Slashdot Mirror
Are The Alternatives Even Worse Than Daylight Saving Time? (chron.com)
The New York Times notes an important caveat to Florida's recently-approved law observing daylight savings time year-round: it specifies that their change will only go into effect if "the United States Congress amends 15 U.S.C. s. 260a to authorize states to observe daylight saving time year-round."
"In other words: Even if the governor signs the bill, nothing will happen now... States can choose to exempt themselves from daylight saving time -- Arizona and Hawaii do -- but nothing in federal law allows them to exempt themselves from standard time." Meanwhile one California legislator exploring the idea of year-round standard time discovered that "youth sports leagues and families worried that a year-round early sunset would shut down their kids' after-school games." But the Times also acknowledges problems in the current system. "In parts of Maine, for example, between Thanksgiving and Christmas, the sun sets before 4 p.m. -- more than an hour earlier than it does in Detroit, at the other end of the Eastern time zone." So is there a better alternative?
An anonymous reader quotes Business Insider: Standardtime.com has a unique suggestion. Their proposal has only two time zones in the continental U.S. that are two hours apart, which The Atlantic calls "a simple plan to fix [DST]"... Johns Hopkins University professors Richard Henry and Steven Hanke have come up with yet another possible fix: worldwide adoption of a single time zone. They argue that the internet has eliminated the need for discrete time zones across the globe, so we might as well just do away with them...
No plan will satisfy everyone. But that doesn't mean daylight-saving time is good. The absence of major energy-saving benefits from DST -- along with its death toll, health impacts, and economic ramifications -- are reason enough to get rid of the ritual altogether.
The article associates Daylight Saving Time with "a spike in heart attacks, increased numbers of work injuries, automobile accidents, suicides, and more." And in addition, it also blames DST for an increased use of gasoline and air conditioners -- adding that it will also "rob humanity of billions of hours of sleep like an evil spacetime vampire."
"In other words: Even if the governor signs the bill, nothing will happen now... States can choose to exempt themselves from daylight saving time -- Arizona and Hawaii do -- but nothing in federal law allows them to exempt themselves from standard time." Meanwhile one California legislator exploring the idea of year-round standard time discovered that "youth sports leagues and families worried that a year-round early sunset would shut down their kids' after-school games." But the Times also acknowledges problems in the current system. "In parts of Maine, for example, between Thanksgiving and Christmas, the sun sets before 4 p.m. -- more than an hour earlier than it does in Detroit, at the other end of the Eastern time zone." So is there a better alternative?
An anonymous reader quotes Business Insider: Standardtime.com has a unique suggestion. Their proposal has only two time zones in the continental U.S. that are two hours apart, which The Atlantic calls "a simple plan to fix [DST]"... Johns Hopkins University professors Richard Henry and Steven Hanke have come up with yet another possible fix: worldwide adoption of a single time zone. They argue that the internet has eliminated the need for discrete time zones across the globe, so we might as well just do away with them...
No plan will satisfy everyone. But that doesn't mean daylight-saving time is good. The absence of major energy-saving benefits from DST -- along with its death toll, health impacts, and economic ramifications -- are reason enough to get rid of the ritual altogether.
The article associates Daylight Saving Time with "a spike in heart attacks, increased numbers of work injuries, automobile accidents, suicides, and more." And in addition, it also blames DST for an increased use of gasoline and air conditioners -- adding that it will also "rob humanity of billions of hours of sleep like an evil spacetime vampire."
Thats just stupid, I am sure a lot of people won't be able to sleep when its daylight outside...
"nothing in federal law allows them to exempt themselves from standard time"
Does it really work that way, that states can only do things if federal law explicitly allows it? That seems to run contrary to all western law since the Magna Carta, in the sense that they're asking for permission rather than having freedom by default (natural law) and then perhaps an explicit law is made to limit that for the good of wider society.
Nothing provokes the typical Slashdotter's rage quite like the transition into - and out of - Daylight Saving Time.
BTW what exactly does that whole "Maine sunset versus Detroit sunset" have to do with any of this? In any of these solutions - including the wacky ones - there will be far-apart locations with vastly differing sunset times.
#DeleteChrome
I tried reading the whole summary. I don't understand what's trying to be said. It looks like English, a language I swear I can read. But the words, and the way they're put together, just don't make any sense. Either it's in a foreign language or the entire thing is utter nonsense, assumedly ginned up as a joke using a neural net, as no human could possibly type so many words just to spit out utter nonsense.
Hear that Mr. Anderson? That is the sound of... inevitability.
What Florida is voting for is to move from EST/EDT to AST (no daylight savings). They are not exempting themselves from Standard Time, they are voting to adopt a different standard timezone. They are voting to eliminate daylight savings time. Standard time in most of the world follows political borders not some raw calculated mean position every 60 minutes apart.
Fuck it lets go full Vulcan. Base is arbitrary in mathematics and base-12 makes more sense because it's more composite. We change our number system and tweak the metric system to a new dozenal numeric system. We'll switch to a UTC based system and everyone will be on the same time with cultural adjustments. A machine learning system will study common sounds and word associations, which will generate a new language which is less ambiguous. We'll all adopt the new, more efficient form of communication. Basic income will then be applied to all people and free healthcare for all. We'll clean up the earth's ozone and move all energy to solar. We'll fix the issues with bitcoin and create a truly unencumbered and secure payment system for all currency.... blah blah blah blah blah blah... let's be perfect!
Technology could be a sticking point for making changes to how we handle DST. But I don't think we want this done at a micro level with States, Counties, or worse Cities. I am all for a standard of time and eliminating DST which has never provided much in proof of any real benefit and some studies suggest some negatives to human health. Other then our reliance on time accuracy for so much, why is it this cannot be resolved on a federal level as it should? Wonder if the NIST could chime in on this?
And just like ground hog day, twice annually, slashdot gives us our DST story. Is it original this time, and no duplicate?
Or whichever time you go to sleep now. What would happen is that at some place you would go at 19h other at 1h. You shift the time people do stuff rather than shifting the clock. It may take a bit of time to initially set up, but in the end it should not disturb your sleep. If anything it may change people habits and really follow the sunset and sunrise for opening time rather than year round fix time.
How can it be worse to totalky ditch the day?
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
Switch to UTC everywhere and allow each region will settle on its hours naturally. If most businesses in a region decide that "business hours" are from 0500 to 1300 then others are likely to go along with it. He'll this might even be beneficial for traffic. Without the convention of 9-5 businesses ina region might feel more free to vary their hours some. Calling noon the middle of the day made sense when people lived their lives within a few tens of miles (or kilometers). When the trains came and it meant that there needed to be consistent time over larger and larger distances we got 1 hour timezones. With more people interacting with people or traveling across many timezones perhaps it's time to widen timezones again... To the circumference of the earth, giving only one timezone.
How about, instead of time zones swerving around certain cities (causing a jagged vertical 'line'), and being in discrete 1-hour increments, we have continual time adjustments based on one's coordinates? As one moves, the time gradually changes by seconds, adding to minutes, eventually hours; it can be calculated down to Planck seconds if you wish; but there's no sudden jump.
Or, ya know, we could all use UST for anything involving a network, like the Internet, or financial markets, or phone-based activities. Everything else would go back to approximate times like 'sunrise', 'high noon', 'sunset', 'night' etc.
So the NYSE might open at 06:00 UST, but the local grocery store might open 'an hour past sunrise'. Wanna know if it's sunrise? Don't look at your mobile device, look at the sky.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
It was a 'fight' to get rid of imperial systems, which made no sense whatsoever. Now we got mm, cm, m, km; kg, g, mg – degrees in Celsius and so on... Our "time system" is still fucked up, however. We still got those stupid months, where roman emperors decided to name them after themselves and take away days from other months to make 'their' month bigger/more important.
"Daylight Saving Time"? There were times where people got up when the bells rang. Those times are long gone. Either model the time after the rise of the sun (then this one hour isn't gonna cut the cheese) or have a fixed time. What we have now doesn't make any sense. It does neither A, nor B. It just plain sucks and was likely invented, because somebody saw a way to profit from this crap.
Employers insist people work fixed hours, which is mostly unnecessary now. That's why daylight savings was originally brought in, so that "9 to 5" was mostly daylight.
Make flex time mandatory and daylight savings isn't needed.
Luck with that in the US. The odds of most employers not making their staff's life as miserable as they can seem small.
I was going to title this "First world problems" but that's not accurate.
While people are seriously concerned about kids not being able to play sports in the dark, countries much further North of the equator deal with this issue. Hell, kids in Sub-Arctic Canada practically live in the dark most of the school year and they manage just fine. They often use such magical solutions as lights and practicing indoors.
Given the whole DST thing was meant to help farmers way back when, and tractors have more lights than a UFO these days, we should just abolish the whole stupid thing and deal with it.
Numbered time is arbitrary once noon is ignored.
There are 2 choices.
* keep noon locally when the sun peaks overhead
* change to UTC
Anything else is useless.
Airlines, trains, and TV runs on UTC. Meetings between TZs would be UTC for coordination.
Time numbers are arbitrary, for the most part.
Daylight saving time is not a problem. Dogs are. Dogs are annoying. Dogs bark all the time. Dogs bite. Dogs shit everywhere. That's why I stomp on them. When I see a dog, I stomp it flat. I stomp on poodles and I stomp on rottweilers. I stomp on great danes and I stomp on chihuahuas. No matter the size, dogs are a nuisance and I stomp them flat. That's what I do. I stomp on dogs. Stomp stomp stomp.
Imagine flying to a city on business... and having to find out what time is lunch time.
That is why we need time zones.
The USA should go back to using sundials. These newfangled clock things never worked properly in the States anyway.
The only sensible solution is to change Christmas.
Oy vey...
Daylight Saving Time is a good thing and you should stop complaining about it.
I'm in IT, daylight is a foreign concept to me. The only use I have for time is for timestamps - I have no use for time on a personal use.
The computers don't care what time it is when they flake out! As a matter of fact, I think the Microsoft Windows Server developers purposefully put in the code that when the system clock reads between 00:00 and 05:00, branch to buggy code.
The same with hardware failures. I think computer hardware needs the Sun to be shining overhead (Gamma rays or something) to function properly - it's all that Quantum physics interactivity in the chips - that was what I was taught at the Deepak Chopra school of Electrical Engineering.
So, I have great affinity for the farmers who say that the cows don't care when they crash because computers don't care what time it is: they have to be milked when they have to be milked!
DST is more desirable the further north you are. At the equator, day=12hr, night=12hr all year round. On the arctic circle in northern Canada, Norway and Russia, day length varies from 0 to 24hrs. At the ideal latitude (i.e. Greenwich :-) ) days vary from about 8hrs in winter to 16 hours in summer. DST is a compromise that extends the working day well for the most densly-populated belt on the planet.
"...except there was a typo and it says DJT. So I'll have to escort you out of the building, Mr. President."
Care killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.
Let's not over-complicate this. The main alternative to DST is standard time (no DST). Arizona does it and it works just fine. It's not worse, it's better.
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Fucking get rid of it already!
I think everybody should finally understand why it is so important to finally switch to metric time. This will solve all of these problems and set us up for a future where humans live and communicate across the solar system and hopefully the galaxy.
How about simply adjusting clocks based on longitude? Then the suns rises and sets for everyone at the same time. We carry tracking devices that report our whereabouts to our corporate masters. It should be easy to use the GPS data to tweak the clock settings in real time.
What about when something is scheduled at a distant location, such as a train or flight? Sure, it's 10:30 here, but what time is it there? Arrivals and departures will always be specified in local time as they are now. No problem.
We call it daylight savings, but we aren't actually saving anything. The solution is both simple and obvious - we start actually saving daylight. Contrary to popular belief the sun dosent actually turn off at night so we could just fly giant Mylar sheets into space and presto, we actually have more daylight! Since more daylight is what people want this should make everyone happy! What could go wrong?
But... I'm near the eastern end of EST. Near the summer solstice, with DST in effect, it's light out from about 4:30 AM to 9 pm. Honestly, I'd be better off if there were a 2-hr DST shift - I don't get up before 5:30 AM, 5:30 to 10 pm would be much better, which is what they get at the western end of EST and what I grew up with.
WIthout DST, we're looking at it being light out from 3:30 AM to 8 PM. To me, a 3:30 AM sunrise with the modern fixed work/school/daycare schedule is just inhumane. And what a waste having all that daylight waaay before time to get up, and then get dark at 8 PM.
OK, so getting rid of DST makes summer suck. So we could just do DST all year like Florida wants to?
Well, Russia tried permanent DST, and depression and morning traffic accidents is winter went up. Near the western edge of EST, winter solstice sunrise is already 8:20 AM. Permanent DST would make the sun come up at 9:20 AM - about two and a half hours after most people get up for work/school. That is depressing. I remember waiting for the school bus on frozen, dark snowy days well before civil twilight even began, but with permanent DST, we'd be talking about getting to school and classes starting way before civil twilight. So people get depressed and have accidents now for a week on either side of the time change... but if we get rid of it, I'm not sure we aren't just trading it for another set of problems - insomnia in summer, less summer sports and exercise, and trading two weeks of depression and accidents in the spring/fall for three months of depression and accidents in winter.
A single world time zone doesn't help with any of this. It's not like everyone will just run a nocturnal schedule in the part of the earth that gets midnight at what's now noon and vice/versa. If you have to call someone around the world, the question would just shift in semantics from "what time is it there" to "what time do people get up there?" And having a single time zone with no DST doesn't help with it being light too early in summer or too late in winter. Companies, schools, etc could be free to shift the time on their own, but for anyone with complicated schedules, having different organizations make different decisions about whether to shift or not just makes everything worse.
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
So if you're working in New Zealand, the night shift is 9am - 5pm ? Yeah, that's going to work.
... and today's pet project has
Whoâ(TM)s having heartattacks each year over DST?
I assume the spike it due to recording and reporting glitches? As in, normally you have 5 during the 2AM hour, but in the fall we report 10 because there are two âoe2AMâ hour that night? I assume in Spring we find a dip in heartattacks?
If people are worried about doing activities in the "dark", why don't they just reach for the light switch and move it to the 'on' position? We live in a post-Edison / post-(Nikola-)Tesla world.
The last time I experienced real darkness in an urban area was during the great 2003 blackout.
It baffles me to no end that it is apparently easier to convince people that the entire world should operate on a different schedule, than it is to convince people that individual buildings should have opening hours that make sense based on their requirements.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
What we need is too times. Any and all single solutions simply do not work.
Daylight savings time is designed to fix a broken system, and it makes it worse. All it does it complicate matters. It means that for some businesses that take advantage of the sun, they have to change their schedules twice as often. You just start beginning work at 8am in winter and then suddenly you go back to 7am. At least for a few weeks before you are back to 8am. For people where the sun is unnecessary and irrelevant, daylight savings is just a hassle that causes thousands of people to get into car accidents and have heart attacks. For the rest of the world it just makes the entire seasonal change phenomenon takes twice as much effort to correct for.
What I am getting at is that we need to bring back local time. Half the world operates on it anyway in hacked together conversions anyways. What we need is counties/cities to have their own solar based time. The best solution would probably be to fix Dawn at a specific time so that all the farmers, fishers, construction workers, Truck Drivers to some extent, etc. can stop changing their schedules all year round. And let us not undervalue solar time, the only side effect of getting office workers to begin work at dawn is giving them the longest day time as possible, after work they have the most amount of daylight possible after work without getting them to drive to work in the dark.
Technology has made the conversion between different times insignificantly easy. And the perfect pair to this local time is a single global time. People can cooperate with far away people on a single time with no conversions. If a job requires offices across a continent or even globe to be synchronized and working in tandem, they can work off of global time. If your work involved the real world in anyway or is not synchronized with another team across the globe, you can get up at the optimum time either for your job or just biologically speaking.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
The shock of the spring time change (it's mostly on the spring forward side) is easily alleviated by planning a week in advance. (Check your local government: you might even be able to pencil in next year's time change into your calendar already; who says government is never on the ball?)
Starting Saturday morning, a week before time springs forward, get up six minutes earlier than the previous Saturday. Progressive offsets relative to established routine on standard time, by day of week:
F -00 just a normal workday
S -06
S -12
M -18
T -24
W -30
T -36
F -42
S -48
S -54 first morning on DST
M -60 first standard workday on DST
This program alleviates almost 100% of the "shock" (I quoted a big chunk of the literature is a previous DST post). Note that if your established routine is to sleep in like crazy on the weekend, I haven't changed anything. Give yourself exactly the same social jet lag as customary, but this time on a 23h54m circadian day.
What to do in the morning on the catastrophic three days where you are getting up 30+ minutes earlier (relative to social time) than normal? Maybe show up at work 30 minutes earlier? Walk the dog? Make a Facebook post? Pay a couple of bills? The possibilities here are as endless as they are universally appalling.
People love to quote the car accident and heart attack statistics, but they won't lift a finger to fiddle with their alarm clock ten times in a row to wipe these gruesome statistics down to zero.
Stupid, lazy, unmotivated, inveterate complainers.
Even people who use their cellphone as their alarm clock seem unwilling to lift half a finger, just to procure an app to manage this ten-day progression automatically.
———
Here's my situation.
My natural, adult body clock runs 25h25m.
Not that long ago, I free-ran for a three-year period. For 1001 days, I woke up 85-minutes later, day after day. Try it sometime, it's a total blast, and you'll be the life of the party among friends & family for the whole while.
The yowls and howls of protest over what could be managed as a painless 10 x -6 minute cumulative progression simply blow my mind.
Over the past three years, I've managed to control my condition with melatonin almost perfectly. No dose of standard melatonin can achieve this, I tried every possible dose over years and years, until I became so frustrated I punted melatonin into the void, to try my hand at free-running. After slogging through this for what seemed like eternity, by happenstance I got my hands on a sustained-release formulation (never tried this before), and decided to give melatonin one last shot; turns out there is a successful dose—just barely—with 97+% dose-schedule adherence. Ultimately SR was the magic bullet in my case (a last straw viewed from one side is a magic bullet viewed from the other side—yet people persist in thinking that subatomic physics is weird).
If I miss just one pill, it takes me a full month to recover my previous alignment. My record-shortest circadian day is presently 23h58m sustained for a couple of months. Not a bloody large margin of error, so I freak out over remembering to take my pill at precisely 15:00 every damn day. Pebble watch vibrates while I'm removing something hot from the oven? Oh, well, I can clean the floor later. No, not quite, but I certainly give it a moment's sober consideration.
If somewhere, Maine wants school to end during daylight, why should they not schedule their school district's time to end before sunset? :-) but this business of lock stepping schedules in very different daylight profiles is a convention we could do well to avoid. Follow the sun.
If workplaces decided their times, it might spread out rush hour traffic, making it less hideous.
It would mean that start and stop times for businesses (stores for example) would differ, so you might not be able to assume start at 9am and end at 6pm or whenever, but people need to adapt to the sun, and would be able to do so.
Acting in this fashion makes daylight savings time unnecessary (and shows it up as a source of confusion). Thanks, we humans are already supplied with confusion a'plenty and don't need more
As a boy in Eastern Massachusetts we tried not going back to standard time and stayed on DST. I think Nixon was president?
With a group of other elementary school age children we waited for the school bus in the pitch dark. A car came by and badly made the corner we were standing on. Looking back on it, probably somebody doing the Drive of Shame home, still half in the bag.
There were lots of complaints and we went back to the spring/fall change.
...the less your opinion about daylight savings matters.
There was a Roman essayist called Hadrianus who observed that the more comfortable peoples' lives are, the more they are compelled to twist minor issues into catastrophes.
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
Clearly the daytime is a racist xenophobe. We need to take over the earthâ(TM)s rotation so everyone has the same amount of daylight and everyone can have their ball games before dark.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
Everyone East of the Appalachian Mountains (or there about) should be either moved into the Atlantic Time Zone (with NB, NS, PEI, and Labrador) or into a new time zone (adjusting the others one-way or the other). It just makes more sense than have a large swath of the country being in one time zone, that more than an hour difference in sun position from one side to the other.
This also doesn't account for Indiana, which for the longest time didn't observe DST due to being on the cusp of Central and Eastern. They now do, but most people there are upset because it is dark too late in the morning in the Winter. They seem like perfect candidates for a 1/2 hour time zone, like Newfoundland.
Wait until your IT career gets to the point you are a road warrior.
When you switch timezones every week, DST is a silly joke that is not even noticed.
Changing a state to follow the DST time zone year round is saying that you want 1:00 PM to be close to solar noon, not 12:00 PM. So 1:00 PM just becomes your new clock noon. And the sunset time difference of greater than 1 hour between Maine and Detroit is completely expected. If time zones were evenly distributed and did not follow geopolitical borders, then locations inside the same time zone but on opposite sides would have sunsets exactly one hour apart on the clock. So it doesn't take much fudging of the time zones to get locations that have sunsets more than one hour apart on the clock. It's nearly unavoidable. And though we loose an hour of sleep in the Spring, we gain an hour of sleep in the Fall. So for that particular metric, short term it's bad, and long term it evens out.
why should they not schedule their school district's time to end before sunset?
Negotiating with teachers' unions. That's why.
Have gnu, will travel.
Screw that. A better alternative is to split the difference, move the clocks 30 minutes and done. And bo I don't care about the arbitrary "noon is when the sun is the highest" as that does matter even with the system broken system.
There are a lot of ways to reform timekeeping and calendars, the problem isn't finding a better solution but making changes. So much is culturally embedded, especially if it affects religious observances) that changing is probably impossible, at least in any agreed upon fashion.
The only way I can see any kind of reform happening is if a company like Amazon gets into so much of the economy (beyond retail and computing), including travel and other cross-zone and scheduled activity that they decide to switch to a new system for their own purposes and people switch to it because they consume so many services.
But if a change was made, I hope it would rationalize not only timekeeping but the calendar, too, which is a train wreck of historical anachronisms.
I'd go so far as to say we ought to consider a decimal timekeeping system and the international fixed calendar, too. A lot of the reform problems seem to incorporate a bunch of kludges to accommodate related anachronistic time and calendar measurements.
Time zones are still a problem but probably the one necessary evil for common timekeeping we can't get rid of because they allow people to relate time of day to daylight hours. If you switched to decimal time (10 hour days), you might consider 20 global time zones with half-hour differences but more closely rationalized by longitude so sunrise-sunset might be slightly more uniform.
Article is FUD. Heart attacks, space vampires, dogs and cats living together. Really?
DST is an idea that predates electric lights. Admit it sucks and move on.
When Congress dreamed up DST decades ago, ir was purportedly done for the farmers, so they'd have more daylight hours to do their work.
Have YOU seen the lights on their combines? They're blinding! Furthermore, their animals don't know or care about anything more than natural daylight hours.
Frankly, it's just one more instance in a long, LONG line of modern congressional failures perpetrated on the American people, except that this one went viral.
Arizona got ir right; I say we just abolish DST altogether, keep the time zones as they are and quit fiddling with our clocks twice a year, and not lose any more sleep over it.
move Maine into the Atlantic Time Zone and the early sunset problem goes away
Maybe in a few of these cases DST could have been the proximate cause, but let's face it, the individuals who suffered these tragedies must've been pretty weak to begin with. If it hadn't been DST, something else would've done them in. Their boss says something nasty to them, the trash bags they have to take out is unusually heavy, they didn't control their appetite at the Chinese buffet dinner, the weather is unseasonably cold and it snows a lot.
I agree. But try to find accurate and true information from any "news" outlet in the US.
No. There ain't any. All we have ... you and me too ... are certain sources which resonate with what we simply expect to hear, or the established mindsets of our social group(s) even if we don't like them. The are nor any more honest.
We could get rid of time changes and time zones completely. We have the technology.
When most people are carrying around a phone or some other device with GPS and significant computing power, it should be easy to create an app that calculates local solar time anywhere on Earth that you go. You can display it graphically, showing sunrise, sunset, day length (not to mention moonrise and moonset, why not?) somewhat after the fashion of a Yes Watch.
Then we would only need TWO times: local time and universal time (like GMT or Zulu time). Everything local could be designated with local, solar time: school hours, work hours, local events, etc. Everything that has to be coordinated over a larger geographical area could be done with universal time.
The only downside I can figure is, that local time often won't be any clean one-hour offset from universal time. So maybe instead of being GMT+6, your local time might be GMT+5hrs 17mins. Conversions between different places become a bit more awkward. Yet, again, we've got this tool in our pockets that can easily perform such calculations and show the results in a friendly graphical form. Let's use it!
Science says the tilt of the Earth gives less sunlight to the North on Dec 21. But have you noticed that the sun is also weaker and yellower? Already, we notice it is brighter and whiter than on solstice. The tilt only moves it towards the south, and gives it a shorter, lower track through the sky. But the amount of atmosphere traversed is the same for any light coming up from the horizon -- East or South. So what makes the light itself appear weaker in Winter?
Solar Eclipse: https://vimeo.com/230976895
Light of the chromosphere can be observed on the back of the moon.
Lunar Eclipse: https://vimeo.com/253700958
Shadow changes from curve to flat
Energeian Planes
there is only 1 to not bother with it.
All this fear of a standard time is ignorant. How about local states or regions just choose to start work / school at 7am instead of 9am.
Local businesses can simply change their open hours either once, or change it twice a year if they like, but at least then people everywhere will know what time that means instead of the kludge calculations that have to be done now.
Why is this so hard to figure out? People in the UK start work at a different time than those in Colorado. It's much simpler to just adjust to that without all of the computer, tv and other tech issues for companies in multiple time zones.
Keep EST/DST for north, allow to keep one T all year around for south, like in Arizona.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Hi Crazy! Why would you think its okay to expect that of everyone once or twice a year? That is ridiculous. We can just stop changing the clocks and alleviate crazy schedule manipulation.
... They argue that the internet has eliminated the need for discrete time zones across the globe...
This looks like a whole discussion in and of itself...
While I find the having to turn the clocks back mildly irksome it is merely because it is an added task. Personally it doesn't make much of any difference to us and we barely notice because we don't do most of our work by the clock but rather by what needs to be done, the season and the light. We farm. We raise pastured livestock and fortunately, by choice, don't milk so we're not tied to someone else's time clock other than when we have to interface with other people but that's what appointments are for and they have nothing to do with DST or standard time.
I can see how it is more stressful for people who are tied to the clock. They would benefit, according to the research, from decoupling both from time clocks and from DST/ST.
Ive got a simpler solution, stay on standard time.
There is nothing wrong with one word-wide time zone; it is called UTC and our computers like it.
It's just that it's more practical to have local time so we can all work from 9 AM to 5 PM.
After the oil embargo of '73, the US Congress voted year-round DST. At the time I lived in Cincinnati, OH and sunrise that January was 10 AM. That wasn't very popular. Children waiting for their school bus hours before dawn, etc. IT was repealed the next year.
Anyone that can't handle a one hour difference is a pussy.
The article associates Daylight Saving Time with "a spike in heart attacks, increased numbers of work injuries, automobile accidents, suicides, and more."
That article writer is a sad sack.
Having DST in 2018 is like requiring all cellphone and smartphone manufacturers to include PULSE DIALING on their phones, and an RJ-11 port, just in case, you know, you ever want to plug it into a POTS wire and use it like it's a landline?
Here's a simpler solution. Put everyone on GMT/UTC/ZULU time for coordination, (so you might hear someone say, "the plane departs at 0235Z,") and let each city or town determine its own local time based on SOLAR NOON, which is how they did it in the old days, back when things made SENSE. Everyone would just set their watches and clocks to GMT/ZULU time, and know their own local offset, or set them to the local time, and again, know their own local offset.
BTW, this would be trivial in today's modern world, given the ubiquity of smart-devices; anyone who objects, "but I don't have a fancy, new-fangled, smart device!" can be handed a simple digital wrist-watch with a Dual-Time feature, (yeah, they actually used to make those,) and let them set the time as they need. Most people whose lives are not massively connected could likely survive just with local time, and those who are connected would find it easy to live with their lives primarily on the global UTC standard.
Some might view this as a global tyranny of time, but it's not, instead it abolishes the STATE tyranny of arbitrary time zones, and allows any locality to use their own time that works best for them. It makes NO SENSE for Eastern Maine and Western Michigan to pretend it's the same time in the two locations, nor for Eastern Alabama and the Texas and Oklahoma Panhandles to pretend they exist in the same time, given the absurdity of having SOLAR NOON, the ACTUAL middle of the day, occur between ONE and TWO in the afternoon, or very early in the morning! Meanwhile, a lucky few people happening to live somewhere where for at least PART of the year, ACTUAL (solar) noon closely coincides with clock-noon, according to their local BS "time-zone".
The only adjustment this will require is that when you talk to your friends, family, and coworkers, whenever you say a time, and add "A.M." or "P.M." to it, it be understood to mean BEFORE OR AFTER the SUN crosses over the line where you are, between the north and south POLES, or the meridian, hence (from the Latin,) ANTE MERIDIEM, (A.M.) and POST MERIDIEM (P.M.) versus if someone says some four-digit number, followed by "zulu," it be understood to be the Universal Coordinated Clock (UTC) time, which is basically equivalent to Greenwich Mean Time, give or take a fraction of a second.
Then, when people post events, such as "Soccer Practice will be at 2100Z" will be easily understood NOT to mean that they're supposed to meet at 9:00 P.M. local time, but instead at... say, 5:55 A.M. local time, at that particular location, safe and happy knowing that where they meet, the sun will be up then, (since the planners of the even know that that particular day happens to have 13 hours and 53 minutes of sunshine that day, which means 6 hours and about 56 minutes of daylight BEFORE (and then again, AFTER) noon that day, will put sunrise there WELL BEFORE the time they have to meet.
Remember that once upon a time, this is how things were done, and it went FINE until trains came along and ruined everything for everyone. Well, thanks to modern conveniences like dual-time wrist-watches, and smart phones, and computers, etc., there's no real excuse for the NONSENSE of insisting everyone living in regions of vast swathes of the planet have to all be on the same time because adding, say, three hours and thirty six minutes to UTC is too hard.
Also, maybe we take this golden opportunity to stop worrying so damned much about time, and stop letting people enslave us to the goddamned clock ANYWAY. People in and around the Mediterranean Sea (by reputation, anyway,) seem to have it right. This obsession with maximizing value by obsessing about TIME is slowly killing us. They don't worry about crap like that NEARLY as much as we do, and they live longer, happier lives. We really need to try to follow their example, rather than dying, second by second, according to the tyranny of a clock.
Our reign has gone on long enough. Indeed. Summon the meteors.
But if a change was made, I hope it would rationalize not only timekeeping but the calendar, too, which is a train wreck of historical anachronisms.
You're not the first to wish this. There are several proposals. Here's my favorite:
The calendar year has 13 months with 28 days each, divided into exactly 4 weeks (13 × 28 = 364). An extra day added as a holiday at the end of the year (after December 28, i.e. equal December 31 Gregorian), sometimes called "Year Day", does not belong to any week and brings the total to 365 days.
Yes, it handles leap year also. Details at the link.
Nope, no sig
Daylight saving - not savings - may be a lost cause. But could you at least decide which one is your local standard and do it consistently throughout the summary?
Nope, no sig
You're in your time zone, and there is no Daylight Saving Time, period. If, because of your location, parent pressure, whatever, your school/league/job decides for certain portions of the year to shift its hours around, fine. If your school doesn't want kids going to school in the dark, then for part of the year school starts a bit later. If your league doesn't want games in the heat of the day in summer, then the games start later. Etc.
Florida sits in the middle of the EST/EDT time zone so this move is a bit unusual, since for part of the year it will put them an hour ahead of states whose longitude is east of them. They basically want sunrise/sunset to happen later in the day (as measured by their clocks). So the mornings will be darker (sunrise happens later according to the clock), and the evenings brighter (sunset happens later according to the clock). My guess is this is at the whim of retired people who like to sleep in.
What is the problem with 24 time zones all set so that 12 o'clock coincides with solar noon? The days shrink and grow as the year goes by. But there's no radical shifts like sundown at 4.30p. Or the jet-lag from springing forward.
The shock of the spring time change (it's mostly on the spring forward side) is easily alleviated by planning a week in advance. (Check your local government: you might even be able to pencil in next year's time change into your calendar already; who says government is never on the ball?)
Starting Saturday morning, a week before time springs forward, get up six minutes earlier than the previous Saturday. Progressive offsets relative to established routine on standard time, by day of week:
F -00 just a normal workday
S -06
S -12
M -18
T -24
W -30
T -36
F -42
S -48
S -54 first morning on DST
M -60 first standard workday on DST
This program alleviates almost 100% of the "shock" (I quoted a big chunk of the literature is a previous DST post). Note that if your established routine is to sleep in like crazy on the weekend, I haven't changed anything. Give yourself exactly the same social jet lag as customary, but this time on a 23h54m circadian day.
What to do in the morning on the catastrophic three days where you are getting up 30+ minutes earlier (relative to social time) than normal? Maybe show up at work 30 minutes earlier? Walk the dog? Make a Facebook post? Pay a couple of bills? The possibilities here are as endless as they are universally appalling.
People love to quote the car accident and heart attack statistics, but they won't lift a finger to fiddle with their alarm clock ten times in a row to wipe these gruesome statistics down to zero.
Stupid, lazy, unmotivated, inveterate complainers.
Even people who use their cellphone as their alarm clock seem unwilling to lift half a finger, just to procure an app to manage this ten-day progression automatically.
I was thinking we could standardize this even further. Since we all (almost all) have devices that are synced to UTC via NTP, why don't we just adjust the length of each day throughout the whole year. We could pick a time, say 7am, to match sunrise. Then the rest of the day would run normally. At midnight, the clocks could automatically adjust the time by a few seconds or minutes so the next day sunrise happens at the same time, 7am. In the summer we would have more daylight in the evening to satisfy the tourist and soccer moms, and there would be no sudden, abrupt time change twice a year to throw everybody off.
What's the difference between year round Daylight Saving Time and year round Standard Time? Neither businesses nor government are required to set their start times at any particular time.
The only difference is that Standard Time is a little be easier to calculate. If the sun is half-way between East and West at noon, then it's Standard Time. In most parts of the time zone this won't be really true anyway, so say if it's "just about half-way" instead of exactly half-way (which would be the standard time at the exact location).
But since nothing is required to happen at any particular time of the clock, over time things will adapt to whichever you choose to have as permanent. And it won't make any difference which you choose.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Add :45 seconds to the end of every day from March 21st to September 21st
Subtract :45 seconds from every day from September 21st to March 21st.
Easily done in a world where virtually every clock is electronic.
You're welcome, world. Glad I could be of assistance.
No
Yeah, that's way more efficient than, you know, not changing.
-Dave
I say we switch to 6 x 28 hour days and get off the solar time teat. Sleep-masks, blackout drapes, and flashlights for the weak.
...
If I wasn't autistic before reading this post I definitely am now.
Meanwhile one California legislator exploring the idea of year-round standard time discovered that "youth sports leagues and families worried that a year-round early sunset would shut down their kids' after-school games."
If only we had artificial lighting ... we could power it with electricity, perhaps.
Nah, let's just give every single human being jet lag twice a year with no way out.
> nothing in federal law allows them to exempt themselves from standard time
at least that I've found, nothing in federal law actually obliges them to follow it either. It seems both the Standard Time act of 1918 or the Uniform Time Act of 1966 just define timezone boundaries, neither oblige states to actually follow/use the time they define.
And Wednesday afternoon would happen the day before Wednesday morning. It kinda messes with your head. Cities at longitudes where that happens will never agree to it.
The people who advocate a single global timezone either haven't thought it all through, or they live close enough to UTC that it wouldn't affect them much.
We can start and end out days whenever we want. Evidence shows that accidents and risk of death increase due to this nonsense known as "daylight savings time". Get rid of it, and implement standard time year round. Areas like maine can start their school days earlier, and end earlier to allow for sporting events in daylight. Who cares if kiddy sports are at "night" anyway?
Standard/daylight savings time mean nothing except as documentation. Working hours aren't always 9-to-5, schools, companies, government are presumably free to set their own schedules as they see fit, including seasonally or periodically varying their schedules. Why does it matter whether Florida is permanently on standard time or daylight savings time, if Floridians can set their schedule as they wish?
Does the Federal government really require certain working hours? The OPM sets shift differential pay only if the majority of work hours are outside 8 AM-3PM, so work schedules of 11AM-7PM, 10AM-6PM, 9AM-5PM, 8AM-4PM, 7AM-3PM, 6AM-2PM, 5AM-1PM, and 4AM-12PM are all considered basic pay scale schedules. https://www.opm.gov/policy-dat...
Why should I have to adjust my life to accommodate the idiocy of others/Congress?
Back to the way it was before GWB's government tampered with science and claimed that moving the switchover times actually accomplished anything? DST used to be useful, the change brought more dark hours than daylight, without saving any energy at all.
I have a system where the half-hour lunch takes an hour and a half on physical time, and the working hours are shorter than standard
their change will only go into effect if "the United States Congress amends 15 U.S.C. s. 260a to authorize states to observe daylight saving time year-round."
Just move into a different timezone where standard time is an hour ahead and opt out of daylight savings
On the first of each month, set the clocks ten minutes in the appropriate direction.
Alleged benefits are increased, negative impact is reduced.
DAVID why is this /.
fucking stupid
run and hide in fear, bitch.
or just simply pull msmashes dildo out your ass so u can think straight
All we need to do is just stop changing the clocks twice a year... Our bodies wouldn't be in a constant state of getting fucked up when we try to sleep, and we wouldn't have to worry about whether or not a particular time zone changes their clock or not. Just stop fucking doing it.
It may fix the shock, but it doesn't fix the problem that when it finally starts to get brighter in the morning, it's suddenly dark again, and we get an extra month of winter depression.
is when it's over.. Yeah, sure.. I lose an hour sleep when it first changes over, but I personally like having the extra hour daylight later, and would prefer to stay on DST.. the problem is the switching back and forth that causes more issues. Eliminating timezones all together would be a major pain in the ass. Machines deal with UTC.. Most _people_ don't.. If I'm going to call someone on the coast, or even in another country. It wouldn't work out well if it was '9am' here and '9am' there (according to us both being on UTC), but they're still asleep, because it's when they'd normally sleeping (and still night time there). jmo.
then we passed a law to make it closer to a 4:8 split for DST, so clearly we find it possible to shift it, so what's the difference between shifting it again to a full 12 month?
Instead of messing with people's sleep by having the change at 2am, have the DST switch over on a Friday at 4pm (weekend comes 1 hour earlier!) and the reverse in fall on a Monday morning 8am (work starts 1 hour later!).
The article associates Daylight Saving Time with "a spike in heart attacks, increased numbers of work injuries, automobile accidents, suicides, and more."
Man, this is dangerous stuff! Should we ban plane flights along with DST?
We should have our clocks continually adjust to the sunrise time of the sun for a given timezone. We pick a "sunrise time (say 545am) and our clocks continually adjust everyday so sunrise is the same time everyday. We let the sunset time be whenever it is but we would maximize the daylight hours for every season. I'm sure people would piss and moan about their stove clocks always being wrong and you'd have to give them a $25 atomic clock voucher for each household to ensure they all had the right time on at least one of their clocks. This would be in-spite of the fact most people already have a damn cellphone that automatically adjusts. It would cost $4 billion dollars.
Get rid of the humans, animals do not care about clocks.
During Nixon's administration in the early 70's
Kids were waiting for the school bus in the morning, in the dark and getting hit by cars or buses.
They dropped it halfway through.
I'm becoming more of a fan for no more DST, it was started in WWII or I, with the plan to save energy to help fight the Axis. ;)
With no more DST, the sun sets in the upper mid-west around 8:45 in July, that's not that early, really.
Plus drive-in movies may make a come back
Finally the one time zone will not work, I don't want to work during 1 AM to 9AM, even though it would be daytime.
Plus tie the time to Longitude or Latitude, way to complicated. I can lookup the time for the person I need to contact via their city or area code to see the local time.
Must be my Midwest Farmer and old living in a 55+ community? I still get up around 6 and down with the Sun no matter what. Studies of DST kill do not take into affect that change has on old people freaking out when they miss a bridge game, youngsters hanging out/drinking later than they should and getting up half buzzed/hung over and driving freaked to work and trying to work still messed up.
Business hours and school hours are not some divine edict handed down on stone tablets from burning bushes. Before the silliness of "Daylight Savings Time", like the 1960s, businesses that needed to work by the sun had Summer Hours and Winter Hours. Want your kids to have more after school recreational time? Why not get your elected local school board to change the school hours to start earlier and let out earlier? Do we really still need a practice geared to allow agrarian small farm owners to also work a factory job? (One of the excuses used to foist off the clock shift in the 1960s.) I've never been able to see an actual advantage to Daylight Savings Time.
NRRPT/RCT