Is Daylight Saving Time Worth Saving? 646
Daniel_Stuckey writes "In politics, health, and academia, there are plenty of detractors that say daylight saving might not be worth saving. One vocal opponent is Missouri State Representative Delus Johnson, who wants to end the watch and clock switchery altogether. In short, he says we should spring forward this one last time, without ever falling back. He wants Missouri – and other states willing to join a pact – to permanently adopt daylight saving time and call it Standard Time. He's sure that it'll increase economic development in the later part of the year; giving people a little more daylight to do their Black Friday shopping. Matthew J. Kotchen and Laura E. Grant at the National Bureau of Economic Research have argued that DST has had adverse effects on energy spending. They calculate some extra $10-16 million spent by Indiana due to time changes. Their research concluded it's probably a much bigger loss in other states. A year ago, Motherboard's Kelly Bourdet reported on a health study that concluded DST might actually kill you. Chances of heart-attack were stated to increase by 10 percent on the days following the spring change, and to decrease by 10% after gaining the hour in the fall."
There's even a We The People petition about it.
Morning sunlight is a waste (Score:5, Insightful)
NO. (Score:5, Insightful)
No! It's a royal pain in the ass. Get rid of it!
Is daylight savings time worth saving? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:NO. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Morning sunlight is a waste (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe you should either get to work earlier? Why should the rest of us plan our days around your idiosyncracies - or anyone's for that matter.
You do know that, effectively, that's what you're doing anyway with DST. Solar physics doesn't actually change.
As an Arizona resident (Score:4, Insightful)
I can safely say moving your clocks is idiotic. If you want to work 8-4 or 9-5, it really don't matter at all. Just pick one and make it happen.
Re:NO. (Score:5, Insightful)
Screw DST (Score:4, Insightful)
Twelve AM was set up to be defined as the middle of the night; 12 PM the middle of the day. (Or 00:00/12:00 if you prefer the 24 hour clock). Don't like how dark that makes the usual active hours during the Winter? Fine - switch the hours that businesses are active. But please stop arbitrarily changing time-keeping.
a Native American Proverb (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Look at it historically... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:NO. (Score:2, Insightful)
The imperial measures aren't a pain in the ass if you know how to use them. In fact they're easier in some way as you don't have to decimalize things. I can use a half, two thirds or a quarter when I'm doubling or halving recipes, something which is somewhat more convenient with non-metric measures.
The only people I see arguing against imperial measures for daily living are people who don't actually know how to use them. The contrived examples people use to prop up the metric system aren't ones that ever occur in real life. We don't compare the temperature to freezing and boiling to decide if we're hot, we rarely if ever think about both miles and inches at the same time as the precision wouldn't make sense.
And as for date, unless you're a proponent of year, month, date, you're day month year system is the worst one in common use as it ensures that the time dates are never in order with out kludge whether you care about sorting by month or year. People rarely if ever want to know what happened on a specific date in random years.
Re:Morning sunlight is a waste (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Is daylight savings time worth saving? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes.
Re:NO. (Score:2, Insightful)
One last change I could deal with. Been through it already, they obsoleted my alarm clock and every computer needed an update after the last bit of congressional time-fuckery.
As for the farmers -- the people whom this was originally meant to benefit -- they can set their alarms an hour earlier or later any bloody time they like. They can even make it progressive so the cows are always fed at dawn, or any other thing they like. No need to go screwing up everything else.
The entire DST thing is the perfect poster child for government getting in where it isn't needed and totally screwing the pooch.
Re:NO. (Score:5, Insightful)
Must be rough having first world problems.
All problems in first world nations are first world problems (by definition), but that doesn't mean they shouldn't be remedied.
Re:Electricty has made daylight savings obsolete (Score:2, Insightful)
If you need more light, change your hours
Are you REALLY so ignorant of reality that you believe that ANYWHERE NEAR a majority of people have this option?
The VAST MAJORITY of people in the modern world DO NOT GET the privilege (that you apparently enjoy) of setting their own work schedule. MOST OF US are TOLD by our employers what time work starts, and what time it ends (along with how long we're allowed to eat at lunch).
Having the extra hours of light in the day, AFTER your boss LETS you go home, is very nice, whereas having it in the morning is useless, as there's nothing much productive you can do with before you have to report to work: at the end of the day it extends a contiguous period of daylight wherein you can be productive for an additional hour, in the morning it's a self-contained hour, which is bordered by sleep and work, which is substantially LESS productive).
-AC
Re:Morning sunlight is a waste (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:NO. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:NO. (Score:0, Insightful)
Retarded calendar is retarded.
There are ~365.25 days in a solar year. There are ~28 days in a lunar cycle. A simpler calendar is the answer, and the math is easy.
A day is a Universal day. ("UTC" is a poor compromise between a bad acronym and a bad French acronym.) The roll-over should be based on a longitude that does not touch land. All locations should use the same number at the same time to describe the time-of-day. If you want to describe the sun's position in the sky, use words like "morning", "evening", etc. That's why we have words.
A week is 7 days, just like now. Every week starts on Monday. (The system we use here in the US, starting a week with Sunday, is dumb and wrong.) Weekends are not endcaps, they end the week.
A month is 4 weeks. Exactly. That makes it exactly 28 days. Lunar phases will "advance" month-to-month because phases are on a 29-day cycle. Lunar orbits will "decline" month-to-month because orbits are on a 27-day cycle.
A normal year is 13 months (13*28 = 364) + 1 day. A leap year is 13 months + 2 days. The "gap" days are not part of any month, and do not have a day-of-week name. They are annual gap days. The gap days are at the end of the year, not the beginning. This is consistent with weekends (Sat/Sun) at the end of the week, not at the beginning or both ends. These "gap days" might also be called "yearends" (similar to "weekends").
Leap years are calculated as they are now. Every 4 except every 100 but every 400.
There have been similar calendars in the past. (The year-and-a-day Tudor calendar comes to mind.) I propose making this one a logical standard based on real astronomy rather than numerology and superstition.
Re:Morning sunlight is a waste (Score:5, Insightful)
Have you ever heard of the land of the midnight sun? The number of daylight hours changes dramatically at high lattitudes, such a system would not be workable. With such variable light, your system woudl redifne the definition of hour through out the year. In the artic circle, an hour would range from 1 day to an infatesimally small amount. Doing buisness with any would be insane. Arranging for internatinal meetings and events would not work without detailed knowledge of the sun's position at that given point. It would be fairly chaotic.
I thought you were going to propose something sensible for a second, like only using UTC everywhere at all times of the year.
Re:Electricty has made daylight savings obsolete (Score:4, Insightful)
I can't think of anyone who couldn't find a job with a different work schedule.
In the US, we currently have a large number of people who can't find a job with ANY work schedule, so I think it might be a bit harder to find another job with reasonable pay in your field with a different work schedule than you think. If it were easy, those jobs would already be taken by those who don't have any job.
Re:Morning sunlight is a waste (Score:5, Insightful)
Children walk to school early in the morning..
Ahh the "think of the children" argument. I live in a relatively safe bedroom community near a major city. There's a grade school around the corner from me. I can say with some certitude that kids don't walk to school these days.
Re:NO. (Score:4, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly- spring forward AND HOLD FOREVER (Score:5, Insightful)
>"Representative Delus Johnson, who wants to end the watch and clock switchery altogether. In short, he says we should spring forward this one last time, without ever falling back. "
I have been saying this for many, many years. Go on daylight savings and then NEVER CHANGE AGAIN. Give us light when we can *USE* it in the winter.
The second best solution is to go on standard time and NEVER CHANGE AGAIN.
But remaining on this INCREDIBLY STUPID system of changing time twice a year is just INSANE. It does NOTHING to save energy. In fact, it does almost nothing positive at all. Yet it causes tons of lost productivity, sleep problems, irritation, confusion, and inconvenience.
Re:Morning sunlight is a waste (Score:5, Insightful)
so just let 6pm be sundown and 6am be sunup, no matter where you are or what time of year it is
You do realize that the number of daylight hours varies over the year, and by latitude right?
In winter at even medium latitutes (northern contiguous united states) there might only be 7 or so hours of daylight a day. So 6am and 6pm would be 7hours apart and then the time from 6pm to 6am would be 17hrs long? So the length of an hour would change depending on whether it was day or night?
Go far enough north and there is no sun up in winter. At all. How does your system of time work if there is no rising sun for a full month?
Re:Morning sunlight is a waste (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Morning sunlight is a waste (Score:5, Insightful)
Fuck how parents feel. The kids don't really care.
And I don't give a damn about the candy industry or the amount of light on Halloween, either. We, as a society, need to move beyond pandering to the whims of these "helicopter" parents turning their "precious and unique snowflakes" into a generation of helpless losers unable to grasp the idea of "don't stand in the road" and "don't get into the van" and "don't believe Mr. Timmons when he says he has a roll of dimes in his pocket for you".
And if you take this as humor, I feel sorry for you, you've already gone too far over to "their" side.
Re:NO. (Score:3, Insightful)
How is that any worse than...
OK, he's in two tone zones over, it's two hours later... or is it earlier? Or is he in one of those places that's only a half hour difference? Or is it an hour and a half? Err, wait, it's one of those places that doesn't do DST, so it's actually three ... no one ... no two and a half... oh, fuck it already, I'll just leave a message.
No, life would be WAY easier without DST and timezones, where everyone was on UTC. Who cares if the sun sets at 1800 or 0300? It would be a little jarring at first, but eventually we'd realize just how nice it is that the time is what the time is everywhere.