Proof Daylight Saving Time Is Dumb, Dangerous, and Costly (bloomberg.com) 352
From a report on Bloomberg: The case for daylight saving time has been shaky for a while. The biannual time change was originally implemented to save energy. Yet dozens of studies around the world have found that changing the clocks has either minuscule or non-existent effects on energy use. [...] The latest research suggests the time change can be harmful to our health and cost us money. The suffering of the spring time change begins with the loss of an hour of sleep. That might not seem like a big deal, but researchers have found it can be dangerous to mess with sleep schedules. Car accidents, strokes, and heart attacks spike in the days after the March time change. It turns out that judges, sleep deprived by daylight saving, impose harsher sentences. [...] Some of the last defenders of daylight saving time have been a cluster of business groups who assume the change helps stimulate consumer spending. That's not true either, according to recent analysis of 380 million bank and credit-card transactions by the JPMorgan Chase Institute.
We've known this for years (Score:4, Insightful)
We've known for a long time, at least in my recollection since the '70s, that daylight savings time didn't do much other than cause problems. Since our Nation really isn't based on agricultural production anymore maybe it's time we just give it up. I'm sure the farmers, chickens and local schools can get it sorted out okay.
Re:We've known this for years (Score:5, Funny)
We've known for a long time, at least in my recollection since the '70s, that daylight savings time didn't do much other than cause problems. Since our Nation really isn't based on agricultural production anymore maybe it's time we just give it up. I'm sure the farmers, chickens and local schools can get it sorted out okay.
It's another case of Government over-reach. No one tells me what to do. We have the right to make it whatever time we want it to be.
I use the metric minute, hours and days, but in every other letter of the greek alphabet.
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It's another case of Government over-reach. No one tells me what to do. We have the right to make it whatever time we want it to be.
So it's beer o'clock? I like this new work schedule.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
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Then who the fuck is the proponent of this bullshit? If it serves exactly nobody, why the hell do we keep it?
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Shops basically started it as I heard. Longer daylight hours, once people were used to having clocks, meant more shoppers. This predates energy shortages, etc.
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If it serves exactly nobody, why the hell do we keep it?
TODAY it serves very few people. Electricity is cheap and plentiful in the modern world, and modern lighting means we can do tasks requiring bright light at any hour of the day.
WHEN IT WAS INTRODUCED, much of the world relied on lamps and candles for light. Standardized time zones were still fairly new (introduced 1883) which caused people on the western end of time zones to have later lighting. In the 1880s and 1890s a few large cities used arc lights to replace gas lights, but these were high power (oft
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I think you've got it backwards. With DST, "light" hours are shifted from the morning to the evening. Sunrise is "later" by the clock, not earlier.
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I can tell you with 100% certainty that sleep-deprived pigs are exceptionally grumpy.
Re:We've known this for years (Score:5, Funny)
A group of scientists placed five monkeys in a cage, and in the middle, a ladder with bananas on top. Every time a monkey went up the ladder, the scientists soaked the rest of the monkeys with cold water. After a while, every time a monkey would start up the ladder, the others would pull it down and beat it up. After a time, no monkey would dare try climbing the ladder, no matter how great the temptation. The scientists then decided to replace one of the monkeys. The first thing this new monkey did was start to climb the ladder. Immediately, the others pulled him down and beat him up. After several beatings, the new monkey learned never to go up the ladder, even though there was no evident reason not to, aside from the beatinThe second monkey was substituted and the same occurred. The first monkey participated in the beating of the second monkey. A third monkey was changed and the same was repeated. The fourth monkey was changed, resulting in the same, before the fifth was finally replaced as well. What was left was a group of five monkeys that – without ever having received a cold shower – continued to beat up any monkey who attempted to climb the ladder. If it was possible to ask the monkeys why they beat up on all those who attempted to climb the ladder, their most likely answer would be “I don’t know. It’s just how things are done around here.” Does that sound at all familiar?
Re:We've known this for years (Score:4, Informative)
No human would fall for that...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Oh.
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A group of scientists placed five Microsoft employees in a cage, and in the middle, a ladder with bananas on top. Every time a Microsoft employee went up the ladder, the scientists soaked the rest of the Microsoft employees with cold water. After a while, every time a Microsoft employee would start up the ladder, the others would pull him down and beat him up. After a time, no Microsoft employee would dare try climbing the ladder, no matter how great the temptation. The scientists then decided to replace on
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The areas that do not implement DST do so precisely because farmers don't want it.
It's business interests that drives it ... if New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and in Canada Toronto didn't implement it, the other areas that need to be in contact with and in sync with the plethora of Head Offices based in those cities wouldn't lobby to implement or keep it.
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We've known for a long time, at least in my recollection since the '70s, that daylight savings time didn't do much other than cause problems. Since our Nation really isn't based on agricultural production anymore maybe it's time we just give it up. I'm sure the farmers, chickens and local schools can get it sorted out okay.
DST should not be a problem for anyone anymore.
If you want to know the time, just google for "correct time".
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It's got nothing to do with farmers, a similar article [nationalgeographic.com] points this out:
Re: We've known this for years (Score:5, Insightful)
I commented the below comment in the last /. post about DST:
As someone even more North than you (Canadian Prairies), it doesn't make any sense... sun is still down when most people go to work, and sun goes back down again before most people are done work.
Shifting it an hour really has no benefit when you only get 7 hours of daylight in the winter.
In the Summer it's opposite. Sun comes up between 5-6 am, sets around 10pm.
With that said, where I live, we don't have DST and I'm damn glad we don't.
It's largely a regional thing, based on where you are geographically. This is why generalized discussions about DST don't make sense. Everyone lives in different area's both on the horizontal and vertical axis.
In other words, your experience is not my experience. How about we quit arguing about it and get on with our lives?
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DST is useful if you give a fuck about the sun. Guess what. I don't.
Next argument?
Re:We've known this for years (Score:5, Funny)
DST is useful if you give a fuck about the sun. Guess what. I don't.
In a recent review of the Sun, it only got one star.
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Why not do a permanent time shift such that the sun sets at 8:15 pm! Now you can have even more cookouts.
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And I've never had a professional job where my boss sat and treated us like factory workers. We were expected to be in the office 10 am - 3 pm. Outside of that get your work done and no one cared.
Morning people came in at 6:30. Night owls came in at 10. You could choose how much time you wanted to spend in the sun.
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I work in a pretty broad cross-section of industries, and the start time for almost everyone is 7:00am. If they don't start at 7:00am, it's because they start at 6:00am.
It's only office types (which I know are over-represented here on Slashdot) that get to wait until after the sun is up before work starts.
Re: We've known this for years (Score:5, Funny)
You remind me of what was once said in the North Dakota state legislature, by one of the brilliant state representatives, when they were considering (but ultimately rejected) the idea of opting out of DST: "I don't know. My garden needs that extra hour of daylight."
National DST Day (Score:5, Interesting)
Why not just make the Monday after DST time change a national holiday? Problem solved.
Me, I like Daylight Savings Time, because it will allow me to sit out on the porch in May listening to the Blackhawks game and still have enough light to read. And in the Winter it would suck having to go to work in the morning in the pitch dark.
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What about setting time to halfway in between and then sticking to that.
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If there's one thing that is far worse than any move of the clock by an hour either way, it's the stupid concept of half an hour offsets in timezones. But hey it works in North Korea so clearly it has something going for it or dear leader wouldn't have decreed it so.
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In case I wasn't clear, I mean that instead of DST being a one hour change make it a half hour change then stick to that as standard time and don't change it anymore.
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Ah! as I implied, I hadn't thought it through. Maybe everyone could shift by a half hour, but I guess that depends at minimum on whether that would make sense for those living in equatorial regions.
Re: National DST Day (Score:2)
India is UTC+5:30
If the US shifted its timezones by a half hour, Canada and Mexico would almost certainly follow, and Britain would probably do it within a year (most of my British friends like the later sunsets of BST, but despise the twice-annual clock changes).
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Because it's the Tuesday after the time change that gets the biggest spike.
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Hey I have a radical idea! How about we adjust the work etc schedules differently for summer vs winter? Hmm, we'll ok it is not so radical, many businesses already do it... SO f*ing do that AND STOP WITH THE TIMEZONE BULLSHIT.
Hey, our meeting is set up a bit late, it will be dark, how about setting it earlier. NO LETS ALL CHANGE OUR CLOCKS INSTEAD!!! Madness...
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DST works the sa
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Speaking of circadian rhythm, nobody considers the fact that DST helps keep it more aligned all year long.
In modern society, people are pretty much stuck on a fixed schedule all year long due to work, business hours, social events, etc. Having the sun come up at 4:00 a.m. would just serve to interfere with sleep. I would bet good money that the overall health detriment of that all summer long would far outweigh a single hour shift once per year.
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Speaking of circadian rhythm, nobody considers the fact that DST helps keep it more aligned all year long.
I have two words for you: winter hours
If you want different words, try summer hours
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What's to stop them simply playing the blackhawks game when there are different numbers displayed on the clock? Or how about going to work in the winter when it gets light irrespective of what arbitrary numbers are displayed on a clock?
DST doesn't change anything except the arbitrary numbers assigned to a particular portion of the day.
Excellent (Score:3)
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Our support folks had several calls today "caused" by the time change. i.e. "Gas pumps have the wrong time", "Appointments are off by an hour", etc. There will be several more over the next week or two.
Re:Excellent (Score:4, Insightful)
There is no need to have gaps or duplicate time points in your data. Hint: timezones and DST are only an illusion.
You must have missed the part where OP says "most people want to view data in local time"
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Someone who wants to accurately analyze time-based data and insists on local time is an idiot. Such analysis should always be done with the data in a suitable form, such as GMT or Unix timestamps.
Re:Excellent (Score:5, Insightful)
Someone who wants to accurately analyze time-based data and insists on local time is an idiot
So, when my travel app says I need to take the 1:30 am train, I'm an idiot for not using GMT or Unix timestamps ?
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That's not an analysis, that's just specifying a point in time. As long as you specify the time zone (explicitly or implicitly) it's not a problem. Trying to do an analysis (like calculating durations) on a set of times not specified in a consistent timezone (which you would be doing if some of the times were daylight savings and some weren't) is like trying to measure with a ruler whose length changes while you're measuring.
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Imagine one of the managers of the train company wants to have a per-day overview of delays. If you ignore DST in the definition of "day", then the statistics will be off by one hour in the summer. If you don't ignore DST, you'll have a 23 hour day and a 25 hour day.
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In industrial applications most people just ignore DST. Either they use UTC for everything, or they use a local timezone and accept that it will be 1 hour out for half the year.
It's too much hassle to try to change large numbers of devices all at the same time, without breaking various processes and in a way that is fault tolerant and recoverable.
I don't even bother changing most of my clocks.
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What do they do in Japan? I think we should do that.
I'm rather surprised you didn't suggest it.
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There is no DST in Japan, or Russia for that matter.
No DST, washlet toilets... It's a very civilized country.
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You need to read more about time reckoning, then. There is no need to have gaps or duplicate time points in your data. Hint: timezones and DST are only an illusion.
DST time change is a pain in the neck to hospitals.
It's a pain in the neck to surgeons and anesthesiologists who have the time jump backwards an hour in the middle of an operation, and the timestamp is a critical part of the data logging they do. Admittedly it's only twice a year, but it's still a pointless nuisance.
And yes, local time is important whenever you're dealing with the public.
Prototypical example (Score:4, Insightful)
Daylight savings is the perfect example of government's regulatory overreach interference in people's lives for theoretical gain. What is there is an increase in stress, time, money and heart attacks.
It's a concept that kills people, something studies have shown for years. Meanwhile anyone who wants an extra hour of daylight can make a personal choice and adjust their sleep schedule.
http://www.livescience.com/567... [livescience.com]
https://permies.com/t/509/Debu... [permies.com]
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfor... [nytimes.com]
https://www.theatlantic.com/na... [theatlantic.com]
But... (Score:3)
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Falling back gives a far smaller benefit than the problems from moving forward, in some cases it even is a negative on its own.
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Proof was not given... (Score:5, Insightful)
Proof Daylight Saving Time Is Dumb, Dangerous, and Costly
A correlation was cited, but causation was not proven. There are more pedestrian accidents between noon and 1pm. But that does not mean that lunch hour needs to be eliminated.
.
Nice try. Wanna play again?
Re:Proof was not given... (Score:5, Interesting)
A correlation was cited, but causation was not proven.
DST happens on different dates every year, so if there's a clear correlation, it's as good as a proof for causation, because there's nothing else that happens on those days.
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DST happens on different dates every year,...
Different days of the month, but not different weekdays. Nice try. Wanna play again?
Re:Proof was not given... (Score:5, Informative)
Different days of the month, but not different weekdays. Nice try. Wanna play again?
Sure, I'll play again.
Switching over to daylight saving time, and losing one hour of sleep, raised the risk of having a heart attack the following Monday by 25 percent, compared to other Mondays during the year, according to a new U.S. study released on Saturday.
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...So there is a correlation between Accidents and DST....
There may be a correlation between accidents and DST, I'm not denying that....
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Causality, well that is a different story.
To me it looks as if there is a group of people who just do not like DST. So they've gone out and tried to search for reasons why DST is bad. When playing in the realm of statistics and correlation, you tend to find what you're looking for. Whether or not it is a valid causality.
I think we should eliminate lunch hours, because of all the pedestrian accidents that occur during that
Proof was given that DST is ineffective (Score:3)
We're not trying to prove smoking is bad for you. We're merely trying to disprove the claims by the tobacco companies (DST proponents) that smoking is good for you.
And
I'd be all for ending it in the UK, except... (Score:2)
... except that most of the lobby groups would call for us to be at GMT+1 all year round because they want it "lighter later". Screw that. I say the UK should stay at GMT all year round. I want some light to wake up to in winter - waking up in the pitch black is totally depressing.
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GMT-4 will not work for all of New England. Maine and Massachusetts should be on Atlantic time (GMT-4),
I'm all for it in Boston if we move permanently to Atlantic time (GMT-4). The only reason why Boston is on Eastern time is to match New York. This results in the sun being up at 5:30am and setting just after 8:00pm during the summer. Who needs the sun to be up at 5:30am? And who is stupid enough, other than farmers, to take advantage of it? You certainly can't hold a party at that time... Though, if
I just stopped changing my clocks (Score:3)
Personally I stopped changing my clocks. Past few years I have just stayed on the current time and it's been great. I get more sunlight in the winter when I'm actually awake to enjoy it, and I avoided all the moaning and groaning of having to get up/go to bed earlier.
Yes get rid of it (Score:4, Insightful)
Contact your state representatives (Score:2)
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It has also been proven that at least at the high school level, students do better when they start school later. Why, in a post-agrarian society, are we still starting school at 8:00 (or worse, 7:00 for some classes)? Just start school at 9:00 instead of 8:00 and end it at 3:30 instead of 2:30, and the problem basically goes away.
Proof the summary is dumb and dangerous (Score:2)
The suffering of the spring time change begins with the loss of an hour of sleep.
Yeah. Summary is both dumb and dangerous to the continued health of my braincells. Which kind of wrapped in a safety bubble bumbling idiot comes up with that "suffering". Mind you if someone is incapable of adjusting their sleep schedule so they don't lose an hour of sleep, let them suffer. Maybe we can weed out such precious flowers in a few more generations of dawinism as those people who can't cope with an alarm going off early die off early in heart attacks.
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Most people are incapable of adjusting their sleep schedules at the drop of a hat. What I find is that about a week before the time change used to be, my body clock starts shifting. This means not only does the actual time change cause problems, but also the lack of the old time change. And instead of gaining an hour on the other end, somehow my body clock shifts the start time so that
I always figured it was about productivity (Score:2)
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But you don't magically get an extra hour of daylight. They still work X hours which overlaps with Y hours of daylight. You've just offset one against the other slightly.
And, in fact, in most places at any decent latitude, the hours of daylight are vastly longer than the average working day and even when they are not, what you lose in the morning, you gain in the evening and vice-versa:
http://jan.moesen.nu/daylight-... [moesen.nu]
As a mathematician, I honestly could never fathom what it was trying to achieve.
Even if
This farmer in favor of DST (Score:3, Interesting)
I farm and I'm actually in favor of DST, sort of. The reason is, without DST, during the very long summer days, I would have to wake up at 4 am to do herbicide applications (it's calmest around dawn). With DST I can sleep in until 5am. So I'd much rather have it than not have it. It makes a huge difference. Without DST I would just have to go to bed a lot earlier, but to make that effective I'd have to simply go to bed early all the time to condition my body to wake up earlier. That just doesn't work all that well when everyone else is going to bed later.
But I would be in favor of simply having DST year round. The reasoning is that without DST, in the winter, folks usually wake up in the dark and drive to work in the dark, and then by the time they head home from work, it's dark again. With DST, you'd still drive to work in the very dark hours, but at least when you got home from work you'd enjoy a short period of daylight. At least for the northern latitudes.
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how so? Germany is central Europe, so not at a really northern latitude, but even here the sunset in the winter is way before 18:00. it is long dark on the way home.
It is not the hour, it is the change (Score:4, Informative)
There is really nothing wrong with Daylight Saving Time. For modern people, it is better to have daylight later in the day than earlier. The problem is the change to and from Saving Time to Standard Time; that messes everything up.
Change to DST (summer time) and just STAY THERE and stop changing time and all our problems go away.
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If you want people to have more daytime after work, you might as well just make a law that says work must end no later tha
Missed Mass (Score:4, Funny)
Also I missed church this morning, and evening Mass never feels the same. Ditch DST.
I get tired of the complaints (Score:3)
Why do people complain? You have more light for evening activities while still having enough light in the morning to get you to work.
I can ride my bike home after work and not be in the dark. I can take my kids to the park. I can spend one more hour in the yard.
It changes back because it's too dark in the morning for too long.
And sure, as Hawai'i and Arizona can tell you, you're just fine if you don't change them. But I like it.
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You have more light for evening activities
It's still too cold right now for evening activities, and if I just wait another month, sunset will be an hour later anyway.
DST year round (Score:2)
Re:Proof?!?! First-world problems.... (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not going to dispute that this is a really shitty submission, and that Slashdot could do better.
What I will dispute, however, is that the problems that people experience in civilized nations are somehow less important than the problems people experience in less civilized nations.
People in civilized nations have to deal with all of the same problems that less civilized nations have to deal with. We still have to eat food and drink water. We still have to provide ourselves with shelter. We still need clothing. We still need to avoid injury and death.
In fact, it's often much harder for people living in the most developed countries to do such things. Most of the most civilized nations are in areas with very inhospitable conditions, such as long and harsh winters, or short crop growing seasons. It's not like, say, Africa or the Caribbean, where the climate is such that shelter, clothing, and even agriculture almost become non-issues.
Belittling "first-world problems" is silly, because they not only encompass the problem at hand, but they also encompass all of the problems that less civilized nations need to deal with, too.
By their very nature, "first-world problems" are inherently more severe than "non-first-world problems".
If something is deemed to be a "first-world problem", then it's a very significant problem. Just because civilized nations have come up with ways of dealing with the foundational problems doesn't mean that the higher-level problems are less problematic. It's actually quite the opposite.
Re: Proof?!?! First-world problems.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Except that "first world problem" is normally used specifically to imply something is insignificant. In this case the thing is, apparently, actually significant, so I agree it's the wrong use of the phrase. But In general it can be a meaningful phrase.
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So heart attacks and traffic accidents are first world problems? Guess you should be happy in your third world hellhole then and we can turn off the development aid?
Re: Proof?!?! First-world problems.... (Score:2)
Re:Correlation =! caustion (Score:4, Insightful)
If one hour change caused this much havoc then driving/flying between time zones should have the same effect yet oddly, it doesn't.
It doesn't ? Where's your data ?
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If one hour change caused this much havoc then driving/flying between time zones should have the same effect yet oddly, it doesn't.
or does it?
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Actually, yes, it does. Read up on the effects of jet lag some time.
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If you get jet lag flying between adjacent time zones you should just kill yourself. You're too pathetic to live.
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That said, I suspect Daylight Saving was more useful when we were an agrarian society and the extra hour of daylight was useful for field
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I suspect Daylight Saving was more useful when we were an agrarian society and the extra hour of daylight was useful for field hands to see what they were doing out in the crop fields.
Your suspicion is incorrect. It doesn't matter if you're a farmer or a carpenter or if you work in any other occupation where you need sunlight to see what you're doing; when you work has nothing to do with what time it is, and everything to do with when the sun is shining. You'll make an agreement to meet at an hour o'the clock because that's how our society works, but it could as easily be based on time after sunrise. You can get sunrise time information trivially.
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I find it interesting that we have a lot of hand wringing about how the one hour change causes such mass casualties, but nobody is interested in banning employers from scheduling people nearly at random rather than offering a consistent schedule. If getting to work on time induces that much lethal stress, shouldn't we ban sanctions against employees who come in late as long as they average out close to on time?
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I see a over whelming consensus that wants it dropped, I see countless studies that prove it doesn't do anything for saving energy. So why can't we just drop it already? Its a terrible state of affairs when a majority want something done and it can't get done. So who is holding back the obvious move to repeal Daylight Saving time?
It's because unlike most slashdot basement dwellers, real people like to enjoy more daylight after work.
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Yes, I said that slashdot basement dwellers don't like DST.
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Well you can now change your tune. Several people have already posted that they like DST. And I'm also one of them. Pleased to make your acquaintance.
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Well you can now change your tune. Several people have already posted that they like DST. And I'm also one of them. Pleased to make your acquaintance.
You're right. Now I can state that in the last 50+ years, approximately 0.000000001 of the people I "know" say DST is a good thing. (That's assuming they're not just contrarians who're saying it as a matter of course.)
But still, 0.000000001 is more than zero...
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I have to reset the blinky clock on the stove. it blinks and blinks and blnks.....
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The last thing that blinked and blinked 12:00 at me I tossed in the trash. The stove is much more heavy than a VCR so tape it is.