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

Re:It's"daylight saving"

[PolygamousRanchKid]

This is English, not German.

Noch nicht, aber wir arbeiten daran.

If you ask a linguistic, they will you that English is a butt ugly bastard mix of French and German anyway.

But English is amazingly effective in that everyone seems capable of using it. I sat in a company cafeteria in scenic Austin, Texas, and listened to how a colleague from China talked to a colleague from India . . . in an English that would have turned my 8th grade English teacher into a rampage. But hey, they could effectively communicate with each other. The wonders of English!

Capitalizing words in English seems to be a bit of a fad these days . . . we can't blame it on the "hipsters" any more since they are now history.

What are the current counter culture folks called . . . ?

About the Only Good Thing...

[rally2xs]

...of not changing would be making drive-in movie theaters viable in the western part of each time zone. Otherwise, you get off work at maybe 5, drive an hour home or maybe more if you're in this screwed-up area of impossible traffic that is the DC area, and when NOT being exactly on the summer solstice, having just a few minutes to get the lawn mowed (hour and a quarter for the 1 acre here, or 45 minutes for the zero-turn mower I have now), and that's it. Not getting anything else done outside. Walk the dog? Do it in the dark. Have a cook-out? Dark. Rake the leaves? Dark.

Dark, dark, dark, dark, dark...

Pee on that. Keep DST, and make the day for something besides sitting in the office and writing code while wasting all the best part of the day for doing stuff outside, then getting home and going broke feeding batteries to the flashlight(s). We can tolerate non-DST in the winter 'cuz its too nippy to enjoy stuff outside anyway, but lets apply roundup to the weeds, spray for mosquitoes, work on our big radio antennas (K8DH here), and everything else outside in the daylight by keeping DST!!!

Re:Make the entire year DST

[Powercntrl]

Most people don't like when DST ends, not when it is in effect.

You have to be a morning person to actually like DST. Fuck that. Anyone who enjoys being awake at the crack of dawn should just get up early of their own accord.

If you ask me, the biggest waste isn't daylight. It's all the road space, electrical generating capacity, and cell network bandwidth that goes unused every night, because there's a silly stigma against working the graveyard shift. Unless you work outside, it makes absolutely no difference whether the sun is shining over your place of employment. Convince half the population to be nocturnal and you've doubled the capacity of your roads, without paving a single new lane.

Re:It's"daylight saving"

[Kjella]

If you ask a linguistic, they will you that English is a butt ugly bastard mix of French and German anyway. But English is amazingly effective in that everyone seems capable of using it.

Everyone is capable of using it just like they could butcher any language, but English is a PITA to learn properly because they've generally not only adopted the vocabulary but also other bits and pieces. For example say the following words: beak peak weak leak steak... whoops, the last one is completely different for no discernible reason because it's a loaner from old Norse. You were knighted but not fighted, you were fought. And you're ugly-uglier-ugliest but beautiful-more beautiful-most beautiful not beautiful(l?)er. It's no wonder that basic users end up with "me love you long time" English, a lot of it is simply rote memorization that this is the way things are. Same with vocabulary, a driver does driving and a plumber does plumbing but a person cooking food is a chef rather than a cook(er?). It's not that any pattern is more or less valid, but English got all of them mashed together.

Re:You left off

[hey!]

I'm old.

Hey, so am I! And you know what, being old means you tend to be miserable a lot of the time. It's a package deal: on one hand life afflicts you with suffering. On the other hand, you get to live.

Being able to take it doesn't make you special; everyone who survives long enough learns to live with whatever it is aging has in store for them, whether it is arthritis, digestive problems, or for a majority of us, disturbed sleep patterns. That doesn't make disrupted sleep normal for younger people, or mean it should be compulsory for everyone.

Now the smart thing to do as you get older is to optimize the time you have left. And that means paying attention to the best evidence we have. You say that your cells don't know what time of day it is? Wrong. Even single-celled eukaryotic organisms have circadian rhythms. So as you get older if you want to minimize your misery you have to get serious about sleep discipline. No late night screen sessions without blue-filtered glasses, regular bedtimes, don't eat or drink to much late at night. Basically all the stupid shit you did when you were a kid because you could get by on six hours of not very good sleep.

As long as we're talking anecdotes, when I got serious about sleep hygiene I saw improvements in my arthritis and Type 2 diabetes sugar control. That makes sense because diabetes and arthritis are both inflammatory diseases, and the evidence is strong linking sleep disruption and a wide variety of inflammatory conditions linked with aging, including cardiovascular diseases and dementia.

Re:This is a one sided bull

[Opportunist]

The original idea was to conserve energy by having daylight when people are actually awake in Summer.

In Summer, in Mid/North of Europe or the US, you have daylight from about 4-5am to about 8-9pm. Now, people rarely get up at 4am, and even if they do, they don't really care too much whether it's dark because they go to work anyway and don't need much light to get dressed and go to work. But it was thought that it would be beneficial to not need artificial lighting until about 10pm when most people would go to bed. That way we could "win" an hour of power consumption for lighting.

No later than when LEDs came along and the power consumption for lighting became an insignificant fraction of our power use, the whole shit became totally obsolete for its original purpose. So we now make up new shit because "It's always been that way, and who made you king that you wish to change it".