Daylight savings time is coming up and I expect to hear all the whining (whinging for our British friends) about having to change clocks, how it causes more accidents in the weeks following, and worst of all - the people who question the whole reason, they just won’t to understand that sunrise changes through the year.
My state legislature is proposing going onto daylight saving time year around - which never passes because “We can’t have children going to school in the dark in the winter.”
Too bad we could not have a system where the day starts 20 seconds earlier every day for the first 180 days of the year, and then starts 20 seconds later for the last 180 days of they year. It would require adjusting too many existing timepieces. But —Maybe once most people live by “cell phone time”, it could be a thing. Call it “God’s time” - rising by the sunrise. Then pitch a lot of woo about it being healthier to follow the sun.
I assume there’s a valid reason that school hours can’t be shifted so kids don’t start in the dark? When I was still working, I was amazed at school buses on the road with me before 6AM.
I vote that we stop changing the clocks twice a year and adjust our lives accordingly. Is that too hard?
Do away with clock changes and leave us the extra hour in the evenings.
Like said above, change the friggin school day instead of the clocks.
I won’t call it God’s time, that is weird for so many reasons. Natural Time or farmer’s time makes sense. But no, no thank you. Just leave the clocks alone.
Let’s go even farther than that and abolish time zones, leap days, and leap seconds. Seriously. Never touch the clock again. It’s okay to have Christmas in the middle of the summer. The Southern Hemisphere manages it just fine. Everybody who needs to be aware of the sun already knows how to find it.
I don’t agree, Christmas (in the north) belongs in early winter. After all it is tied in its roots to the Solstice. The Christmas date was basically a Church marketing ploy to start with.
You are talking about solar time, as opposed to mean time? Not a new idea, e.g., the Roman civil day. It works less well, even local mean time does, in today’s globalised society, but when it comes to God’s time, billions of Muslims, not to mention other religions have no problem incorporating it.
My point is, civil timekeeping does not really inconvenience Muslims, Christians, Hindus, etc.
What we celebrate now is more Yule than anything, which could be a movable feast to serve as a proper solstice celebration. Biblically speaking, there’s nothing at all that puts Christmas in winter.
But more to the point… you’re not going to care. The calendar drifts slowly and gradually. Christmas wouldn’t even drift into spring for 200 years, and another 200 years to summer! Customs and culture would adapt with the calendar. Traditionalists would die out, new ones would take their place. People would gradually switch over to celebrating the actual solstice as a movable feast (Yul, Saturnalia, whatever). Church holdouts would cling to the ecclesiastical date, but society would gradually see it as just another personal day off for someone’s weird minority religious day.
I don’t mind changing the clocks at all – never bugged me one bit, and really don’t understand why it’s such a stick in so many’s craws, but if we had to change, let’s go back to permanent standard time, in other words, keep the time we’re on right now. A lot of people want to have DST year-round, and that just makes for a depressing, dark winter, with mornings of being up at 8 or almost 9 a.m. and it’s still dark out. I’ll sacrifice the “extra” hour of daylight time and tack it on to winter mornings.
Ergo, I like the way things are right now, because we get the best of both worlds but, if forced, standard time for me.
There is a valid reason, which is that in northern cities the length of daylight in the dead of winter is barely 8 hours. If you want to get kids to school, have a school day that is about 6.5 hours long, have after-school activities such as volleyball and marching bands and chess clubs etc, then get them home, then something is going to be in the dark and there’s no way around it.
There’s some research indicating that moving everything back to avoid these 6AM starts is beneficial for school-age kids, but be aware that this means school buses (and high school upperclassmen driving themselves) will still be running in the dark, just in the other direction during evening rush hour, after sunset in the winter.
I can see the usefulness when lighting was provided by kerosene lamps, but the lights are on now in homes, offices and schools regardless of whether it is light outside. Daylight savings time seems silly to me.
I suspect there’s a real pole-equator divide on this issue. In subtropical regions, where you get fewer hours of sunlight during the winter, daylight savings can seem troublesome. Here in the sub-tropics, for instance, we range from 10 hours of sun per day on December 21 to 14 hours per day on June 21, which means that no matter what, children won’t be going to school in the dark, and an extra hour of sunlight in the summer is an extra hour on the beach after work.
In Chicago (where I’m at), that would push sunrise to 8:15 a.m. in the middle of December, and we’re on the eastern edge of the time zone, so we have it better that folks west in the same zone (Kansas City would be around 8:30 and Minneapolis would be around 8:50). I guess it depends on what side of the day you prefer more light, but I’m groggy until I have some sunlight. Once I’m going, I’m good to go, but I need that morning light to wake myself up and lift my mood.
And, besides, it’s STANDARD time for a reason! Make it all standard if you will, and leave noon somewhat in the ballpark of solar noon, as God intendend, not one hour off! * grumble grumble * Get off my lawn!
Some people in the Northeastern states (the six New England states plus New York State) have been talking about moving to the Atlantic Time Zone, the same time zone as the Maritime Provinces and Puerto Rico. If you look at a map, New England is on the far eastern side of the Eastern Time Zone. Along with changing the time zone, these states would stop observing daylight saving time.
For that, pulykamell, you may want to better yet redraw the time zones so that they get less variance. It has been commented elsewhere before that for example the US the time zones, drawn for the sake of where railways had their big hubs in the late 1800s, have ranges significantly offset from where they theoretically should be. So for many parts of the country this…
…was blown away already the day that the “standard” time zones were fixed.
Part of the issue is also that what has been adopted as “regular” school and business hours in many cases are based on whatever made sense in a particular part of the country or for a particlular industry in the early 1900s (Why 9 to 5 vs. 8 to 4? Why are shifts 8, 4, 12 for some and 7, 3, 11 for others?), and wouldn’t necessarily have to be the same everywhere if it’s not a good match for the natural world. But TPTB want to be able to know, for instance, that everyone across the country is at the office and doing business at the time the Exchange closes in New York.
Heh… down in Puerto Rico we don’t use DST, sensibly, because at 18 degrees latitude it’s kind of pointless. But every now and then you get someone proposing to adopt it for the sake of always being in the same degree of separation with our primarily Eastern-USA-centric business- and federal-agency communications and transactions.
Yes, but it drift way outside solar noon under DST. That’s why I used the words “somewhat in the ballpark.” On June 21 our solar moon here is about 12:55 with DST; in Atlanta—the most difference I could find for a major city—it’s 1:39. Under standard time, everyone’s within 45 minutes of solar noon, instead of all being up to an hour forty off.
Why is it important? I guess it’s not, but it makes more sense to me to stay at standard rather than daylight time.
To me, that’s the perfect compromise in that it’ll piss almost everyone off. To be on a half hour time zone is annoying enough, but thirty minutes here or there don’t make enough difference in my option. It would have to be an hour shift at minimum.