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."

Comments

Re:One worldwisw time zone

[Calydor]

And not even that.

If you have to call someone on the other side of the globe (and trust me, a LOT of businesses have to do that), now you can't even do simple math to say, "Oh hey, California is nine hours ahead of me, and now it's noon for me. Maybe I shouldn't call right now." Instead you are going to HAVE to have a program or similar that'll show you what kind of sunlight people have where you're about to call, because you can't actually use the time for anything.

The internet has NOT done away with the circadian rhythm. Until it does, a single worldwide time zone is an even stupider idea than DST.

Re: One worldwisw time zone

[Kjella]

You're just using time zones but specifying times in a reference zone.

No, I'm suggesting all clocks are set to UTC thus no time zone conversion ever and UTC becomes redundant while "noon/midnight" becomes a variable concept that occur at different times for different people instead of 12AM/12PM.

But if you're driving from San Francisco to New York you clearly still want to know when stores start to open at 01:00 UTC, 02:00 UTC, 03:00 UTC or 04:00 UTC aka 9AM PST, MST, CST, EST and for all sort of practical purposes like quiet hours, extra pay for night work etc. you need a formalized transition, which would naturally require "night" in SF to have a different definition than "night" in NY. It would be extremely unpractical to make this a continuous change where every location has to look up their latitude/longitude and start paying extra night shift pay from 23:34 in one store and 23:37 in another or the bar has to close at 01:13. And not having it change at all would be even less practical.

So yes, I'd keep the hourly zones but I'd re-purpose them to be like an "solar cycle zone" or something like that. So when you cross a zone it's still the same time but practically you can expect opening hours to be an hour earlier/later when you cross and all sort of statutory rules shift by an hour. To me that'd make much more sense today when we use precise mechanical/electronic timekeeping devices while sundials and high noon is rarely used as reference points in any but the most informal sense. Time is best left travelling at one second per second everywhere you go (at non-relativistic speeds anyway), not jumping by an hour. Or even a whole day if you cross the dateline, which wouldn't exist anymore.

Re:Technology holds us back from reversing DST

[amiga3D]

It's crazy anyway. Why not just get up earlier? For decades I worked from 6 to 2:30. When I got off work I had plenty of daylight. My kids got out of school at 3:15 and I picked them up on the way home. No problems. Then one day my work decided that 6 was too early despite the fact the work force had come to love it. Our new manager didn't like getting up that early and shit on all of us.

let's all cater to the lazy, stupid & unmotiva

[epine]

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.

Re:One worldwisw time zone

[BitterOak]

And the biggest problem with a worldwide time zone is that in many time zones the day/date will change in the middle of the day. We label days and dates to correspond with the period of time we are generally awake (Okay, I frequently stay up past midnight, but I'm generally not doing business.) So with one world time zone, your kids might go to school on Monday morning and come home Tuesday afternoon. How would holidays work? Do you go by what day it is when the school/work day starts or ends? What if the day changes, say, half an hour after the school day starts? When do you get off for Thanksgiving? The school day that starts on the Wednesday and then half an hour into the day changes to Thursday, or the day that starts Thursday and and changes to Friday half an hour in? (Yes, I know many schools get Wednesday off too, but the same logic applies.) This, I think, is the biggest obstacle to a single worldwide time zone.

And note, that in situations where time zone changes would create a bigger headache, UTC can be used. Airline pilots and control towers use UTC for all their communications, for instance, so UTC is always there for those who need a worldwide time.