And why country singers use Tulsa Time.
This is the only post in this thread I understand. 
(I grew up in Saskatchewan where they don’t fuck around with the clocks - I have zero interest in doing so, since I know you can live just fine without it.)
And by the letter of the law–American law, at least–you’re right:
I’ve been getting that from some Texans while trying to set up a telconference. Do they believe in DST in Texas?
Maybe this isn’t very enlightened of me, but I’m actually beyond promoting getting rid of daylight saving time, and have moved on to taking a more disciplinary view of the subject. We should get rid of it AND PUNISH people who get in our way. Voting and due process are all well and good, but surely we’d all agree we’ve reached the point where it’s time to start hitting people, breaking windows, and the like. Particularly fiendish and entertaining punishments should be meted out to those who try to lay out what they imagine are logical reasons to use DST. Enough’s enough.
Move it ahead an hour, of course.
Daylight Avings Time? 
What–no Miller time joke as yet? You disappoint me.
I, too, think we should get rid of either daylight saving time or standard time–either one. Pick one and be done with it. It solves nothing and is PITA to deal with. I’d prefer more light in the evenings, please.
Why can’t we have year round daylight savings time? We just set our clocks an hour ahead and leave them there all year round. Done and done.
I dealt with this while working in a power grid control room where the clocks & computers remain on standard time year-round. Standard time continues to ‘exist’ after the time change…it’s just an hour behind daylight saving time (daylight time only ‘exists’ while the clocks are turned ahead). So EST=CDT during daylight saving months. You can also say ‘Eastern Prevailing Time’ which is EST or EDT depending on the time of year…same as just using ET.
Agreed, since I am about as far west as you can get and still be in the Eastern Time Zone. Last week of June it gets dark around 11pm.
Napier, the other thing is can we do something about numeric dates? MM/dd/yy or d/m/y or what. I always write 9 july 2010 so no one gets confused.
When I am supreme chancellor of the world:
- Fix the daylight savings time thing
- The numeric date thing gets standardized and punishment is by losing a finger or toe each time you deviate.
- St John NB and St John’s NF get to fight to the death over who gets to keep their town name.
- (Used to be a fight to the death for the Roughriders and the Rough Riders, but that’s over)
- Mission accomplish. Resign before the revolution ousts me. But all the saskachewaners would love me because two things favour them.
A fairly big issue you then run into is the dark mornings in the northern latitudes in the wintertime.
In Chicago, for example, in late December, the sun doesn’t rise until around 7:15 a.m., and that’s under Standard time. Go to year-round DST, and the sun won’t rise until after 8 a.m. in Chicago for pretty much all of December and January.
It looks like you might live near Seattle – you’d be in even worse shape. At its latest (at the end of December / beginning of February), the sun doesn’t rise in Seattle until just before 8 a.m., which would be just before 9 a.m. under year-round DST.
In the mid-1970s, during the energy crisis, the U.S. government instituted DST during the winter (I’m pretty sure this was during the winter of 1974-1975), with the thought that additional sunlight in the evening would help with energy savings. There was a lot of complaining about kids having to go to school in the dark, etc., and it was discontinued after a year or two.
Well, you are a poster after my own heart.
I like yyyymmdd format. I have never seen yyyyddmm, so I think yyyy??? always resolves to yyyymmdd. Also, if you treat its 8 digits as though it were a single number, it sorts in true date order. It also has fixed width and requires only numerals, both of which are convenient if you program in a wide range of environments.
If I had been able to influence things early on, or if I were chancellor instead, I’d create a 5 day week and add a sixth day that only occurs on leapyears. I’d make the day 100,000 seconds long, 100 seconds to the minute, 100 minutes to the hour, 10 hours in the day. I’d also build a special arena in which I’d deal with people who wanted to introduce DST.
If they don’t use 4 digits for the year, then I am completely lost, because we are in a bad part of the century for abreviated dates. At work I have admissions coming from home, from other nursing facilities and the hospital. Most of my patients are born before 1931, and a have recently had one born in 1912. Okay… since every referring facility uses a different format, want to tell me when they were born? 12/08/05.
What the heck. Ok my patient probably isn’t 105 years old, but I hate guessing. Standardize this for the whole world. Personally I like biggest to smallest, making today 10/07/2010 but again, anything is better than chaos.
My birthday is 8 September. I accuse my mom of not knowing when I was born… I must have been a foundling, because she filled it in wrong on many many forms.
But back to daylight savings time, I hate how the morning gets swallowed up in my north west home. And light until 11 pm. You try convincing the son of a doper that its not his bedtime when it is completely bright out. This year he can tell time somewhat, so its better, but he still thinks Im going to work way too early at 7pm.
So split the difference–change the time to halfway between regular and daylight saving time and leave it there.
BTW--www.timeanddate.com is fantastic for coordinating dates/times between places.
Schedule Once is an invaluable tool for scheduling people across time zones. You can email each participant with the info they need from their perspective.
As kenobi mentioned, schools starting in the dark is a problem. Bigger than anyone might think. I taught in a high crime area and teachers had to be at school at 6:45 am. It could be a little disconcerting to be dropped off for work with no access to the building itself and no car to wait in.
But the main problem is with elementary children having to walk to school in the dark. It’s just to dangerous for a number of reasons and parents become very vocal about it when the subject comes up. I can’t say that I blame them.
And then, of course, the farmers say that all that extra sunlight on DST ruins their crops in the dry seasons. Can’t have that.
Thanks for that. I’ll have to try to remember that site. It’s the pits working for a global company where some people (looking at you, IT) are so US centric that times for things like server outages are only given in terms of US time zones. How are all the rest of us 60,000 supposed to figure out when 6-7 pm EDT is in our local zone? Haven’t they ever heard of UTC?
I constantly run into this too, and I think I know why. People are totally in thrall to television, and the new TV seasons come out in the fall and are heavily advertised. So most people see new shows advertised at “X:00 EST” over and over, but do NOT see comparable advertising during Daylight Time (EDT). This causes them to use “EST” to mean “time” with no more thought than they use “o’clock.”
Whenever I ding someone for this they always claim to be vaguely aware it’s Daylight Time, but they just didn’t stop to think EST stood for something specifically NOT Daylight Time.
Purely a product of television advertising.
But don’t most shows premier in September or October?