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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?"
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.
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!
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
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.
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.
Why would the cows care about what number a pointer on a clockface is pointing to? If they want to be milked an hour after dawn, the farmer milks them an hour after dawn.
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.
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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.