Why Are We Still Observing Daylight Saving Time? - Slashdot

Why Are We Still Observing Daylight Saving Time?

›

• It's always amazed me that some people actually think the number of daylight hours in a day changes by changing a clock.

  For many people the number of USEFUL hours does change.

  - "According to a March 2022 CBS News poll, 46% of Americans prefer permanent daylight saving time, while 33% prefer permanent standard time. The remaining 21% simply favor the status quo."

  If only there were another possibility: Change it by half an hour, once, and be done with it.

  FWIW: I'm in favor of the status quo. It means two more days per year are interesting ones.

  (and where would we be without the twice-yearly moan-fests by people who are too self-centered to understand why it's done?)

  • by DThorne ( 21879 ) on Sunday March 12, 2023 @09:00AM (#63363445)

    I hope you're being jokey here. It's not "interesting", it has tangible negative health and safety effects, it was based on zero factual information and it's stupid. Some article you read somewhere has convinced you screwing with our internal clocks bi-annually is enough of a boon to "many people" to warrant such an idiotic policy. Might want to check your newsfeed options.

    • Re:

      Sure it is. Just watch how much fun people have coming into work late and saying, "Oh, silly me! What am I like?".

      It never gets old no matter how long you live.

      (Every single day should be just like all the others, right?)

    • Re: Craziness

      People naturally wake up earlier in the summer and later in the winter. Daylight Saving Time is a simple way to align our work schedules to that, rather than having individual companies decide to switch to an 8-4 schedule in summer or not.

      It causes minimal difficulty other than the bizarre whining around here. I woke up this morning and my phone had moved forward an hour -- job done! Yes, there will be a little jet lag tonight, so maybe I'll take a some melatonin. But it won't be any worse than I typically

    • • Re:

        The best suggestion I heard was in a cartoon, which pointed out that if the "move clocks forward" event would just be scheduled on a Friday afternoon, everybody who works 9-5 will cheer.

        Presumably this post was intended as irony, although on the internet it's always hard to tell.

      • Re:

        One day? My body needs a few weeks to adapt to th new time

      • Re:

        Oh, yeah, because there is no such thing as people who work overnight, or on the weekends. So just because you can sleep all day on Sunday doesn't make it any better of a time/day to do it. Just get rid of it altogether. It has no benefits.

      • Re:

        There's a point where people need to stop trying to justify the way they disrupt lives, and stop disrupting lives, but that's a concept that's lost on people who require control over others.

  • Re:

    That wouldn't really address the issue. It would make the early morning sun in the summer slightly less annoying, but not enough, and it would make winter mornings slightly less dark, but not enough.

    • Re:

      It addresses it better than the other two options.

  • Re:

    Love the moan fest thing.

    What I am surprised the slashdot crew does not seem to know about is Coordinated Universal Time, or UTC. Yeah, kinda backwards on the initialization, eh?

    One single time over the entire world, and very accurate. No time zones, no daylight savings time, one time experience to rule them all.

    But if a person lives nearer to the equator, Daylight Savings time is so damn stupid a person would have to be an idiot to even make an excuse for it.

    And living at the highest latitudes,

    • A discrete approximation [Re:Craziness]

      Yep. DST is a discrete approximation to trying to keep sunrise time closer to constant for mid latitudes.

      Optimum solution would be to redefine the day so sunrise occurs at a constant time, but that of course would mean a variable length of the day.

      (and would screw up at high latitudes, although hardly anybody lives above the Arctic circle.)

      • Re:

        Optimum solution is to have noon at a constant time. That's actually how it works before anyone screws with it.

        • Re:

          Depends. If you want to start the day when the sun rises, and put the extra daylight in the evening (which is what daylight saving time attempts to do, in a discontinuous way), sunrise is the obvious choice.

          I can't think of any reason at all that noon should be the constant point. It splits the extra daylight between morning and evening, but unless you want sunlight before you wake up, that's useless.

          "How it works" is how we choose to define it. Maybe you're referencing some historical "that's the way it wa

        • Re:

          Optimum for what?

          Local solar time was indeed the standard for people in the early 19th century who spent their time in their immediate locality interacting with people face to face. At the time it was completely satisfactory in every way, but as soon as people began to routinely travel over long distances -- with railroads -- it became completely unmanageable. Imagine today if towns still had their own local time. If you made a phone call from Syracuse NY to Albany at 4:55 pm, the recipient would have left

    • Re:

      It's actually a beautiful piece of compromise: that derangement of initials was selected as the one that doesn't match the word order in English or French, so everyone is equally confused.

      The trees were all made equal, by hatchet, axe, and saw.

  • Re:

    "According to a March 2022 CBS News poll, 46% of Americans prefer permanent daylight saving time"

    Duh, you can't have this. Try it, and come winter, everyone will go, "Oh no, the kiddies are going to school in the dark, we can't have that, lets change the school hours to be later in the day. Then, the businesses have trouble getting the parents in to work 'cuz the're wrangling the kids to either take them to school or get them on the bus, so the businesses all say, "Oh, no, we can't have all these people

    • Re:

      Yet meanwhile here in the Great Lakes region even without DST in effect our kids to go school... in the dark. And no one runs over them while they are waiting for the bus outdoors on the streets. You must mean everyone from the middle latitudes region of the continental US.

  • Re:

    You guys aren't getting the point... the status quo is fantastic for those of us who need daylight EITHER in the morning or evening, so before or after work.

    On Friday, sunrise was around 6:15am here. That was plenty of time for me to get a good run in before work.

    On Monday, I won't have enough time in the morning, but sunset will be at 7:05pm, so I smoothly transition to evening outdoor workouts instead, and get a bike ride in when I get home at 6. If you left DST in place year around, I wouldn't have enoug

  • Re:

    My plan: Fall back an hour in the fall, and fall back 23 hours in the spring.

  • • Latitude matters [Re:Craziness]

      Depends on latitude. If "your entire country" is at low latitudes, Daylight Savings Time is not useful.

• If people want to start work earlier, start work earlier, but don't screw with the clocks. if 9-5 becomes 8-4 so be it.

  Retail stores, restaurants, and theme parks already operate on variable schedules. It's really only businesses operating on banking hours and schools that treat their fixed hours of operation with religious reverence.

  • Re:

    So the places where productivity drops twice a year is academia and finances.

    Great, who needs that?

    • Re:

      We need to go to UTC, where there is only one time over the entire world. I mean, how stupid and unnecessary are time zones anyhow? 8^)

      • Re:

        Agreed. Personally, I live on UTC. Ok, it means I go to work at "odd" times, but how is this relevant? Where's the difference between working 9 to 5 and working 6pm to 2am when it's the same time, just labeled differently.

        People are way too hung up on labels.

      • Local solar time

        Indeed! Now that GPS equipped timepieces are ubiquitous, we can all finally get back to using local solar time.:)

  • Easier

    If every place of business is going to move their hours of business to better fit into the available daylight then why not leave things as they are and not change the clocks? There will be no net difference.

  • Re:

    Y'know, and have them on things like shop windows, signs and advertisements and other stuff that's hard to change our not worth it 2x yearly.

    But please, don't let me interrupt your rant. Continue.

  • Re:

    Banking is done online these days.

    I bet most kids would love a day every year where they can come to school half an hour later.

• Re: Craziness

  This. The clocks should match the actual time as closely as is reasonable (not down to the nearest minute based on longitude obv) otherwise wtf is the point of having something that tells the time? Also if people want more useful time in the mornings during the summer then gtfu earlier! Dont put the clocks to be put forward to fool thickos into thinking its an hour later.

  • Re:

    Define "actual time" -- scientifically. I'll wait...

    Hint: Just like "all words are made up", all time(keeping) systems are made up -- and arbitrary.

    • Re: Craziness

      Midnight midday
        The clues in the names.

      • Re:

        So by advocating staying strictly to midnight beuig midnight and midday being midday, what are you suggesting?

        Variable length seconds to track this and a different time of day depending where you are on the planet (say a time zone for every square meter to make it simpler eh?) in relation to the sun?

        I mean if you like but I can't see it being popular.

    • • Re: Craziness

        Oh so something that is variable depending on the mass of nearby objects? That sounds horrible.

• Re:

  No one really wants to start work earlier. Many, though, or so it seems, would like to end work earlier, even if that means having to start earlier, too.

  And many people have no say about the timing at their workplace.

  I can relate to that, but I also see that those who already find they start work too early need to be considered, too. For them, having to start even earlier in winter will not only be an inconvenience; in the long run, it will be detrimental to the health of many.

  Personally, I'm in the dilemma

• Re:

  That doesn't work if you have to drop off your kids at school, interact with suppliers and customers, and coordinate with external organizations such as banks.

  The advantage of DST is that everyone switches on the same day, and no businesses need to change their posted hours.

  A big problem with ending DST is that there is no consensus on how to do so. Some people want to keep DST as it is. Some want to end it and go back to standard time. Others want to go to permanent DST year-round. None of these groups is

• It's always amazed me that some people actually think the number of daylight hours in a day changes by changing a clock.

  If people want to start work earlier, start work earlier, but don't screw with the clocks. if 9-5 becomes 8-4 so be it.

  You have not thought this through. Specifically, you're violating the Chesterton's Fence principle [lesswrong.com].

  Consider what would happen if every business, school, etc. decided for themselves if, when, and how to shift their hours. You wouldn't know without looking every time what time stores opened and closed, and businesses would have the same problem talking to suppliers and non-retail customers (granted that all of this would be less problematic in the Internet age; previously it would have been impossible). Business hours would fall in and out of sync with school hours, causing headaches for parents. It would be a mess. So much of a mess that no one would actually do it, we'd just stick with standard time and be annoyed at the sun waking us up annoyingly early in the summer, and at going to school and work in pitch black in the winter.

  Of course, we could tame the mess. We could pass legislation specifying that all businesses and schools must shift their hours by the same amount, at the same moment, all in lockstep. Which, of course, is exactly what we do, only we do it the smart way, the one that doesn't require millions of businesses to change their signs twice per year.

  • Re: Craziness

    ProTip: stores already have their own opening and closing times

  • Re:

    Consider this: You have all that information available to you at your fingertips in real-time. You have the internet in your hand. You have a phone in your pocket. You can find out everything you need to know about any location you intend to visit.

    We don't do it the smart way. Because there is, was, and will continue to be no smart reason to change the clocks in the first place. Every single thing you said to consider is not only stupid, but patently wrong.

• Re:

  I don't think I've ever met a single person who thinks that.

  (The main problem with eliminating the time change is that a majority of people agree it should be done, but the people advocating not changing the clocks by using DST all year can't agree with the people advocating not changing the clocks by keeping standard time all year.)

  That makes sense to me; change work hours twice a year, and leave the clocks along.

• • • • • > Am I right?

          (checks publicly-funded peer-reviewed research on the topic of going back to DST in the spring...) nope, you're not.