Daylight Saving Time Sucks

Why not split the difference? Permanently switch the clocks ahead thirty minutes from standard time.

If you live in a northern/winter community, yes there's less morning daylight, but there'll also be less car accidents from evening commutes.

As much as I hate the hour changing I really do prefer to have more daylight at night after I get home from work. I can actually take my son to the park.

Clearly the real solution is a universal basic income, single-payer healthcare, and a six-hour workday. And watches that run on Swatch Internet Time.

Anticipating post being transported to D&D in 3... 2... 1...

I get to work at 9:30 AM so I say DST FOREVER!

Archangel wrote:

As it turns out, we already tried this:

Those advocating year-round DST don't remember the disaster in the mid-70s. The country switched to year round DST for two years. It was quickly killed for many reasons. School children going to class in the dark was one, another was that people in cold country discovered that an extra hour of sun in the evening was of no benefit, but darkness until 8:30 or 9:00 AM was a pain.

The trial was supposed to run from January 6, 1974 to April 27, 1975 (P.L. 93-182), but the law was amended to end early, on October 27, 1974 (P.L. 93-434), because no one wanted to endure another winter of DST.

I'm curious where the quote about it being a "disaster" came from? The Wikipedia article you linked doesn't mention that.

SpacePPoliceman wrote:
ClockworkHouse wrote:

Ah yes, UTC. The Esperanto of time.

Watching the subsequent UTC discussion unfurl, I had many thoughts, but I felt this comment really encapsulated them all in a neat package.

Nah.

Esperanto was a silly idea from the get go.

UTC has numerous excellent use cases, which pretty much all revolve around global organizations. Because it's logical to want everyone working on the same project to able to communicate unambiguously.

Thing is, for the vast majority of us, our daily lives are not local endeavors, not global ones. I don't need Tran Pham in Ho Chi Minh City to know that when I say I want breakfast at 7am, I really mean 3pm UTC.

We'd be used to UTC within a generation. Like US switching to the metric system, it is something that would cause a little short-term pain for long-term benefit.

Nevin73 wrote:

We'd be used to UTC within a generation. Like US switching to the metric system, it is something that would cause a little short-term pain for long-term benefit.

Define "little short-term pain". Because if I tell you I'm gonna kick you in the nuts once a day FOR 20 YEARS, and tell you to stop worrying because you'll "get used to this short term pain within a generation"......

Like, what would it cost us to make that adjustment?

How badly would mandatory safety-critical services be impacted during the transition?
Would it keep tourists away?
Would it discourage international businesses from investing here?

Count me in on Permanent DST. In the North, winter is dark all the f*cking time anyway, and I appreciate the long, day-lit evenings in the summer.

Mostly, though, I just hate the changes.

Jonman wrote:
Nevin73 wrote:

We'd be used to UTC within a generation. Like US switching to the metric system, it is something that would cause a little short-term pain for long-term benefit.

Define "little short-term pain". Because if I tell you I'm gonna kick you in the nuts once a day FOR 20 YEARS, and tell you to stop worrying because you'll "get used to this short term pain within a generation"......

Like, what would it cost us to make that adjustment?

How badly would mandatory safety-critical services be impacted during the transition?
Would it keep tourists away?
Would it discourage international businesses from investing here?

Why would any of those questions have negative answers?

UTC is useful in programming and that's it.

Chumpy_McChump wrote:
Jonman wrote:

Like, what would it cost us to make that adjustment?

How badly would mandatory safety-critical services be impacted during the transition?
Would it keep tourists away?
Would it discourage international businesses from investing here?

Why would any of those questions have negative answers?

How would they not?

How badly would mandatory safety-critical services be impacted during the transition?
Look, we can barely manage a one-hour time change for DST without people forgetting to change their clocks and being late for work. Moving to UTC is a 7 or 8 hour time change. You are high if you think that's not going to be a massive country-wide disruption to the workforce, albeit a temporary one. Will it impact air traffic control when their entire workforce effectively has jetlag?

Would it keep tourists away?
There are people who won't travel to foreign countries because they don't want to have to figure out the currency. It doesn't take a lot to make someone pick a different tourist destination.

Would it discourage international businesses from investing here?
There is a cost to operating in environments that don't follow the same conventions as the rest of your business environment. A wackadoodle way to running your clocks is yet another small impediment to investment.

I feel there is a little bit of an east coast west coast thing going on here. Where I live in the winter it gets dark at 530PM. That means a huge chunk of people get off work and have to drive home in the dark and can't really do much outside in the evening on weekdays. Now that we have changed time, it gets light around 630AM, before the majority of kids go to school and people have some time to hang outside on the weekdays.

I propose universal sunrise time, or UST. It's very simple: sunrise is always at 6am. This has the added benefit of creating a spacetime paradox by dramatically slowing time in the polar regions.

karmajay wrote:

I feel there is a little bit of an east coast west coast thing going on here. Where I live in the winter it gets dark at 530PM. That means a huge chunk of people get off work and have to drive home in the dark and can't really do much outside in the evening on weekdays. Now that we have changed time, it gets light around 630AM, before the majority of kids go to school and people have some time to hang outside on the weekdays.

It matters where you are in the time zone. Growing up in Louisville, on the western edge of Eastern Time zone, summer sunset was 930ish, winter 530ish. My wife in Nashville on the eastern edge of Central Time zone, had 830 and 430 darkness. Terrible.

DST is one of those things that I've never understood the furor over. When I lived in a state that did the whole DST thing, I just saw it as an extra hour of sleep one night per year and an hour less another night. I never had any trouble adjusting. I do kinda miss it, though. Even in the middle of summer the latest we see the sun in Hilo is about 7:30.

I wonder if there's a certain personality type that doesn't mind it for whatever reason? Maybe people who get up very early anyway? I was a swimmer growing up which meant that I was up at 4:30 almost every day of the week through high school and college in order to workout, and now I get up only slightly later to run 4 mornings a week.

Quintin_Stone wrote:

I'm curious where the quote about it being a "disaster" came from? The Wikipedia article you linked doesn't mention that.

Sorry, sorry -- I cut and pasted the post where I first learned about the 1970s DST trial. (Reddit? Slashdot? It was 1:30am.) The post was highly upvoted, but not authoritative -- so "disaster" was opinion, not editorial.

Similar sentiments have been published, however, such as in the San Jose Mercury-News, CNN, and PBS NewsHour.

billt721 wrote:

DST is one of those things that I've never understood the furor over. When I lived in a state that did the whole DST thing, I just saw it as an extra hour of sleep one night per year and an hour less another night. I never had any trouble adjusting. I do kinda miss it, though. Even in the middle of summer the latest we see the sun in Hilo is about 7:30.

I wonder if there's a certain personality type that doesn't mind it for whatever reason? Maybe people who get up very early anyway? I was a swimmer growing up which meant that I was up at 4:30 almost every day of the week through high school and college in order to workout, and now I get up only slightly later to run 4 mornings a week.

There's a pretty strong inverse correlation between one's dislike of DST and the odds of being a psychopath.

I'm pro DST. An hour of daylight between 8-9PM is worth so much more to me than between 5-6AM. I am prepared to pay the price of a week of jetlag to get that for 4 months of benefit.

We run it for an even 6 months here in .au and I think that makes it 4 weeks too long. 2 weeks later to start and 2 weeks earlier to finish would be better as sunrise at 07:15 feels a little late to me.

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/Ez9t1Cp.jpg)

I think we should just abolish the concept of time itself and all walk around in a permanent haze of confusion and self doubt.

ruhk wrote:

I think we should just abolish the concept of time itself and all walk around in a permanent haze of confusion and self doubt.

But we all already do that, regardless of DST or not.

garion333 wrote:
ruhk wrote:

I think we should just abolish the concept of time itself and all walk around in a permanent haze of confusion and self doubt.

But we all already do that, regardless of DST or not.

Well, yes, but I meant in a more generalized sense.

Jonman wrote:
Nevin73 wrote:

We'd be used to UTC within a generation. Like US switching to the metric system, it is something that would cause a little short-term pain for long-term benefit.

Like, what would it cost us to make that adjustment?

I think that the military has a fairly elegant solution here with the routine use of Zulu and Lima time. Anything that is mission-critical and involves individuals in multiple time zones is done in Zulu (GMT/UTC), while virtually all local functions are done in Lima (local) time. My experience is primarily in aviation, where both Lima and Zulu times are often quoted side-by-side, especially on flight schedules.

This has the benefit of keeping everyone on the same page over large distances, while preserving the intuitive sense of local daytime. While it's arguably correct that fairly immobile individuals and businesses could adjust to dinner being from 0200 to 0300, it would be an incredible pain in the ass to get off a flight in a random country and have to figure out what their meal-times and working hours are. Instead, you just check the local time, and the odds are that you'll probably have a fairly good grasp of when you can expect things to happen.

If I land in a country around 1100L, I know that lunch is probably happening soon. If I show up at 1100Z, then it could be anywhere from dinnertime to morning rush-hour depending on where I am in the world. UTC is critically important for a lot of applications, but it sucks for daily human activities.

Also, Japan doesn't dick around with time-changes and after living there for five years, I really dislike the DST switch. Also, my dog is super confused as to why I'm waking up and feeding him an hour earlier than normal. He's going to be really annoyed when the time goes in the other direction.

So the solution is to have two clocks?

garion333 wrote:

So the solution is to have two clocks?

You can be right FOUR times a day then.

Spoiler:

Serious answer though, we already DO have two clocks. One for summer, one for winter.

Jonman wrote:
garion333 wrote:

So the solution is to have two clocks?

You can be right FOUR times a day then.

Spoiler:

Serious answer though, we already DO have two clocks. One for summer, one for winter.

No, I mean two clocks simultaneously. It's just a way for watch makers to sell more watches. Coldstream was never in the military, he's actually from Switzerland!

garion333 wrote:

No, I mean two clocks simultaneously. It's just a way for watch makers to sell more watches. Coldstream was never in the military, he's actually from Switzerland!

I mean, technically, we all have 24 simultaneous clocks, it's just that only one is ever applicable to where we are. But I still look at one of those other ones when figuring out whether to call my Mum in England.

Jonman wrote:
garion333 wrote:

No, I mean two clocks simultaneously. It's just a way for watch makers to sell more watches. Coldstream was never in the military, he's actually from Switzerland!

I mean, technically, we all have 24 simultaneous clocks, it's just that only one is ever applicable to where we are. But I still look at one of those other ones when figuring out whether to call my Mum in England.

Actually there are 38 time zones.

Chairman_Mao wrote:

Actually there are 38 time zones.

I had a bet with myself how long it would be before the first person would tell me precisely how many time zones there are.

You'll be pleased to know that I was about on the money.