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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"
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.
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Nice try. Wanna play again?
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
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.
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.
i'm glad i live in az. it cuts down on the global drama.
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.
But you don't magically get an extra hour of daylight. They still work X hours which overlaps with Y hours of daylight. You've just offset one against the other slightly.
And, in fact, in most places at any decent latitude, the hours of daylight are vastly longer than the average working day and even when they are not, what you lose in the morning, you gain in the evening and vice-versa:
http://jan.moesen.nu/daylight-...
As a mathematician, I honestly could never fathom what it was trying to achieve.
Even if you told your employees "be in within an hour of sunrise, you can go home an hour after sunset" (or whatever), it would actually make more sense and there would be no need to change clocks whatsoever, and it would maximise "daylight working" (which is just a stupid concept in the modern world anyway).
Changing the clocks to follow a window of sunlight that is CENTERED ON NOON BY DEFINITION, and then making up a fake time to adjust that just makes no sense whatsoever - any way you shift it you lose the same amount of sunlight as you gain.
It's a nonsense that has followed us for centuries which nobody has ever had any proof that it made any difference, and everyone has always known that the associated costs were greater than the gains anyway.
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.
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."
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.
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 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.'"
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.