Many US States Consider Abandoning Daylight Savings Time (newsweek.com) 366
An anonymous reader writes:
A special Massachusetts commission recommends the state stop observing Daylight Savings TIme "if a majority of other northeast states, also possibly including New York, also do so." After a 9-to-1 vote, the head of the commission reported their conclusion after months of study: "There's no good reason why we're changing these clocks twice a year"... According to local reports, "The commission studied the pros and cons of the move and found, for example, retailers liked the idea of more daylight late in the day for shoppers... They also said there would be less crime, fewer traffic accidents and we would actually save energy."
A Maine state representative argues that it's actually harmful to observe Daylight Savings Time. "Some of those harms include an increased risk of stroke, more heart attacks, miscarriages for in vitro fertilization patients, among many other undesirable complications," reports Newsweek. Maine's legislature has already passed a bill approving an end to daylight savings time -- if Massachusetts and New Hampshire also end the practice, and if voters approve the change in a referendum.
At least six states are considering changing the time zones, according to Newsweek, and when it comes to Daylight Savings Time, the Maine representative told a reporter she had just one question.
"Why do we keep doing this to ourselves?"
A Maine state representative argues that it's actually harmful to observe Daylight Savings Time. "Some of those harms include an increased risk of stroke, more heart attacks, miscarriages for in vitro fertilization patients, among many other undesirable complications," reports Newsweek. Maine's legislature has already passed a bill approving an end to daylight savings time -- if Massachusetts and New Hampshire also end the practice, and if voters approve the change in a referendum.
At least six states are considering changing the time zones, according to Newsweek, and when it comes to Daylight Savings Time, the Maine representative told a reporter she had just one question.
"Why do we keep doing this to ourselves?"
You left off (Score:2, Insightful)
... and these states consider this TWICE a year, EVERY year!
Re:You left off (Score:5, Insightful)
You sound like one of those "It doesn't happen to me" guys, which is great. You don't get a fucked up sleep schedule for several weeks? Wonderful. You don't get hungry an hour earlier/later than the clock says you ought to? Good for you. Obviously then no one does.
You didn't get in a car accident today? No one else did. Your house didn't burn down? No houses at all burned down. You didn't die? Worldwide immortality achieved!
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There's a reason they posted as Anonymous Coward...
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I'm one of those "it doesn't happen to me" guys, which is great for me.
But it's still annoying and silly. There's no reason for it.
The fix is simple, year-round DST. If the schoolkids standing at the bus stop in the dark is a problem, then you're starting school too early anyway. Stop doing that. If the farmer is milking cows according to the clock, the farmer is doing it wrong. The only sane thing to do is make next spring's changeover the last one ever, abandon "standard" time permanently.
If anything
Re: You left off (Score:2)
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I live in Europe, trollerick. In fact I bet I visit other countries a lot more frequently than you at roughly twice a month. But hey, it's north-to-south, so I don't cross time zone borders.
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I travel a lot. And as such I can tell you it means little to me whether I go from Europe to the US or whether daylight saving strikes, equally I'm struggling to get back to a sensible rhythm.
Fortunately I was able to simply go and ignore DST altogether. I come to work an hour late during the Summer and also leave an hour late. Hello flexible work times, go suck on my nuts DST.
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It has significant physiological effects. We aren't computers that you can just reset the clock. It takes several days to get used to the time change, during which there are a higher risk of accidents. It may have been a good idea when the electric light bulb was still a rarity, but it ceased being a good idea decades ago.
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It's not a big deal, and changing your schedule by an hour, twice a year, does not cause strokes or miscarriages or anything else bad.
I've lived through a lot of DST changes and have never given it a second thought. You change your clock and go on with your life.
It might not be a big deal but people are saying it's pointless and does more harm than good. Why continue to do something year after year if there is no benefit?
People change their schedules and daily routine more than that, regardless of the existence of DST. Last week I was watching a movie and went to bed an hour later than usual. The week before that I had to get up an hour earlier than ususal to drive to a different office for a meeting. These things happen a lot more frequently than the DST change, and people are fine with them.
This is not an argument for DST. This is an argument against DST. Many businesses where I live already have "summer hours" and "winter hours". People already wake up at different times of the day depending on the time of the year. Why screw with the clock all the time? The only argument I've heard that makes a little sense is they don't want
Re:You left off (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm old.
Hey, so am I! And you know what, being old means you tend to be miserable a lot of the time. It's a package deal: on one hand life afflicts you with suffering. On the other hand, you get to live.
Being able to take it doesn't make you special; everyone who survives long enough learns to live with whatever it is aging has in store for them, whether it is arthritis, digestive problems, or for a majority of us, disturbed sleep patterns. That doesn't make disrupted sleep normal for younger people, or mean it should be compulsory for everyone.
Now the smart thing to do as you get older is to optimize the time you have left. And that means paying attention to the best evidence we have. You say that your cells don't know what time of day it is? Wrong [nature.com]. Even single-celled eukaryotic organisms have circadian rhythms. So as you get older if you want to minimize your misery you have to get serious about sleep discipline. No late night screen sessions without blue-filtered glasses, regular bedtimes, don't eat or drink to much late at night. Basically all the stupid shit you did when you were a kid because you could get by on six hours of not very good sleep.
As long as we're talking anecdotes, when I got serious about sleep hygiene I saw improvements in my arthritis and Type 2 diabetes sugar control. That makes sense because diabetes and arthritis are both inflammatory diseases, and the evidence is strong linking sleep disruption and a wide variety of inflammatory conditions linked with aging, including cardiovascular diseases and dementia.
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[Yorkshire accent] Luxury!
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Yes, but why do you feel entitled to make the rest of us get up early?
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This is much better, but yeah - there are still problems. Daylight at the end of the day is much more valuable to me all year round. I would never want to drop DST all year, but if we need daylight in the morning in winter for a good reason, I guess DST just had to stay.
Re:You left off (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:You left off (Score:4, Informative)
Why would the cows care about what number a pointer on a clockface is pointing to? If they want to be milked an hour after dawn, the farmer milks them an hour after dawn.
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It's"daylight saving" (Score:5, Informative)
singular, not plural.
Also you don't need to capitalize each word. This is English, not German.
Think of it like this: during a melee you pick up a +5 magic sword and say, "It's ass kicking time!". Not "It's Ass Kickings Time!"
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Obligatory. [youtu.be]
Re:It's"daylight saving" (Score:5, Interesting)
This is English, not German.
Noch nicht, aber wir arbeiten daran.
If you ask a linguistic, they will you that English is a butt ugly bastard mix of French and German anyway.
But English is amazingly effective in that everyone seems capable of using it. I sat in a company cafeteria in scenic Austin, Texas, and listened to how a colleague from China talked to a colleague from India . . . in an English that would have turned my 8th grade English teacher into a rampage. But hey, they could effectively communicate with each other. The wonders of English!
Capitalizing words in English seems to be a bit of a fad these days . . . we can't blame it on the "hipsters" any more since they are now history.
What are the current counter culture folks called . . . ?
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This is English, not German.
Noch nicht, aber wir arbeiten daran.
Gesundheit.
Re:It's"daylight saving" (Score:5, Interesting)
If you ask a linguistic, they will you that English is a butt ugly bastard mix of French and German anyway. But English is amazingly effective in that everyone seems capable of using it.
Everyone is capable of using it just like they could butcher any language, but English is a PITA to learn properly because they've generally not only adopted the vocabulary but also other bits and pieces. For example say the following words: beak peak weak leak steak... whoops, the last one is completely different for no discernible reason because it's a loaner from old Norse. You were knighted but not fighted, you were fought. And you're ugly-uglier-ugliest but beautiful-more beautiful-most beautiful not beautiful(l?)er. It's no wonder that basic users end up with "me love you long time" English, a lot of it is simply rote memorization that this is the way things are. Same with vocabulary, a driver does driving and a plumber does plumbing but a person cooking food is a chef rather than a cook(er?). It's not that any pattern is more or less valid, but English got all of them mashed together.
Re: It's"daylight saving" (Score:2)
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They aren't a cooker, though, which is the point he was trying to make. In British English at least that's an appliance.
Re: It's"daylight saving" (Score:2)
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The verbs are very simple; only two conjugated tenses, everything else is done with auxiliaries, as is the subjunctive. No silly gender nonsense either. That's a lot simpler than French or Italian.
The downside is that the spelling is an absolute bastard, and some learners screw up phrasal verbs - but they can all bugger off.
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They squeeze their arses, same as before.
Oh hang on, that's the Italians.
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And it's not tonal. Mispronounced words are easier to understand, and tone can be use to convey meaning even when the vocabulary is lacking.
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Also you don't need to capitalize each word. This is English, not German.
In English, you capitalize most words in a title. See for example [yourdictionary.com].
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Hmm, if I just picked up a +5 magic sword I'd probably say "It's ass stabbing time", but I take your point.
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You know I actually despise Islam, right?
It's it really just that one comment that made you think this or is there more? I want to understand what happened.
The reason it doesn't happen (Score:4, Funny)
This is incorrect (Score:5, Informative)
What they're suggesting is actually remaining on "Summer" time all year round.
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UK here, winter time is stupid, it gets light before I even wake up and then it gets dark before I'm even on my way home from work. We just changed from BritishSummerTime which made a lot more sense.
So Winter Time is stupid and rubbish, I'd much prefer to have some day time left in the evening than have it completely wasted whilst I'm sleeping.
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The problem is fitting in with everyone else. You know, school, jobs, transport, that kind of shit.
Re:This is incorrect (Score:5, Insightful)
That doesn't work well in higher latitudes, because then you end up with schoolchildren walking to school in the morning while it is still almost pitch black outside through most of December and January. The hour right before sunrise is often both the darkest and coldest period of the night.
Unless you propose that children start and finish school an hour later than they currently do, which could would be an even bigger clusterfuck than DST as tens of millions of adults, via a ripple effect, end up having to adjust their schedules to compensate, forcing them to work later as well, and negating the extra hour of daylight that they might otherwise have had in the evening.
"Standard" time year around makes the most sense. Noon, logically, is when the sun *should* be at its highest in the sky, but on DST, the sun is at that position at 1PM through the summer months.
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Ever since the invention of the light bulb, it doesn't matter when the sun comes up.
But, if you adjust your clock so that you are performing more activities while it is light outside, then you eliminate the need for some of those light bulbs, which is the whole point of DST.
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Candles (especially good ones that don't smell and produce loads of smoke) were an expensive luxury through most of history.
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This. Imagine if supermarket opening times were posted as "Sunrise plus 27 minutes" or whatever. The one in the next town would say the same and mean something slightly different.
This is sort of how it was before the railways, in fact. It's just that nobody really noticed as it was a day's walk or a few hours by gee-gee and by the time you got there you'd forgotten why you went.
Not quite (Score:5, Informative)
Several northern states are considering going from Eastern to Atlantic time, effectively springing ahead and never falling back.
Compromise (Score:5, Insightful)
Advance the clocks half an hour next spring and then leave them there
Sigh (Score:5, Insightful)
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I live in Japan, we don't do the whole change the clock thing, and you know what I absolutely love it. None of this changing the clock bullshit. A lot of people seem to think that it shouldn't bother people, but some of us do not work on the same schedule as the people during the day, and that change really messes up the schedules of those who have to work those hours. The end of changing the clocks is needed. The hour less daytime in the evening is not that hard to get use too, and honestly in the wint
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Re:Sigh (Score:4, Informative)
They buried the lead in the summary. They're not just considering an end to DST, but a simultaneous shift from Eastern to Atlantic time zone.
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This what you're saying actually is a matter of your time zone not being properly chosen.
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The tme zone is chosen pretty well for New England and Eastern Standard Time. All of New England is within the "natural" border of EST, except for a tiny bump on Maine. Ie, they're not more than half an hour off of true solar time during EST. The western EST border strays too far west, but that's a problem for Michigan and the like.
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Sure, but even farmers have to interact with people in the rest of society who are not getting up early and are staying up late. Anyway, DST has nothing to do with farmers. It's all about summer-time recreation honestly.
Personally I'd rather stay on DST all year long (which is actually what these states are proposing if you read it... they want to change to Atlantic standard time, which is the same as EDT). I think people would rather have a bit of daylight at the end of the day on a short winter day, th
Re:Sigh - It is not farmers (Score:3)
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About the Only Good Thing... (Score:5, Interesting)
...of not changing would be making drive-in movie theaters viable in the western part of each time zone. Otherwise, you get off work at maybe 5, drive an hour home or maybe more if you're in this screwed-up area of impossible traffic that is the DC area, and when NOT being exactly on the summer solstice, having just a few minutes to get the lawn mowed (hour and a quarter for the 1 acre here, or 45 minutes for the zero-turn mower I have now), and that's it. Not getting anything else done outside. Walk the dog? Do it in the dark. Have a cook-out? Dark. Rake the leaves? Dark.
Dark, dark, dark, dark, dark...
Pee on that. Keep DST, and make the day for something besides sitting in the office and writing code while wasting all the best part of the day for doing stuff outside, then getting home and going broke feeding batteries to the flashlight(s). We can tolerate non-DST in the winter 'cuz its too nippy to enjoy stuff outside anyway, but lets apply roundup to the weeds, spray for mosquitoes, work on our big radio antennas (K8DH here), and everything else outside in the daylight by keeping DST!!!
Re:About the Only Good Thing... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Dark, dark, dark, dark, dark...
Pee on that. Keep DST, and make the day for something besides sitting in the office and writing code while wasting all the best part of the day for doing stuff outside, then getting home and going broke feeding batteries to the flashlight(s). We can tolerate non-DST in the winter 'cuz its too nippy to enjoy stuff outside anyway, but lets apply roundup to the weeds, spray for mosquitoes, work on our big radio antennas (K8DH here), and everything else outside in the daylight by keeping DST!!!
Exactly. I suppose that people who go to work, come home and never step outside except for going to some other inside place don't care, but people who do actually do things can really make use of those extra hours of daylight. Plus the neighbors won't like it if you get up and mow the lawn at 0430.
LED technology make DST obsolete (Score:2)
It's time for daylight savings to go (Score:2)
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The idea is that we should wake up with the sun. There are biological and economic reason for this.
The problem is that in modern society, we live by the clock, not by the sun. DST is a way to approximate this behavior.
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Then I guess in October we should turn our clocks back not only by one but actually 2 hours. Sunrise around here is no sooner than 7am. 8am in December.
I've already abandoned it (Score:2)
I don't switch my clocks, I just switch my work hours. I'll keep my afternoon sunshine thanks.
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I don't switch my clocks, I just switch my work hours. I'll keep my afternoon sunshine thanks.
There's actually something to that. I travel to the west coast fairly often. If its a short stay, like a week, I simply "stay" on East coast time. For longer stays, my body will force adaptation, but for short trips it avoids jetlag.
DST - Australian Argument (Score:2)
The classic OZ housewife's opposition to Summer Time: "It faids me curtins."
Lack of sleep is harmful to your health (Score:2)
Without daylight time the sun would kick my ass out of bed at ~3:00 AM during summer months. Most days it would start to get light before I ever bothered going to sleep.
Reason people may like it (Score:3)
yup, i say split the difference (Score:2)
Why stop at half-assed solutions? (Score:2)
We could turn back the clock 6 hours instead of one. That way we go to work when it's still dark and it remains dark for most of the time we're at work, and then when we get out it's about (real) noon and even in Winter we have at least 3-4 hours of daylight left. And in Summer even a whooping 10!
If the holy grail is to have daylight when you get out of work, why don't you put your time change where your mouth is?
Re:Daylights savings causes miscarriages? strokes? (Score:4, Informative)
Make the entire year DST (Score:5, Insightful)
Most people don't like when DST ends, not when it is in effect. We don't like the loss of daylight in the evenings in Winter. It gets dark too quickly. People come come from work and it's already dark and they have no daylight time left to enjoy on their own.
So if DST is abandoned, then clocks should be permanently adjusted forward one hour. Of course that would never happen because standard time zones are offset from UTC.
So maybe the best solution would be to extend DST to cover the entire year.
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Ok just replying to this because the timestamp above was incorrectly set to 02:01.
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...and it's 01:03 right now...
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Which is better than a the author of the summary, who's straight out lying. Where they (EditorDavid?) claim "A special Massachusetts commission recommends the state stop observing Daylight Savings TIme", the actual article says
...which is exactly the opposite of what the summary says.
It's also sheer idiocy. But that's not surprising, s
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Lucky we had you here to point that out.
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With everyone using digital clocks, there is really no reason that we couldn't just set 12:00 as solar noon and do micro adjustments every day to the clock.
We would likely still want time zones so you could use the solar noon of the center of the timezone.
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The actual day is 23 hours, 56 minutes and 4.1 seconds, so we are already off by having a 24 hour day.
Uhh, no. You're talking about a sidereal day, which is the rotation of the earth relative to the rest of the universe, and the reason that is different is because we are in orbit around the sun and that orbit shifts our relationship with the universe around us. Imagine spinning in a circle while you're on a merry-go-round that is itself spinning (much slower than you), and you are talking about your relationship to the school that the merry-go-round is near, not your relationship to the center of the merry-
Re:Make the entire year DST (Score:5, Informative)
The actual day is 23 hours, 56 minutes and 4.1 seconds
It's blindingly obvious that this cannot be true. Think about it. Our clocks measure 24-hour days. If the solar day (the time between when the sun is directly overhead) were actually almost four minutes shorter than 24 hours, noon would shift by two hours every month. Sunrise and sunset would shift by even more.
The figure you mention is correct if you're judging completion of a day by watching far-distant stars (sidereal day). If you're judging it by looking at the sun, which is what's useful for human schedules, the mean length of a day is 24 hours and 0.002 seconds (solar day).
The difference is that the apparent motion of distant stars is caused only by the Earth's rotation. The apparent motion of the sun is caused by the Earth's rotation and the Earth's orbital motion about the sun. Because the orbit is elliptical, the length of a solar day actually changes throughout the course of the year. But the mean length is ever so slightly more than 24 hours
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Re:Make the entire year DST (Score:4, Interesting)
Most people don't like when DST ends, not when it is in effect.
You have to be a morning person to actually like DST. Fuck that. Anyone who enjoys being awake at the crack of dawn should just get up early of their own accord.
If you ask me, the biggest waste isn't daylight. It's all the road space, electrical generating capacity, and cell network bandwidth that goes unused every night, because there's a silly stigma against working the graveyard shift. Unless you work outside, it makes absolutely no difference whether the sun is shining over your place of employment. Convince half the population to be nocturnal and you've doubled the capacity of your roads, without paving a single new lane.
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As I've graduated out of my 20's I've noticed I'm a lot, a LOT more sensitive to time changes than I used to be.
Re:Time (Score:5, Funny)
I was in the 2nd grade the year we did DST in January. Far from scary darkness, the kids loved it. It was an excuse to carry a flashlight to walk to the bus stop (pretty cool when you're 7 years old). I'm sure some parents FEARED for safety, but since we had flashlights, we couldn't have been that hard to see.
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So suddenly, loads of parents end up having to adjust *their* schedules to compensate, so that they don't end up needing to leave their kids alone at home for as much as an hour before school. Via a ripple effect, your proposal would actually end up affecting a majority of adults, causing most people to have to work later in the day and completely negating the extra hour of daylight that you supposedly got
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If not time zones, then you're back to "sun time" which is slightly different at each longitude. Try scheduling trains so they're not on the same track heading different directions when the freakin' time is changing with every mile west and east you run. You had to be a mathematical genius to be a railroad engineer back before time zones. Lots of 'em failed, and spectacular train wrecks ensued.
Try your 6th grade story problem, "Train A leaves Chicago at 5:30 AM traveling 60 mph, Train B leaves New York a
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No it wouldn't. Time zones are very helpful, for example when you're trying to set up a reasonable time for a phone call/teleconference, or thinking about when someone will read an e-mail. You can think, "well, they're five hours behind us, so they won't be getting into the office for a couple of hours yet," or, "they're two hours ahead, so they should be just getting back from lunch." You can have a row of clocks showing the time in all your offices and from that have some idea of what part of the day
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A sensible meeting software will automatically calculate a given time based on the timezone of your partner and yours, not display "4pm" even though you're in Rome and he's in Sydney.
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Way ahead of you.
If you schedule meetings before noon, don't count on me to be there. Or that the next meeting I schedule that involves you will be before 6pm.
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The US states alone span GMT-5 to GMT-10, with territories it's GMT-4 to GMT+10.
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Re:This is a one sided bull (Score:4, Interesting)
The original idea was to conserve energy by having daylight when people are actually awake in Summer.
In Summer, in Mid/North of Europe or the US, you have daylight from about 4-5am to about 8-9pm. Now, people rarely get up at 4am, and even if they do, they don't really care too much whether it's dark because they go to work anyway and don't need much light to get dressed and go to work. But it was thought that it would be beneficial to not need artificial lighting until about 10pm when most people would go to bed. That way we could "win" an hour of power consumption for lighting.
No later than when LEDs came along and the power consumption for lighting became an insignificant fraction of our power use, the whole shit became totally obsolete for its original purpose. So we now make up new shit because "It's always been that way, and who made you king that you wish to change it".
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[pedantic]
DST is Daylight Saving Time.
Not "savings".
[/pedantic]
It was wrong so many times in the summary I'm convinced they're trolling us.
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Let's just switch to traditional Japanese time [wikipedia.org].
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A quarter to Revolution.
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Bear in mind that the entire point of timekeeping approximates the sun's position in the sky. Otherwise you might as well suggest that everyone switch to UTC, and abolish timezones completely. As has been pointed out elsewhere by comments in this story, that would be an even bigger headache than DST is.
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Really?
I didn't know I wasn't people.
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Then you should be fine with eliminating DST time changes, if you are a fan of not "having a fuss".
Stop fussing.
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Well, it gets a bit unwieldy when you get closer to the international date line. Now, the "next day" is at midnight, with timezones being locked, if you're living close to the IDL your day would change somewhere in the afternoon, 2pm is Tuesday and 3pm is Wednesday... or something like that.
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Why stop half way? Push the clock another 5-6 hours forwards, go to work right after Midnight so you can get out around noon and have 4 hours of daylight left in Winter and 10 in Summer!
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Hey, if you're fast enough you can land before you leave!
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I live in the UK - please can we move the whole of the UK to the South Pacific.
The way things are now, in the summer, its light from 3AM to 10PM,and in the winter its light from 10AM to 4PM. What the hell difference does moving the clocks one hour do apart from pissing us all off.
PS the cows cant tell the time, even using analogue clocks.