First, I have to say that the situation I outlined isn’t my situation right now.
But you don’t understand - I’m not talking about not having enough time to get to work after dropping my kid off at the now later time , although now that you bring it up, that would be an issue too. And people can’t always solve it by getting to work 20 minutes later - you might be able to and I would have been able to at some jobs , but all sorts of people have to work set shifts . The ER isn’t going to change shifts around because one doctor needs to start his shift at 8 am instead of 7 because of the kid’s daycare hours.
But again, I wasn’t talking really about having time to do things- I was talking about the complications of having to remember that my job changed my working hours so now I have to go in at 8 am instead of 7. But only one kid’s school changed hours , so one kid now goes to school at 8 and the other at 7. And the bowling league that started at 6 pm changed to 5 pm in October , so now my husband can’t make it since he works until 5 year round.
It’s never going to be possible to have everyone make their own individual decisions - it’s always going to be that most of society is going to do one thing. Either people will change the clocks and businesses will mostly keep the same hours all year, or we won’t change the clocks and businesses will still mostly keep the same hours all year. Neither one is intrinsically better than the other- but either one is better than having to remember that kid A’s school starts at 9 am in September but changes to 8 am in November and then back to 9am in March while kid B’s school is 9 am year-round. And having to do that for multiple jobs and schools and organizations.
It is established that the government has a role to play in defining time zones. Clearly, you are not advocating that the government get out of the business of standard time altogether.
So, the questions are:
To keep changing times twice a year?
To stop changing times?
– and if so, what times should be permanently established.
No matter what we choose, there will be advantages and disadvantages, and those advantages and disadvantages will impact different people differently. The government’s job is to balance them and find the best compromise.
You seem to be suggesting that there is some “natural” solution to this problem. That given that some people don’t like changing times twice a year, that there is an obvious, simple answer.
But, no, there isn’t. There are still a range of possible solutions, all of which have advantages and disadvantages, and none of them is the “natural” or “obvious” answer. These may include:
Making winter time permanent
Making summer time permanent
Shifting all time zones by half an hour
Redrawing the time zones altogether
Nothing said in this thread makes any of these an obvious or natural solution.
To me, the best solution is to make summer time permanent. Given that we already live under summer time the majority of the year, to me that’s the most obvious and natural solution.
Others might disagree. However, our positions are equal, especially given the fact that everything about the time and clocks is arbitrary and mandated by the government.
But right now, some businesses open at 9, and others at 10, some schooldays begin at 8, others at 830, etc. What I’m suggesting just keeps one standard of clocktime, and allows people to work their individual schedule around that reality.
It allows some people to work their individual schedule around it . Not all and probably not most. Because , just to take one example, if we don’t change the clocks and school always starts at 8am , then the staff at that school doesn’t have the option to start and end an hour earlier so as to have more sunlight after work, do they?
Do you suppose people were going crazy before DST was imposed on us? People actually existed, and worked out their schedules just fine, before DST. They might have grumbled a bit about how nasty it felt when daylight became less plentiful but everyone just accepted it as an inevitable fact of life on planet Earth. Then the government came along to “fix” something that wasn’t broken, and you know what? Daylight is still exactly as plentiful or rare as it was before. Your joy at having an extra hour of light in the morning is negated by my misery at losing an hour of light in the late afternoon. Zero sum game. The only difference is now we must dick around with our clocks twice a year.
Of which, would you like it if we changed the clocks by an hour every month? I suspect not. That would be excessive, probably. Why is twice a year a perfect number of times to change the clocks, but four times is bad and twelve times is worse?
Because twice a year is the status quo, and you’re used to it.
But it’s still two times per year more than we actually need.
It makes far more sense to take the average or median start time, compare it to the desired goals for sunlight hours, and just have the government set the clocks according to what is the best average outcome.
If you are saying that we should keep one time and expect businesses and service providers change their schedules twice a year (or more) based on local sunlight hours, that’s definitely worse than what we have now, in my opinion. We might as well keep what we have now.
And this is especially the case if a major consideration is (and in my mind should be), what will give the most people an opportunity to enjoy sunlight, and what will be best for the economy? To me, the answer is clear: set the clocks to maximize daylight hours after standard office hours, and minimize daylight hours before 6 a.m. when most people are still going to be in bed.
Personally, I’d prefer everyone use UTC. One time zone, one date for the whole world simultaneously.
There will always be arguments about scheduling, but we can end the arguments about time. I’d rather the governments standardize to one time and date, and put an end to the time discussions. Let the scheduling be only about that.
Do you mean that everyone in the world was miserable and outraged before DST was imposed on us? Face it, the government fucked up bigtime with this experiment that never should have been tried in the first place, and has been rationalizing it for 100 years with all sorts of nonsense about “farmers” and “seasonal affective disorder” and other concepts irrelevant to the basic need to have a single consistent system of time-keeping.
I like summer time. It improves my quality of life, so I don’t think anyone “fucked up bigtime.” If anything, I think they didn’t go far enough, and now they should just get rid of winter time. Barring that, I would prefer to keep changing my clocks twice a year, because to me that’s better than being on winter time all year round. Are you telling me I’m wrong?
Because two is enough to suit me. And I’m sure that two is preferable to four for most people too. If most people would find that four suited them, then the government should implement that solution.
And that’s what this is about: preferences. There isn’t a “correct” answer. It’s about what solution matches up with the most preferences.
(Come to think of it, maybe four shifts of 30 minutes would be better than two shifts of 60 minutes. We should definitely put that on the table for discussion.)
I think that is a relatively minor issue. Due to the invention called a light bulb, businesses are rarely reliant on sunlight for conducting business. Secondly, businesses already do this all of the time and we accept it. Weekend hours exist. My local hardware shop shifts its hours by one hour on Wednesdays. Stores have special Christmas hours after Black Friday. I would predict few businesses would have summer and winter hours but rather the same hours year round.
Much of the complaining about Daylight Saving Time revolves around the actual switching back and forth twice a year (disruption of sleep schedules, higher traffic accident rates, etc.). Instituting changes even more frequently wouldn’t address those complaints, and would probably be perceived as making it even worse.
That depends. If the problem is having to go around and adjust all your clocks, and remembering to make the change, then the more times a year you have to do it, the worse it is. But if the problem is with losing (or gaining) time, and having to adjust, then more, smaller changes would be easier to adjust to than two big ones.
It’s an example of people who can’t adjust their individual schedule according to their preference. No matter how much staff at that school want the extra hour of light at the end of the day, they can’t adjust their individual schedule to get it. The whole school has to be on the same schedule.
Kind of - but I actually kind of think that’s the reason for the clock change. I assume you like standard so you can commute both ways in the light during the winter, correct? My guess is that you wouldn’t care if the sun came up at 5:30 or 6:30 in the summer, because you will be commuting in the light either way. And @Ascenray likes sunlight after work - but it doesn’t matter all that much to most people if sunset is at 4:30 or 5:30 in the winter. Changing gives you the light both ways in the winter and Ascenray time to play golf after work in June. So each of you is happy part of the year - and you might not care about the rest of the year. Without the change, you would each be unhappy half the year - and still might not care about the rest of the year.
I’m confused - you’ve been commuting in the dark ( at least one way) for a couple of months but changing to standard time lets you commute both ways in the light? I don’t know where you live exactly, so I’m going to use times from a city at the western end of my time zone. But let’s say part of your morning commute was in the dark during the end of September and October because sunrise was between 7:00 and 7:45 - and even as late as 7:50 right before the change back to standard time. Wouldn’t you still be commuting in the dark from mid-November to mid February when sunrise was more or less between 7:00 and 7:45 standard time?
I don’t care about resetting the clocks. That is not a big deal. However, I hate having to physically and psychologically adjust to the time change. It’s only a few days to a week of disruption. Yes, I manage to survive it every time, but I really don’t like it. Pick one or the other and stick with it. I don’t have a preference which.