Why are’nt time changes on the same day every year? This year it is on my anniversary. I do not remember it being on this day ever. This got me thinking who makes the decision which day time changes? Is there some secrete organization making decision effecting all our esteemed repose?
It’s always on the first Sunday of November since 2007. Before that, it was the last Sunday of October. Unless you celebrate your anniversary on days rather than dates, it isn’t surprising that the dates didn’t match before.
Yeah, what’s with that? And my birthday seems like it’s never on the same day twice. I mean, last year it was on a Saturday and this year it was on a Sunday. How am I suppose to be able to plan ahead when the day keeps changing?! Not Good Enough, I say.
You too? I thought I was the only one. I hate how they keep changing the date of Easter Sunday too, not to mention the weekends, every bloody year the weekends all fall on different dates to the previous year.
I was thinking for a while that the OP was lamenting that the daylight saving time changes don’t happen on the same date all across the world, making time conversion a bitch. Sure, it’s the first Sunday in November in Canada and the US, but it’s all over the calendar elsewhere - Europe is the last Sunday in March to the last Sunday in October, for example. Also, some clocks change at 02:00, some at 01:00, and some at 00:00, depending on where in the world you are!
That really makes it hard to do proper “what time is it there?” conversions without knowing a whole bunch of little rules.
Or having a modern mobile phone or iPod, which can take care of those things for you automatically. 
Well, if you’re setting up a conference call with someone in New Zealand, say, it can make a diff whether you’re calling them at 7 AM or 6 AM their time. THere is a website The World Clock — Worldwide that shows current time for many places, but it’s too late – if I want to set up a phone call for next Tuesday, it doesn’t show me what the time will be THEN, only what the time is NOW.
Also, this doesn’t seem to be Chicago-related, so I’m moving it to the forum called “General Questions.” No problem, svertim, it’s not a rules violation or anything serious, it’s just that you’ll most likely get better responses.
This is pretty mild, but one of my pet peeves is people who try to quote a time in GMT (for a global conference call invitation, for example) but don’t know how to do it correctly when daylight saving time is in effect. Microsoft Outlook is the worst offender. “The GMT offset above does not reflect daylight saving time adjustments.” :rolleyes: Gee, that kind of defeat the whole purpose of using GMT, don’t you think?
Another annoyance in North America is people who keep saying “eastern standard time” when they really mean “eastern daylight time”. I do not think the word means what you think it means.
Since it was recently changed to the first week in November that answers the first part of the question. However, it does not address the second. Who made the decision to change from the last Sunday in October to the first Sunday in November?
That is correct. So it would be reasonable to assume various groups or individuals make time change decisions. Who are they?
It’s a federal law, so Congress has to pass it in the U.S.
I assume that the equivalent federal bodies do it in other countries.
And it makes sense for it to be at different times in different parts of the world, because of differing latitudes. We think of the British Isles as being at about the same latitude as the US, but they’re actually much further north. Britain has similar temperatures to us because it’s warmed by the Gulf Stream, but hours of daylight don’t care about that.
Underneath all the snark above are some real answers. First is that Daylight Savings time was moved a week later in the year 3 years ago. So if your anniversary is Nov. 7, then no, it wasn’t ever on your anniversary before. Because it’s based on a day of the week (Sunday), rather than a date, the date is going to change because there aren’t an even number of days in every month. The same happens with Thanksgiving, which some years is on my birthday, but not always.
As long as Congress keeps it on the first Sunday of November, it will be on your anniversary some years, but not others. I’m sure someone more math inclined could tell you how often, but at a wild guess based on my faulty memory of my birthday/Thanksgiving coincidences, I’d speculate that once every five to seven years, the switch will be on your anniversary.
And jeez, why do we need time zones anyway? Wouldn’t the world be a simpler place if it were the same time everywhere? It works for China, why not everyone else? And maybe the U.N. can pass a law making the sun rise and set the same time every day, everywhere.
I’m all about simplicity.
In the EU it’s governed at the European level by a Directive - a peculiar type of instrument in EU law which is adopted by the European bodies and creates an obligation for the member states to adopt national laws implementing the Directive into their national systems.
Grr, it annoys the piss out of me too. The SDMB used to be like this: it set a “GMT/UST standard” on the server that actually changed based on daylight savings time in Chicago. :smack: It has been fixed for several years now, but it seems that Apple is now prone to this dumbass phenomenon: iPhone alarm bug.
If you can work out what the time is now, surely it’s not that hard to work out what the time will be next Tuesday? Just add or subtract the appropriate number of hours, pretty much.
Because all we care about is the time zones. No one cares if it’s EST, or EDT, or MST or PDT or whatever. I’m in the Pacific Time Zone here, and if I tell my friend in DC I’m calling her at noon Eastern time, she’ll expect a call at noon. If I say I’m calling at Eastern Daylight Time or Eastern Standard Time, she’ll… still expect my call at noon! Imagine that!
So yes, the word does mean what we think it means. It’s meaningless!
…until the world’s staggered daylight savings times kick in. This time of year I try to give to my overseas colleagues an absolute value: “I will call you at 17.00 GMT” for example. They can then work out the relative value where they are, whether they have daylight savings on or not. Unfortunately this only seems to confuse them even further.
It does have a specific meaning for state/province that doesn’t observe daylight saving. This is the case in Arizona and Saskatchewan, and was also the case in Indiana. For most cases, however, simply saying “eastern time” or “eastern” will suffice. It is shorter, unambiguous, and correct. Saying “eastern standard time” when daylight time is in effect is just wrong and annoying.
I assume you meant that post as a joke, but I have a personal interest in time and calendar matters, and I’ve had a preference for that scheme for quite a while. After all, the time on the clock is just a number. Why not have the whole world run on one standard, say, GMT? 17:00 GMT would be the same number everywhere in the world. Of course, it would be late afternoon in Europe, some time around noon in the U.S. and the dead of night in Australia, but the number could be the same everywhere. Rather than asking your colleague on the other side of the globe which time it is with him, you’d ask him for his office hours, and he’d say something like 20:00-4:00 GMT - within which period you’d find the appropriate time for your call.
Swatch made an attempt at this, together with decimalising time. They subdivided the 24 hours of the day into 1,000 units called “beats” (each of 86.4 seconds). 0 = 1000 beats would be midnight in Switzerland; 500 beats would be noon in Switzerland; 250 would be 6am, 750 would be 6pm, etc. They made watches showing time in beats, but they sold poorly.