Comments

1
yeah. lets make this miserable part of the year EVEN WORSE by making it dark at 4:30.
2
Farmers? How about "I hate it because it's an example of our government imposing structures on people to appease industrial capitalism."
3
I think we should just shift 1/2 hour, and call it good.

I'd prefer to stay in sync with the changes of dawn/dusk, than jerk it around twice a year.
4
Two times zones is halfway to nowhere.

I could understand the idea of having the entire country on UTC. Sure, you'd have to get used to the idea of going into work at 5 PM, and getting home at 1 AM. But in exchange, you'd never have to change your watch again, and you'd never have to specify what time zone you were in when dealing with schedules and calendars.

But if you have two time zones, then you still have all the headaches of different time zones, *and* you have the headaches of having things start at a different time in different parts of the country. Or, even worse, everyone in the West Coast will be permanently shifted 2 hours away from noon, and all of us night owls will be permanently jet lagged. It's the worst of both worlds.
5
http://www.timeanddate.com/time/dst/hist…
@1, DST wasn't about the farmers so much as conserving fuel.

In a Stranger world, those sensible Europeans who are convinced GMOs = death are proof we need scary Genetically Engineered labels until the farmers stop supporting Monsanto. Therefore, the fact that so much of Europe uses DST means we should follow suit. Nothing they do is ever wrong.
6
Well someone's tired of getting to work at 5:30am to take that conference call with New York.

There's more to daylight than business.
7
I like DST as a practice, and also because it allows me to have something nice to say about GW Bush. I know that there are some people are quite passionately against it, but I consider them to be mentally ill. They should move to Arizona and be with all the other mentally ill.

As for the darkness that we will be plunged into next week, I have an elaborate coping mechanism. The early darkness gives us ample opportunity to enjoy all of the festive holiday lighting people put up this time of year, which lasts through the end of the year. And after the first of the year the days start getting longer, which means that Spring is coming, and along with it, the next season of DST.

As for the two time zones thing, that is an idea that only an economist could love.

8
Plus, driving home in the pitch black is such an effective way to kill pedestrians, bicyclists, and children this would be abundant headline fodder, it's even easier than guns.

See, even fair and balanced news gets it.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/2007/11/03/…
9
@7 - Well said Catalina.
10
I know that there are some people are quite passionately against it, but I consider them to be mentally ill. They should move to Arizona and be with all the other mentally ill.
Why not Nevada, a state that considers people with mental illness so subhuman (just like you do) that it ships them out of state so that it doesn't have to help them?
11
Daylight savings is not primarily for the benefit of farmers, as the third option in the poll/survey seems to imply. Nor is it for pedestrian 'safety' or for energy conservation. Instead, the retail/recreation industries benefit most from DST, and who continually lobby for it.

From:
http://www.history.com/news/8-things-you…

"5. Daylight saving time in the United States was not intended to benefit farmers, as many people think.
Contrary to popular belief, American farmers did not lobby for daylight saving to have more time to work in the fields; in fact, the agriculture industry was deeply opposed to the time switch when it was first implemented on March 31, 1918, as a wartime measure. The sun, not the clock, dictated farmers’ schedules, so daylight saving was very disruptive. Farmers had to wait an extra hour for dew to evaporate to harvest hay, hired hands worked less since they still left at the same time for dinner and cows weren’t ready to be milked an hour earlier to meet shipping schedules. Agrarian interests led the fight for the 1919 repeal of national daylight saving time, which passed after Congress voted to override President Woodrow Wilson’s veto. Rather than rural interests, it has been urban entities such as retail outlets and recreational businesses that have championed daylight saving over the decades."
12
@8, that was a wire-service (AP) story. There's no evidence that Fox News gets much of anything (except drooling troglodytes, of course).
13
Damn city folk, always blamin' shit on farmers. I tells ya.

Daylight saving is about maximizing use of daylight, it was never directly about farming or farmers. While the four contiguous time zones have been more-or-less static for 150 years, the US only dabbled with DST during the two world wars, the system we have now wasn't mandated until the '60s.

I think facts get conflated because for some reason we learn this was all Benjamin Franklin's idea—he thought of DST like Da Vinci invented the helicopter.
14
alison schraeger can suck it. the time zones are about circadian rhythms, not what business needs.

15
delirian dear, you really must learn to lighten up. Besides, Nevada observes DST, Arizona does not. So what would be the point?
16
Clocks are an arbitrary system for numbering different parts of the day, not something that exists independent of social agreement. We can change it to anything, and call it whatever we want. DST doesn't change time or have any effect whatsoever on the amount or use of daylight. If it's too dark to do something, do it when it's lighter.

"I get extra sleep this weekend!" No, you don't. You just decided it was okay to get up later.
17
I get it, it is just fun and games to use a disability as an insult. I'll bet you dressed up as a mental patient for Halloween, right? Haw, haw!

But drop the familiar tone, okay? I'm not your friend and I think you are being a bigoted asshole right now.
18
I think it's well past time we retire time zones altogether and shift to UTC or similar.

If the goal of DST is to make better use of daylight hours then having the clocks in Michigan, Maine, and Florida is doing far more harm than good.

By synchronizing to a global standard it would allow each state to establish more meaningful local practices that would be synchronized with the latitude, longitude, and school and business needs of each community.

The government can always set a loose standard for "bank hours" by designating when post offices, courts, and government offices open and close. Businesses which opt to can follow suit just as many businesses follow the government's lead on "bank holidays".

19
The only thing I hate more than having to change every clock and watch I own, is the people who call it "Daylight Savings Time".
20
"Only the government would believe that you could cut a foot off the top of a blanket, sew it to the bottom, and have a longer blanket." And apparently Catalina Vel-DuRay. :P
21
Time is just an idea man you can't, like, OWN time.
22
@18: And we could also measure temperatures in Kelvin, right? "Hot day today, it is nearly 300 K. This is much better than the 270 Ks that we had in the winter." And we can get rid of degrees in latitude. Seattle would be 0.83 N, 2.13 W (some values will be more easily expressed as fractions of pi). November 1st, 2013 at 7 PM PDT makes sense to a person, while the UNIX epoch time of 1383337806 is gibberish. There are a lot of changes that can be made, but in the end what matters is that people have to use them.
23
While we're making rules, can we agree on what day to dress up for Halloween? When people start dressing up a week in advance, it's like a party that thinned out because it spilled into the bedrooms. IF YOU'RE NOT DOING BLOW, EVERYONE BACK IN THE KITCHEN AND LIVING ROOM, WE'RE GONNA DANCE.

Here's my Draconian proposal:
Adults party on the 3rd Saturday of October, which will always precede the 31st. On the 31st, children can dress up and go trick-or-treating. No Friday night parties, no mid-week parties. 3rd Saturday. NO EXCEPTIONS.
24
Sorry that you're irate, delirian dear. It must be difficult going through life always looking for something to be insulted about.

And I do think it's interesting that you regard "mental illness" as a disability. Like with any other illness, It really depends on the type of illness and the severity of the condition, doesn't it?

But if you want to be regressive in your feelings about the disabled and the mentally ill so that you can find something to be offended by, by all means have at it.
25
I'm retired. Have been for a lotta years now. I don give a fuck what time it is. I get up when I feel like getting up and go to bed when I feel like going to bed.

Hell, most of the time I don't even know what day it is.
26
And Matt dear, I understand how the sun works. I just like having more daylight after work in the spring and summer. Is that so wrong?
27
@24: You can tell the real bigots because when confronted, they just dig on in and blame other people for taking offense (or call them politically correct, or whatever). And yes, mental illness is a disability, which is not a judgement. It is something that is treated to regain as much function as possible, just like any other disability or illness. It is laughable that you would say I have regressive views on the matter when you used the term as an insult.

I called you on being an asshole by using people with mental illnesses as a scapegoat and did it in a way that gave you plenty of room to back away from that statement and save face. That time is past. You aren't just just being bigoted right now, you are an actual bigot.
28
Economists are the woo-woo new agers of the academic world. They can say a lot of wonderful things, but in the end it's just meaningless pablum that even they don't understand.
29
I dislike daylight saving's time, changing the clocks is a hassle and it also really messes with schedules if you need to take a medicine at the same time every day (or give one to a dependent), since the drugs don't care about the clock change, and the time you chose to work with your schedule is now an hour off and you need to slowly shift it (how slowly depends on the med). But two timezones is not enough for the continental US. If we all used UTC, that might work, because it would be obvious that schools, jobs, stores, banks, etc. should not just run at the current named hours that they do. But with two timezones, I expect a lot of places would try to stick to the named hours, and it would be far worse for people'e health. People are affected by the sun in all sorts of ways. We already need to get High Schools pushed back into starting later after sunrise, and this would add this complex regional component to trying to make improvements. Yeah, it can be tough if you are doing business across timezones, which is why you can ask people to put the timezone of the appointment into the info or add it to your notes or personally convert all the time info you are given to your preferred timezone and not change your watch. Basically, it'd help a few people, but probably mess up far more people. I'd be willing to change my mind if studies said this would be a good idea, but one guy saying this would make his life easier? That is not an argument.
30
No! Please. Schrager's idea would be like permanent double Daylight Savings Time for the entire Pacific time zone region. Just when we're ready to stop getting up an hour early every day for stupid DST, she wants us to permanently get up two hours early? Absolutely not. Standard time is where it's at. Put it there, and leave it there.
31
My vote is to change to daylight savings year 'round. I vastly prefer having more sunlight later in the day. It's already getting dark at 6 p.m. Sunday night, that's going to change to 5 p.m.

We're already moving toward that. It used to be that daylight savings was for about a half a year. Now it's nearly eight months out of the year.
32
I favor UTC for business, train schedules, and so on. For day-to-day time-keeping where it doesn't matter if things synch up across large distances, just leave it up to whatever people want to do individually. I personally like the idea of GPS Local Time that calculates the precise local solar time based on the GPS coordinates of any clock's current location. Basically, noon at your current location is when the sun is as its highest point for the day, with the current time being relative to that. Or you could automatically calculate the percentage of daylight remaining and express local time that way.
33
Year round DST is a dumb idea. Sunrise at almost 9:00 am in December and January? Fuck that noise. School hours must be daylight hours.
34
So change school hours in the winter, then. Not the clocks.
35
Abolish DST. Data does not back up that it does anything desirable.
36
@ 34, assuming you're not yanking my chain, you are obviously not a working parent.
37
@22 Yes, Kelvin. Though I'd settle for Celsius. And the damn metric system while we're at it. And yes, radians are a better measurement system than degrees as well. We spend an awful lot of time teaching school kids one system only to teach them in a different system later on. Perhaps we could just rip off the band-aid and go to tau rather than pi though.

You do bring up an important point. In a UTC system the point of "midnight" would no longer align with the 0:00 hour so that could be confusing. However, midnight does not correspond with the middle of the night now anyway. There's a sway one way or the other depending on where in the time zone you live. It only corresponds if you live on the central meridian and are in standard time.

My other suggestion would be to use these "computers" that are all the rage now and publish times based on the actual longitude of the destination. You'd need to know GPS coordinates for precision, but within a city the difference wouldn't be substantial. We could then define "midnight" as the actual middle of the night at your longitude and count forward through your actual day. Given a GPS coordinate and a time would give a time coordinate precisely without all the tables of of time zones and DST data.

I used to have fantasies of decimal time in Middle School. Where are the French when you need them?
38
Delirian dear, calm yourself. You're distraught.

Mental illness runs the gamut, from full blown delusional/demented/psychotic, to what used to be considered "eccentric". Gay people used to be considered mentally ill, as were opinionated women.

You think I'm a bigot, I think you're a self-important twit. Which one of us is crazy?
39
No, it is not a label. "Eccentric" is not a mental illness, because it doesn't need to be treated. That is the key definition to any mental illness: the need for treatment due to disability. If a condition does not impair a person or cause significant distress, then it is not a mental illness. The APA was right to remove homosexuality from their diagnostic guide for that exact reason (40 years ago).

You clearly have some internal idea of what 'crazy' is and you have decided to slap the mental illness label on it. You have not thought this through and have only reacted based on your own bigoted stereotypes. But as far as the definition for twit, I think it actually applies more to you. You refuse to accept criticism and challenge your stereotypes. And when confronted with examples of your bigotry, you simply attack those who point it out instead of reflecting on whether they are right nor not. And you mock people by calling them 'dear' in every post. So yes, you are the twit here.

And by the way, 'crazy' is a ableist slur when used in a discussion of mental illness. Do you have any shame?
40
Just pick a time and stick with it, whether that alignment is what we call daylight or standard time
41
From what I read, there are a lot of posters out there who have way too much time on their hands. Look up why DST started as in the first place and let's get the republicans on the case. That's about all they seem to doing lately is wasting time, why not give them a real reason for their existence, as they don't seem to have any idea themselves.
42
@41: Sorry, but the only way to reform DST is to kill Obamacare. The Republicans won't budge on that.
43
If businesses think it's such a great idea to open an hour earlier in the summer, why don't they just do that? The stores all set "holiday hours" when they want to stay open later in the winter, why can't they set "summer hours" where they open and close an hour earlier? We don't need to screw around with the clocks to do that, do we?

I especially don't understand the people who want DST all year. If we're going to have the clocks the same all year (like we should), they should be set to Standard Time all year, so noon is around when the sun is highest. Set your business hours whenever you want to set them, so you can still go home and enjoy the evening. It's not like anybody is open 9:00 to 5:00 anyway.
44
I'll give up my Daylight Saving Time when you pry it from my cold, dead clock!
45
Kind of late to this thread, but:

The definition of disability in the ADA includes people with mental illness who meet one of these three definitions:

1 A physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities of an individual

2 A record of such an impairment

3 Being regarded as having such an impairment


http://www.womenshealth.gov/mental-healt…
46
Somebody ship this idiot first to Harbin, China, where on the shortest day of the year, the sun sets at 3:49 PM. Then, ship her over to Chengdu, where on the shortest days of the year, the sun doesn't rise until after 8 AM. This is what the US would be like with no daylight saving time and only 2 time zones. Working in darkness is AMAZING for productivity (ask any of my coworkers who work in the basement suites how they feel about that assessment).

Just set the clocks FORWARD, let schools start at sane hours (no more of this 7:10 first bell bullshit...it makes ZERO sense to start school over an hour before the average adult begins their work day), and make everyone happy they get to see a little sunshine (er, at least daylight) every day.
47
I always figured they had school start earlier than workday times so that kids could get dropped off by their parents if they weren't on the bus system, though it always made me confused that the school day ENDED so much earlier than parents tended to be off work.
48
It depends on where you live, @47. There's nothing terribly wrong with the school day starting a *little* before the average work day, but 1.5-2 hours earlier is extreme (especially when kids should be going to local schools that aren't far from home). Around these parts, they say it's due to (a) needing to use the buses to serve multiple schools (so the HS kids get the shaft of starting at the ass-crack of dawn) and (b) to keep the buses off the road during rush hour to reduce congestion. So, basically, at least a decent chunk of why the kids have to suffer is for the adults' convenience. Not cool. Also, bad for high school and to some extent middle school kids since their clock is set to stay up and wake later. But I digress a bit on that point (I, personally, think most schools should be approximately 8:30-4, with art, music, guided study halls, and extra-circulars consumed into the school day).

However, I will say, upon further reflection, what we need is *more* time zones, not fewer. I love your late sunsets in the summer up there in the PNW (okay, love/hate, since I'm 3 hours ahead when I get there and often just want to sleep on day 1, but come to adore seeing sun after 9 PM, which we just don't get), but I also understand that those come with late sunrises in the winter. By the same token, please understand the plight of the extreme E and NE, where the sun sets only a few minutes after 4 PM during EST in the winter (seriously...the earliest sunsets in Maine are around 4:01 PM, we drop below 5 PM in DC). And we don't get to enjoy the late summer sunsets...here in DC, we top off at around 8:30 PM, WITH DST...Maine barely bests 8 PM. There's no way we can get out and play a good rec sports game without daylight saving (we get only 25 minutes more daylight WITH daylight saving than you would get without). So maybe I should say...shift all the time zone boundaries a little east, creating at least one new one, and THEN move everyone to daylight time. Therefore, your summer sunsets and winter sunrises would comport with the clock and so would ours.

Please wait...

Comments are closed.

Commenting on this item is available only to members of the site. You can sign in here or create an account here.


Add a comment
Preview

By posting this comment, you are agreeing to our Terms of Use.