I think you have something backwards here.
I believe you need to patent your idea and begin lobbying immediately for its introduction.
I believe “No DST sucks ass.” means “Having no DST sucks ass.”
As opposed to “No, DST sucks ass.” A little awkwardly worded, but I was able to sort it out.
I’ll admit my idea is a little ahead of its time. To help understand why, let’s take a peek at the adventures of Nander Nor, a kid from the year 2031:
Nander Nor downloads and runs a new app, the Chronotron 2030. Using predictive analytics and internet archives, it simulates people from the past. He sets it to March 2011 and “random person”. Zzz-zap! “Hello, simulant, I am Nander Nor from… dum da dee dum, your future!”
“Oh hi, my name is Beowulff. What kind of a name is Nander Nor?”
“Well, what kind of a name is ‘Beowulff’?”
“Okay, good point. I have so many questions for you…”
“Hah, I’ll bet. Hey, do you want to know who Ted Mosby finally married? Or how we finally cured cancer?”
“Nah, I was wondering if they finally did away with daylight savings time. It’s such a terrible hassle, you know.”
“Oh we’re using Long Time now.”
“[mouth agape] bwuh?”
“The days are getting longer as we approach summer, so we’re on long time. See, I’ll show you on my Strawberry iGeeGaw. Here’s my clock app. See these radio buttons? I can set it to “Long”, “Normal”, and “Short”. On the solstice, it auto-switches back and forth from Long and Short. Here, I’ll show you “Short” time.” [Nander presses the button next to “Short”]
“But nothing has changed. It’s counting exactly the same.”
“Well, not exactly. Long time is 1.0002 seconds and short is 0.9998. It’s an imperceptible difference to most people. Thanks to this innovation, we never have to adjust our bodies to daylight savings time.”
“But why didn’t they just get rid of DST altogether? Surely simplicity is a better answer.”
“We simulated how the future would go if we did that. First, everyone was relieved not to change their clocks. But they soon got tired of 5am sunrises so in twenty years, they switched it back. But then they got sick of the twice-a-year sleep cycle disruptions so it was switched yet again. It turns out humanity would toggle back and forth like this forever.”
“But how could anyone adopt a new standard like this? Wouldn’t there be panic in the streets, people jumping from rooftops, mass hysteria?”
“Luckily, we knew enough to phase it in. The new clocks were available many years before the switchover, so adopting it was easy. It wasn’t nearly as bad as when we switched over to global driving on the right. But even that became normal after a while. Humanity always underestimates its ability to adopt change.”
“What about the southern hemisphere?”
“There’s an app for that. Multivac, what is the current local time in Bolivia?” [computer promptly responds “6:57 AM”]
“Hmm… well if it’s such a great system, why didn’t anyone suggest it before?”
“The first daylight savings time proposals were thought up before adding machines existed. By the time we had technology to solve the problem better, there was too much entrenched thinking. Even the SDMB, a vanguard of progressive thinking, was 99% against the idea at first. But ultimately, logic won out.”
“But why not go even further and do away with time zones altogether? Use your GPS to slice up every longitude to the arc-second. And use the latitude to determine how much time-shifting to use. And instead of a linear approximation, use a sine function! Okay, okay, now that I hear it out loud, I realize how stupid that sounds. Hey, can that thing bring up other people from the past?”
“Yeah, you can stick around as I bring back someone from the 1930’s American South to show them our integrated drinking fountain next!”
Gee, thank you.
I think I understand it just fine. Here are my two problems with it:
Too many things don’t change automatically. We run about a dozen electronic instruments in addition to a half dozen clocks that require intervention twice a year. This includes things that may be in use during the change, so they can’t be interrupted. Pretty much all year long, we keep finding ones that didn’t get reset, sometimes only after we started using data erroneously. For a while I tried a serial number based tracking list but it got out of sync with the units and was just extra work. Then I started setting some of the to Coordinated Universal Time to avoid this problem, but then of course errors started happening when we needed to calculate the local civil time based on UTC.
And, too many things change automatically, and do it wrong. So we have to change them not twice a year, but six times a year. Or fight with them in other ways. For some reason, about every year or two, our corporate email/scheduling system messes up my account during one of these automatic changes. I’ll miss a meeting only to discover that it is shifting the times on my invitations incorrectly. And every time there is some weird kind of workaround that involves putting me into a separate time zone temporarily, which of course screws up again a little while later.
I think this is a great deal of trouble for not much proven benefit. The people in Arizona that I work with agree. Gee, how many hours away are they? Well, what date is it?..
Wow. Over a 100 people have voted in this poll, and assuming the OP voted for his own proposal…he is the only one.
Consider your proposal bunked.
I’m willing to let the “Savings” in the title slide, but you’re banned from using “whomever” until you learn to use it correctly.
Oh really? Guy who wants to have a variable second gets a slide, but me getting the ablative and abalone cases mixed up…that’s where the line’s drawn?
You’re my thesis supervisor, aren’t you?
Glad you two were able to figure out my ass sucking. I stand by my point that no one wants the sun up at 4AM.
I’m surprised that so many people voted against any form of daylight saving. I’d be interested in seeing what latitude those people live at. Judging by the graphic at the Wikipedia article, it is less popular the closer to the equator one gets.
I will say that it is a pain for systems that we use at work, especially as some don’t do the automatic change correctly. I’d prefer to have our systems on UTC so the time stamps can be kept constant through the year. The electronics don’t care about long summer evenings outside, so they can stick to the same time all year, but I like having the sun stay up for evenings in the back yard or out on the river.