An editorial that appeared in Newsday late last week called for the abolishment of daylight savings time. My first reaction was, "hell no, anything that would erase a full hour of beach-time is a rotten idea.” I calmed down, read the article, attempted to understand the author’s (rather lame) points and came away with pretty much the same reaction I initially had; “don’t tinker with the status quo.”
My next thought was, “well if there’s an editorialist who feels daylight savings should be overturned, perhaps there are others who support the cause.” Step 1: forum search on the SMDB; seven hours later the search came back with 59 threads mentioning DST, but none mentioning abolishment. “Whew!” I thought, “I can rest easy with the knowledge there isn’t a grassroots movement that will result in cutting into my summertime leisure.” Step 2: A quick Google search; 11 seconds later and bang!, they’re out there, not in huge numbers, but there are supporters of the cause. In an attempt to broaden my horizons, I figured I’d read a couple of the thoughts and points of the enemy camp. It was here that I stumbled across {I hate admitting this} a pretty logical proposal. No, my mind has been changed, but I have to objectively admit, the people at standard time make sense.
“End(ing) daylight saving time that will reap large benefits in addition to ending the semi-annual changing of the clock…we propose that The Pacific and Central time zones remain on permanent daylight saving time, and that the Mountain and Eastern time zones remain on permanent standard time…reduc(ing) the number of time zones in the United States from four to two. (Major cites east or west of the Mississippi River) will…all be operating on the same time and people traveling or doing business between the…coasts will only have a two hour time difference to contend with, instead of the three hour difference with which we are currently burdened.
This proposal will simplify scheduling, travel, and commerce…it will also allow people to get more sleep, be better adjusted to their daily routine, avoid missed appointments…and, most importantly, save lives.”
Well, my personal take is thanks, {I wouldn’t mind Yankees / Mariners games starting an hour earlier} but no thanks, the people of the sun deserve as much sunlight as is permitted by law.
Not a great debate (Mod, IMHO?)…but interesting nonetheless.
All I can say regarding the quotation you quoted is that the people in the Pacific and Central Time Zones are going to be mighty upset when, come December and January, they have to wait until 8 for the sun to come up.
Not only am I in favor of stopping the current DST situation – I want to reverse it! I want the time adjusted so that when the day is getting shorter (winter in the Northern Hemisphere) set the clock ahead so that it seems we have more day and not less. I don’t know about you, but I hate having the sun go down by 5 PM. If I wanted to live like that, I’d live in Scotland, not Southern California.
Conversely, despite the fact that I am a SoCal native, I can’t stand it the interminable daylight hours during the summer. I swear, early July, the sun doesn’t set till almost 9 PM! If you need to take away an hour from some part of the year, here’s the place to do it!
All I’m saying is, let’s even things out a little, okay?
Permit a comment from someone who works for an international company that operates 24 hours a day…
DST is the spawn of the devil. It’s not so bad in the spring (when it just looks to our computer systems as if all of our systems had crashed for an hor simultaneously), but it’s murder in the fall (when we have a 25-hour day and two 1AM hours).
You want to know wnat our sales looked like at 1:43AM? Was that the first 1:43AM or the second 1:43AM?
Oh, yes, and our folks in Germany and the UK did their switch to DST a week before we did this spring. And the folks in Japan don’t do it at all. And the folks on the west coast do their DST switch three hours after the folks on the east coast do their DST switch.
DST is a major problem when it comes to logs for my computer systems. Takes me a week to straighten out what time something actually happened if I need to know exactly when a specific data transaction took place.
And then there’s the internal computer system known as ‘the body clock.’
So I set my clocks the required hour ahead this Saturday night. Sunday, my internal processor ticking away the seconds still had not accomodated the shift. So as it ticks away the seconds of the day, and the clock on the wall says 00:00, my logic processor knows that it is time to go to bed.
However the system crystal informs me that it is not 00:00, it’s really 23:00, and we have 1 more hour of uptime to go before the good ol neural hard drive powers down.
Of course then my 5 hours of power-down time at night are reduced to 4, and I walk into work on Monday morning groggy, foggy, and basically unconscious as my system crystal is telling me that it’s not time to spin up the hard drive yet because it’s not 07:30, it’s still 06:30 and we should still be inputting caffeine in our pajamas. It takes roughly ten days to resynch the system.
All these concerns aside, the overriding purpose for having DST is not simply to give us an extra hour of light, its to save energy costs. Consider having a day with more dark than light. If the sun set an hour earlier all summer, and rose at 5:30 am or so, we would ‘waste’ that early hour of light and that extra hour of ‘daytime darkness’ would require all of us to expend more electricity lighting and heating our homes in those evening hours. What DST does is save daylight, and daylight is natural energy. So I for one support DST. I think we can take other minor annoyances to save our society energy costs.
I just moved to Arizona, which is one of 3 states that doesn’t do DST. And I LOVE not having it.
I hated adjusting every clock in my home 2 times a year. I hated trying to get the kids to get mentally and physically switched over.
I just don’t see the advantage. If you want more hours of sun, wake up earlier.
The only disadvantage of not having it is that most of the rest of the country has it, so half the year I’m on Pacific time and half on mountain time. It gets confusing when you call someone long distance to figure out how many hours different it is.
Alaska may join Arizona, Hawaii, and parts of Indiana and opt out of DST. There’s a bill in the legislature to abolish the time change – and this time it’s getting some traction. Of course, we’d then be an extra hour behind the Lower 48 during the summer.
As legislators were taking public testimony on the bill yesterday, it was clear that the reasons for abolishing DST are rather trivial – but the (alleged) inconvenience of opting out are also relatively trivial. It may be a case where the cost of changing outweighs any benefit (the story of the QWERTY keyboard).
The best of both worlds would be to abolish DST nationally. That way, everyone would stay in synch through the year, and we’d lose those two horrendous Sundays when traffic accidents spike (or so they say).
TheeGrumpy you make a good case. Much of Alaska gets insanely long daylight hours anyway during the summer. That argument doesn’t hold for most of the country, though.
Yeah that part would be a pain.
I guess I never realized it took so much out of people to switch a whole hour. I’ll admit crossing 6 time zones tends to take a little bit out of me. But changing one hour?
I my like 4 hours of daylight after work. That is the advantage to me. Waking up earlier would require much physical and mental anguish.
Thank you all for reminding me why I should never move to the Hoosier state.
Takes about three days to get my toddlers switched over. Three days worth of their bodies wanting to stay up an extra two hours (instead of the extra one hour they normally try to con us out of), and three days of extra sleepy and extra cranky kids in the Spring. Fall is a little better.
I live in Minnesota. In late December in gets dark by 4pm. It doesn’t get light out until 8. In June, its still twilight at 10pm, and bright by 5:00am. You can mess with those hours and it wouldn’t make a darn bit of difference to me - or my energy consumption - but it would to my computer systems (I’m an IT geek too, that gets to stay up all night while our systems change over to make sure nothing goes wrong with our time).
I’m with Pythagoras here. Back in high school, my astronomy teacher said that during WWII, daylights savings time ran year-round to help save on illumination costs.
Come to think of it, I would mind that now. It’s so depressing in October to set the clocks back and have it get dark at 5 PM (or earlier). I’d much rather have the light in the evening.
I personally would love to see us make daylight time standard and then quit changing the @#$%^ clocks! Switching times twice a year is disruptive and annoying.
RR
I lived 25 years in Saskatchewan, where they don’t switch the clocks back and forth, and the last years in Alberta, where we do. I can tell you from personal experience that there IS NO FREAKIN’ ADVANTAGE TO MESSING WITH THE TIME!!! Yes, I’ve heard all the arguments that it saves energy. I don’t care. The energy savings would have to be tremendous to make it worth all the screwed-up human function, and I don’t believe that the energy savings are all that great to begin with. In winter, everyone goes to and from work in the dark, and in summer, everyong goes to and from work in the light, whether you mess with the clocks or not.
Talking about the human effects, don’t forget the driving into the sun factor - for awhile every spring and/orfall, tons of commuters drive right into the sun either going to or coming from work; you just get past that stage, then you mess with the clocks, and you do it all over again. Twice the accidents for your money.
I say just leave the poor clocks alone. Leave my body alone - it knows what time it is (it really does - I never have to use an alarm clock), and it is not impressed by my trying to tell it differently twice a year.
