Can we just end DST please?

[Recursion]

It costs hundreds of millions of dollars in IT administration to adjust computer's timezone definitions. It leads to all kinds of problems.

Just start work and school at 7, rather than 8, and then have a "grace period" in the winter in which work and school start at 8.

The absolute same effect, with much lower overhead.

[CBGLuthier]

1. I just spent my first year without DST and loved it.

Mauritius does not observe it any more.

[Recursion]

2. Yup. India doesn't either. (How was puja, btw?)

I mean, it makes little sense in the tropics to begin with.

Looking forward to Diwali?

[JustABozoOnThisBus]

11. I don't think India has time zones, either

and that makes no sense in a country that big. Plus, being some hours AND THIRTY MINUTES away from GMT is just strange.

[Recursion]

12. Right? And Nepal and Sri Lanka added an additional 15 minutes

I think simply to say "We are not India"

The time zone was set to make the sun directly south at noon in Delhi during an equinox. So in Mumbai the sun sets rather late, and in Kolkata it rises rather early.

[jeff47]

54. They do...they have one.

India would basically be split in half if it used the "standard" time zones. So instead India set up one time zone for the whole country, 30 minutes off from the neighboring time zones.

Their zone covers about the same area as a "standard" time zone.

[CBGLuthier]

21. Yeah my wife has spent the last week making barfi and ladoo recipes to choose ones to make next week

Today is arrival of indentured servants day here so two weeks in a row with a day off work is always nice.

[wordpix]

65. What is barfi? Doesn't sound good to eat...

[CBGLuthier]

67. Milk fudge. It is very good to eat. I think the one she made had coconut in it.

[Blue_Tires]

53. Mauritius??

Can I come crash at your place for a few weeks??

[Renew Deal]

3. You can move to Arizona

And avoid it all

[KamaAina]

41. Or better still, Hawai'i.

[The2ndWheel]

4. Since time doesn't exist anywhere but in our heads

I say throw the baby out with the bathwater.

[Xipe Totec]

5. I work in UTC. nt

[MannyGoldstein]

8. I prefer Zulu time

More entertaining.

[Fumesucker]

15. More cultural appropriation

Didn't you catch enough flak for the gefiltefish wisecrack?

[MannyGoldstein]

64. I'm a very, very bad man. nt

[Recursion]

16. China and India have this right: put the whole country on one time zone

Yes, that means people in the west probably start work later.

Hell, put the whole world on Greenwich time.

[Chan790]

45. "Hell, put the whole world on Greenwich time."

I'm on board. GMT or Zulu or UTC...doesn't matter to me. Let's go to a single global time-standard. People will adapt and in 10 years, we'll all wonder why we didn't do it sooner.

[jobendorfer]

55. China and India are a lot closer to the equator than we are

The variation in the length of day v. night increases as you move away from the equator.
Countries near the equator ( or even close to the tropics ) don't see a lot of variation in daylight hours,
so it doesn't make sense for them to engage in DST.

On the other hand, in my town (Portland, OR, ~45 deg latitude) -- on the summer solstice, the day is about 15
hours long; on the winter solstice, it's about 8.5 hours long. So in the northern U.S., there is some real
variation to contend with. That said, I'm not convinced that DST is the best way to solve it.

J.

[kaiden]

6. I miss that hour until I get it back in the Fall.

[LiberalElite]

34. So do I. nt

[Fumesucker]

7. That's down in the range of what American spend on chewing gum

Orbit and Trident together total well over a billion dollars a year, add in the next three brands and you are over two billion.

http://www.statista.com/statistics/295031/leading-us-chewing-gum-brands-based-on-sales/

[jberryhill]

9. Did you bring enough for everybody?

[restorefreedom]

19. love trident! nt

[Donald Ian Rankin]

10. Changing the times at which things happen would cause far more problems than moving the clocks. N.T.

[Recursion]

13. What? No. It's much simpler

Just make 7 am the default start time for everything. Give a grace period in the winter. Or don't. There's no complexity involved here.

[Fumesucker]

14. Not everyone is going to get a "grace period"

I can foresee all kinds of scheduling problems, particularly for parents with kids in school. It's difficult enough on a steady schedule, if your kids all of a sudden start going to school an hour later it's going to be a major headache if you don't also get that extra hour.

[LiberalElite]

35. What grace period? Employers don't do grace periods. nt

[Myrina]

44. 7AM ? Oh hell no.

I'd be fired. I've never started a job, or classes, before 8AM. Most of my professional life my chosen hours have been 8:30 - 5:30.

It takes an Herculean effort for me to be anywhere at 7AM.

[Jokerman]

17. This IT administrator does nothing for DST.

On most networks it is all done automatically.

The clock on my oven and the one in my truck are the only things I've adjusted manually in many, many years.

[bhikkhu]

39. Evidently you're missing out on hundreds of millions of billable dollars! n/t

[Jokerman]

50. Either that or the OP is unsubstantiated bullshit.

Of course that NEVER happens on DU.

[meow2u3]

18. Keep DST

I don't want to be woken up by the sun at 4:30 every morning, thank you. I live in the Northeast, where the spring and summer sun rises earlier than most people want to wake up if it weren't for DST.
Besides, the extra hour of light on a summer evening is good not only for tourism, but also for people to be able to exercise, play sports, and have fun while it's still light outside. It's worth the inconvenience of adjusting the clocks twice a year.

[Freddie]

38. Agreed!

I love the long summer evenings, and who needs bright sunlight @ 5 am? I love DST and I hate to see it end.
However, I'm old enough to remember the Energy Crisis of the mid-70's, when Pres. Nixon decided to save energy by having DST all year. The result was angry parents as kids were waiting for the school bus in the pitch black in the winter. Couldn't some scientist have predicted that?

[RobinA]

40. Couldn't Agree More

I'd ditch standard time before DST. I want that light at night.

[berni_mccoy]

43. Agreed... and IMO it should be the other way around...

stop falling back, just stay on DST.

[smirkymonkey]

57. I agree. I would rather have lighter evenings and darker mornings.

Not everyone is up very early, but almost everyone is up during the early evening hours.

[restorefreedom]

20. yes, please. and our hearts will thank us

fall is ok, but in spring when we lose that hour, heart attacks go up

http://www.livescience.com/50068-daylight-saving-time-heart-attacks.html

[panader0]

22. No DST here in Arizona

Never missed it, never will.

[Zing Zing Zingbah]

25. Yeah, but you get an hour more of daylight than the Northern states do

I think that makes a big difference

[Atman]

46. Bingo Zingo!

Boom bah! I grew up in Florida, now in New England. Florida is so much farther west in the time zone. The sun is up until damned near ten o'clock at night in the summer. Here in New England the birds are chirping and causing a racket at 4:30 am...and I wouldn't have it any other way. We just changed the clocks, and soon it will be pitch black at 4:30 in the afternoon, while the sun will still be up in Florida. Screw that. Eliminate all of that nonsense. Your computer knows how to do it...just GMT +(whatever). Why is it so complicated? Wake up, get up, go to work. The battery operated devices on you wrist have nothing to do with what time it is. They're just there to give you a reference point as to when you're late for work/school. Or the bars closing.

[Zing Zing Zingbah]

23. I prefer EDT to EST up here in New England

Sucks when we go back to EST because it gets dark too early. I know EST is supposed to be the "real" time, but I wish we could just stay on EDT all the time.

Does stink a little have to adjust for daylight savings time begin and end two times a year, but then we're pretty good at it for the most part. I have check that some of the time recording devices properly switched over where I work. Mostly automatic switch over unless there is something wrong with the device.

[roamer65]

70. Yeah. I agree.

I would prefer staying on it permanently as well, even being on the western side of the eastern time zone. NE is more like Atlantic time anyway, i.e. PEI and Nova Scotia.

[Zing Zing Zingbah]

72. Yeah, I think Maine would be better off in the Atlantic time zone

[City Lights]

24. Yes, please!

I despise changing time twice a year. Pick one and stick with it. I don't care if it's CST or CDT.

[Blues Heron]

26. Let's go back to local time

Let noon be noon, they way it should be! With these new-fangled computers I'm sure it wouldn't be a problem like it was for the railroads back in the day!

[hunter]

27. Yes.

It's an annoying test of social conformity.

I don't like the Gregorian calendar either.

It's used as tool of religious oppression against more naturalistic "pagan" religions, some with more sophisticated approaches to time-keeping.

Many cultures noticed how 13 months of 28 days equals 364 days, and then added the appropriate days to keep their calendar in synch with the actual solar year. Some cultures even kept a longer multi-year calendar incorporating phases of the moon in a logical way.

Various religious authorities saw these sorts of calendars as witchcraft and stamped them out.

[Recursion]

63. The Gregorian calendar has two contradictory goals

It's based on the timings of a lunar calendar event (Easter) and a solar calendar event (Christmas), and there's no real way to keep those two in sync. The medieval astronomers were freaking out because they realized eventually Easter would coincide with Christmas, and that couldn't happen -- except that by the definition of both, it will happen at some point, unless you arbitrarily re-define one of those events every few centuries. They chose Easter. There's probably a theological conclusion to be drawn there.

[muriel_volestrangler]

73. Oh, that's rubbish. The Gregorian calendar completely ignores the moon

It's about getting the long term number of days in the calendar as close as possible to a tropical year, ie the time from vernal equinox to vernal equinox (or another event linked with the seasons). They found the 365.25 days (ie 1 leap day every 4 years) of the Julian calendar wasn't accurate enough, and made it 365.2425 instead (ie not having leap days in years divisible by 100 but not 400). If they hadn't introduced the Gregorian calendar, then the dates of all seasonal events would be gradually drifting. You'd end up with a northern hemisphere winter in September, and so on.

As it is, the 365.2425 is not perfect, but it will take about 3000 years to move 1 day, which is good enough. The Gregorian calendar is a good fit for keeping the seasons at the same time of the calendar. If it hadn't been adopted in the Medieval era, we'd have done it later.

[Fritz Walter]

28. "Time is an illusion. Lunchtime, doubly so" Douglas Adams

And I would add "DST exponentially so."

However there are two small benefits to changing clocks:
1. These are the only two days out of the year that all my clocks, timers, appliances, electronics and my wristwatch are anywhere close to being in sync; and
2. Thousands, if not millions, of people would never change their smoke alarm batteries without this semi-annual reminder.

[ryan_cats]

29. It

It just ended. Unfortunately, it will start again.

[Buns_of_Fire]

30. My PC resets itself, my cell phone gets its time from the network,

the VCR has been flashing "12:00" for the last six years, and I'm retired, so I don't really care WHAT time it is. Just let me know what y'all decide. I'm good either way.

[TheKentuckian]

33. Wow, haven't had a VCR in over a decade but the last had on screen programming

So, it was easy to set but a little tougher to remember to move up or dow..

[Buns_of_Fire]

47. It was my mothers, and I'm too lazy to crawl behind her monster console TV

to figure out what cables are going where (there's also a cable box and a DVD player, all daisy-chained together somehow), unhook everything, reroute everything, rehook everything, and then do it all over again when it all stops working. So I figured the safest approach would be to just leave the whole mess well enough alone while it still more-or-less works.

[TheKentuckian]

31. Let's only have daylight

[B2G]

32. I'm not starting my work day at 7. nt

[Recursion]

60. You do, it's just called "8" during DST

(Well, I have no idea what your schedule is, but your work starts an hour earlier than your clock says it does for 8 months out of the year.)

[snooper2]

36. hundreds of millions? LOL

come on you just made that up...

[Recursion]

59. No, that's from Usenix (the sysadmin trade association)

That's the estimate of how much all the programming time that goes into each alteration of the DST schedule costs. (And they seem to make it longer every couple of years.)

[LiberalElite]

37. I hate losing that hour.

There are 24 hours in the day. The length of sunshine in that 24 hours gradually becomes shorter and then gradually becomes longer. Some locations on the globe experience a more dramatic difference than others. Playing with the clock twice a year does nothing to change this fact.

[MindPilot]

48. I know, right? Nobody is saving anything.

It is the same kind of pretzel logic that says a flow restrictor on my kitchen faucet will save water. It takes the same 12 cups to fill the pot regardless if that takes 5 seconds or 30.

If your life is governed by daylight, it doesn't matter what the clock says. If you are a construction worker, you probably already ignore the clock and show up on the jobsite at daybreak. If you work in an office, you arrive at a particular time; dark or light out makes no difference.

[LiberalElite]

56. It was started a long time ago to save energy -

what energy are we saving with all the electronic gadgets we have now? All those "devices" needing recharging? The coffee machines, etc.? Plus, many people work more than 35 hours a week in non-farming occupations. What does turning the clock one way or another have to do with any of that? I sympathize with people who have SAD but at a certain time of year the days get shorter regardless. I would assume that to nature it's a big WHATEVER.

[Myrina]

42. I like it, actually.

My body clock makes it nearly impossible for me to wake up & be coherent while it's pitch black outside.

As we close in on the end of October and the sun doesn't rise until after 8AM, neither do I. Been late for work more times than I care to count over the years. But as soon as the clocks go back an hour & sunrise is between 7-8AM (for those brief few weeks), I'm up & on time.

I think I'm part Grizzly Bear.

[pnwmom]

49. No, please go back to year-round DST. I liked that the best. n/t

[Recursion]

62. Why not just keep standard time year round and start stuff an hour earlier?

The effect is exactly the same.

It's crazy that we had the option of either changing the nominal time our day starts or redefining "noon", and chose the second.

[pnwmom]

66. Because we will never "start stuff an hour earlier." We will just have shorter evenings

and I hate the winter days that end here around 4:30 pm.

[d_r]

51. I think next spring

we should set them forward 1/2 hour, then never touch them again.

[MBS]

52. please, yes!!!

[phylny]

58. I would like to have it one way or the other.

My reason? My dogs were barking at me incessantly today at 5 o'clock. and I couldn't for the life of me figure out what their deal was. Of course, their tummies told them it was 6 o'clock, time for dinner!

[MattBaggins]

61. NO. Now stop asking

[Scuba]

68. You think DST is about school starting times? Bwahahaaaaaaaaa.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7779869

The upcoming shift in the daylight-saving time change is designed to help retailers — and is a substitute for a genuine energy policy, says author Michael Downing.

...

when we have an hour of sunlight after work, Americans tend to go shopping. The first and most persistent lobby for Daylight Saving in this country was the Chamber of Commerce, because they understood that if their department stores were lit up, people would be tempted by them.

[Recursion]

69. No, I don't

But we could get the exact same benefit to retailers without screwing with our clocks twice a year, if we just got up earlier in the summer. Which is what we're doing anyways. We just don't need to call 7am 8am to do it.

[mountain grammy]

71. a substitute for genuine energy policy..

now that's an all American solution.

[JustABozoOnThisBus]

74. No, I'd like to have Double Daylight Saving Time

Bump the clocks an hour in March, then another hour in April. That way it'll stay light even later during summer.



I'm guessing DDST might come sometime after Universal Legalized Drugs and Single Payer Health Care.