduce crime (at least initially); for the former, more northern locations would have sunrise occur 08:30 or later, which would make the morning commute difficult. Some even argue that the U.S. should go to only two timezones. The DST change occurs at the end of March in the EU, so there will be a second round of confusion for trans-Atlantic conference calls then.
> The majority of people feel that DST is a bad idea....
Do you have a source for this?
The majority of people feel that DST is a bad idea and want it to stop.
I know some people don't like it, but a majority? I really doubt it. Citation?
DST is nothing more than collectively agreeing that we will get up and go home an hour earlier all summer long. Hence the traditional opposition in farming areas - farmers work on the sun, not the clock, and if every store closes an hour earlier, it is more difficult for them to get there after the farm work is done but before they close.
Here in Minnesota, we have large stores like Mills Fleet Farm and Wal-Mart that have extended hours, if not open 24 hours, and stock items that typical farmers need for maintaining Livestock and doing various repairs. This can also be supplemented with Amazon orders that can be delivered directly to your home. There is an ever decreasing need for DST changes just to support farmers. Also, we have had the electric light for more than 100 years now. I think it's time to change. Farmers will be able to adapt. If they can't, then maybe they should be replaced with robots.
My car has inbuilt sat nav and I still have to adjust the time manually twice a year. It knows exactly where I am, but can't relate that to a timezone, let alone sync time to the GPS signal. Or the digital radio. Or my phone when that's connected via bluetooth. It's weird that it seems to have multiple data sources that could potentially keep the time accurate but doesn't use any of them.
Sigs are so 1990s. No way would I be seen dead with one.
The issue of daylight would be dealt with locally.
The issue of date on the other hand becomes a whole lot more awkward. You either have the date change at 00:00 everywhere, which means that for much of the world it changes during the day (it's my birthday! but only until lunchtime!), or in the middle of the night locally, meaning that now I know what time it is anywhere in the world but no idea what date it is.
That would seem to be a harder problem than simply agreeing times in UTC, which we could do today, and people just doing the conversion to/from their local time as necessary.
And don't even get me started on people who thing that GMT is the same as UK time all year long...