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I wish America would shift the period from an hour to 30 minutes. I feel like everyone I know hates the change especially since it's an hour. If anything I wish

I wish America would shift the period from an hour to 30 minutes. I feel like everyone I know hates the change especially since it's an hour. If anything I wish we could stay on DST and not revert back.

IgorPartola 10y ago
Why not just get rid of DST? Is it still in any way relevant? Edit: instead of "get rid of DST" I should have said "get rid of the semi-yearly time shift". Personally I much prefer EDT over EST where I live, for example.
- post_break 10y ago
  This is why we still use it. http://andywoodruff.com/blog/where-to-hate-daylight-saving-time-and-where-to-love-it/ http://andywoodruff.com/blog/where-to-hate-daylight-saving-t...
  - Declanomous 10y ago
    I personally think the way the United States handles time zones is a large part of the problem. I live in Chicago, some of my cousins live in South Bend, IN, and some live in Niles, MI. For a long time, Indiana didn't observe DST. Michigan was on EST and observed DST. Chicago, of course, is on CST, and observes DST. It was interesting to take trips and cross between the different systems for time-keeping. For one thing, the sun rises incredibly late on the far Western edge of a time zone, and sets quite late as well. According to this map, while Chicago and NYC experience about 10 days with sunsets after 8:30 pm, the Western edge of Michigan experiences about 130 days where the sun sets after 8:30 PM. On the flip side, Chicago and NYC experience over 100 days with sunrises before 6:00 AM, while Western Michigan does not have a single day with a sunrise before 6:00 AM. Our current system is a massive improvement over the old system with hundreds or thousands of individual time zones, at least in the sense that scheduling activities between geographically distant areas is much easier. However I think the system is much worse for the life of any given individual. I think it would make far more sense to have a single time zone for the United States, and have individuals choose their schedule based on the time of the year and their local sun. I have a lot of autonomy in my job, and I have basically been doing this for several years now. I wake up later in the winter, sometimes as late as 7:30 AM. In the summer I wake up with the sunrise and bike to work, leaving my house before 6 AM. Waking up with the sun makes getting up much easier, it reduces my energy usage, and following the schedule of the sun helped my insomnia as well. I think the idea would be really unpopular in practice, since people are used to the "9-5" mentality, where schedules are set by the clock. A lot of people live far enough South and East in their time zones not to be terribly affected by the shifting time of the sunrise. Furthermore, I can see national companies instituting policies which ignore the benefits of a shifting schedule, forcing their workers on the West Coast and the East Coast to both arrive at the same hour.
    - tacostakohashi 10y ago
      Frankly, I'm beginning to think that the "old system" of per-city solar timezones, defined by the time the sun is directly overhead that city, is actually preferable to the "modern" (post International Meridian Conference of 1884) system of timezones with hourly offsets. With solar time, the timezone, and offset with every other timezone, is fixed. With the timezone system, it became a political decision, subject to constant changes as everybody tries to move into the timezone of their trading partners, or make adjustments for the time of year. Scheduling things between geographically distant areas can, in fact, be really hard with the timezone system - e.g., the offset between New York and London is either 4 or 5 hours, and changes 4 times per year, due to the different DST schedules. Not much fun if you're trying to run, say, an airline offering transatlantic flights + US connections. In the old days, the solar system would have been difficult to work with, if you had to use some hard-copy chart (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/01/Comparative-time-table.jpg/350px-Comparative-time-table.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/01/Co...), and calculate things manually. These days, it would be trivial to build the functionality into devices, watches, apps, etc, on the basis of an exhaustive, static database, instead of the timezone database which needs frantic updates due to political changes.
      - upofadown 10y ago
        At this point I would go so far as to say that the time zone system is an archaic hack. If we want to do things with respect to sunrise and/or sunset we can just do that and use UTC for everything else. Note that solar time can be determined with a small algorithm based on latitude and longitude that can fit in small embedded devices. The only remaining question is; what location should be used?
    - maxerickson 10y ago
      An easy way to consider the combined effect of the timezone and DST is that solar noon for the western edge of the Eastern timezone is ~1:50 right now. I think the (utter non) popularity of UTC for setting meeting times sort of points to people not being ready to switch to a single zone (they have had access to the convenience for decades).
- laumars 10y ago
  Not really. Broadly speaking, DST was introduced to conserve fuel during war time. Personally I prefer it to be lighter in the evenings than in the morning so I prefer DST (or BST as it's known in the UK) over the winter time (GMT / UTC)
  - JumpCrisscross 10y ago
    > Broadly speaking, DST was introduced to conserve fuel during war time It was also conceived before mass air conditioning, an invention which likely makes it a carbon-producing policy.
    - mikeash 10y ago
      Would it be possible to use something like DST to make peak production of solar power line up better with peak electricity demand?
- minikites 10y ago
  I like the DST change for all the reasons in this article: http://www.leancrew.com/all-this/2013/03/why-i-like-dst/ http://www.leancrew.com/all-this/2013/03/why-i-like-dst/ > If we stayed on Standard Time throughout the year, sunrise here in the Chicago area would be between 4:15 and 4:30 am from the middle of May through the middle of July. And if you check the times for civil twilight, which is when it’s bright enough to see without artificial light, you’ll find that that starts half an hour earlier. This is insane and a complete waste of sunlight. > If, by the way, you think the solution is to stay on DST throughout the year, I can only tell you that we tried that back in the 70s and it didn’t turn out well. Sunrise here in Chicago was after 8:00 am, which put school children out on the street at bus stops before dawn in the dead of winter.
  - pavel_lishin 10y ago
    So, with DST, the sunrise variance goes from 4 hours, to two hours, right? 5:30am in May, and 7:XX in January?
  - e12e 10y ago
    So funny reading this after growing up at 69 degrees northern latitude ;) Walking a couple of kilometers to school from the age of eight in darkness only lit by streetlamps. It's not so terrible. That's not to say it's wrong; just different :)
  - hx87 10y ago
    Why not get up at 4:30am between May and July?
  - astrodust 10y ago
    If you're so concerned about children ending up going to school in the dark, crazy idea, make school start later.
- basch 10y ago
  should get rid of leap days and seconds too. let time drift slowly, and have an arbitrary length corrective "day" off for the entire world once a century. month long siesta.
  - minikites 10y ago
    The Mayans sort of did this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haab%27#Wayeb.27 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haab%27#Wayeb.27

IgorPartola 10y ago

Why not just get rid of DST? Is it still in any way relevant? Edit: instead of "get rid of DST" I should have said "get rid of the semi-yearly time shift". Personally I much prefer EDT over EST where I live, for example.

post_break 10y ago
This is why we still use it. http://andywoodruff.com/blog/where-to-hate-daylight-saving-time-and-where-to-love-it/ http://andywoodruff.com/blog/where-to-hate-daylight-saving-t...
- Declanomous 10y ago
  I personally think the way the United States handles time zones is a large part of the problem. I live in Chicago, some of my cousins live in South Bend, IN, and some live in Niles, MI. For a long time, Indiana didn't observe DST. Michigan was on EST and observed DST. Chicago, of course, is on CST, and observes DST. It was interesting to take trips and cross between the different systems for time-keeping. For one thing, the sun rises incredibly late on the far Western edge of a time zone, and sets quite late as well. According to this map, while Chicago and NYC experience about 10 days with sunsets after 8:30 pm, the Western edge of Michigan experiences about 130 days where the sun sets after 8:30 PM. On the flip side, Chicago and NYC experience over 100 days with sunrises before 6:00 AM, while Western Michigan does not have a single day with a sunrise before 6:00 AM. Our current system is a massive improvement over the old system with hundreds or thousands of individual time zones, at least in the sense that scheduling activities between geographically distant areas is much easier. However I think the system is much worse for the life of any given individual. I think it would make far more sense to have a single time zone for the United States, and have individuals choose their schedule based on the time of the year and their local sun. I have a lot of autonomy in my job, and I have basically been doing this for several years now. I wake up later in the winter, sometimes as late as 7:30 AM. In the summer I wake up with the sunrise and bike to work, leaving my house before 6 AM. Waking up with the sun makes getting up much easier, it reduces my energy usage, and following the schedule of the sun helped my insomnia as well. I think the idea would be really unpopular in practice, since people are used to the "9-5" mentality, where schedules are set by the clock. A lot of people live far enough South and East in their time zones not to be terribly affected by the shifting time of the sunrise. Furthermore, I can see national companies instituting policies which ignore the benefits of a shifting schedule, forcing their workers on the West Coast and the East Coast to both arrive at the same hour.
  - tacostakohashi 10y ago
    Frankly, I'm beginning to think that the "old system" of per-city solar timezones, defined by the time the sun is directly overhead that city, is actually preferable to the "modern" (post International Meridian Conference of 1884) system of timezones with hourly offsets. With solar time, the timezone, and offset with every other timezone, is fixed. With the timezone system, it became a political decision, subject to constant changes as everybody tries to move into the timezone of their trading partners, or make adjustments for the time of year. Scheduling things between geographically distant areas can, in fact, be really hard with the timezone system - e.g., the offset between New York and London is either 4 or 5 hours, and changes 4 times per year, due to the different DST schedules. Not much fun if you're trying to run, say, an airline offering transatlantic flights + US connections. In the old days, the solar system would have been difficult to work with, if you had to use some hard-copy chart (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/01/Comparative-time-table.jpg/350px-Comparative-time-table.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/01/Co...), and calculate things manually. These days, it would be trivial to build the functionality into devices, watches, apps, etc, on the basis of an exhaustive, static database, instead of the timezone database which needs frantic updates due to political changes.
    - upofadown 10y ago
      At this point I would go so far as to say that the time zone system is an archaic hack. If we want to do things with respect to sunrise and/or sunset we can just do that and use UTC for everything else. Note that solar time can be determined with a small algorithm based on latitude and longitude that can fit in small embedded devices. The only remaining question is; what location should be used?
  - maxerickson 10y ago
    An easy way to consider the combined effect of the timezone and DST is that solar noon for the western edge of the Eastern timezone is ~1:50 right now. I think the (utter non) popularity of UTC for setting meeting times sort of points to people not being ready to switch to a single zone (they have had access to the convenience for decades).
laumars 10y ago
Not really. Broadly speaking, DST was introduced to conserve fuel during war time. Personally I prefer it to be lighter in the evenings than in the morning so I prefer DST (or BST as it's known in the UK) over the winter time (GMT / UTC)
- JumpCrisscross 10y ago
  > Broadly speaking, DST was introduced to conserve fuel during war time It was also conceived before mass air conditioning, an invention which likely makes it a carbon-producing policy.
  - mikeash 10y ago
    Would it be possible to use something like DST to make peak production of solar power line up better with peak electricity demand?
minikites 10y ago
I like the DST change for all the reasons in this article: http://www.leancrew.com/all-this/2013/03/why-i-like-dst/ http://www.leancrew.com/all-this/2013/03/why-i-like-dst/ > If we stayed on Standard Time throughout the year, sunrise here in the Chicago area would be between 4:15 and 4:30 am from the middle of May through the middle of July. And if you check the times for civil twilight, which is when it’s bright enough to see without artificial light, you’ll find that that starts half an hour earlier. This is insane and a complete waste of sunlight. > If, by the way, you think the solution is to stay on DST throughout the year, I can only tell you that we tried that back in the 70s and it didn’t turn out well. Sunrise here in Chicago was after 8:00 am, which put school children out on the street at bus stops before dawn in the dead of winter.
- pavel_lishin 10y ago
  So, with DST, the sunrise variance goes from 4 hours, to two hours, right? 5:30am in May, and 7:XX in January?
- e12e 10y ago
  So funny reading this after growing up at 69 degrees northern latitude ;) Walking a couple of kilometers to school from the age of eight in darkness only lit by streetlamps. It's not so terrible. That's not to say it's wrong; just different :)
- hx87 10y ago
  Why not get up at 4:30am between May and July?
- astrodust 10y ago
  If you're so concerned about children ending up going to school in the dark, crazy idea, make school start later.
basch 10y ago
should get rid of leap days and seconds too. let time drift slowly, and have an arbitrary length corrective "day" off for the entire world once a century. month long siesta.
- minikites 10y ago
  The Mayans sort of did this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haab%27#Wayeb.27 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haab%27#Wayeb.27