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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?"
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?"
... and these states consider this TWICE a year, EVERY year!
singular, not plural.
Also you don't need to capitalize each word. This is English, not German.
Think of it like this: during a melee you pick up a +5 magic sword and say, "It's ass kicking time!". Not "It's Ass Kickings Time!"
The reason it doesn't happen is because people will be upset when they find out they have to be on 'winter' time all year round.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
What they're suggesting is actually remaining on "Summer" time all year round.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Several northern states are considering going from Eastern to Atlantic time, effectively springing ahead and never falling back.
Ever since cell phones came out, I don't even notice DST anymore. It just kind of happens and my clocks adjust automatically.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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.
Advance the clocks half an hour next spring and then leave them there
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.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
...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!!!
I was in the 2nd grade the year we did DST in January. Far from scary darkness, the kids loved it. It was an excuse to carry a flashlight to walk to the bus stop (pretty cool when you're 7 years old). I'm sure some parents FEARED for safety, but since we had flashlights, we couldn't have been that hard to see.
No it wouldn't. Time zones are very helpful, for example when you're trying to set up a reasonable time for a phone call/teleconference, or thinking about when someone will read an e-mail. You can think, "well, they're five hours behind us, so they won't be getting into the office for a couple of hours yet," or, "they're two hours ahead, so they should be just getting back from lunch." You can have a row of clocks showing the time in all your offices and from that have some idea of what part of the day it is.
Without timezones, you'd have to think about what phase of the day a time corresponds to in another part of the world. It's more work to think through. It's been tried before. You may or may not remember "Swatch Internet Time", heavily promoted starting in 1998. They divided the day into 1000 parts called ".beats" with 0 at midnight UTC+1 and used the same values everywhere. It went nowhere because it just isn't useful.
And it's not tonal. Mispronounced words are easier to understand, and tone can be use to convey meaning even when the vocabulary is lacking.
I have found one logical reason that people may like DST. It normalizes sunrise time through the year, at the expense of extremifying sunset time. Here's a chart showing this.
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".
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I live in the UK - please can we move the whole of the UK to the South Pacific.
The way things are now, in the summer, its light from 3AM to 10PM,and in the winter its light from 10AM to 4PM. What the hell difference does moving the clocks one hour do apart from pissing us all off.
PS the cows cant tell the time, even using analogue clocks.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
If you go an look into the reasons we still have the time change it is not farmers. They were actually the only people who have organized against it because it messes up the time schedule of animals and they want the sunlight at the end of the day during the fall months.