Arizona? No thanks… but Hawaii is a possibility! But that brings up an interesting point. If DST is go great, why do we let states opt out? It just adds another level of confusion.
Perhaps you don’t have young children who don’t take kindly to having their Circadian rhythm changed twice during the school year for no reason.
I honestly didn’t care much before I had kids. But now, I curse the utter pointless stupidity of Daylight Savings Time for the reek that it is. It doesn’t help my attitude that I’ve seen the enlightened side - I grew up somewhere that doesn’t change the clocks and life went on without calamity ensuing.
Daylight saving time is a blessing when you have small children. I dreaded them waking up at 5:30 in the morning. At least after the clocks changed I’d get another hour’s sleep.
Actually, William Willett shares the blame for promoting the hell out of doing such a thing, even if Hudson came up with it earlier. His original proposal would have been even more obnoxious. He wanted to adjust the clocks by 20 minutes each week over a period of 4 weeks in the fall and spring. At least Benjamin Franklin was joking when he proposed it.
If we want to use daylight better seasonally, change business hours semi-annually, not the clocks. The next step is to do away with time zones and have everybody use UCT. OK, your local businesses may open at 1:00 AM and close at 11:00 AM. So what. Yeah, I know, AM and PM mean “ante” and “post” meridian. Again, so what. If that bothers, you, THEN we go to using 24 hour clocks.
If you can’t handle a one hour change twice a year perhaps you should look at having your license revoked. Or maybe you could go to bed an hour earlier to make up for the hour you will lose.
I’m amazed at how a one hour change can throw some people into a complete panic.
Simply because I enjoy having lots of light when I get home and I hate it being dark at 4:30 PM in December I do wish they would just leave it at daylight saving time.
I grew up in an area where we did change clocks twice a year and life also went on without calamity ensuing.
Doesn’t work for me. I still wake up tired even if I get the same amount of sleep. Circadian rhythm is a cruel mistress.
Seems unfair some people are unfazed by it. Or don’t experience jet lag.
At any rate, we all adjust. Doesn’t mean we have to like it.
My understanding is part of the issue is the boundaries of the time zones are not really correct to begin with. For instance, Detroit should be in the Central Time Zone but when time zones were established lobbied to be in the Eastern Time Zone, to be on the same time as NYC.
Obviously this is somewhat less necessary today, except in areas like NW Indiana where the orientation is toward a larger city in another state, so it makes sense to switch, but even Indiana should be in the Central Time Zone to begin with.
So those places are already effectively in Daylight Savings Time to begin with and advancing them pushes them too far ahead.
Just out of curiosity, would anyone know of how to do this.
Using the Prime Meridian as a starting point and dividing the Earth into 24 time zones. That would give you 15 degrees for each time zone.
Then starting at the Prime Meridian, use 7.5 degrees east and west of that line, to form the “base” time zone. Continuing this on west, it would be interesting to see what the time zones in the USA would look like, if used as such without any regard to political boundaries.
I’m amazed at how the idea of NOT making a one hour change would throw so many people into a complete panic. Leaving things alone frightens people more than making a mindless change and then back again.
nm
Why don’t we just stay on Daylight Wasting Time? Absolutely nothing is accomplished by DST other than annoying the hell out of people.
This comes up twice a year, every year. The further north you are the more you appreciate daylight saving time. I like to get 9 holes of golf in after work, and that would be impossible for most of the summer without DST.
Nobody’s panicking, we’re just not interested in having sunlight streaming in our windows at 4:30am all summer long. Have that sunshine late in the day, after work, so you can go outside and do something with it.
As an aside, the idea of businesses changing their time twice a year is 10x as ridiculous and disruptive as DST could ever be. At best it has the exact same effect as DST, good and bad. At worst businesses won’t follow the rules and everyone’s schedule will change haphazardly, depending on the whim of their bosses. Have fun commuting when your business hours change at a different time than the trains and schools.
Get a pair of binoculars and a good bird guide, and go out at 4:30 and “do something with it”, when there are no golfers dictatorially ordering your lifestyle into daypart blocks when activities are officially sanctioned. Be prepared to explain to the suspicious police what you are doing out that that hour of the bright and sunny day. Or just get up at 4:30, wake the kids up, have a leisurely home-cooked breakfast out on the deck, before they meander off to school with all their homework done when they’re fresh and there is nothing on TV.
I for one really appreciated waking up this past Sunday at what my body felt was 5:30 to make a change in our Citrix server environment (provisioned) to account for a bug that only takes place when the time changes. Thankfully, my management didn’t make me do the change at the time of the clock change, but it was still 2 hours of work that shouldn’t have had to be done (yes, if Citrix had fixed the bug, it wouldn’t have been needed either), and it’s not the first computer related work that I’ve had to do to account for arbitrary time change.
Personally, I blame it on the ‘early birds,’ that won’t wait until a reasonable time of day to get things started and insist that everyone that sleeps past 6AM is just lazy.
Sometimes compromise pleases everyone, sometimes no one. This would be the latter.
You’d only get a half hour of extra daylight in the summer, and only a half hour of extra morning sleep in the winter. Might as well just leave things as they are now.
Nobody wants to get up and go outside in the morning, we want to wake up. We want to be active in the evening. That’s why people go out and party at night and not at 4:30 am (unless they stay up UNTIL 4:30 am).
FYI to the whole thread, to be an insufferable pedant - “binocular” is already plural (the “bi”) and it’s daylight saving time, not savingS time.
You need to get out more. Which, of course, is the purpose of DST.
Ditto me! AND my anniversary!
Yeah, well, you see, that kind of gets at the really evil part of Daylight Saving Time. When Arizona is the voice of sanity, what twisted worm hole have we fallen into???