I remember growing up in Saskatchewan and having to shovel piles of dead schoolchildren and car crash victims out of the way when I was going to school in the dark.
Except if you were crossing into Newfoundland.
And think of all the people who have heart attacks just shoveling snow! Shoveling corpses (even little ones) has to be twice as strenuous.
Would it not have been easier to use a pitchfork?
Indeed. Those suggestions for coping with year-round DST—schools starting later in the winter, businesses adjusting their hours—sound, to me, more disruptive and inconvenient than simply resetting clocks twice a year.
If you travel 800 miles in any direction you will find people living normal lives an hour off from where you came from. They are not dead.
ETA: Changed 500 to 800 after looking at Boise to Pierre SD
Yes, I can’t imagine how human beings manage to live without changing their clocks twice a year.
All those people in Japan or Korea or Iceland must be continually in dire straits.
And those poor people in China, all on a single time zone, not able to figure out how to make personal adjustments to an arbitrary system of measurement.
And @ekedolphin wins the thread! It is thus an honor to have been the OP.
On December 21st there’s less than 9 hours of sunlight a day in New Hampshire. I work 8.5 hours, and during normal work in the office days I drive 45 minutes each way. Why would driving in dark during the morning be more of a hardship than driving home during the afternoon in the dark typically is, in your opinion?
But but then they have to push a button! Can you imagine how horribly difficult it is for people to remember to push a button two times each year?! What utter madness.
yeah, it absolutely gives me an extra hour of useful daylight. I have an extra hour in the evening, at the benefit of not being awakened too early in morning.
I’d actually prefer that. All of the US should be a single time zone. People in the east and west would start work, school, dinner, sports, etc. at times that made sense locally (which could take into account the latitude as well as the longitude) and we’d all know what time that meeting with the folks in CA is. It would de-standardize “clock time”. No more “9-5” defaults. And it could free us of the tyranny of clock time. Maybe schools would start after kids wake up, jobs would start after parents get their kids off to school, etc.
Or Saskatchewan. We’re on CST year round.
Probably half of the bills passed by the Senate are unanimous. In fact if nobody objects they won’t bother to take a vote.
~Max
I don’t really think it’s the driving in the dark, it’s the getting up in the dark. It is a lot easier to wake up when you wake with the light, and harder to sleep when it’s light out. Having most people spend an extra few months getting up an extra hour before it’s light (than they used to) is not going to be a good change.
And we don’t have to speculate about this! We tried it 50 years ago and despite people thinking it was a good idea everyone hated it and we got rid of it.
Some things have changed since the1970s, but I think it’s incumbent on anyone arguing that this is a good idea to explain what they think has changed that will make this a better or more popular idea now.
It seems to me that if you ask people “would you rather not have to change the clocks twice a year”, they will of course answer yes, because changing the clocks is annoying, and we all have experience with doing it often and not liking it, while relatively few people have personal experience with getting up way before the sun rises for months on end. But if you actually make this change, then everyone will get that experience good and fast and—just like in the 70s—will be howling to change it back after the first month of waking up two hours before sunrise.
My hope is the same as what happened in the 70s happens again and people start bitching and complaining about getting up at 7 to pitch black darkness and cry to change the timing back and shut up for about another twenty years.
Seems likely. The real victims here are all the software developers who are going to have to change all the software that automatically adjusts time, then re-change it again when we get rid of this dumb idea.
I bet when we get rid of it again, we change the switching dates a little, just for rub-ins.
I’m confused. Some of you LIKE Daylight Savings Time?
Apparently all of the Senate does.
According to this YouGov poll at least, most Americans want to stay on one time (63%) vs keeping the clock switching (16%). And of those that want to eliminate clock-switching, 48% prefer DST to 29% standard time.
Correct. And it’s usually stuff like declaring the first week in June to be National Apricot Week.