What about when they do acknowledge the drawbacks ? - I perfectly well understand that DST doesn’t provide any more sunlight, it just shifts it around. Sunrise in my area is about 6am EDT in June. I think that means it would be 5am EST. I don’t want it to be light at 5am- it’s useless to me at that hour since I am still asleep. And through most of my life, it wouldn’t have mattered if I had changed my waking time- waking up an hour early isn’t very helpful if all it does is give you an extra hour of sitting around waiting to take the kids to school, to go to work etc. And if you have enough control of your schedule to shift things around so you wake up an hour earlier, start work an hour earlier, end work an hour earlier and so on , you’ve really just replicated DST on an individual level
I’ve aready said that I don’t actually care one way or the other. If we killed the switch, I’d argue tepidly for staying in standard time so that +/-UTC had any meaning, but I don’t have a strong opinion.
Yeah, what it amounts to is that to people who don’t have the ability to freely move their schedules around, it can matter what time sunrise and sunset happen.
On commuting days, 21:00 or 21:30.
Here in the far Northwest, in the winter, it’s dark when I go to work and dark when I drive home. In the summer, it’s daylight before I wake up and still pretty light when I go to bed. For a few months in between we get sunrise and sunset at what seems to be more normal times. Shifting sunrise and sunset an hour either way makes almost no difference. Hence, I’d like the “pick one and stick to it” plan. Doesn’t matter which one to me.
Modnote: this is P&E and not the Pit. You are pushing the limits here. Find a way to make your argument without insulting other posters.
These are not helping either.
This topic was automatically opened after 9 minutes.
Not really. Effective in 2007, US and Canadian federal legislation extended DST by four weeks, three weeks earlier in the spring and one week later in the fall. There was a reason for that.
The main idea was to save energy by delaying, for four more weeks, the time of day when lights needed to be turned on – saving the energy equivalent of an estimated 3 million barrels of oil and its associated GHG emissions. It also extended the available time for outdoor activities. The general idea was that a later sunset due to DST was generally more beneficial than an earlier sunrise due to standard time. Most people, depending on their geographic location and daily schedule, benefited more from longer daylight hours at the end of the day than in the morning. Reversion to standard time, albeit as late in the season as practical, was felt necessary to avoid lengthy morning darkness.
Side note – just saw this on CNN:
https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/06/health/permanent-daylight-savings-health-harms-wellness/index.html
The clown Congresscritter (R from Georgia, I believe) gave as his reason for sponsoring the bill something to the effect of “criminals prefer darkness, so if we go to permanent DST, criminals will have less darkness to work in.”
Exactly.
This seems the most sensible, logical, straightforward solution to me–for everyone who loves earlier sunsets, there’s someone who hates them, so your personal preference is canceled out. Most of us have no personal preference, and are just annoyed at the inconvenience of changing our clocks every few months.
A few years back Ireland and the UK were looking at eliminating DST, and someone did a massive survey study of all the existing literature, and reached the conclusion that…study results were all over the place, and not definitive.
I suspect that the studies we see in news articles are going to be the more dramatic ones that indicate a difference.
Agreed, pick one and stick. Just end the clock changing.
The Directive
https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/policies/seasonal-time-changes/
would not directly apply to Russia (or China) anyway insofar as they are not European Union member states, so it is really smaller countries in Europe which have been voting on it (and the European Parliament approved the directive in 2019, which would have meant no clock changes in 2021 or 2022).
Large countries (east to west), far north versus tropical, are going to have their own views… but the fact that China has one zone and Russia a whole bunch (yet both countries sans daylight saving time) suggests it is all pretty arbitrary.
The Chinese experience proves what we all know: the number on the clock is entirely arbitrary. Ref the Foxtrot cartoon cite above, as long as one cycle of the clock corresponds within a few seconds of one rotation of the planet, we’re golden.
What the usual articles saying China has one timezone don’t get into though is that school or workplaces don’t all start at the same clock time nationwide. I don’t know enough about the details to explain it, but schoolkids in far Western China aren’t starting their school day at e.g. 8:00 on the clock which is 3 hours before sunrise then ending it 8 hours later at 5 hours after sunrise.
China’s situation is from what I have casually picked up is actually worse, in that a lot of people in Eastern Turkestan (but not everyone) might be going to work based on the time in Beijing rather than based on what would make sense locally.
Lots of people do that in this country. A roommate of mine in Alaska worked “Pentagon time” a number of weeks a year, meaning that the 9am phone meeting was at 4am local.
I am one who doesn’t mind the change. I’m usually up before dawn no matter what time of year it is.
It’s a relatively small proportion of people. I believe it’s much more common in China.
The trope is that certain businesses have this on the wall:
