China, which is roughly the size of the continental US, has only one time zone when it ought to have several, and this has caused problems.
And each time we revert to “standard” time, aren’t there two 2:AMs in one day? :smack:
Daylight savings time.
This is why Benjamin Franklin was never President.
Nit pick: it’s Daylight Saving Time. No “s” at the end of saving. 
No one in the thread has yet to establish a valid reason why it should be scrapped. Saying that it bugs you, or that you have trouble adjusting is being selfish. For those of us who don’t have trouble adjusting, why should we give in to your particular whims?
The main argument against DST is that the assumed benefits of it aren’t clearly occurring in actuality. Thus, we could argue that there is no “need” for it.
However, I predict that, should we stop going on DST, then we’d immediately be facing complaints all summer long about how the sun now goes down too early. And if we simply stay on DST (that is, if we accept that the sun should be at zenith at 1:00 pm), then all winter long everyone would bitch about how the sun isn’t up early enough. :dubious:
If accuracy is your goal, tune in WWV.
One issue is that, at least in the northern part of the U.S., you wind up with dawn in December and January coming relatively late in the morning. (I know, I know, people in Canada and Ireland will tell us that that’s no big deal. 
)
In Chicago, during the shortest days of the year, sunrise isn’t until around 7:15 a.m. If you have DST running year-round, that pushes sunrise to 8:15 a.m., meaning that (among other things) kids are going to school in the morning in the dark.
In the mid '70s, during the first energy crisis, I remember the Ford Administration instituting a year-round DST, and “children are now waiting for buses in the dark” was one of the complaints.
I’m a huge fan of DST.
Please see this graphic from Wikipedia.
I am also in the “no big deal” camp on the time change. I am always amazed at how people moan over a single hour switch.
Does anyone here fly? You would think if these people flew from one coast to the other they would be permanently disfigured by the 3 hour change. Never to recover!
Regarding DST
I wasn’t aware he ever sought the office. 1706
By 1789, the year President Washington took office, Franklin was 83 years old.
And those were hard years, long before central heat, indoor plumbing, or even a nice Harley to straddle.
I doubt at age 83 Franklin thought it a good move to burnish his political credentials.
You’ll hear those complaints from some Americans who are likely hippies, terrorists, or Communists – people not to be listened to.
All red-blooded, real Americans have better things to do, like going to Mars (where there is no DST!) or drinking beer (which can happen at any hour!) than whine about whether the sun goes down at 9pm or 10pm in certain latitudes of Earth during the summer.
No, but they would run into problems the other way, townspeople scheduling a PTA meeting for 5pm when it was only 4pm “cow time” for example. There were a lot of protests that “cows don’t know what time it is” from the farm belt when the proposal came up.
I remember decades ago reading a comment by Isaac Asimov regarding daylight savings time. It was (paraphrasing) Here in the Home of the Free and Home of the Brave, if Congress tried passing a law mandating that everyone get up an hour earlier there would be a great hue and cry along with calls for impeachment. But it can pass a law saying clocks be set ahead an hour which is the exact same thing without a peep of protest.
I’ve never met anyone who said they liked Daylight Saving Time, but I’ve met lots who said they hate it. If there were a referendum, I suspect that an overwhelming majority would vote to abolish it. Who’s giving in to whose whims?
No one? Not one person? Yeah, right.
I like Daylight Saving Time.
Now, you’ve heard it.
People don’t legislate things like DST without having a large amount of support for it in the first place.
I love DST - lots of post work mountain biking from spring through fall.
And golf.
And why is that undesirable? If the choice is between 4:40 AM sunrise / 8:00 PM sunset, vs. 5:40 AM sunrise / 9:00 PM sunset, the former seems more natural to me.
If your state/area didn’t observe DST, what would prevent you from going to work earlier and leaving early enough for post-work MTB?
My job - I need to be at work through certain hours to overlap my day with people in far away time zones. Plus, my wife is a school teacher and her hours are set so if we want to meet after work we have to go by her hours. Other people have job hours set by the clock in other ways but most have to work until 5 or 6 PM.
If I wanted to I could take off work early to ride or run but I couldn’t do it all the time and I couldn’t meet up with friends who can’t take off early. Having it light at a later hour means we all can do activities after work. I can run in the morning but I can’t really ride in the morning, this allows me to do both.
Fair enough. But I suspect for every outdoor enthusiast who wants as many hours of daylight as possible, there is a city dweller who’s happy to get out of the hot summer sun as soon as possible.
Yeah, that’s the issue. Umpteen million employers across the country won’t all agree at the same time to start business an hour earlier in the summer so that their employees can enjoy more sunlight when they get off work. But the government can do that, so they did. (And “enjoy more sunlight” means “spend more money”, which is why businesses like it.)