And you lot call yourself Dopers… The Master has already addressed this in a column many years ago (in a question apparently sent in by Ravenman). The change in DST that added March and October was to done to conserve energy, just like Cecil said.
This is the history of daylight saving time , there was talk of ending it in my state
Massauchettes which I was happy to hear. I am not sure if this is doing to happen after all. I wonder how much energy we’re really saving doing this.
I listen to a radio station that does this, and a listener wrote in asking when during the four note signal did the new hour start. One of their on air personalities said that on the last note is when the hour changes. So that’s what I use to reset the clock in my car, as it tends to gain time.
Cows get baffled by the time change and lose milk production.
The only way it wouldn’t be too soon is if this nonsense never occurred at all.
It’s “standard” in the sense of “being the actual time, in relation to the position of the sun”. Arbitrary hops back and forth are just bureaucratic meddling.
Yep. And besides all the stuff you have to fiddle with manually twice a year, the fact that some devices change time automatically has the potential to be even worse. It may be helpful for now, but it would be an absolute nightmare if the awesome majesty of the law ever changes the rules yet again and the devices are not – or are no longer – updateable.
From your cite, when Indiana adopted DST in 2006, energy consumption increased.
Also the same reason Arizona won an exemption from DST way back in 1967.
Even Standard Time isn’t “the actual time in relation to the position of the sun” for the vast majority of people, due to the continuous nature of the earth’s rotation and the discrete nature of time zones.
For most places, true local noon (i.e., the time when sun shadows point due astronomical north) does not coincide with 12:00 PM Standard Time.
Having any type of official time standard at all involves “bureaucratic meddling”. There are valid reasons to object to DST, but the erroneous notion that the system of Standard Time time zones somehow represents astronomically “actual” or “true” time, as opposed to an equally “meddlesome” bureaucratically imposed arbitrary scheme, is not among them.
Very true (well, I’m going to assume the numbers in that study are true because right now I’m too lazy to follow the footnote). But that doesn’t negate the fact that proposed energy savings was the impetus behind extending DST. It had nothing to do with farmers or trains or any other such rubbish.
Kimstu: You’re taking me rather too literally. Of course the discrete nature of hourly time zones is going to create deviations from “true noon”, presumably increasing as you approach the boundaries. This is unavoidable if one is going to standardize the time system, and if the railroads hadn’t done the airlines or broadcasters or just modern life would have. My point is that this is qualitatively different from some bureaucrat decreeing that you have to mess with your clock twice a year so that kids have more daylight time to play outside in the summer.
If choosing between standard and daylight time, I’d prefer to go with standard for the reasons I mentioned, but that’s incidental – either one would be far superior than changing your mind twice a year. It’s the messing about that I object to. I’ve even read that it’s suspected to be a contributor to higher accident rates immediately after the change.
Yes.
Or just keep them where they are now and never change them.
I lived in Indiana before they decided to switch, and before so many items switched automatically. Coming from Chicago, it was heaven to not be running around the house messing with clocks and watches twice a year.
I have a mantel clock that requires me to move the minute hand past the three, then the hour hand somewhere, then something else, or the chimes get screwed up. I know it’s only twice a year, but it’s a pain. I love the clock, but I would also love never messing with it again.
“We were told” is not a cite. Do you have the actual law?
However, there is this.
Someone’s gotta be awake somewhere.
boffking will need to confirm when he worked at the station. Or it could be the station didn’t yet have the needed equipment.
Might have been heaven for you but it was a royal bitch if you worked at a TV station. Half the year you’d be on NYC time and the other half you’d be on Chicago time.
Since at that time all of the network programming and satellite news feeds originated from New York it meant that half the year you ran network prime time live and the other half you had to record it all and run it an hour later. I worked in news where the problem was the satellite news feeds. They would be off by an hour half the year and it was a pain to do different calculations half the year.
I think for a while when I was young the Indiana stations got around this simply by airing prime time from 8 - 11 PM in the winter and then from 7 - 10 PM in the summer and then the late local news would follow at either 10 or 11 PM.
He is right. It used to be that way. In 1995 Congress de-regulated the hell out of broadcasting and made it very, very good for corporations and not very good for consumers. One of the many bones they threw to the station owners was no longer mandating them to have actual humans present at all times.
I tried to find a cite for the old regulations but it was tough because the 1995 regs kept coming up on Google. (I’m sure someone else would find it in a heartbeat and make me look petty and evil :o)
I1 #33
Isn’t Indiana one of the very few States that don’t dance the DST jig?
No. I’m pretty sure boffking isn’t old enough to have worked in a radio station in 1995.
While all of Indiana officially observes Daylight Saving Time, 12 of the 92 counties are on Central Time, with the rest still on Eastern Time.
It is reasonable to believe that someone who had worked at the station for a long time told him in good faith that the control panel must be constantly manned, especially because such a person may have been so instructed when they were trained under the law at that time.
It isn’t like college radio stations employ top communications attorneys to conduct strict training sessions for someone’s 2 hour block of bluegrass at 2am on Tuesday mornings every other week.
Why bother with these time zones and confusing hours and minutes? In the future, everyone will use Swatch Internet Time. The time is now @875 everywhere in the world. Easy peasy.
Except that the system is so unwieldy that pockets of the country use unofficial local times, providing endless opportunity for confusion and misunderstandings.