The only people I know of who have a problem with the current system are a few idiots who don’t understand it. The vast majority of people need a few days to get used to the lost hour, and then everything is fine. (Obviously it’s different in the US, where the idiots are far louder and more dominant, because everybody must cater to them).
So you’re trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist for most people.
Your solution is orders of magnitude more complex than the existing one. Twice a year one hour is much easier than 2 minutes every week, esp. considering that many people still have old watches (that is, non-synchronous ones).
Huh? Where’s the downside to it being light out later at night? Now my entire drive home is in daylight, not darkness or partial darkness. Plus I can get 9 holes of golf in after work. Also, it’s still light enough in the morning that my kids aren’t going to school in the dark.
Well, there’s an easy way to fix that: tell those people to migrate to the Northern Hemisphere, or else the U.S. will send in the Marines.
But there’s also the problem of the tropics, where they are thoughtless enough not to realise the benefits of DST. There are too many there to relocate, so we’ll just have to wait until global warming drowns them.
There isn’t. You can choose not to do it, or you can do it like this. I’ve not heard any alternate way of shifting activity earlier in the day that isn’t either:
1,000x as complex as what we do now
doomed to spotty compliance and eventual failure
I’d rather live without it than attempt to live with an alternate method.
You know how every once in a while some piece of sophisticated machinery blows up because they didn’t convert between metric and English units (warning: pdf)?
The problem would be orders of magnitude worse if the units were close enough that it takes careful measurement and analysis to tell the difference.
I say split the difference. Move the clocks halfway between standard time and daylight time and keep them there year round. Put the whole world in sync with Newfoundland.
Your reasons for abandoning DST are less than compelling.
a) Changing the clocks is not that big a hassle. Cell phones and computers adjust automatically. I have maybe 3 clocks in my house that need re-setting and 1 in my car. A few seconds on each and I’m good for half a year. No big deal.
b) “A sudden 1 hour time shift” is much less dramatic than you make it sound. We changed the clocks at my house before going to bed Saturday night, and had a more-or-less normal day Sunday. By this morning (Monday), I barely even noticed I was getting up “earlier.” Of, course, I get up way too early every weekday anyhow, but that’s beside the point.
In my opinion, nothing is broke, so why fix it? You propose a highly complex and expensive solution without a problem.
I live in Arizona and we don’t do DST. It just stays the same all year long and it’s one of my favorite things about living here. I’ve always thought DST was wacked, and I love just being able to ignore it when the news talks about ‘time to set your clock forward/back’.
If it is really that difficult for your body to adjust (and you really never go to sleep an hour early or an hour late :dubious: ) you can adjust in ten minute intervals. Surely you can handle that. It’d take less than a week to prepare.
I’m gonna get called out on this one, but whenever i hear this stuff I think about all of the people in refugee camps or hiding in jungles and the like. Plenty of perfectly ordinary middle-class families have had to enter situations where they are surviving off bugs and rats and walking 20 miles a day to say alive. If that happened in modern America- geez! We act like having to park at the back of the mall parking lot is an unbearable burden. Get some resilience, people!
This sounds similar to Ancient Egyptian time, although in that case, they defined the hour in terms of a specified proportion of the daylight hours, whatever that might be. The Babylonians wanted more precision and introduced the fixed hour (always 1/24th of a solar day), and introduced the minute, using as a fraction their oh-so-favorite number, 60.
