I prefer the longer DST. I quite like what we have had the last few years. I would prefer it be even longer.
I’m sure it was a creation of some marketing wizard.
Would you mind posting where you live?
I do not. I want to see it gone.
I’m not entirely caught up on this thread yet, but to elaborate on what I said a few days ago here, I think that businesses, schools, and service providers should change their schedules every day based on local sunlight hours. Today in my location the sun rose at 7:13am. This is an easily referenced value with current technology. My local CVS can open at sunrise + 2 for all I care. Today that means they open at 9:13, on January 15th they’d open at 9:52, and on June 15th they’d open at 8:03. Every CVS employee gets 2 hours of sunlight before the doors unlock every day.
(Obviously this is never going to happen, but can you just imagine the quality of life improvement for everyone? At the expense of our GDP, maybe, but… blah)
The energy savings of DST (if they really exist when all is said and done) are a lot less relevant with modern energy-efficient lighting than with old 70s incandescent bulbs.
Same here. I was quite happy when they extended the DST period. Like others that have weighed in to say the same thing, I strongly prefer evening light to morning light. Even though I love the long hours of summer and waking up without an alarm because the sun takes care of the job. The reality is that I have stuff I have to do and stuff I want to do, none of which I am going to get up before work to handle, and all that benefits from more daylight in the evening.
Similar to my views, except I’d use UTC as the benchmark instead of a bunch of geographic zones. The conflation of scheduling conventions with time standards is nonproductive.
My husband keeps referring to this story:
Explained: The Daylight Saving Time Donut in Arizona | Condé Nast Traveler.
Basically, Arizona does not do DST, but the Navajo Nation does… but the Hopi reservation inside the Navajo reservation does not. So you could drive from 11 AM to 10 AM to 11 AM, then back out to 10 AM and 11 AM again. Mmmmmm, doughnuts…
This strikes me as the sort of issue where everyone OUGHT to be motivated by selfish wants. We will make the best collective decision is everyone lobbies for what works best for them. It’s not as if there’s some moral issue here, it’s just about all of us interacting conveniently with each other.
The only reason that Standard time exists at all is because of scheduling standards. Otherwise we would make the whole world one big time zone.
That seems like a really silly idea. Earlier in the thread, people were arguing that some people have trouble adjusting schedules twice a year. How would they manage every day?
I’d like to imagine a world where we already operated like that, and someone tried to convince everyone that we should all drag ourselves out of bed in the middle of the night and slog in the dark to our soul-crushing jobs because the clock said so.
Exactly. We should complete the process: every town on its own time → each large region on its own time → whole world on one time. Then we can argue about schedules instead of time.
Except that the vast majority of people have a very little negotiating strength to bargain for schedules. So most of us will be in an even worse position than before. The fact that the government at least roughly tells us where the day begins for some significant average set of social functions is a huge boon and a stronger starting point.
Letting people argue about the time is a convenient way to distract them from where the problems are: scheduling.
As demonstrated by the idea that the government controls when the day begins. It doesn’t, of course. We all know that the sun rises and sets without regard to any government. The number on the clock is just a number. Instead of addressing the problems with schedules, who sets them, how flexible they are, etc, people and the government muck around with the number on the clock. It’s rearranging the deckchairs on the sinking ship.
I know it’s politically impossible to put everyone and everything on UTC, but it doing so would move the focus from the number on the clock to the actual problems in our schedules.
It would be a catastrophic failure. Remember “the government controls” really means “the public has at least some say in.”
What will happen is that the government will have to start handling petitions for setting reasonable starting and ending times for every possible commercial and non-commercial activity ever, for general sectors and also for individual companies and organizational entities.
Standard time at least offers some degree of a baseline starting point. Take that away and you have chaos. And the vast majority people are losers in the face of chaos.
I don’t know about school kids but I do know that university students, insurance company workers and courier service employees are in fact going to work or class at 8am or 9am. Are you saying that schools start at 10am or 11am
Oh, that’s ridiculous.
The only times the “government” sets are public offices and schools.
All other business are free to set their own starting times, and would not have any problems dealing with a change to UTC, although there are social issues that would be difficult to overcome.
Command-economy-like controls in the US are even more unlikely than switching to UTC. The path to better schedules is empowering the people involved, which would typically be promoting unions and other pro-worker organizations.