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)
Re: (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.
Re: Morning sunlight is a waste (Score:5, Informative)
Re: Morning sunlight is a waste (Score:5, Funny)
But Who decides which words Are capitalized?
Re: Morning sunlight is a waste (Score:5, Funny)
Capitalists, obviously.
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But imagine the difficulties of implementing a concept like "summer hours" and "winter hours" for a big multinational corporation like Home Depot.
Oh, wait.
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Re:Morning sunlight is a waste (Score:5, Informative)
If we do away with daylight savings, we should shift all the time zones about 7 or 8 degrees farther west longitude. The sun sets too early in the eastern half (near the 'leading edge') of each time zone.
Re:Morning sunlight is a waste (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Morning sunlight is a waste (Score:5, Interesting)
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:Morning sunlight is a waste (Score:5, Insightful)
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Solar time was how all (non-arctic) cultures tracked time before railroads required standardization across long distances. The Japanese even had mechanical clocks with movable hour markers so they could adjust to the seasonal changes. That being said, you are right about the complications of doing this at high latitudes.
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?
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This breaks down as soon as you try and automate something, which is about 99% of how modern office workers are being replaced - by computers. My 00:00am in Dallas needs to be the same as 00:00am as New Orleans if you have banks in both areas and are posting daily totals. If New Orleans is 15 minutes ahead of Dallas, things go haywire with automation and your accountants are going to come screaming at you the next morning. Don't forget any banks in between placed at arbitrary points, or if the bank changes
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Yeah, but the sun would rise and set a half hour later on the clock.
I don't understand how shifting the timezones shifts the clock. It just shifts the set of people who are in each timezone.
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Why is it so important to have sunlight in the morning, give me evening sunlight that I can enjoy after work. I don't need sunlight for my morning deuce.
Children walk to school early in the morning. The brighter outside it is, the better parents feel (how much this really impacts safety is debatable).
School ends long before the sub goes down, so having extra daylight at the end of the day is of less importance.
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You could solve that problem by scheduling school in a more reasonable way without effecting everybody else. Ultimately with only 8 hours or so of light at the winter solstice, the only way to avoid that problem is by centering the school day around noon.
Bottom line is that it makes more sense to just schedule things properly than to kludge things together.
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.
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I beg to differ, sir. You may have heard the aphorism: The plural of anecdote is not data. You have one data point: kids at your school do not walk to that school. Given the difficulty of proving a negative, I'll even grant you the possibility that you are correct even for hours you have not held the school under observation.
I, however, have seen kids walking to schools near me, within the last school year.
Your statement thus cannot be extended universally. The issues of children walking to school in t
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:Morning sunlight is a waste (Score:5, Informative)
I remember walking to the school bus stop in the dark when Nixon implemented year-round daylight savings time as a result of the oil embargo. It was just starting to get light by the time the bus arrived. From 1973 oil crisis [wikipedia.org] :
Year-round daylight saving time was implemented from January 6, 1974, to February 23, 1975. The move spawned significant criticism because it forced many children to commute to school before sunrise. The pre-existing daylight saving rules, calling for the clocks to be advanced one hour on the last Sunday in April, were restored in 1976.
Re:Morning sunlight is a waste (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
NO. (Score:5, Insightful)
No! It's a royal pain in the ass. Get rid of it!
Re:NO. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:NO. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Indeed, but there's literally about zero effort to just not fall back. This is low hanging fruit on the pain-in-the-ass fruit tree.
Except for changes to every computer, embedded or otherwise, that would normally "fall back" and thus have the wrong time for half the year, there is zero effort involved. If you have zero responsibility for maintaining anything, yes, there's zero effort.
It would be somewhat less effort to fall back one more time and then stay there, since it is somewhat easier to set up systems to stay on standard time year-round than to stay on daylight saving time.
Re:NO. (Score:5, Informative)
As for the farmers -- the people whom this was originally meant to benefit
Farmers ignore daylight saving time as they have to deal with animals who are governed by the sun and not a clock. Daylight saving time was instituted so there would be more sunlight in the evening and therefore lower resource use. Read a bit of ,a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time#History">history. Notice there is no mention of farmers as a reason for DST.
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.
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I love it when someone implies that because [serious problems] exist elsewhere, that dealing with local problems of less magnitude is somehow a bad idea or a wasted exercise, thereby demonstrating a complete failure to understand how the world works, and why, in fact, the entire world isn't "third world" right now.
Re:NO. (Score:5, Informative)
Doesn't sort well.
20130308 sorts perfectly. That's why, I suspect, that the standard way to express the date is "2013-03-08" (see the 1988 ISO 8601 standard [wikipedia.org]), as it also sorts perfectly.
For that matter, date+time as 20130308120000 sorts perfectly. I use it in all my database work. Throw in some separators, viz. 2013-03-08 12:00:00 and it's perfectly human readable and makes sense right out of the gate, most significant to least.
Re:NO. (Score:5, Informative)
If you don't understand why putting things in date time order is valuable, I'm certainly not going to attempt to teach you. Hey, aren't you missing an episode of "Lost" or something?
Re:NO. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:NO. (Score:5, Insightful)
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No reason to hurry, but also no reason to *ever* replace another worn-out highway sign without it having distances in klicks as well as miles, it only takes a few more inches to list them both. Infrastructure continuously wears out and needs to be replaced, establish policy that from this day forth all new replacements will offer both measurements and within a few decades the change is 90% complete at minimal expense. A final little push to update the last stragglers and you can start phasing out the impe
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And what if you need to split a quart 100 ways? then you're pooched worse than if you were using metric.
Re:NO. (Score:5, Interesting)
UTC with NTP... that's the way to go. Goodbye local time forever!
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Re:NO. (Score:5, Informative)
Every time I have to deal with timezones I wish everyone was UTC I know for a lot of people including my self the next day would change part way through the day but it's so annoying to deal with as many time zones as we have today. While we are at it can we fix it so no month has less than 30 days or more then 31?
Things would be worse without timezones since it's not like everyone will go to have a 09:00UTC - 17:00UTC workday, they'll work based on the local solar time (which is why timezones were invented in the first place). So without timezones you'd have to remember "Let's see... it's 14:00 UTC here now and I just got to work, so is my west coast colleague awake yet? Hmm.. let me look up the sunrise. Oh yes, here it is, his local sunrise is at 14:30UTC so he's probably still in bed, I guess I better call him later. I wonder when he'll get off work...hmm...if sunrise is at 14:30, he probably starts work around 16:30, so maybe he'll be home around 01:30UTC.
Fixing the calendar is hard since (like timezones), years are tied to natural phenomena and 365 is only evenly divisible by 5 and 73. So you could have five 73 day months (plus a leapday), or maybe could go with 13 months of 28 days to give 364 days. Just make the extra 1.25 days a holiday.
Re: (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 litt
Re:NO. (Score:4, Interesting)
I've advocated making all even months 30 days and all odd months except November 31 days with November receiving the leap year day. Simplifies things completely and never leaves people guessing, except for if it's a leapyear or not.
If we're going to change the months, we should just have 13 months of 28 days each, a nice even 4 weeks per month. That has one leftover day per year (two on leap years), which would not be part of any month or week. We'll call those "nameless days" or something and would fall between saturday of the last week of the year, and sunday of the first week of the next year. Those days would be holidays and everyone can have a big new year's party.
Is daylight savings time worth saving? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Is daylight savings time worth saving? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes.
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We can shift. Half of the year, we will say, "No", and the other half, we will say, "Yes."
Just in time (Score:5, Informative)
This article just in time for the yearly "Should we keep DST? No, but we'll keep it anyway" cycle.
Re:Just in time (Score:5, Funny)
This article just in time for the yearly "Should we keep DST? No, but we'll keep it anyway" cycle.
I was starting to get worried that we weren't going to get to have this little twice-a-year bitchfest here on Slashdot this Spring.
Some traditions are important. They help keep you grounded and define your culture.
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No, it's just annual. Nobody complains in the fall when they get an extra hour on their weekend.
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Electricty has made daylight savings obsolete (Score:5, Informative)
There was a time when it was very, very dark at night, and it made sense to adjust the schedule so you could actually see.
But with electric lighting, it's pretty much never dark in areas where people live and work. The benefit to daylight savings is much less than it was 100 years ago.
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I never understood this argument... turning our clocks back and forth doesn't actually change the amount of sunlight per day. Just moves the hour from morning to evening, and back.
If you have a job that requires sunlight late in the day, just wake up an hour earlier. Does a farmer get more daylight hours working from 7am - 8pm, as opposed to working 6am - 7pm?
Re:Electricty has made daylight savings obsolete (Score:5, Informative)
To the working stiffs, it does because if it's dark in the morning and on the way to work it doesn't affect them, but multiple hours of light after work is very beneficial.
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Many people seem to enjoy doing things outdoors, in actual sunlight, after they get done with work. So, you say, just go to work an hour earlier. Well that is OK if your employer, customers, etc also agree to that shift. But then the customers also have the same problem with their employers and customers. But since most people are fine with having an extra hour of sunlight during the after work hours most people will agree to it. Now all we have to do is agree on when exactly this shift will happen. H
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I've got no problems with adopting it permanently... just pick one and stick with it, imo.
Re:Electricty has made daylight savings obsolete (Score:4, Informative)
When you're a farmer, this is easy. When you're an hourly worker in a corporation, or any modern office worker, this is impossible in most places. (unless you're lucky enough that yours allows flexible hours.)
I'm with the crowd to keep DST all year.
It doesn't really help the farmer either, since the cows want to be milked at the same time each day and they rarely pay attention to DST changes.
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.
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Electric lighting isn't free.
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Neither are clocks.
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Malarkey! [wikipedia.org]
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That said, it would actually make more sense to leave it at EST rather than DST. On DST we're home earlier in the evening and thus usually will run the AC unit more, increasing energy usage.
In a future world where a majority of thermostats adjust based on househo
Re: (Score:2)
That argument works if you are indoors, but if you are outside gardening, cycling, etc, more hours of post-workday daylight are a real boon. Of course we could also solve the problem by adjusting the clock time start/end of work days or adopting more flex time working, but that seems to be just as controversial.
We can also fast forward lunch. (Score:2)
Let's just do this... (Score:2)
Cut all the whiny human 'cry, cry, I'm all worked up about where the abnormally close star is right now' crap and just adopt TAI across the board. Now that is proper time.
Do we keep ?DT or ?ST (Score:2)
The summary says that we should 'spring forward' without 'falling back.' However the end of the summary says that 'springing forward' increases risk of heart attack, so wouldn't it be better to wait till we 'fall back?' Picking the wrong one would mean a 2-hour shift (or maybe an overlap) between zones (somewhere over an ocean.)
Re: (Score:3)
Presumably it's that springing forward makes people late more than falling back, which increases stress, thus the heart attacks. Falling back, likewise, makes people early and reduces stress. However, the effect is only for immediately after a clock change... so it makes no sense to "wait until we fall back". The only way that logic would make sense would be to fall back every year and never spring forward... of course that won't work for obvious reasons.
Personally, I'm in favor of abolishing time zones alt
Missouri (Score:5, Interesting)
It's nice to see a mention of one of my great state's reps that, for once, doesn't involve them doing/saying something unspeakably stupid...
Yea, I'm talking about you, Todd Akin [policymic.com] and Rory Ellinger. [ky3.com]
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Yes, if you agree clearly it isn't stupid~
sheesh.
OTOH, you publicly display how ignorant you are about Capitalism and feudalism in your sig. So I guess I shouldn't be surprised by ignorant people thinking there opinion on the matters is valid.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, if you agree clearly it isn't stupid~
sheesh.
Never knew you were a Todd Akin fan. What a piece of shit.
OTOH, you publicly display how ignorant you are about Capitalism and feudalism in your sig.
Yea, sure thing buddy... 'cause expecting you to have the capacity for critical thought is just going waaay too far...
So I guess I shouldn't be surprised by ignorant people thinking there opinion on the matters is valid.
Didn't your mother ever tell you, if you don't have anything constructive to add to the conversation, keep your self-aggrandizing, masturbatory petulance to yourself?
Kill it (Score:2, Interesting)
Kill it dead, bury it in the textbooks of history and let daylight saving stand as a testament of the folly of man that he thought he might outwit mother nature. Incredible amounts of money and aggravation are wasted every year on this leftover from the age of agriculture.
In a modern world where clocks are set by the atom this archaic throwback to the days of the steam locomotive has gone from quaint to foolish expense. No one will miss it and society has long since moved on with these wonders we call light
Re:Kill it (Score:5, Interesting)
I will miss it, as well many people in the north.
Some things you should probably consider:
1) No one is trying to trick mother natures, if you think it's about that, then you are fucking stupid and STFU
2) There is no indicator that, overall, money is wasted
3) "In a modern world where clocks are set by the atom "
This underscores how ignorant you small minded you are. It has nothing to dodo the the accuracy of a clock.
More daylight in the evening is beneficial and enjoyable.
Yo do know we live on a globe, right? and that northern states are impacted more by the shifting about of daylight? And there aren't a lot of places that get an exact amount of day and night every year? and that not everyone gets to pick there work hours? and people do more outside in the evening then in the morning? People use more electricity for lighting in the evening then they do in the morning?
Most people get up just in times to shower, eat and then go to work. Not a lot of relaxing hang around tyime. and if there where it would be colder anyways
Bunch of short sighted morons.
Re: (Score:3)
Incredible amounts of money and aggravation are wasted every year on this leftover from the age of agriculture.
Speaks someone who has no idea where their food comes from. Hint: agriculture.
Here's one simple example: Every morning the cows come in around dawn to be milked. Several hours later the milk tanker arrives to collect the milk and take it to the bottlers to get it ready to put on the trucks to go to the supermarket for you to buy tomorrow.
The cows will come in a little later in winter. Which pushes the schedules for the tanker drivers and bottlers back by an hour. Now the bottlers who used to work 9-5 ar
Look at it historically... (Score:2)
If I remember correctly from history classes, the original purpose of it was to preserve daylight for farming. Think about how light it is during the summer time (at night).
However in the current "Non Agrarian" society we live in, it make no sense. Having a 23 hour day and a 25 hour day makes certain companies have a nightmare for their computer systems. Was that hour ending 02 the first or second hour ending 02 (on the 25 hour day) or "what happened to 02 on 03/10/2013 ? Oh yeah DST.."
It really doesn't
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
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Related to this, before time zones estimating what the time in another city was very hit-and-miss. Different municipalities simply set clocks according to the sun's position in the sky, resulting in utter chaos for railroads.
As railways and telecommunications improved, however, timekeeping became more baffling. Each railroad would use its own standard time, usually based on the local time of its headquarters, and their schedules were published in accord with their own time. Some railroad junctions even had a separate clock for each railroad. The main station in Pittsburgh, for example, kept six different clocks. In 1883, there were twenty-seven different local times in Illinois alone. Railroad users were inconvenienced and confused by the lack of uniformity. The difficulty came to an end in 1883 when U.S. and Canadian railroads adopted four standardized time zones which replaced the multiplicity of local times.
Daylight Saving Time: When, Where, and Why? [psu.edu] The adoption of DST was an outgrowth of the experiences with time zone adoption.
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.
Delus Johnson is an idiot. (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
But inertia from PHBs inevitably gets in the way. It is actually easier to change every clock in the timezone than it is to get a sensible decision out of a PHB in time for it to still matter.
Again (Score:2)
Yes, it
's worth saving.
There, never ask it again.
Arizona laughs at your silliness (Score:2)
We should just use standard time as standard time. Seriously, it is nice living in a place that doesn't adjust. It is always UTC -7 here. Playing with the clocks is silly. If we want to get up earlier or later part of the year, just do that.
Also I really question if an hour either way makes any economic difference at all.
Get rid of the time zones already! (Score:3)
Seriously -- let's just all use GMT, and get rid of Daylight savings, and all use 24 hour time.
Want to schedule a meeting with your coworker 1 cubicle over? How about with your coworker over in the Paris office? Awesome: Let's meet on Monday the 22nd, at 17:34 via (insert voice/video chat system of choice).
Time zones?
Daily savings time?
AM/PM?
Ain't nobody got time for that!
Re: (Score:2)
Seriously -- let's just all use GMT, and get rid of Daylight savings, and all use 24 hour time.
Want to schedule a meeting with your coworker 1 cubicle over? How about with your coworker over in the Paris office? Awesome: Let's meet on Monday the 22nd, at 17:34 via (insert voice/video chat system of choice).
Time zones?
Daily savings time?
AM/PM?
Ain't nobody got time for that!
Obligatory Nationalist response:
FUCK GREENWICH!
lol
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.
Cure for the common heart attack! (Score:2)
a Native American Proverb (Score:5, Insightful)
Health effects (Score:5, Interesting)
So, heart attacks go up by 10% in the wake of spring-forward, but fall by 10% in the wake of fall-back? The solution is clear, then -- we need to adopt an official 25-hour day.
The twice-yearly clock shift really is a silly, silly exercise. Not so silly as a uniform, one-size-fits-all, year-around schedule for work, school, and entertainment, but silly all the same.
No one cares (Score:2)
Oh, no! I can't shop at night! (Score:3)
One vocal opponent is Missouri State Representative Delus Johnson... 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.
LMAO.
Ignoring the fact people shop indoors, where there's this marvelous invention called electric lights and they can't even tell how dark it is outside oftentimes, the real Black Friday Rush people are either at home on their computers buying online or had to go out and stand in line at the store all through the night to get the doorbuster deals anyway.
No need to change it... (Score:5, Interesting)
My wife looked into this, from a legal standpoint.
Daylight savings is simply a federal standard for which days of the year participating states will change their times.
Read that again.
It's really a state-by-state issue, where any state can voluntarily not participate.
Talk to your state reps if you want to make a difference.
This has been tried before (Score:5, Interesting)
In January 1974, the U.S. went to DST early to conserve energy. It did mean we went to school in the dark. It also meant school kids had an excuse to play with flashlights (entirely unnecessary, but a good enough excuse and fun for the younger kids). It was a great novelty, and it was nice to have more sunlight after school when it was actually useful. Due to fear of kids getting hit by cars (in spite of the flashlights to make them visible), we went fell back again the next fall.
Re: (Score:3)
I was going to say the same thing.
On the other hand, they could just start school an hour later, couldn't they?
Early school is bad anyway [sleepfoundation.org]
Saskatchewan already did this. (Score:3)
Saskatchewan permanently went on DST, in most of its territory. Saskatchewan straddles the 105th parallel so it should be in the Mountain time zone, except for the easternmost strip. However, in 1966, it went onto mountain daylight time - and stayed there. (Technically, it went off but changed to Central time, where it has been ever since.) To this day Saskatchewan remains on CST year round.
In my city local noon is at 12:57 pm each day - solid evidence that we should be on Mountain time. But we aren't.
It's a huge nuisance, to be honest, since television schedules, airline schedules, and meetings between people in multiple time zones change (and the habit of people who are really on daylight time to continue to call their time standard time can be very confusing - witness the Winnipegger who tells a Saskatonian about an 11 am CST meeting when she really means CDT - the Saskatonian will be an hour late because he'll actually attend to the call at 11 am CST).
It would be a lot more convenient if the entire continent were ST or DT - but if there is all this evidence that DT has issues, maybe we should just, effectively, be on DT year-round.
The stupid thing is, if we had 8-4:30 workdays in winter and 7-3:30 in summer, we'd effectively *have* daylight time. But society apparently needs government to make that happen.
Re: (Score:3)
I live in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan.
I can't say I'd ever want DST after growing up here. I'm 24 years in age.
A lot of my family lives in Alberta, and I do a lot of business all over Western Canada. I can't say its ever really been an issue.
Oddly enough, as ass backwards as some things are here, this is one thing I like about Saskatchewan.
THsi would be a disaster! (Score:4, Funny)
no, this ancient ritual has to end (Score:4)
not really ancient, but its the 21st century and we don't need to change time for stupid reasons like saving energy or for farmers. Actually the farmers need for DST is a myth as well, so nobody has a fucking clue why we still due this.
Saving energy is a farce because I live in Canada, so either the lights are on either in the morning when its still dark at 8am or at night when its dark at 4pm. Doesn't make a fart's difference in the amount of energy I use because we are screwed one way or another with DST. The majority of business and retail centers have lights on all day long, so who the hell is saving energy when dusk or dawn is pushed back or forward an hour?
Not to mention Apple still hasn't gotten DST working properly on iOS, nearly every time change my alarms get all screwed still after 6 versions of iOS, I am hoping with my new Nexus 10 Google figured out that if ( 8am alarm == 8am current time) then ring the fucking alarm regardless of what fucking timezone or DST option is enabled, Apple hasn't figured out that logic yet; iOS probably has 5000 lines of code involved in figuring out how to ring an alarm to ensure it doesn't offend some religious cult or something by not respecting the alignment of planets or some archaic calendar cycle or something.
I for one (Score:3)
The Russians did that, BTW (Score:5, Informative)
A few years back, the Russians went to DST-365(.25) - locked the clocks forward 1 hour and stayed that way.
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.
Latitude (Score:3)
Daylight Savings Time makes perfect sense at higher latitudes, where there is little value in having daylight at 3:00am or 4:00am so it would be worthwhile to move it into the evening.
But there is a cost and an inconvenience, and there are lots of places where the change in daylight pattern is not a sufficient benefit to justify it, and it's done mainly out of inertia.
Sadly, the time change dates in the US are hopelessly unsuited to Canada, but Canada imitated the US rules because too many people have lives that revolve around the schedules of US television.
Re: (Score:3)
In the depths of winter we get ~9 hours of daylight.
Major Commuting starts are 7AM in the morning. Major Commuting ends after 6 PM in the evening. That's 11 hours.
No matter how you fiddle with it, most people are going to commute in the dark in the morning, or the evening, or BOTH.
I wouldn't care if it is DST all year or Standard time all year, but the switch really should go.
The Switch is definitely killing people pointlessly (Increased heart attacks and fatal accidents).