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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!
And just like ground hog day, twice annually, slashdot gives us our DST story. Is it original this time, and no duplicate?
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.
"...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.
ôó
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I kind of like knowing the bank will be open at 9 AM, that I can get an iced tea at 4 PM after work, that the grocery store is open at 7 AM on Sunday, etc. For a lot of jobs - flex time doesn't work because the job is to service the customer around THEIR hours. If no one had regular hours - then when should things be open? Gas stations, grocery stores, banks, restaurants, pretty much all retail would be in a world of hurt. What if your local grocery store decided they would be open from 5 AM to 2 PM on Tuesday, then the next day decide that they'll open at 1 PM. Kind of sucks, doesn't it?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
But, what about cows? Cows go moo. Moo cow, moo?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
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!
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.
... 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.
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.
That's all kind of arbitrary. People might say, "Why not just change the clocks so 9am is earlier so we get more daylight?" and you can say, "Why not just go to work earlier regardless of what the clock says?" In any case, the issue is cultural conventions. Convincing everyone to start their work 6am to 2pm isn't any easier than convincing everyone to change the time to 3 hours earlier.
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.
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.
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.
Why not just get up earlier? Because I can't dish off getting my kids ready for school and dropping them off at school on someone else.
You've simply made the morning routine someone else's problem and proclaimed yourself the end-of-day childcare hero.
> 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.
San Ardo, CA - the gas station is open form ~7 AM to ~8 PM. It's about 30 miles to the next gas station, either way - and there's no place to stay the night. Gas stations in smaller towns are often open with limited hours.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
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...
Utterly retarded because:
1) In the western world, especially the US, CA, UK, etc most people don't work outside so daylight isn't necessary
2) Why in the mickey-mouse fuck does this dude think that anyone wakes up with the sunrise over the last 80+ years and use it to base his arguments on?
If you wrote this, please stop writing.
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
Yep, if people are worried it will be dark after school, instead of turning back the clocks why can't we just start school an hour earlier. Pray tell the difference this would make, other than no requiring everyone to change clocks?
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.
Because I don't want to get up at 6 AM like a crazy person. I like staying up late and having a bit of a lie in.
Here in the UK, during the middle of summer in London, the sun rises at 4:00 AM and sets at 23:00. If it weren't for daylight saving (British Summer Time or BST) that sun would be up at 3 in the fucking morning. I'll take my extra hour of sleep. BST wouldn't work during the winter either as dawn would be around 8-9 AM instead of 7-8 AM.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
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.
You've got a point. I've always had a job. Now I retired early and I play at repairing cars. I easily make up the money I lost by retiring early and I get up when I damn well please. I busted my ass to get to this point working many times for months without a day off. Yes, I'm a privileged mother fucker. I don't have a Rolex and my car is a 10 year old Grand Marquis but I own my house and cars free and clear, all it took was decades of hard work.
I had to pay someone to watch them every morning and make sure they hit the school bus. That's the burden of having kids, fortunately they make up for it in so many other ways. I didn't have to pay anyone to watch them after school though so it was only half a problem.
Which most can't afford to do. It is easier to get the kids to come home and manage themselves until after work without paid supervision.
On top of that getting up and going to work before dawn can be its own form of soul-crushing drudgery.
You asked "Why not just get up earlier?" Don't pretend that answers that you personally don't like don't count. Those are easily in the top 3 answers to that question.
Bullshit. You've added on 2 hours of daylight that don't exist. 4:45-ish to 21:20 ish.
Unlikely, since most jurisdictions that contemplate the change want to move to permanent summer/savings time, not standard standard time.
It's better than manipulating time. It's ridiculous to change the time twice a year. It causes problems everywhere.
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