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Personally, it would be brilliant if we'd just go to permanent daylight savings time nationwide. The transition is hard on the kids and living in the northern p

Personally, it would be brilliant if we'd just go to permanent daylight savings time nationwide. The transition is hard on the kids and living in the northern part of the country, the extra daylight is appreciated.

austincheney 9y ago
Better would be to go to a single Zulu timezone nationwide. You just go into work an hour later in the central area compared to the east coast.
- idbehold 9y ago
  https://qntm.org/abolish https://qntm.org/abolish
  - kemiller 9y ago
    You are doing important work here.
  - Nullabillity 9y ago
    If I'm thinking about calling someone I'll check their IM status, not look at the clock. If I'm going to a store I don't visit often I'll have to look up their opening hours on a map anyway. Whether that says it's 08-20 or 16-04 couldn't matter less. And that's before getting into the even more ridiculous stuff: > First of all, we need to straighten out some terminology. The terms "a.m." and "p.m." (ante meridiem and post meridiem) are strongly deprecated now, because they refer to the position of the Sun, not of the clock. So use 24-hour time? Somehow the rest of the world manages just fine. > So, you have to say "solar noon" to refer to the instant when the Sun is at its zenith, and "twelve hundred hours" to refer to the instant when the clock reads 12:00. Similarly "solar midnight" and "zero hundred hours". And you have to use the twenty-four hour clock, it's the only way to be unambiguous. 12:00 is just an arbitrary time anyway, and even now it might not have much to do with noon anyway, depending on where you live. Hell, look have a look at the arctic circle, where noon (or day/night) doesn't have much of a meaning anyway. > Even in the best case scenario, it is impossible to retroactively scrap time zones. The past will always exist, and the people who lived there will never adopt your new standard. Nor can all of past history be renumbered. The history of timekeeping will remain exactly as complicated as it always has been, and the zoneinfo database can never be abandoned. Do you also refuse to use epoch timestamps, because they can't represent dates before 1970? Sure, you'd need to handle zones for historical data, but that'd get progressively less relevant the further away from cutoff you get.
  - EvanAnderson 9y ago
    That's wonderful. Thank you for sharing that.
  - tempestn 9y ago
    Your conclusion is a thing of beauty: > If it's any consolation, all of this is extremely unlikely to happen, since it relies on an international agreement between every single nation in the world. Or on China attacking and conquering the entire world and installing China Standard Time as part of a totalitarian regime, which is slightly less unlikely but still very unlikely.
  - Asooka 9y ago
    This has nothing to do with DST.
  - tzs 9y ago
    That's greatly exaggerating the difficulty of deciding if it is OK to call your Uncle who is about 165° east of you in a single time zone system compared to the current multiple time zone system. In fact, the procedure is the same in both systems: 1. Look at your clock. 2. Add 11 hours to clock time. 3. Ask yourself if it would be daytime at your location when your clock says that time. 4. If yes, call your Uncle. • Under the current multiple time zone system that works because clock time is close to local time. Step #2 computes the clock time at your Uncle's location, which gets you close to the local time at his location. Daylight hours are approximately the same in his local time as in your local time, aside from the seasonal variation which you can ignore if you allow yourself a reasonable margin of error (e.g., aim for calling him a couple hours or so after sunrise rather than shooting for the crack of dawn), so you can use your local time as a proxy for his [1]. • Under a single worldwide time zone system it works because your local time is about 11 hours behind his local time. The time you get in step #3 is what the time will be on your clock (and on his clock, and on everyone else's clock) when your local time is the same as his local time is right now. So if that clock time will be a good time for you to receive a call, now is a good time to try your Uncle. Of course, you probably wouldn't actually have to do any of that. Just as in his first example with the current time zone system where he Googles "time in melbourne" rather than looking at his clock and adding 11 hours, in the single worldwide time zone you would Google "local time in melbourne". In such a world, where local time can be quite a ways off from clock time, Google would surely recognize such queries and do the right thing. Heck, it might even assume you mean local time if you just did "time in melbourne" because in the single time zone there would be no need to Google for the clock time for a particular area. I'd expect "time in melbourne" to probably give something like "The local time in Melbourne is X at world time Y". That covers everything. [1] If you really are aiming for crack of dawn calling, then you will have to take into account the seasonable variation in sunrise relative to local noon, but you have to do that in both the multiple time zone system and the single worldwide time zone system.
- mejin 9y ago
  I like it that no matter where I live I can wake up at 6, stores open by 9, and lunch is at 12. Imagine every time traveling having to ask the locals what time things happen. Also, I don't think any politician will allow their state to be the state that doesn't have the same time as other countries in the same longitude
  - starlig-ht 9y ago
    Arizona doesn't do daylight savings, while the Navajo Nation (surrounded by AZ) does, and so does Utah to the North.
    - SAI_Peregrinus 9y ago
      And the Hopi Nation (surrounded by the Navajo Nation) does not.
      - colejohnson66 9y ago
        And then the Navajo Nation portion inside the Hopi Nation does
    - protomyth 9y ago
      > Navajo Nation (surrounded by AZ) Actually, it occupies area in 3 states. The Hopi Reservation is surrounded by the Navajo Nation.
  - mattferderer 9y ago
    Most places I've visited vary from business to business. With all due respect, I don't know of anywhere that fits your 9 & 12 mold. When I travel I always need to look up the hours of businesses. Many also pick a day or two during the week to close or prepare. Many also operate dramatically different depending on the day you go.
    - brewdad 9y ago
      Ok but they do operate at a reasonable approximation. Sure a shop may open at 0800 in one town and not until 1000 in another but are there really places on earth where the shops tend to open at 0100 and close by 0900? Certainly there can't be many.
- kemiller 9y ago
  Good God, no. The time isn’t just an arbitrary number to help coordinate meetings, it communicates what time of the day/night cycle you’re experiencing, to a reasonable approximation. Having separate time zones may be annoying, but it forces you to think about others’ experience. If I say I was up last night til 4 in the morning, that tells you something.
  - racer-v 9y ago
    Agree. Noon should be the moment when the sun is at its highest altitude in the sky, or a close approximation thereof.
    - mcny 9y ago
      > Agree. Noon should be the moment when the sun is at its highest altitude in the sky, or a close approximataion thereof. I too want the same time worldwide but I guess the best we can do is UTC. I mean we could do it but I fear we'd just be sweeping the ugliness under the rug. I don't want this kind mess https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_China > Currently, timezone usage within Xinjiang is roughly split along the ethnic divide, with most ethnic Han following Beijing time and most ethnic Uyghurs following Ürümqi Time.
      - incompatible 9y ago
        We already have UTC when you want the same time worldwide. Using UTC in everyday life would be somewhat confusing when travelling. I guess it would take quite a while to get used to things happening at a different time on the clock.
    - rocqua 9y ago
      I think the sunrise is a better fixture socially, and maybe the sunset is a better fixture biologically. Noon is just an easy to measure compromise for the above two. Social life and timing mostly revolves around how early you get up. "Its late" kind of means "I am behind schedule to get enough sleep before waking up". Biologically, we are programmed around sunlight. Whilst our mornings aren't really controlled by the biological clock (that is what the alarm is for), the evening really are. Besides, the for many people, the evening is what separates 'civil life' from 'private life'.
- thephyber 9y ago
  This is similar to China, which has 5 timezones wide and they have one standard national timezone. The US is far wider when you consider Alaska, Hawaii and the island territories in the Caribbean and the Pacific. It spans from UTC+10 (Guam) to UTC-10 (Hawaii / Aleutians).
- InclinedPlane 9y ago
  Why? You would still need to create a system to keep track of local time of day. Hey, guess what, we already have such a system, people already use it and are familiar with it, let's keep using it.
  - austincheney 9y ago
    No, you don't need that. Many people think you need it, but only because they have never experienced the alternative. Once you try it you won't want to go back.
- trumpownsyou420 9y ago
  you should probably keep your opinion to yourself.
- seanmcdirmid 9y ago
  Erm, this is china. In Urumqi, the official time is still the same as Beijing but stores open and close much later. However, they still have an unofficial separate time that locals use to coordinate the meaning of noon, morning, and night.
waqf 9y ago
I think we should shift time zones a little every day, so that (in some designated location, say New York or DC) the sun rises at exactly 6am every morning. This eliminates the sudden transition to daylight savings which is the source of most complaints, and it would be trivial to implement with modern electronics.
- connicpu 9y ago
  "trivial"
- grzm 9y ago
  I firmly believe we'd see a lot of problems. Pick nearly any datetime library and see how easy it would be to calculate things like durations between two arbitrary timestamps. Even with those that do handle daylight saving or time zones properly, many applications that do use these libraries don't use these features. Or how often projects update their timezone databases. Handled in an incremental way would be a world of pain, precisely because of our reliance on modern electronics and software, or more precisely, because we rely on time so heavily to coordinate events, and rely on syncing these operations with human activities. I think I may have just literally shuddered. By the way, what you describe is how things worked prior to standardization of time which was driven in part by the expansion of the railroad. There's a brief history on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_zone#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_zone#History
- macNchz 9y ago
  Regardless of the (extreme) technical challenges to implement something like this...a 6am sunrise in NYC would make for sunset at 3:15pm in December. A little early for my taste!
mattferderer 9y ago
As a parent of young children, we dread changing the clocks & curse the evil people who came up with this terrible idea. If Dante's Inferno were to be written today, their would be a 10th Circle for those who came up with daylight savings time. It would involve the sound of screaming children, important appointments & clocks that change at random.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- wavefunction 9y ago
  The people who came up with it were people living in more agrarian times, when your kids wouldn't be screaming, they'd be up watering the chickens and helping you out around the farm before day-break no matter what the hour of the day.
toss1 9y ago
NO! Agree that the transition is hard, but Standard time is much better. Wakening before the sun is not only biologically counterproductive, but the late morning dark would further hinder ability to exercise in the morning for months out of the year. Just Kill DST, stay on standard time and be done with it
- ebiester 9y ago
  Whether standard or DST makes more sense really depends on geography.
  - Asooka 9y ago
    That's why we have timezones?
    - 24gttghh 9y ago
      I think they mean Latitude.
    - snarf21 9y ago
      I think they mean Maine vs Florida not east/west. You may need the daylight "later" in Maine than Florida.
zeveb 9y ago
Why permanent daylight savings time? Why not just permanent real time? Clock noon should be roughly the same as solar noon, all year round. 'Daylight savings' is an impossibility.
- chimeracoder 9y ago
  > Why permanent daylight savings time? Why not just permanent real time? Clock noon should be roughly the same as solar noon, all year round. 'Daylight savings' is an impossibility. Because if my commute involves driving fifty miles east in the morning and fifty miles west in the evening, I don't want to have to adjust my clock by about 5 minutes twice a day. (At the equator, this would be 3 minutes - the further you go from the equator, the greater the difference that fifty miles would represent).
  - zeveb 9y ago
    > Because if my commute involves driving fifty miles east in the morning and fifty miles west in the evening, I don't want to have to adjust my clock by about 5 minutes twice a day. You seem to think that I'm arguing against time zones. I'm not (here, anyway): I'm arguing that the time within a time zone be that of noon at its midpoint, so that no point within the timezone is more than 30 minutes from true noon (yes, some timezone are larger than an hour …), as opposed to those who want permanent DST, or even double DST, where clock noon might be hours from true noon.
    - koenigdavidmj 9y ago
      And life gets interesting if your time zone crosses through anywhere populated. (That's why northwest Indiana is on central time: it basically exists as a bedroom community for Chicago, so it's most sensical to be on Chicago time.)
- Spooky23 9y ago
  The valid argument is usually about safety. Many people, especially children are travelling to go to work or school and sunrise at 7:20, feels a little unsafe for many people. That extra hour in the morning helps.
c517402 9y ago
Arizona doesn't participate in daylight savings time. And, we really don't need to be saving any daylight in Arizona.
- osteele 9y ago
  Most of Arizona doesn’t participate in DST [1]. [1] “Daylight Savings Time explained”, CGP Gray. https://youtu.be/84aWtseb2-4 https://youtu.be/84aWtseb2-4. Skip to the 5 minute mark for Arizona.
  - selectodude 9y ago
    Is Navajo Nation technically in Arizona, though?
    - AlotOfReading 9y ago
      For some purposes yes, for others no. The state has jurisdiction in matters not involving the tribe that take place there and the residents can vote / participate in civil government as Arizonians. However, the nation does have sovereignty in tribal affairs on the reservation and a few outside it.
shmerl 9y ago
Yeah, this whole DST shift is pointless. Just keep it constant but standard, not DST. Also, I'd prefer a switch to 24 hour time notation. AM/PM is cumbersome.
- mintplant 9y ago
  I switched my own "native" time format to 24 hours years ago, in my head and on all my personal devices. Now I'm able to convert between the two formats effortlessly, and doing mental math on times is easier when I don't have to mix in a bunch of modulo-12 operations. (I live in the US.)
  - shmerl 9y ago
    Same thing here. I use 24 hour system anywhere I can. Converting it isn't an effort for me. But I wish everyone around would use it.
    - Koshkin 9y ago
      Well, in English, you can't say "16 o'clock", can you? You can only say "sixteen hundred hours" (which sounds terrible, if you ask me).
      - shmerl 9y ago
        Yeah, sixteen hundred hours sounds awful. Sixteen o-five sounds OK to me though.
      - thaumasiotes 9y ago
        > Well, in English, you can't say "16 o'clock", can you? You can only say "sixteen hundred hours" What's stopping you?
        mitchty 9y ago
        Nothing, get enough people saying it and it will become the thing. I'd vote for sixteen hour or something similar.
tzs 9y ago
If kids are a concern, what about the problem of DST in winter in northern areas meaning kids go to school in the dark? For example I see kids walking to school at around 7:15 AM (6th-8th grade and high school) and around 8:30 AM (K-5th grade). This is at latitude ~47.7° N (same latitude as the city that is part of your name, in fact). Here is what various DST options would do in terms of kids going to school before sunrise: Elementary: Middle/High: No DST: never Nov 20th - Feb 10th Current DST: never Oct 10th - Mar 16th Permanent DST: Nov 23 - Feb 2nd Oct 10th - Mar 16th
- racer-v 9y ago
  This is just a problem of schools starting too early. You can't fix stupid. Although isn't the idea of "permanent DST" an oxymoron?
  - tzs 9y ago
    I agree that middle/high school is arguably starting too early (especially since research has shown, I believe, that teens really should be sleeping later). In the case of elementary school, though, you are dealing with kids young enough that they probably cannot reliably be counted on the get ready and leave for school on their own, and so you need to fit school times in with their parent's work schedule.
    - racer-v 9y ago
      As long as we're trying to fix all the world's problems, I'd submit that the ideal domestic partnership has one parent able to focus full-time on childcare and home life. It doesn't have to be the same parent all the time, but I find the expectation of dual incomes to be one of the great rip-offs of modern life.
      - positivecomment 9y ago
        Somewhere along the way to 10s, we lost the work flexibility. "I took care of my kids for 5 years" gets your CV discarded in an instant. So both parents, not always because they need the money, but very frequently because they're afraid to lose their career, choose to keep working.
DerekL 9y ago
What is the point of making it permanent? If you want to increase the daylight after the workday, then just make working times one hour earlier, instead of changing the clock.
Asooka 9y ago
As a former schoolchild, please no, PLEASE NO. Waking up early is already hard, having to wake up an hour earlier than I would otherwise have to for the entire year would be hell. Just use normal non-DST time. Please.
- Asooka 9y ago
  Can the people downvoting please explain?
mnw21cam 9y ago
That'd be "Daylight saving time", not "Daylight savings time". Not sure why so many people get this wrong.
- luckroy 9y ago
  I'm with you, but we're fighting the losing fight. As an aside, what a brilliant marketing name. Daylight is in peril and we all adjust our clocks to save it from the treacherous grasp of morning. We're heroes!

austincheney 9y ago

Better would be to go to a single Zulu timezone nationwide. You just go into work an hour later in the central area compared to the east coast.

idbehold 9y ago
https://qntm.org/abolish https://qntm.org/abolish
- kemiller 9y ago
  You are doing important work here.
- Nullabillity 9y ago
  If I'm thinking about calling someone I'll check their IM status, not look at the clock. If I'm going to a store I don't visit often I'll have to look up their opening hours on a map anyway. Whether that says it's 08-20 or 16-04 couldn't matter less. And that's before getting into the even more ridiculous stuff: > First of all, we need to straighten out some terminology. The terms "a.m." and "p.m." (ante meridiem and post meridiem) are strongly deprecated now, because they refer to the position of the Sun, not of the clock. So use 24-hour time? Somehow the rest of the world manages just fine. > So, you have to say "solar noon" to refer to the instant when the Sun is at its zenith, and "twelve hundred hours" to refer to the instant when the clock reads 12:00. Similarly "solar midnight" and "zero hundred hours". And you have to use the twenty-four hour clock, it's the only way to be unambiguous. 12:00 is just an arbitrary time anyway, and even now it might not have much to do with noon anyway, depending on where you live. Hell, look have a look at the arctic circle, where noon (or day/night) doesn't have much of a meaning anyway. > Even in the best case scenario, it is impossible to retroactively scrap time zones. The past will always exist, and the people who lived there will never adopt your new standard. Nor can all of past history be renumbered. The history of timekeeping will remain exactly as complicated as it always has been, and the zoneinfo database can never be abandoned. Do you also refuse to use epoch timestamps, because they can't represent dates before 1970? Sure, you'd need to handle zones for historical data, but that'd get progressively less relevant the further away from cutoff you get.
- EvanAnderson 9y ago
  That's wonderful. Thank you for sharing that.
- tempestn 9y ago
  Your conclusion is a thing of beauty: > If it's any consolation, all of this is extremely unlikely to happen, since it relies on an international agreement between every single nation in the world. Or on China attacking and conquering the entire world and installing China Standard Time as part of a totalitarian regime, which is slightly less unlikely but still very unlikely.
- Asooka 9y ago
  This has nothing to do with DST.
- tzs 9y ago
  That's greatly exaggerating the difficulty of deciding if it is OK to call your Uncle who is about 165° east of you in a single time zone system compared to the current multiple time zone system. In fact, the procedure is the same in both systems: 1. Look at your clock. 2. Add 11 hours to clock time. 3. Ask yourself if it would be daytime at your location when your clock says that time. 4. If yes, call your Uncle. • Under the current multiple time zone system that works because clock time is close to local time. Step #2 computes the clock time at your Uncle's location, which gets you close to the local time at his location. Daylight hours are approximately the same in his local time as in your local time, aside from the seasonal variation which you can ignore if you allow yourself a reasonable margin of error (e.g., aim for calling him a couple hours or so after sunrise rather than shooting for the crack of dawn), so you can use your local time as a proxy for his [1]. • Under a single worldwide time zone system it works because your local time is about 11 hours behind his local time. The time you get in step #3 is what the time will be on your clock (and on his clock, and on everyone else's clock) when your local time is the same as his local time is right now. So if that clock time will be a good time for you to receive a call, now is a good time to try your Uncle. Of course, you probably wouldn't actually have to do any of that. Just as in his first example with the current time zone system where he Googles "time in melbourne" rather than looking at his clock and adding 11 hours, in the single worldwide time zone you would Google "local time in melbourne". In such a world, where local time can be quite a ways off from clock time, Google would surely recognize such queries and do the right thing. Heck, it might even assume you mean local time if you just did "time in melbourne" because in the single time zone there would be no need to Google for the clock time for a particular area. I'd expect "time in melbourne" to probably give something like "The local time in Melbourne is X at world time Y". That covers everything. [1] If you really are aiming for crack of dawn calling, then you will have to take into account the seasonable variation in sunrise relative to local noon, but you have to do that in both the multiple time zone system and the single worldwide time zone system.
mejin 9y ago
I like it that no matter where I live I can wake up at 6, stores open by 9, and lunch is at 12. Imagine every time traveling having to ask the locals what time things happen. Also, I don't think any politician will allow their state to be the state that doesn't have the same time as other countries in the same longitude
- starlig-ht 9y ago
  Arizona doesn't do daylight savings, while the Navajo Nation (surrounded by AZ) does, and so does Utah to the North.
  - SAI_Peregrinus 9y ago
    And the Hopi Nation (surrounded by the Navajo Nation) does not.
    - colejohnson66 9y ago
      And then the Navajo Nation portion inside the Hopi Nation does
  - protomyth 9y ago
    > Navajo Nation (surrounded by AZ) Actually, it occupies area in 3 states. The Hopi Reservation is surrounded by the Navajo Nation.
- mattferderer 9y ago
  Most places I've visited vary from business to business. With all due respect, I don't know of anywhere that fits your 9 & 12 mold. When I travel I always need to look up the hours of businesses. Many also pick a day or two during the week to close or prepare. Many also operate dramatically different depending on the day you go.
  - brewdad 9y ago
    Ok but they do operate at a reasonable approximation. Sure a shop may open at 0800 in one town and not until 1000 in another but are there really places on earth where the shops tend to open at 0100 and close by 0900? Certainly there can't be many.
kemiller 9y ago
Good God, no. The time isn’t just an arbitrary number to help coordinate meetings, it communicates what time of the day/night cycle you’re experiencing, to a reasonable approximation. Having separate time zones may be annoying, but it forces you to think about others’ experience. If I say I was up last night til 4 in the morning, that tells you something.
- racer-v 9y ago
  Agree. Noon should be the moment when the sun is at its highest altitude in the sky, or a close approximation thereof.
  - mcny 9y ago
    > Agree. Noon should be the moment when the sun is at its highest altitude in the sky, or a close approximataion thereof. I too want the same time worldwide but I guess the best we can do is UTC. I mean we could do it but I fear we'd just be sweeping the ugliness under the rug. I don't want this kind mess https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_China > Currently, timezone usage within Xinjiang is roughly split along the ethnic divide, with most ethnic Han following Beijing time and most ethnic Uyghurs following Ürümqi Time.
    - incompatible 9y ago
      We already have UTC when you want the same time worldwide. Using UTC in everyday life would be somewhat confusing when travelling. I guess it would take quite a while to get used to things happening at a different time on the clock.
  - rocqua 9y ago
    I think the sunrise is a better fixture socially, and maybe the sunset is a better fixture biologically. Noon is just an easy to measure compromise for the above two. Social life and timing mostly revolves around how early you get up. "Its late" kind of means "I am behind schedule to get enough sleep before waking up". Biologically, we are programmed around sunlight. Whilst our mornings aren't really controlled by the biological clock (that is what the alarm is for), the evening really are. Besides, the for many people, the evening is what separates 'civil life' from 'private life'.
thephyber 9y ago
This is similar to China, which has 5 timezones wide and they have one standard national timezone. The US is far wider when you consider Alaska, Hawaii and the island territories in the Caribbean and the Pacific. It spans from UTC+10 (Guam) to UTC-10 (Hawaii / Aleutians).
InclinedPlane 9y ago
Why? You would still need to create a system to keep track of local time of day. Hey, guess what, we already have such a system, people already use it and are familiar with it, let's keep using it.
- austincheney 9y ago
  No, you don't need that. Many people think you need it, but only because they have never experienced the alternative. Once you try it you won't want to go back.
trumpownsyou420 9y ago
you should probably keep your opinion to yourself.
seanmcdirmid 9y ago
Erm, this is china. In Urumqi, the official time is still the same as Beijing but stores open and close much later. However, they still have an unofficial separate time that locals use to coordinate the meaning of noon, morning, and night.

waqf 9y ago

I think we should shift time zones a little every day, so that (in some designated location, say New York or DC) the sun rises at exactly 6am every morning. This eliminates the sudden transition to daylight savings which is the source of most complaints, and it would be trivial to implement with modern electronics.

connicpu 9y ago
"trivial"
grzm 9y ago
I firmly believe we'd see a lot of problems. Pick nearly any datetime library and see how easy it would be to calculate things like durations between two arbitrary timestamps. Even with those that do handle daylight saving or time zones properly, many applications that do use these libraries don't use these features. Or how often projects update their timezone databases. Handled in an incremental way would be a world of pain, precisely because of our reliance on modern electronics and software, or more precisely, because we rely on time so heavily to coordinate events, and rely on syncing these operations with human activities. I think I may have just literally shuddered. By the way, what you describe is how things worked prior to standardization of time which was driven in part by the expansion of the railroad. There's a brief history on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_zone#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_zone#History
macNchz 9y ago
Regardless of the (extreme) technical challenges to implement something like this...a 6am sunrise in NYC would make for sunset at 3:15pm in December. A little early for my taste!

mattferderer 9y ago

As a parent of young children, we dread changing the clocks & curse the evil people who came up with this terrible idea. If Dante's Inferno were to be written today, their would be a 10th Circle for those who came up with daylight savings time. It would involve the sound of screaming children, important appointments & clocks that change at random.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
wavefunction 9y ago
The people who came up with it were people living in more agrarian times, when your kids wouldn't be screaming, they'd be up watering the chickens and helping you out around the farm before day-break no matter what the hour of the day.

toss1 9y ago

NO! Agree that the transition is hard, but Standard time is much better. Wakening before the sun is not only biologically counterproductive, but the late morning dark would further hinder ability to exercise in the morning for months out of the year. Just Kill DST, stay on standard time and be done with it

ebiester 9y ago
Whether standard or DST makes more sense really depends on geography.
- Asooka 9y ago
  That's why we have timezones?
  - 24gttghh 9y ago
    I think they mean Latitude.
  - snarf21 9y ago
    I think they mean Maine vs Florida not east/west. You may need the daylight "later" in Maine than Florida.

zeveb 9y ago

Why permanent daylight savings time? Why not just permanent real time? Clock noon should be roughly the same as solar noon, all year round. 'Daylight savings' is an impossibility.

chimeracoder 9y ago
> Why permanent daylight savings time? Why not just permanent real time? Clock noon should be roughly the same as solar noon, all year round. 'Daylight savings' is an impossibility. Because if my commute involves driving fifty miles east in the morning and fifty miles west in the evening, I don't want to have to adjust my clock by about 5 minutes twice a day. (At the equator, this would be 3 minutes - the further you go from the equator, the greater the difference that fifty miles would represent).
- zeveb 9y ago
  > Because if my commute involves driving fifty miles east in the morning and fifty miles west in the evening, I don't want to have to adjust my clock by about 5 minutes twice a day. You seem to think that I'm arguing against time zones. I'm not (here, anyway): I'm arguing that the time within a time zone be that of noon at its midpoint, so that no point within the timezone is more than 30 minutes from true noon (yes, some timezone are larger than an hour …), as opposed to those who want permanent DST, or even double DST, where clock noon might be hours from true noon.
  - koenigdavidmj 9y ago
    And life gets interesting if your time zone crosses through anywhere populated. (That's why northwest Indiana is on central time: it basically exists as a bedroom community for Chicago, so it's most sensical to be on Chicago time.)
Spooky23 9y ago
The valid argument is usually about safety. Many people, especially children are travelling to go to work or school and sunrise at 7:20, feels a little unsafe for many people. That extra hour in the morning helps.

c517402 9y ago

Arizona doesn't participate in daylight savings time. And, we really don't need to be saving any daylight in Arizona.

osteele 9y ago
Most of Arizona doesn’t participate in DST [1]. [1] “Daylight Savings Time explained”, CGP Gray. https://youtu.be/84aWtseb2-4 https://youtu.be/84aWtseb2-4. Skip to the 5 minute mark for Arizona.
- selectodude 9y ago
  Is Navajo Nation technically in Arizona, though?
  - AlotOfReading 9y ago
    For some purposes yes, for others no. The state has jurisdiction in matters not involving the tribe that take place there and the residents can vote / participate in civil government as Arizonians. However, the nation does have sovereignty in tribal affairs on the reservation and a few outside it.

shmerl 9y ago

Yeah, this whole DST shift is pointless. Just keep it constant but standard, not DST. Also, I'd prefer a switch to 24 hour time notation. AM/PM is cumbersome.

mintplant 9y ago
I switched my own "native" time format to 24 hours years ago, in my head and on all my personal devices. Now I'm able to convert between the two formats effortlessly, and doing mental math on times is easier when I don't have to mix in a bunch of modulo-12 operations. (I live in the US.)
- shmerl 9y ago
  Same thing here. I use 24 hour system anywhere I can. Converting it isn't an effort for me. But I wish everyone around would use it.
  - Koshkin 9y ago
    Well, in English, you can't say "16 o'clock", can you? You can only say "sixteen hundred hours" (which sounds terrible, if you ask me).
    - shmerl 9y ago
      Yeah, sixteen hundred hours sounds awful. Sixteen o-five sounds OK to me though.
    - thaumasiotes 9y ago
      > Well, in English, you can't say "16 o'clock", can you? You can only say "sixteen hundred hours" What's stopping you?
      - mitchty 9y ago
        Nothing, get enough people saying it and it will become the thing. I'd vote for sixteen hour or something similar.

tzs 9y ago

If kids are a concern, what about the problem of DST in winter in northern areas meaning kids go to school in the dark? For example I see kids walking to school at around 7:15 AM (6th-8th grade and high school) and around 8:30 AM (K-5th grade). This is at latitude ~47.7° N (same latitude as the city that is part of your name, in fact). Here is what various DST options would do in terms of kids going to school before sunrise: Elementary: Middle/High: No DST: never Nov 20th - Feb 10th Current DST: never Oct 10th - Mar 16th Permanent DST: Nov 23 - Feb 2nd Oct 10th - Mar 16th

racer-v 9y ago
This is just a problem of schools starting too early. You can't fix stupid. Although isn't the idea of "permanent DST" an oxymoron?
- tzs 9y ago
  I agree that middle/high school is arguably starting too early (especially since research has shown, I believe, that teens really should be sleeping later). In the case of elementary school, though, you are dealing with kids young enough that they probably cannot reliably be counted on the get ready and leave for school on their own, and so you need to fit school times in with their parent's work schedule.
  - racer-v 9y ago
    As long as we're trying to fix all the world's problems, I'd submit that the ideal domestic partnership has one parent able to focus full-time on childcare and home life. It doesn't have to be the same parent all the time, but I find the expectation of dual incomes to be one of the great rip-offs of modern life.
    - positivecomment 9y ago
      Somewhere along the way to 10s, we lost the work flexibility. "I took care of my kids for 5 years" gets your CV discarded in an instant. So both parents, not always because they need the money, but very frequently because they're afraid to lose their career, choose to keep working.

DerekL 9y ago

What is the point of making it permanent? If you want to increase the daylight after the workday, then just make working times one hour earlier, instead of changing the clock.

Asooka 9y ago

As a former schoolchild, please no, PLEASE NO. Waking up early is already hard, having to wake up an hour earlier than I would otherwise have to for the entire year would be hell. Just use normal non-DST time. Please.

Asooka 9y ago
Can the people downvoting please explain?

mnw21cam 9y ago

That'd be "Daylight saving time", not "Daylight savings time". Not sure why so many people get this wrong.

luckroy 9y ago
I'm with you, but we're fighting the losing fight. As an aside, what a brilliant marketing name. Daylight is in peril and we all adjust our clocks to save it from the treacherous grasp of morning. We're heroes!