Have you thought of:
I personally loathe DST. All it does is force people to get up an hour earlier. Something they could do on their own if they actually valued that nonexistent “extra hour of daylight”.
Standard time is exactly as arbitrary as daylight time with respect to the sun, moon, and stars.
Agreed. I waste an hour resetting all my clocks, so eliminating the time change would give me back my time.
It’s not the getting up an hour early that’s the point. It’s having an extrahour of daylight after standard business hours that is useful. An extra hour of daylight isolated before work is of no useto me, even if I’m awake.
No it isn’t - it is set such that noon is when the sun is directly overhead on the meridian that defines the time zone.
There is lots of talk in the UK of keeping BST all year round, but surely if we are going to keep the clocks on one time we should keep them on GMT, as that is the proper time zone.
Having said that, there is also talk of keeping BST for winter and having “double summer time” in summer. Although it goes against my sense of scientific correctness, it would be neat having daylight until midnight in early summer. 
And defining noon as when the sun is directly overhead is arbitrary. “Noon” is an arbitrary concept.
How so?
It’s arguable whether Daylight Savings has any useful effect – as has already been stated, the idea is to shift “useful daylight” from very early in the morning (when most people are asleep) into the evening (when most people are awake, and might find an extra hour of daylight useful or enjoyable).
A big reason why it’s not done year round is that, in the more northern latitudes, it makes dawn occur pretty late in the morning. For instance, in Chicago (at about 42 degrees North), the latest time at which the sun rises is 7:18 a.m. (which it does from around December 28th through around January 10th). Push that an hour later, with DST, and it means that most people who operate on a “normal” schedule (including most school-age kids) are going to work or school in the dark. I was in 4th grade when the US tried year-round DST in 1974, and it was pretty freaky, getting on the bus in pitch darkness.
Conversely, adding an extra hour of sunlight to winter afternoons might not do much for many people. Again, in Chicago, the earliest sunset is at 4:20 p.m. Shifting that to 5:20 just means that it’s getting dark as many people are commuting home, rather than already being dark at that point (though perhaps that would be a benefit for traffic safety, but you’d simply be stealing safe driving light in the evening from the morning).
But only on March 21st.
It will make it harder for the child molesters to see them.
There is something soul-crushing about leaving work in twilight. It makes me want to crawl into a hole and die. My house gets extra-filthy during winter because I just don’t have the will to do anything once I get home in the damned dark.
When I was a kid I wondered why the new day didn’t start at 6am (which of course wouldn’t be 6am anymore in such a system), with nighttime beginning at 6pm; these of course match dawn and dusk, which still makes a heck of a lot more sense to me.
Tecnically, we move around it. But from our perspective, We’ve created more light.
People are also forgetting that we no longer have DST to save energy, but to stimulate the economy. Ice cream parlors must love it.
What I have a hard time getting my head around is how people’s bodies have such a hard time adjusting. I don’t disbelieve it, but it’s never been an issure for me. Sunday may be a little weird, but by Monday morning I’m fully back to normal.
Move to Tromso?
I was reading about this last week, when Europe went off DST - I hadn’t realised, for example, that the UK did in fact try permanent DST from 1968 to I think 1971 (any Dopers remember that? I guess it wasn’t that popular if they switched back.) And we had double DST during the war.
Meanwhile, before the US went to standardised DST in the 60s (with a couple of opt-out states), things were chaotic there, with numerous different localities having different DST rules. Apparently there was one bus route in Virginia or somewhere that required seven clock changes along the way, during DST changeover periods. And train companies had to produce numerous timetables to cope with all the local DST rules.
[Arizonan] What is this Daylight Savings Time of which you all speak? [/AZ]
Hey, somebody was gonna say it.
Twilight, hell! I left the house at 7:00 AM this morning, in full darkness. Fuck that.
Quite right. It’s Daylight Saving Time.
I don’t know what it is about the word “saving” that makes everybody want to stick an “s” on the end. It’s no more logical than calling it “Daylights Saving Time”.
I’m not such a stickler. The point I was trying to make was, we don’t observe DST here in Arizona.
I wouldn’t care if it didn’t get light until noon if I could have a few hours of daylight after I get home from work.
There has always been a surplus of S’s in the world. They have to go somewhere. That’s why we have Trivial Pursuits and Scalextrics.
With the growing popularity of the internet and immediate communications across timezones, this is less and less a convenience for us Arizonans. We have to track where we are in relation to the other zones during each shift. This week we’re equal to Pacific time. Next week we’ll be equal to Mountain time.