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Proof Daylight Saving Time Is Dumb, Dangerous, and Costly (bloomberg.com)
From a report on Bloomberg: The case for daylight saving time has been shaky for a while. The biannual time change was originally implemented to save energy. Yet dozens of studies around the world have found that changing the clocks has either minuscule or non-existent effects on energy use. [...] The latest research suggests the time change can be harmful to our health and cost us money. The suffering of the spring time change begins with the loss of an hour of sleep. That might not seem like a big deal, but researchers have found it can be dangerous to mess with sleep schedules. Car accidents, strokes, and heart attacks spike in the days after the March time change. It turns out that judges, sleep deprived by daylight saving, impose harsher sentences. [...] Some of the last defenders of daylight saving time have been a cluster of business groups who assume the change helps stimulate consumer spending. That's not true either, according to recent analysis of 380 million bank and credit-card transactions by the JPMorgan Chase Institute.
We've known for a long time, at least in my recollection since the '70s, that daylight savings time didn't do much other than cause problems. Since our Nation really isn't based on agricultural production anymore maybe it's time we just give it up. I'm sure the farmers, chickens and local schools can get it sorted out okay.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
What comes up twice EVERY SINGLE YEAR, Alex.
Why not just make the Monday after DST time change a national holiday? Problem solved.
Me, I like Daylight Savings Time, because it will allow me to sit out on the porch in May listening to the Blackhawks game and still have enough light to read. And in the Winter it would suck having to go to work in the morning in the pitch dark.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I'm not going to dispute that this is a really shitty submission, and that Slashdot could do better.
What I will dispute, however, is that the problems that people experience in civilized nations are somehow less important than the problems people experience in less civilized nations.
People in civilized nations have to deal with all of the same problems that less civilized nations have to deal with. We still have to eat food and drink water. We still have to provide ourselves with shelter. We still need clothing. We still need to avoid injury and death.
In fact, it's often much harder for people living in the most developed countries to do such things. Most of the most civilized nations are in areas with very inhospitable conditions, such as long and harsh winters, or short crop growing seasons. It's not like, say, Africa or the Caribbean, where the climate is such that shelter, clothing, and even agriculture almost become non-issues.
Belittling "first-world problems" is silly, because they not only encompass the problem at hand, but they also encompass all of the problems that less civilized nations need to deal with, too.
By their very nature, "first-world problems" are inherently more severe than "non-first-world problems".
If something is deemed to be a "first-world problem", then it's a very significant problem. Just because civilized nations have come up with ways of dealing with the foundational problems doesn't mean that the higher-level problems are less problematic. It's actually quite the opposite.
So can we just get rid of it then? I maintain a few data logging systems, and it creates all kinds of problems, as I'm sure you're aware most people want to view data in local time, but not only is there a 1 hour gap in the data in the spring, but there's actually going to be two points in time that are equally valid 1:30 am November 5th, 2017. That's just stupid.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
Daylight savings is the perfect example of government's regulatory overreach interference in people's lives for theoretical gain. What is there is an increase in stress, time, money and heart attacks.
It's a concept that kills people, something studies have shown for years. Meanwhile anyone who wants an extra hour of daylight can make a personal choice and adjust their sleep schedule.
http://www.livescience.com/567...
https://permies.com/t/509/Debu...
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfor...
https://www.theatlantic.com/na...
What about the immense benefits of falling back when strokes and heart attacks dip, the birth rate increases, economic production increases, and consumer spending increases. Yes, it is unfortunate that so many must die from springing forward one hour, but I think you'll all agree, falling back is too great a benefit to discard. Thank you.
If one hour change caused this much havoc then driving/flying between time zones should have the same effect yet oddly, it doesn't.
It doesn't ? Where's your data ?
Proof Daylight Saving Time Is Dumb, Dangerous, and Costly
A correlation was cited, but causation was not proven. There are more pedestrian accidents between noon and 1pm. But that does not mean that lunch hour needs to be eliminated.
.
Nice try. Wanna play again?
Is there a sudden spike in people driving longer hours that correlates with this date every year? Same thing with people cleaning up their yards, does that suddenly happen at the same date as the time change? That is straight out ridiculous.
I'm betting that "people driving longer hours" and "cleaning up their yards" happens at different times every year (depending on that years weather and climate). The time change doesn't shift around. And I'm betting you'd see a far greater spike in strokes and heart attacks early in january when people start training due to new years resolution than a pretty random day in march.
Your suggestions for confounding factors are weak.
"If one hour change caused this much havoc then driving/flying between time zones should have the same effect yet oddly, it doesn't."
Do you have any sources for that? I have a source saying the exact opposite: http://getawaytips.azcentral.com/dangers-jet-lag-4240.html:
In extremely rare cases, the variations in the circadian rhythm have been known to cause heart attacks and strokes. The other side effects of jet lag can cause your stress levels to spike, which could trigger a heart attack if you have high blood pressure or a diagnosed heart condition.
... except that most of the lobby groups would call for us to be at GMT+1 all year round because they want it "lighter later". Screw that. I say the UK should stay at GMT all year round. I want some light to wake up to in winter - waking up in the pitch black is totally depressing.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
Personally I stopped changing my clocks. Past few years I have just stayed on the current time and it's been great. I get more sunlight in the winter when I'm actually awake to enjoy it, and I avoided all the moaning and groaning of having to get up/go to bed earlier.
Twinstiq, game news
If one hour change caused this much havoc then driving/flying between time zones should have the same effect yet oddly, it doesn't.
or does it?
https://www.bing.com/search?q=... The very first result pokes fun at farmers for being against daylight savings time. I expect the other links to support that it wasn't for farmers.
Except that "first world problem" is normally used specifically to imply something is insignificant. In this case the thing is, apparently, actually significant, so I agree it's the wrong use of the phrase. But In general it can be a meaningful phrase.
Problem solved.
For americans, you just roll back the time 5-8 hours and you are set.
The only reason I ever kept clocks in local time was due to Microsoft being too lazy to add UTC conversion as an option. Since leaving M$ OSes it has been a dream as far as switching time goes.
While I have no real opinion (due to lack of data) on the benefits of DST, the article fails to make any mention of the effects of latitude. All of the examples cited are the southernmost states, where the amount of daylight varies the least over the course of a year. As a result, one would expect that the case for DST would be the weakest (as well as for states that straddle the border between time zones). The case would be stronger for northern states, where the amount of daylight varies more over the course of a year (like in Minnesota, where I reside at the moment), and for states that are in the middle of time-zones).
For me, the case is not proven.
Actually, yes, it does. Read up on the effects of jet lag some time.
Get rid of the time change and make it light an hour longer in the evening. Who really gives a damn if dawn is an hour later every day? Most people work. So you're going to work in the dark, so what? Wouldn't most people prefer having it be light outside for a while after they leave work, even in mid-December?
So heart attacks and traffic accidents are first world problems? Guess you should be happy in your third world hellhole then and we can turn off the development aid?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The suffering of the spring time change begins with the loss of an hour of sleep.
Yeah. Summary is both dumb and dangerous to the continued health of my braincells. Which kind of wrapped in a safety bubble bumbling idiot comes up with that "suffering". Mind you if someone is incapable of adjusting their sleep schedule so they don't lose an hour of sleep, let them suffer. Maybe we can weed out such precious flowers in a few more generations of dawinism as those people who can't cope with an alarm going off early die off early in heart attacks.
i'm glad i live in az. it cuts down on the global drama.
You get to squeeze an extra hour of work from your employees while daylight's out. Folks are used to working when the sun's up.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
The entire premise behind Daylight Saving is that it will result in improved quality of life. If it's correlated with decreased quality of life, then that's enough to invalidate its reason for being. We don't need to show causality. We're not trying to prove smoking is bad for you. We're just trying to show that the purported health benefits of smoking don't exist.
That said, I suspect Daylight Saving was more useful when we were an agrarian society and the extra hour of daylight was useful for field hands to see what they were doing out in the crop fields. But today only 1% of the population works on farms.
I farm and I'm actually in favor of DST, sort of. The reason is, without DST, during the very long summer days, I would have to wake up at 4 am to do herbicide applications (it's calmest around dawn). With DST I can sleep in until 5am. So I'd much rather have it than not have it. It makes a huge difference. Without DST I would just have to go to bed a lot earlier, but to make that effective I'd have to simply go to bed early all the time to condition my body to wake up earlier. That just doesn't work all that well when everyone else is going to bed later.
But I would be in favor of simply having DST year round. The reasoning is that without DST, in the winter, folks usually wake up in the dark and drive to work in the dark, and then by the time they head home from work, it's dark again. With DST, you'd still drive to work in the very dark hours, but at least when you got home from work you'd enjoy a short period of daylight. At least for the northern latitudes.
There is really nothing wrong with Daylight Saving Time. For modern people, it is better to have daylight later in the day than earlier. The problem is the change to and from Saving Time to Standard Time; that messes everything up.
Change to DST (summer time) and just STAY THERE and stop changing time and all our problems go away.
Also I missed church this morning, and evening Mass never feels the same. Ditch DST.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
I find it interesting that we have a lot of hand wringing about how the one hour change causes such mass casualties, but nobody is interested in banning employers from scheduling people nearly at random rather than offering a consistent schedule. If getting to work on time induces that much lethal stress, shouldn't we ban sanctions against employees who come in late as long as they average out close to on time?
No point in bitching about it on /. If you want this changed you need to contact your state legislature. The time change is determined locally. I know my state has put forward elimination but the biggest sticking point it whether the surrounding states will also change since many people work daily across state lines. The latest version had an activation only if a certain number of surrounding states also passed the changes.
You have it backwards. If DST were useful as its proponents claimed, you'd expect to see a positive correlation with its use. Instead a negative correlation was found. That's enough to invalidate the claims of DST's proponents. No need to prove causation. (In fact if anyone needs to prove causation, it's the people advocating DST.)
We're not trying to prove smoking is bad for you. We're merely trying to disprove the claims by the tobacco companies (DST proponents) that smoking is good for you.
And if you actually read TFA, you'll see that their comparison was nothing as stupid as comparing the lunch hour to the hour before or after lunch. They compared Los Angeles (which uses DST) with Phoenix (which doesn't use DST). That neatly accounts for all time-based variables like lunch hours.
Why do people complain? You have more light for evening activities while still having enough light in the morning to get you to work.
I can ride my bike home after work and not be in the dark. I can take my kids to the park. I can spend one more hour in the yard.
It changes back because it's too dark in the morning for too long.
And sure, as Hawai'i and Arizona can tell you, you're just fine if you don't change them. But I like it.
"Who are you?" "No one of consequence." "I must know." "Get used to disappointment."
I see a over whelming consensus that wants it dropped, I see countless studies that prove it doesn't do anything for saving energy. So why can't we just drop it already? Its a terrible state of affairs when a majority want something done and it can't get done. So who is holding back the obvious move to repeal Daylight Saving time?
It's because unlike most slashdot basement dwellers, real people like to enjoy more daylight after work.
If you get jet lag flying between adjacent time zones you should just kill yourself. You're too pathetic to live.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
A few years ago, the US lengthened DST (start earlier, and end later). However, it was supposed to be temporary. There was a clause in the law that said after a few years, the Congressional Budget Office was supposed to study the savings, and revert to the original duration if there weren't any. Did the report ever happen?
Don't confusing the effects of *changing clocks* with the effects of Daylight Saving Time. Changing clocks is crazy disruptive. DST (shifting daylight later in the day, so there's daylight when you get home from work) is, IMHO, a great idea. We should just be on it all year round. Nerds, who tend not to be morning people, should appreciate DST more than most.
"Shoot, a fella could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that stuff."
DST is not the issue, it's the switching that's the problem from my viewpoint. I would welcome DST year round as it gives you an extra hour of sunlight in the evening. This would be most appreciated in the winter.
John Oliver did an informative thing on DST a couple of years ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Yes, I said that slashdot basement dwellers don't like DST.
Well you can now change your tune. Several people have already posted that they like DST. And I'm also one of them. Pleased to make your acquaintance.
Not more intelligence. You just have to work more and figure out how to solve more problems, that's all. That doesn't mean you are more intelligent than people living under, let's say, less harsh conditions.
Open Source Network Inventory for the masses! Kuwaiba
Are you that desperate to make yourself feel tough by marginalizing problems? If everyone acted like you nothing would ever get fixed.
Well you can now change your tune. Several people have already posted that they like DST. And I'm also one of them. Pleased to make your acquaintance.
You're right. Now I can state that in the last 50+ years, approximately 0.000000001 of the people I "know" say DST is a good thing. (That's assuming they're not just contrarians who're saying it as a matter of course.)
But still, 0.000000001 is more than zero...
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
DST means it doesn't get lighter for another hour. This helps with sleeping for those who chose not to take steps to shield their bedrooms or eyes from evil sunlight. Without DST it would be too light to sleep without radiation shielding at 3:00 AM here.
Most people know they are going to lose an hour of sleep yet make the choice to go to sleep at the same time knowing full well the result in advance. These same people undoubtedly wake up in the morning crying about being tired or end up having a heart attack a couple of days earlier than they would have otherwise.
I don't care either way. The only thing I want is for politicians to not eternally play ping-pong with time because this is extra work and expense with no ROI.
Most of the media reports of this or that focus on abrupt change of 1hr and are either dominated by noise or followed by corrections that are summarily ignored at least in headlines to drum up unnecessary attention.
Not more intelligence. You just have to work more and figure out how to solve more problems, that's all.
And if you are not capable of doing that, you will not propagate your genes further. Evolution at its finest.
I had family who were farmers and I still have friends who are farming. I had to laugh when I asked my uncle about DST. He said it didn't matter. The cows needed attention the same time every day of the year. He never reset his watch. He always knew when to be to an appointment regardless. I was always impressed by how in tune with nature's rhythms he was.
He was a dairy farmer, but I can't imagine it would be much different for a farmer who does other types of livestock or only does cash crops. If it does, then that farmer has a different approach to farming than what I'm familiar with. I know more and more farmers are getting into different areas which connect them more closely with the rhythms of the city (so to speak), but I guess you need to consider that before you get into it.
There is a benefit to DST (IMHO) for people living around the 40 to 50 latitudes. (That might be an even broader range than I estimated.) It's a matter of visibility of school children. I know from personal experience since I'm out driving around during that time in the morning. I drive past spots where kids are gathering to get picked up by a school bus. Almost all the kids are wearing dark clothing and it can be hard to see them sometimes. So the earlier the sun appears, the more visible they are. So maybe DST is more useful as a regional thing. Although that would create other problems I'm sure.
One thing I do know. Nobody complains in the fall when they get an extra hour of sleep. The only time I hear complaints is in the spring.
An effective "democracy" creates the illusion the people have a say in their government.
Not more intelligence. You just have to work more and figure out how to solve more problems,
"Solving more problems" is the only useful definition of "intelligence".
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Az is too busy asking Mexican looking people to show their green card on demand
I have to reset the blinky clock on the stove. it blinks and blinks and blnks.....
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
I live in New Zealand, where do have daylights savings, but lived in China for 2 years, where they don't. I like daylights savings, I get to make the most of the day after work. I was in the east in China and the fact the whole wide country is a single time zone is wrong. It was worst in the east where in summer the sun would rise before 5am yet it would be getting dark before 8pm. So while time zone handling was wrong at least daylight savings could have improved things a bit,
AC, i like the "for all we know" part. i'm just considering the source and score of 0. i have only lived here for 10 years and have never heard of 3am daylight in az, besides, if you are up at 3am, trust me, its not daylight and dst is not enforced as of yet. we simply don't change our clocks.
We just get everyone in the world to shift their work hours one hour earlier. Call it "Early Bird Time".
Fuck it... What's the problem?
With daylight starting at around 4 A.M. and twilight breaking around 3 A.M. from May to August, for everyone living below the 51st parallel, everyone might as well be up, right?
It's not like anyone will miss that extra hour of darkness in the morning throughout those hot summer nights when you're lucky if you manage to fall asleep by 2 A.M.
Just like no one will miss waking up and going to work/school while there's light outside in the sky for the other half of the year.
But let's talk more about how turning the clocks back-forward twice per year hurts people.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
So let's get the arguments over with quickly so we can all go back to business as usual. Until October anyway.
Has there been any research done based the distance a person is East and West of the 'noon' meridian upon which their timezone is based? And based on distance from the equator?
Twice a year, when the arguments resurface, i wonder this. I've seen positive affects to DST where changing the time really does make sense, and never really any negative (apart from having to get up an hour early one day in a year).
Certainly where I live, in winter without DST we all be sitting in work an hour before sunrise. With DST, it's bright web we get to work. That makes Winter a lot less depressing.
In Summer, without DST, the sun wouldn't set until around 11pm, which makes getting to sleep more difficult.
I'm convinced that the majority of people who argue for the cons don't see the benefits, don't care about others who are affected, and only think about how this minor inconvenience once a year affect them.
So, have any location based studies been done to show just where benefits, where doesn't, where people want it, where they don't? I could almost guarantee that we'd see patterns, certainly stripes on a map gradieating from ones polar view to the other, and then a sudden switch close to the edge of each timezone.
You need to take mental health into affect too. In many places, without DST people would be starting work before sunrise, and going home in a dark. Lack of sunlight for at least part of your day can be a cause of depression. Where I live, there's only 7 hours' of daylight in winter.
I suspect Daylight Saving was more useful when we were an agrarian society and the extra hour of daylight was useful for field hands to see what they were doing out in the crop fields.
Your suspicion is incorrect. It doesn't matter if you're a farmer or a carpenter or if you work in any other occupation where you need sunlight to see what you're doing; when you work has nothing to do with what time it is, and everything to do with when the sun is shining. You'll make an agreement to meet at an hour o'the clock because that's how our society works, but it could as easily be based on time after sunrise. You can get sunrise time information trivially.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
There is no "extra light", it's just moved around, and not even in a useful way.
In the winter I have light from about 0900-1600 and in the summer from about 0500-2300
Meanwhile I work 0800-1600
It doesn't matter which way you adjust the clocks, in the winter It's dark both before and after work. and in the summer it's light both before and after work.
Go further north and it's even more exaggerated until you get far enough north and it's dark 24/7 in the winter and light 24/7 in the summer. You think they care about "daylight savings time"?
There are many drawbacks to DST, there's not a single positive to it at all. It's long past time to scrap it.
I can always count on getting a bunch of "the time on my device is wrong!" support calls around this time of year because some moron didn't configure the correct time zone when the system was configured. You can't just configure GMT+2 (for example) and call it a day, guys... each country has it's own stupid DST rules with different start and stop dates.
It's also a pain to manually change my clocks at home as well. It's 2017... wasn't this problem supposed to be solved by now?!? The IoT "revolution" should have insured that any device made in the last five years that uses electricity should already be connected to a network time server.
Yes there is an increase of about 10% on those first few days that DST kicks in, and there is also a DECREASE (about 10%- surprise) when it switches back.
It's hard to not argue about the benefits of DST in reducing car accidents due to more driving during daylight hours.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/s...
..........FULL STOP.
Golf is the only activity that absolutely must have natural light.
The movers and shakers of this (first) world like to play golf, and hate getting up early in the morning
DST might make a difference in the southern US, but it really makes no difference much north of 46 degrees latitude, since in mid summer the sun is up at bedtime, and it's up again before we rise.
I completely agree on changing to UTC everywhere. When I need to run to a store or the bank or post office I often need to jump on Google to see what hours they are open anyway. What difference would it make if it says a business is open 08:00-17:00 or if that shop set its hours to be 12:30-20:30 because of its longitude? None, really. You would just get used to hours of business in your area being close to these other two numbers instead of 8 am to 5 pm. No big deal. What other effects would there be? Well some people would celebrate New Year's when the sun was high in the sky while others celebrated at night. Again, no big deal.
Noon has several different definitions. A modern definition is 12:00 on the clock during daytime. Which is funny because noon comes from Old English meaning the ninth hour and used to be closer to our mid-afternoon. Another definition of noon is when the sun is highest in the sky, that is, when the sun crosses the local meridian. This one makes the most sense to me intuitively because it can be guesstimated by a person in the wilderness without the aid of watch or compass. Another definition is mid-day which is different depending on the date and your latitude. If the sun rose at your location today at 06:00 and set at 20:00 then mid-day would be 13:00.
Also consider that in our increasingly automated and electronic world it would be a trivial thing for clocks with GPS or at least communication with cell phone towers to display either UTC or, at the user's option, the delta from local sunrise. So a business could set its hours as 02:00-10:00 Delta time. And we could all set our alarm clocks by Delta time as well, so that our body clocks only have to adjust 30-60 seconds a day each day all year round, which is exactly what our forebears did over many million years of evolution. Don't fight Mother Nature! Do things her way and be happier.
Liberals call everyone Nazis yet they are the closest thing to it.
Put some black tape over it. That's why it's called electrical tape.
While daylight saving time was originally a proposal for saving energy, that's not the only reason it exists. And when I say "originally," I mean it: Benjamin Franklin--that's the kite-flying, stove-and-lightning-rod-inventing, womanizing, father-of-our-country Ben Franklin--suggested it in 1784 as a way for Paris to save on candles during the long summer days. It was finally adopted nation-wide (with a few agricultural states dissenting) after World War II to give industrial workers a chance to enjoy the daylight at the end of a summer working day. Back then, it didn't start until much later in the year. Frankly, I don't see the problem. Most of us don't even have to remember to set our clocks anymore. And for those who claim it's just the government intruding into our lives, I politely remind you that it's "the government," the National Bureau of Standards and Technology in the U.S., that sets the time standard in the first place. Let's everybody relax and get back to worrying about protecting online privacy instead, okay?
What if you don't have any problems?
Look harder. Lots of problems in the world - lots of mysteries too.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
My understanding is that Daylight Savings Time makes the sunrise time have a smaller range over the course of a year, at the expense of a more variable sunset.
Here is a chart.
Do you know who else did not follow DST? Stalin, that's who. (Cleverly avoiding Godwin ) Russia has 15 time zones. And they all work at Moscow time. From Vladivostok to St Petersburg. No DST either. So let us blame the reds for the effort to get rid of DST?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
DST is an evil Democrat conspiracy. Half the country, in particular California, are already suffering from drought, and then they add another hour of sunshine to further parch it. I'm looking forward to Trump repealing the unnecessary extra sunlight at the first opportunity.
What does that have to do with intelligence?
I didn't even know that energy saving and commerce were the motives behind DST. I thought it was based on the fact that most people work during the day, and it's nice for us to have some extra daylight for outdoor activities after leaving work.
Summer is so freakin' short at 45Â N. Latitude that I want as much daylight as I can get in the evening when the weather is warm. Do we really need to make a political issue out of this?
If I EVER meet Ben Fuckin' Franklin, I WILL KICK HIS ASS!
You need to take mental health into affect too. In many places, without DST people would be starting work before sunrise, and going home in a dark. Lack of sunlight for at least part of your day can be a cause of depression. Where I live, there's only 7 hours' of daylight in winter.
Then logically, businesses should cut their working hours to 5 a day in the winter, to allow an hour's commute each way in daylight.
Somehow, I don't think this will happen.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Intelligence is the demonstrated ability to solve problems. If you're not solving problems, you're either unable to solve them, or unable to see them.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I always see these same things/studies on Slashdot during this time of the year. Is it just because it is a hassle to code and deal with the change? Personally, I love getting an extra hour of daylight half the year. I get more exercise, my kids get more vitamin D, and it just seems way more efficient for someone who has a family and can't do things outdoors at night.
The negatives? People who die from strokes and heart attacks because of DST were about to die anyway, let's be realistic. Judges that are moody... well that just goes to show that they are human and will treat people more severely any time they have a bad day. It might actually help us weed out bad judges if you show the pattern. Consumer spending? No comment.
Actually that's not the usual mocking point. Back in 1973, when they ditched DST, the biggest complaint that I remember is that a lot of school kids were waiting for buses or walking to school in the dark. I don't know how applicable that is today?
I work for myself and set the hours that I work, some days more hours and some days fewer hours.
Very good for you! However, the majority of people who work don't have that luxury.
I am generally not one to politicize everything but Obama moved the clock switch dates by one week - ALLEGEDLY TO SAVE ENERGY - and now that Trump's in office the ultra left msmash posts a story about how we don't need Daylight Savings Time? really?
If you deal with the rest of the planet - who is still using the same dates we always used, this is a huge pain in the ass, because this week Europe is one hour closer than they were last week. But next week they will be back in sync. So guess how many people from our offices in Europe showed up for today's meetings?
Murphy was an optimist
Which is why your master clock, if you have any competence whatsoever, is permanently set to GMT.
Every system utility that function in local time performs a conversion to local time.
It's the conversion from GMT to local time that jumps twice a year. No changed settings required. One side of this is worse than the other, because one side breaks monotonicity.
And it's so hard to program this correctly, my brain positively throbs for the humanity.
if (!done(once_only_task) &&
once_only_task.start_local <= now_local()) {
do (once_only_task);
mark_done (once_only_task);
}
Wow! Wasn't that hard? Most other exercises in translating the least clue about the vagaries of time into correct code are equally daunting.
Any quality programming language should cough up a hairball when local times are subtracted naively: "use TAI or UTC directly, you complete idiot".
The unpredictable future relationship between TAI and UTC is far more problematic.
But you wanted time to be simple, and earth not to warm/cool, shuffle, spindle, or lose angular momentum, and money not to be a fiat currency, and periods to be unambiguous in all human locales over all time and space.
As we all know, small requests from small minds are always correct, so get the lead out, Batman.
This entire DST debate is just the next station on the train track of nuance removal.
No Java, approximate floating-point arithmetic does not give a reproducible answer unless the value of every operation is mandated—for all platforms and all supported operations—down to the value of the last ULP.
And even then, if the user reorders the rows of the input screen (a supposed invariant) oops there goes perfect consistency.
Why, why, why cruel world?
Because—you might want to sit down here—in truth, infinite precision arithmetic is difficult to implement efficiently and almost every efficient implementation makes tiny little trade-offs in silicon different than before.
Okay, we knock that off before breakfast, and after lunch we find a fabulous solution to Arrow's impossibility theorem that no-one ever thought of before.
Jesus fuck, are we programmers here, or pussies?
The last thing that blinked and blinked 12:00 at me I tossed in the trash. The stove is much more heavy than a VCR so tape it is.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
I would like to take it one step further. Eliminate time zones and day light savings. Every where in the US of A should use Greenwich mean time. We can still have time zones for those who think that time should be set to the sun. time zone -5 , -6, etc. Trains, planes, and space men, all use Zulu time, why not the rest of us. There is no reason a school or other entities that insists the need to be open during day light hours can't modify their schedule with out a need to affect the rest of us. Is there a reason a farmer can't modify his schedule by fifteen minutes every so often to take advantage of the sun, as he sees the need? Why do the rest of us have to change our schedule? Hey, while we are at it, has any one ever thought about changing to the Metric system too?