I’m trying to figure out the reasons why we just got rid of a perfectly good Daylight Saving Time and replaced it with an atrocious substitute, Standard Time. Just when the waning hours of afternoon light start to become depressing, BAM, another hour is gone just like magic. Who thinks that is a good idea?
I left work at 5pm sharp today and it was already dark. Better get used to it. There is about 3 more months of that coming up. People say, “Well, it will be more light in the morning”. Who gives a fuck about that? You think I am going to play catch with my daughter at 7 am? Leave daylight at the end of the day where it belongs.
They say we do it for farmers. That’s a big fat lie. Farmers are in tune with nature and work according to the animal’s schedules. Then they say that we do it for the tiny schoolchildren that have to wait for the bus in the morning. Kids are tough and they will adapt to anything. Plus, it makes it harder for child molesters to see them.
Somebody be for this crime against humanity. Speak up.
It’s bad enough having to wake up early in the morning when it’s light outside, but having to wake up when it’s still dark really sucks.
Plus, if we never went back to Standard Time, I’d never get my hour back. I want my hour back, dammit! In fact, I want more hours. I think we should turn the clock back an hour every weekend, by golly! Or even every night!
I’d prefer it if it stayed light more than 9 or 10 hours a day. Who do I need to talk to about that? This “light at 7:30 and dark at 5:00” is getting old, and it’s only October. I wanna go for a pre-work run at 6am, please, and also have time to muck around outside after work for a couple hours if I feel like it.
ST at 45 degrees north just means that, come winter solstice, everything’s fucking dark. I don’t care what’s done to the clocks. It’s dark when you get up, it’s dark when you get home. There is no way to fix the sun when you get less than 9 hours between sunrise and sunset. Hawaii doesn’t change time as it’s always light; why the hell should we change times when it’s always dark?
For the last several years I’ve been proposing that come spring we turn the clocks ahead 30 minutes and leave them the fuck alone foreverafter, but no one ever listens to me.
The problem here isn’t standard time, it’s the idiotic practice of shifting the clocks twice a year. If we stopped observing daylight savings time altogether, you would have had the past month or two to get used to the shorter days in which case you could bitch about the REAL problem, which is that you live too damned close to the Arctic Circle!
If you want to get home before sunset year round you have two choices. You can either move south or start work earlier. period. Meanwhile, leave my fucking clock the hell alone. Daylight saving time is one of the most ludicrous pieces of crap forced down our collective throats ever. I’m sure that when Franklin suggested it, he must have been joking.
The main result of DST is to ensure that the entire nation (except Arizona, Alaska, and Hawaii) have jet-lag for a week every Spring and bitch about driving home in the dark for an extra two weeks every Fall. You cannot legislate the Earth’s axial tilt and no amount of adjusting your clockmis going to give you more than 10 hors of daylight in Massachusetts in November. Forcing the southern half of the U.S. to change their clocks twice a year for your convenience is a complete crock of shit and that is the first law that I will burn when I become Supreme Ruler of the Universe[sup]TM[/sup]. You have been warned!
Do you know how locked we are into Standard Time? It’s not a matter of “like”, it’s a matter of that one poor bastard at Microsoft who’s responsible for programming the Windows clock. That man (for sake of argument) has already figured out which cities are in which timezones all over the damn world, which states and provinces recognize Daylight Savings Time and which don’t, all so that every Windows program which uses the clock can tell the right time no matter where the computer actually lives. Now you want to break that?
Fine. You get to distribute patches to every Windows PC in existence so that 90% of the scheduling software in the world isn’t wrong six months of the year.
Or are you just proposing ending DST in the United States? Oh, well that’s better then. Now you just have to explain to every cross-border business in the continent why 9:00AM in Windsor is an hour earlier than 9:00AM in Detroit 6 months a year.
Seriously, it’s not worth the headache. The clocks work now; just buy yourself a full-spectrum lamp and deal with it.
I’ve got some news for you. Congress has already screwed with DST. It starts a week earlier and ends 3 weeks later next year.
As SR of the U[sup]TM[/sup], I will allow countries whose entire borders are above the 45th parallel to play silly games with their clocks. But they’ll still only have 6 hours of daylight in Sweden in the winter.
You picked the wrong example here. I am an IT consultant and that sounds like a win-win for me.
I will tell you I am from the South (Louisiana) and I am stuck with this piece of shit just about for good. I am asking for some help here. Southern pride and unity my ass. For the record, I thought this was a crap idea when I was home too. I can’t just go to work early because I have to stay until past five anyway. Billing for overtime is nice but it pisses people off after a while and doesn’t fix the problem at hand.
Let me assure you, DST is not for the farmers. Saskatchewan, the Bread Basket of the World ™, does not observe any clock-screwing-around-with. I lived the first 25 or so years of my life without clock-screwing-around-with, and it was a-okay. And yes, we do live too close to the North Pole.
Another new supporter of Rhubarb for Supreme Ruler of the Universe here. Where can I get your bumperstickers and campaign buttons?
Standard Time is a logical, astronomically meaningful timekeeping system where sunrise and sunset are more or less symmetrical around local noon (discounting variations within a time zone). Daylight Savings Time is just a klugey distortion of that handy simple system that’s pretty much redundant when the days are long and useless when the days are short.
Where I used to work, they changed the schedule in the summertime: standard office hours were 9 to 5 during the school year and 8 to 4 in the summer. Made much more sense (of course, DST was still imposed on top of that).
And the reason that the autumn afternoons get dark too early is to reconcile you to the outdoor Christmas lights going up. Remember back at the end of September we were foaming at the mouth around here over brazenly premature commercial Christmas displays in what was practically still summer? Now it’s mmmmm, shiny sparkly Christmas lights twinkling through the chilly dusk, warm bright shop windows with pretty things inside. Just as God and Nature intended.
Do us all a favor and change your screen name to Wise and Benificent Captor.
I can’t stand it when people say we should abolish DST. These people obviously feel that a good time in July is to eat dinner at 5pm in a darkened room in front of the TV, then going to bed at 8. Which is fine for them, if they choose to live their lives in that sad and sorry way. But they want to ruin the late sunset dinners for the rest of us. Bah, I say. Bah.
Another vote for permanent DST. I’m never going to have time to do anything in the mornings with that light - I want it in the evenings when it does me some good!
And I thought the same thing when I was riding the bus as a kid, so there!
The only argument I ever heard that makes a bit of sense for keeping standard time around is the poor kids waiting for the bus in the dark. I am sympathetic for them, but if a couple of kids need to get run over so that I can leave work in the daylight, so be it.
After a few of em get splatted on the highway, they would change the school hours anyway. Problem solved.
We don’t need light at 7 AM. I’m still sleeping then. I do need light at the end of the day when I’m awake, out of work, and can enjoy it. Daylight savings year round!
