10 ms·
End Daylight Savings
- codex 14y agoIn an era of smart timekeeping, I would much prefer the opposite: minute DST adjustments every single day to ensure that sunrise is always at the same time of day, everywhere. This is how we evolved, after all: to awake with the sun. This would imply two dimensional time zones (one per state?) with a non-trivial conversion function between zones. Once everyone's watch is GPS and Internet enabled this should be straightforward.
- drudru11 14y agoHave you ever looked at date calculation code?
- jzwinck 14y agoPeople even now often prefer watches with no electronics at all. Hours in Japan a couple hundred years ago were variable in length. How did they manage to keep their clocks running properly then? Slaves.
- riffraff 14y agoThe monks on mount athos do this[0], but they adjust weekly, and the time is set at sunset rather than sunrise. "Byzantine clock" makes a lot more sense now that I know this exists. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Athos#Date_and_time_reckoning http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Athos#Date_and_time_recko...
- henrikschroder 14y agoWhere I am, in the summer, the sun sets, sort of, a bit after midnight, and sunrise is about two hours later. And in the winter, the sun rises at nine in the morning, and sets before three in the afternoon. Your suggestion is hilariously myopic. Go live in Alaska for a year, and then come back and tell me if you've re-evaluated it.
- codex 14y agoEDIT: By my calculations, even in Anchorage the average slew rate would be only two minutes a day, which seems practical enough to me. With two dimensional time zones, each region could choose the strategy that works for them. If the slew rate is too great at peak, it could be smoothed. Note that I am not suggesting that the hours in a day change (much), or length of an hour, or an attempt to keep both sunrise and sunset constant; sunrise would always be at seven, and sunset times would change. This way you maximize sunlight time while still going to bed at the same time each night. They would seem valuable for Alaaka. To be honest, though, tus sounds a lot like an argument that humans are not naturally adapted to live in the arctic. Perhaps there no time system makes sense.
- jvm 14y ago> This is how we evolved, after all: to wake with the sun. Is there any actual evidence of this? what about all the non- morning-people who seem to like to wake at noon?
- handzhiev 14y agoWhy the heck do people want same time sunset every day? What's so great about it, I really don't get it. It's like dreaming to have 22 C and sunny all the time. Sounds cool until you really try it. The nature is not equal every day. I see no point in trying to make it so.
- drudru11 14y agoThanks for starting this petition. I signed, tweeted, and facebooked it.
- overgun77 14y agoI live in a region where there is no DST. It's troublesome because DST applies at different dates around the world, since I work with people from different countries, this can get troublesome around the dates when the new times start on the different regions, and when I was a kid I remember on winter when going to school, I actually arrived at night at 7:00 AM and the sun went out until ~8:30, and the sun would set at 5 PM, but on summer, the sun rises earlier than 5 AM and goes down at ~8PM. I like any kind of idea that helps the world to, at least, alleviate some of our resources sucking activities. I don't really believe these random claims people throw like "Recent studies show that DST doesn't save enough energy" or something like that, at least provide some facts and studies that prove that, I don't know much history around the DST, however I'm pretty sure the countries around the world applied it for some good reason.
- calvin 14y agoI like the points made here and the general thrust of the petition; however, the big question I have: where is the data to back up these claims? The argument would be a lot more convincing if sources or studies were cited for claims such as increased air conditioning costs, etc.
- repsilat 14y agoOne real problem with daylight savings is that it goes the wrong way. The idea was that in the winter there would be fewer hours with the sun up, and it made sense to put those hours in a more useful part of the day. When daylight savings was introduced, that "more useful part of the day" was earlier in the day. That doesn't hold today, though - as TFA says, most people work indoors under artificial lighting, and shifting daylight hours earlier into the day just means they're wasted while we're behind desks. What we really need is more daylight in the evening, so we can make productive use of our leisure time playing catch with our kids, practicing with the football club, drinking beer on the porch etc. Still, killing daylight savings would probably be better than "reverse daylight savings", and more politically feasible. Certainly more feasible than crazy ideas like moving to UTC (and probably better for the average person anyway). My pet peeve, though, is leap-seconds. Life would be a lot easier if you could rely on days always having 86400 seconds.
- haberman 14y ago> The idea was that in the winter there would be fewer hours with the sun up, and it made sense to put those hours in a more useful part of the day. Daylight Savings time happens during the summer, not the winter. Winter time is unadjusted and tracks a true solar day. Summer time is adjusted, and indeed it's adjusted in the direction you favor (to provide more daylight hours at night).
- Firehed 14y agoTracks a true solar day? Is there actually a scientific definition of when a day starts and ends? As far as I can tell skimming Wikipedia, it's simply 86400 seconds. Certainly by my body clock, a "true solar day" is when I'm on DST.
- mooism2 14y agoMidday GMT is defined to be when the mean sun is directly over the prime meridian. ("Mean sun" as opposed to "apparent sun" because of the Earth being a naturally occurring celestial object, rather than an idealised mathematical model. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equation_of_time http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equation_of_time .)
- thematt 14y agoSlightly off topic -- but these petitions have been cropping up more and more lately, but have they actually done anything? Are there any we can point to that actually caused some change in government behavior? All I see in every response is just politician-speak from random government officials. Typically they acknowledge the submission and then wave it off with no specific action to fix it.
- sliverstorm 14y agoThey've achieved absolutely nothing that I've heard of. But, slacktivisim has such a low barrier to entry, I expect this is going to go on for a good long while. If not forever.
- nhebb 14y agoSlacktivism is like leveling up in a video game. It gives you the sense of accomplishment, even though you haven't done jack shit in real life.
- ScottWhigham 14y agoDamn that's a great analogy. Love it. Stealing it.
- InclinedPlane 14y agoThese petitions are utterly useless. In fact, they are worse than useless, because they channel energy that would otherwise be useful into such a feckless means. If you care about something, write your reps in congress, your senators, and the president. Clicking a button on on a whitehouse.gov petition is as useless as liking a political post on facebook.
- baddox 14y agoI would say that writing your politicians is also nearly or equally as useless.
- 14y ago
- codex 14y agoGiven that Congress recently extended DST in the name of saving energy, I doubt there is much appetite for abolishing it. While the benefits are disputed, the benefits of no DST are also disputed, simply because almost no industrialized region has abandoned DST, so there is no data. Clearly DST is a stressor, but there may health benefits to stress induced hormesis. Personally, I prefer DST simply because it gives a longer block of sunlight in the evening, when I can be active, at the expense of daylight in the morning, when I am asleep anyway. I'm not sure my sleep would improve with the extra light in a non-DST world.
- wesgarrison 14y agoMy method of killing DST would be to accept it year round. I would much rather have the extra time at the end of the day, after work. I'm not sure if we can just unilaterally say "All our timezones are +1 now, forever" though.
- Firehed 14y agoNo more or less than we can say "We're staying on standard time year-round". We've adjusted when DST starts relatively recently (twice, I think), and it seems several countries have semi-permanently shifted to DST: http://www.timeanddate.com/news/time/ http://www.timeanddate.com/news/time/ Computers pick up on published timezone databases automatically (there was a big mess a couple years back when someone tried to copyright it or something, and they ended up backing down), so any software that can handle any form of DST should have no problem with a permanent shift - and probably by any amount.
- seanmcdirmid 14y agoYa, not counting any legacy systems, or poorly tested feature...
- seanalltogether 14y agoIt's a red herring. People will naturally adjust their sleeping, working and leisure time by 1 hour so the extra hour of sun will have disappeared completely. In fact it may have already happened, consider what time your grandparents used to start work with what time you start work.
- drewjoh 14y agoThis video explains DST really well: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84aWtseb2-4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84aWtseb2-4
- diminish 14y agodaylight savings creates useless complexity, confuses the electronic devices, travel plans, flights and many other human and post-human activities. artificial lighting, flexible working hours, remote working are all helping better day for everyone. beyond that, following bold suggestion exist; 1) the 'second' time unit must be quicker to match average human heart rate. 2) time zones maybe abolished totally and 1 single time zone maybe used.
- ArchD 14y agoUsing a time unit not related to the metric second would be a step back. If you use a new unit equal to half a metric second, that's too fast for normal human heart rate.
- diminish 14y agoyes, not half but a bit slower. i read this from a book long time ago, but don't remember where. the guy was saying that the 'second' was a bit slower than the average heart beat rate and that made people generally unhappier because it is reflected in many things during a day.
- npsimons 14y agoNot to mention it's highly variable; I've easily gotten my heart rate up to 192 BPM; when I was in better condition, my resting was mid-forties.
- zanny 14y agoWhile we are at it, can we get rid of time zones and switch the world to UTC? I get that it is a jarring idea to not be getting up at 8am anywhere in the world, but for international travel, computing, shipping, etc not having to constantly adjust dates and times across arbitrary lines of longitude would be such a boon. I don't get why people inherently need 6am to be the early morning, 12pm being "high noon", and 6pm being "early evening". I'm sure different regions would adjust quickly to just having different hours correlate to different states of the sun wherever they live. Time should be measured the same around the globe, not with arbitrary divisions. You know, we could also get rid of the AM/PM arbitrariness too and switch to a 24 hour clock. Wouldn't it be nice if time made sense.
- InclinedPlane 14y agoThis is a hugely bad idea. You'd still need a system to keep track of local relative time of day. For example, let's say you need to schedule a phone call with someone in another part of the world, how do you determine what time you should call? There are many, many other similar problems. How do you encode all of that information? It turns out, you'll need something almost as complex as the time zones we have today. There's no escaping the irreducible complexity of the problem, there are just ways of shifting it around.
- anonymous 14y agoYou should also note that Russia abolished DST a couple of years ago https://rt.com/news/daylight-saving-time-abolished/ https://rt.com/news/daylight-saving-time-abolished/ , with the president citing pretty much the same reasons as the petition in question.
- jzwinck 14y agoI was thinking of starting the very same petition just a few days ago. It is logical, and would save costs that laypeople fail to recognize or appreciate. DST is a fertile source of bugs in the operation of important computer systems. Financial markets are an example I'm all too familiar with, where systems in New York run at a 5-hour offset to London about 49 weeks per year. Making that work (relatively) smoothly takes a lot more than the proverbial "couple lines of code." If commissions went up by 50% during those three weeks to reflect the costs, people would care more.
- tsotha 14y agoDST is also a killer. Traffic accidents go up for a few days every year when you lose an hour as groggy people are out driving to work.
- mooism2 14y agoI am under the impression that traffic accidents increase briefly when the clocks go forward, and decrease briefly when they go back: there's no net difference overall.
- jzwinck 14y agoI think it may be counter-productive to mention this, because it is difficult to prove. It is trivial to show that there are dead-weight costs incurred when computer systems need to deal with DST across political boundaries. Those costs alone should be sufficient to convince anyone to abandon DST (or just as well, adopt it full-time, as Russia recently did). The fact that "normal" people do not know these costs exist is, I think, the main reason they are sympathetic to emotional arguments such as "DST will save children's lives on Halloween" or equally your "DST kills drivers once or twice a year."
- tsotha 14y ago>I think it may be counter-productive to mention this, because it is difficult to prove. Why would you think this is difficult to prove?
- dear 14y agoLets abolish time altogether. Time is only a human concept. It doesn't exist in nature. There is only now. There isn't a now minus n, or now plus n. Because when you get to now plus/minus n, it is called now.
- icebraining 14y agoYou can get to now minus n? Can I use your time machine?
- michaelochurch 14y agoI like DST, but let's not kid ourselves that it's about energy savings. It's not, because energy savings are minimal to nonexistent. It's about culture. People in northern latitudes like their 9:00pm daylight in the summer, but no one wants 8:00am darkness in the winter, so we switch back to "standard" time (which is now the anomaly, covering only 4.5 months) in the colder months. This also explains the lopsided calendar of DST. It corresponds with the warmth and outdoor activity, not daylight. That's why we start it near the spring equinox and continue it into early November (a month and a half from the solstice). That would make no sense if it were about daylight: it's not symmetrical. It's also about weather. Daylight wise, October and February are roughly equivalent. However, October is warm and has pretty leaves, and February is cold and snowy. When it's warm, we adjust the clock to have an additional hour of light in the evening. When it's cold, we adjust it back to have daylight in the morning (most of us will be leaving work in the darkness regardless of DST, so let's at least treat ourselves to a couple hours of light in the morning). So long as my life is semi-constrained by others' marking of time, I'll be in favor of DST. I realize that it's a ridiculous hack that exists because the sensible time to wake up (for me, 30-60 minutes before sunrise) shifts around in terms of clock time, but it's a ridiculous hack that works.
- handzhiev 14y agoI wish I could upvote this twice because it's the best explanation WHY we want DST. Late daylight summertime is very useful for all kind of outdoor activities. The late daylight is mostly applicable for those of us at northern latitude, and exactly we are these who can enjoy most outdoor activities only in the hot part of the year. So I guess DST makes much lesser sense to those living near the Equator.
- michaelochurch 14y agoMost tropical countries don't have DST, because there'd be no point in it when there are no seasons, but some use a different time zone, which can have the effect of "year-round DST".
- expralitemonk 14y agoHow many people are killed or injured due to accidents caused by having to wake up an hour earlier? What does this cost our economy?
- vaadu 14y agoIt's saving not savings.
- mvkel 14y agoIf you think I'm going to be okay with driving home in the dark 365 days a year, you've got another thing coming, buddy!
- daigoba66 14y agoI would also be happy if people in the US would adopt 24hr time in everyday life. It's a lot less ambiguous than 12hr. And less stupid. For example, in the US, 12:30am happens before 11:30am on the same day.
- luisp128 14y agoInteresting topic. I'd be interested to learning what are the main arguments for the two sides... I just started this discussion on the topic: http://www.the-counterpoint.com/discussion/2G http://www.the-counterpoint.com/discussion/2G