Many US States Consider Abandoning Daylight Savings Time (newsweek.com)

An anonymous reader writes: A special Massachusetts commission recommends the state stop observing Daylight Savings TIme "if a majority of other northeast states, also possibly including New York, also do so." After a 9-to-1 vote, the head of the commission reported their conclusion after months of study: "There's no good reason why we're changing these clocks twice a year"... According to local reports, "The commission studied the pros and cons of the move and found, for example, retailers liked the idea of more daylight late in the day for shoppers... They also said there would be less crime, fewer traffic accidents and we would actually save energy."

A Maine state representative argues that it's actually harmful to observe Daylight Savings Time. "Some of those harms include an increased risk of stroke, more heart attacks, miscarriages for in vitro fertilization patients, among many other undesirable complications," reports Newsweek. Maine's legislature has already passed a bill approving an end to daylight savings time -- if Massachusetts and New Hampshire also end the practice, and if voters approve the change in a referendum.
At least six states are considering changing the time zones, according to Newsweek, and when it comes to Daylight Savings Time, the Maine representative told a reporter she had just one question.

"Why do we keep doing this to ourselves?"

Comments

You left off

[Anonymous Coward]

... and these states consider this TWICE a year, EVERY year!

Re:You left off

[Calydor]

You sound like one of those "It doesn't happen to me" guys, which is great. You don't get a fucked up sleep schedule for several weeks? Wonderful. You don't get hungry an hour earlier/later than the clock says you ought to? Good for you. Obviously then no one does.

You didn't get in a car accident today? No one else did. Your house didn't burn down? No houses at all burned down. You didn't die? Worldwide immortality achieved!

Re:You left off

[Chrisq]

In the UK reports show that keeping GMT+1 all year round would reduce accidents, reduce burglaries, save on fuel, and be good for health. The counter argument is that some Scottish farmers on the western isles wouldn't see the sun come up while they milked their cows. (They are too stupid to think of getting up at an earlier time on the clock) Every year the farmers win.

Make the entire year DST

[execthis]

Most people don't like when DST ends, not when it is in effect. We don't like the loss of daylight in the evenings in Winter. It gets dark too quickly. People come come from work and it's already dark and they have no daylight time left to enjoy on their own.

So if DST is abandoned, then clocks should be permanently adjusted forward one hour. Of course that would never happen because standard time zones are offset from UTC.

So maybe the best solution would be to extend DST to cover the entire year.

Re:Make the entire year DST

[hazardPPP]

Clocks are based around solar noon. We're screwing it up half the year now, don't screw it up for the full year.

The actual day is 23 hours, 56 minutes and 4.1 seconds, so we are already off by having a 24 hour day. Not to mention the year does not have 365 days exactly, which is why we have leap years, but the Gregorian calendar isn't perfect etc.

Furthermore, time zones (even we look at "pure, straight" time zones, not adjustments made for political or practical reasons) are a rough approximation. If every clock were tracking solar noon, the time 100 a miles away would be slightly different. Time zones were created to have predictable shifts in the clock. Ergo, most of the Earth is off of true solar noon, DST or not.

Finally, due to the arbitrary nature of some time zones due to political or economic considerations, moving permanently to DST would actually take a lot of places closer to actual solar noon.

Ultimately, telling time is just a convention. All that matters is that this convention is consistent planet-round so we can effectively schedule things. In the end, what is the practical difference of working 8-4 and setting the clock one hour forward and working 9-5?

Compromise

[rossdee]

Advance the clocks half an hour next spring and then leave them there

Sigh

[DNS-and-BIND]

The whole point of DST in the first place is otherwise in winter the sun sets at 4:30pm. In the summer, it rises at 4:30am. This is fine for farmers, but for an urban population it's no good. I've lived in a region with no DST and it's silly, in summer the sun sets at 7:30pm. Totally wastes useful daylight. If you want to go back to this system so be it, but it's like there is no awareness of why it was adopted in the first place.

Re:About the Only Good Thing...

[EvilSS]

Some of the proposals are to stay forever on DST (essentially shift one time zone east) to maintain that daylight year round. Yes it means some dark mornings but it would also mean an end to driving home in the dark at 4:30pm in December for many northern states.

Re:I love daylight saving

[Anonymous Coward]

so go to work early and leave early.

Re:This is incorrect

[mark-t]

That doesn't work well in higher latitudes, because then you end up with schoolchildren walking to school in the morning while it is still almost pitch black outside through most of December and January. The hour right before sunrise is often both the darkest and coldest period of the night.

Unless you propose that children start and finish school an hour later than they currently do, which could would be an even bigger clusterfuck than DST as tens of millions of adults, via a ripple effect, end up having to adjust their schedules to compensate, forcing them to work later as well, and negating the extra hour of daylight that they might otherwise have had in the evening.

"Standard" time year around makes the most sense. Noon, logically, is when the sun *should* be at its highest in the sky, but on DST, the sun is at that position at 1PM through the summer months.