Rather than resurrecting any number of zombies, lets discuss Daylight Saving Time
NO S!. It is not Daylight Savings
It is such an antiquated idea. We have electric lights now for the evenings.
Someone here, can’t remember who, said it best. The problem with daylight saving discussions is that people try to get 16 hours of daylight out of 12 hours of sun. Or somehing like that.
My personal opinion? Get rid of it. It is inconvenient and now serve no useful purpose.
I love daylight savings time, can’t come soon enough for me. In the UK, we have to wait til the end of March and I’m literally counting the days. If it was up to me, we would stay on it permanently, even though that would mean we would never align with GMT.
Redraw the time zone boundaries in a manner rational to where, and how, people live and do business TODAY and not to what best suited railroad execs in 1883. (Why should Indianapolis be on Boston time?)
Then stick to that.
For a bonus, under “nice if you can swing it”, also rerationalize what are standard “business hours” for both work and school.
By now we ought to just go by a global Zulu time that ignores the sun and set local schedules to whatever is convenient. 12:00 PM = solar noon hasn’t been true since the adoption of time zones, let alone Daylight Savings.
In an ideal world, we wouldn’t need DST because our lives wouldn’t be structured around arbitrary work and school schedules. Schools should start, say, 1 hour after sunrise regardless of when that is or what time zone the school is in, and the length of the day should vary based on the amount of sunlight in a given day. Same for work schedules. If that means working 8 hour days in the summer and 6 hour days in the winter, then good.
Absent that sweeping societal change, permanent DST is certainly preferable to permanent ST. As groggy as I am today, it was very nice having some extra late evening sun yesterday.
How does that work? School starts at 8:15 today and 8:13 tomorrow? Today I work from 8:15 to 5:57 and tomorrow its 8:13 to 5:58? It’s not like sunrise/sunset change times only twice a year- it’s every day.
This is where I stand, although I’m also fine with continuing as it is. Most of the people who complain so much about the change in spring don’t really have such rigid schedules that they need to adapt in a day.
And I couldn’t care less if there’s light when I’m commuting or at work. It’s after work that I care about, those glorious days in spring when I can be outside doing something after work.
The notion of permanently changing what we’re gonna call the time (i.e., year-round Daylight Saving Time, no more Standard Time) seems ludicrous to me.
Set rational schedules for activities. If it makes sense to have school permanently start at 7:30 AM, propose it at the PTSA meeting. Don’t redefine 7:30 as 8:30.
I’ll grudgingly acknowledge that DST makes sense as something to transition to for the sunnier half of the year, instead of changing everybody’s schedule.
Exactly. I don’t really care because changing the clocks does not bother me at all, but if you are going to pick one time year-round, the one that just started with more evening light is the one to do. That’s the time when the sun outside actually means something to daily life.