'Stupid' Daylight Saving Time Ritual Continues. But Why? – Slashdot

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Another group will emerge saying that it was much better when we had it, and we should go back, blah blah blah blah.
Nothing will change except a different chorus will be complaining. Someone will always be pissed off and airing their grievance. It’s much more about the joy of whining then any real issue.
All the time you can find somebody to complain about something. But now it appears a majority wants DST to go.
A majority may want to end it, but they don’t agree on how to replace it.
Some want year round standard time.
Others want year round DST.
I prefer keeping DST. I like having an extra hour of daylight in the summer without commuting to work in the dark during the winter.
maybe they should have 6 months of each?

maybe they should have 6 months of each?
Brilliant! That’s a great compromise solution.
Cool and we can just switch our clocks!
It’s mostly automatic these days, they can’t even whine about having to change their clicks.

A majority may want to end it, but they don’t agree on how to replace it.
If they ever decide to abolish it then the only intelligent answer is to put it in the middle. That way nobody gets to “win” (or gloat).
Nobody wants to end it though, especially the politicians and press. They all enjoy the whining and complaining too much. This press gets two days of free stories a year and the politicians get to go around saying “I know, I’m working to abolish it, vote for me!”

Some want year round standard time. Others want year round DST.
For at least three decades now I’ve been an advocate of splitting the difference.
There’s nothing hallowed about a one-hour increment. Park the clocks half-way between DST and Standard, and leave them there forevermore. Each side gets some of what it wants, and some of what it doesn’t. It’s a simple compromise that will put this fucking twice-a-year bullshit behind us.

I like having an extra hour of daylight in the summer without commuting to work in the dark during the winter.
What about shifting your working hours a bit around(*), so you drive at a time when there’s still light?
Or do you have one of those jobs where you absolutely have to show up exactly when a specific magic number shows on the clock?
(*): instead of jumping suddenly a whole hour forward or backward, slowly follow the sunrise.
This isn’t as stupid idea as it seems: one big argument for more flexible working hours (i.e.: arrange your 8hours shift as you wish as long as everybody on the team is present between 11:00 and 15:00), is that more people can avoid rush hour and driver when there are less traffic jams.
This both lowers time lost to commuting and reduces risk of accidents.
(I am assuming that most /.ers are working jobs that can afford some fexibility (e.g.: IT admins) rather than jobs with fixed opening hours when the whole team needs to be around before opening (e.g.: working in a restaurant) )
I’d be curious to see a survey normalize the results to the latitude of the responder. I’m right near the 46th parallel, and the sun was already rising at around 7:50 before the time change. At the latest, it would have been around 8:45 if we stayed in DST, and I’m pretty far towards the eastern edge of my time zone. I hate changing the time, and living in Arizona really cemented that, but I also think it would be absurd to adjust it according to the whims of people who are more minimally impacted by it.

I’d be curious to see a survey normalize the results to the latitude of the responder.
This^
50% is also not the vast majority.

You need to read that poll again.
    Permanent daylight-saving time (later sunrises and sunsets): 50%,
    Permanent standard time (earlier sunrises and sunsets): 31%,
    No preference: 12%,
    Not sure: 7%,
Where’s the option: “Put it in the middle”?
Does no pollster have a brain?
If Atlantic, Eastern, Central, Mountain, and Pacific permanently became UTC+3.5, 4.5, 5.5, 6.5, and 7.5, The EU would almost certainly do the same thing within a year.
It’s been proposed there, too, with “great idea, but it would cause too much confusion if the US didn’t do it” as the usual reason for not doing it.
If you really wanted to optimize the change, permanently shifting by +40 or +45 would be even more optimal… reducing the really painful period with super-super-late dawn down to about 2-3 weeks,
No, lots of people want DST to stay and standard time to go. There’s a big difference. Permanent standard time means earlier sunrise and less evening light in the summer, which people dislike. Permanent DST means waking up in the dark in the winter, which is actually bad for you.
Florida is exploring a potential loophole:
* Move the part of Florida that’s presently in Eastern time into Atlantic time and simultaneously abolish its observance of DST. Which would have exactly the same effect as permanent EDT, but skirts the present rule’s lack of permanent DST as an option
* Do the same thing with the western Panhandle (move to Eastern, abolish DST), if and only if Alabama does the same thing. They like the idea, but don’t want to deal with being a different time than than their friends
No. If you think it’s too warm or cold, you adjust your thermostat, not redefine Celsius/Fahrenheit just to keep your setting intact.
Want to wake up later? Move your business’ open hours, not redefine time zones.
I was getting ready to make a similar statement, so I’d argue that it does. Proposing a strawman alternative isn’t useful.
Basically, our what our clocks say the time is has absolutely zero effect on when the sunrise and sunset actually happens.
If you want more evening light in the summer, just go to bed earlier and get up earlier. There’s nothing saying that a business needs to open at 8 am and close at 5 pm, just to make an example. It could as easily be 7 am to 4 pm, or 9 am to 6 pm.

All the time you can find somebody to complain about something. But now it appears a majority wants DST to go.
Majority of whom? And can they agree on how to end it and with which time? The overwhelming majority don’t actually give a shit, and as such don’t comment. It’s wise to remember when you speak of majorities you only speak of those who are vocal about it. You can see this in Europe as well, when the vote to abolish DST mandates in the EU came about there was a citing of overwhelming support from those who responded to the survey. And yet nearly all the respondents came from a single constituency in Germany w
I remember the good old days when kids could ride their bikes until sunset, come home and set their clocks back an hour and wait for Halloween. Until President Bush ruined it.
Arizona is not the entire world. The effect of DST is entirely dependent upon your latitude, and your longitude within your time zone. Arizona is at the western edge of MST. They can live without going forward an hour because they are already half an hour foward. Arizona is also in the south, where variations in the length of the day are smallest. Indiana, the other state famous for no DST, is also the westernmost state in EST.
No, you only cross seven time-zone boundaries that quickly. Most of them involve changing between the same two time zones. One can probably do something similar along the northern half of the Alabama-Georgia border (where the time zone boundary follows the state lines).
No one likes day light savings. It’s fucking stupid. Everyone knows it’s stupid. Everyone hates it. There is “pro daylight savings” movement.

No one likes day light savings. It’s fucking stupid. Everyone knows it’s stupid. Everyone hates it. There is “pro daylight savings” movement.
Not everybody lives in the same latitude so not everybody gets to have an opinion.
Try to see it as “two more interesting days per year”

No one likes day light savings. It’s fucking stupid. Everyone knows it’s stupid. Everyone hates it. There is “pro daylight savings” movement.
I love it. I live to the north, and having daylight longer in the evenings – rather than wasting it when sleeping at e.g 4 a.m. – is great. And in winter, earlier light is beneficial too,
I am ridiculously positive on DST. There are MANY MANY MANY people (vast majority??) who feel the same. Ha ha!
Not just football but all sports. How about elementary soccer?
My school has evening practices for kids aged 6 and up. All of that would get canceled too
Dont think of just the sterotypical sports
Soccer has twice the number of players than football in the usa.
Or Floridians who need time to do a little yard work between the time they get home from work & when the snakes come out in force?
In South Florida, you DO NOT do yardwork after sunset. Not even if your yard is lit up like a stadium. It’s unsafe, because the rattlesnakes & water moccasins all wake up and show up at the big outdoor breakfast buffet in your yard. An extra hour of daylight after work means not having to ruin a weekend day doing yardwork.
The majority of public sport are either pay to play, or run on donations. Music, and performing arts run the same way. School districts dont have enough money for a lot of sports. And republicNs afe trying to strip even more money out.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p… [nih.gov]
One of the most significant current discussions in physical exercises and public health is that a decline in PES leads to a corresponding decline in physical activity (PA), which contributes to an increase in hypokinetic diseases among school-aged children and adolescents. PES (a planned, sequential K–12 standards-based program with written curricula and appropriate instruction designed to develop the motor skills, knowledge, and behaviors of active living, physical fi
If they want to take things up a notch, make a flag with 19 stars

Suppose the US ends daylight savings time, then what will happen?
Another group will emerge saying that it was much better when we had it, and we should go back, blah blah blah blah.
Nothing will change except a different chorus will be complaining.
Yes, but without the time change on their calendars they won’t have dates to rally around, so their complaints will be spread out so thin that they’ll go unheard in the noise. Right now, you get a majority of people complaining in unison twice per year.
If your biggest complaint about time changes is the chorus of complaints about time changes, we’re currently living in the worst version of reality for you.

Suppose the US ends daylight savings time, then what will happen?
Another group will emerge saying that it was much better when we had it, and we should go back, blah blah blah blah.
Nothing will change except a different chorus will be complaining. Someone will always be pissed off and airing their grievance. It’s much more about the joy of whining then any real issue.
Another group wants to stay permanently on Daylight savings time.
Here’s the issue at heart, why some people think the shift is stupid, and some like it.
The earth is a spheroid. The earth rotates at an axis not perpendicular to its exposure to its energy source. So the length of daylight is tied to that issue, and where you are on the globe will affect how that length of daylight becomes an issue. Let’s dive in.
Okay, let’s take people living near the equator. DST seems pretty stupid. The length of daylight stays pretty close to the same all year round.
So let’s now take the mid latitudes. There is quite a bit of daylight difference between summer and winter. I live in Pennsylvania, roughly near the middle of the middle latitudes. So here, without DST, when my office was in the basement for a while, I rose in darkness, travelled back and forth in darkness, and didn’t see any daylight outside the weekend for a month and a half at least.
Now for the high latitudes. Eventually we reach a point where it is not possible to make adjustments. There are times when we don’t see the sun at all for long periods of time, and other times when it never sets. Nothing can be done to adjust that. But people living there seem to understand better why the mid latitudes would like DST
I’ve found that the people like Rubio who yes, is from Florida, are generally taking their own situation into account, and might not be aware that others have a much different daylight/dark environment.
But what is really interesting is the claim that 1 hour shift actually kills humans, that all must be on one time. Okay, let’s take that into consideration. Nw we need to know why outside of the lower latitudes, people that live in higher latitudes should experience death rates directly linked to the length of day/night, and it probably should not be possible for humans to live in the lands where sometimes it never gets dark, and sometimes it never gets light.
As well, there are states that have do not recognize daylight savings time. Since the one hour shift kills humans, there should be a remarkable difference in longevity in states like Arizona and Hawaii, Not observing DST means that there will be overall less heart attacks, many less traffic accidents and people should on average live longer. Does anyone have that comparative research?

Suppose the US ends daylight savings time, then what will happen?
But it already has happened, why don’t you know about it? Probably because it is so bad that it only lasts a year before they go back, and then everyone forgets. Then decades later, a new generation thinks that we should end it, smug about being so smart that they were the first to think of it.
Lots of people “know” that it would be better than what we have. Except they really don’t know, because they have never experienced (or even know about) the few times that it was turned off. They haven’t lived throug
If it was such a good idea you’d think somebody would have tried it before.
Oh right. [washingtonian.com]

In 1973 President Richard Nixon signed a law putting the U.S. on permanent DST, and the vast majority of Americans approved of it. One year later it was repealed.
In other news: George Carlin was correct.

No, DST does not cause health problems. Your body doesn’t know what time it is.
Your body might not but your employer does. 🙁
(1) My biggest problem with DST is that SOME devices adjust automatically, so I have to keep a list of those that do not: mostly wristwatches and ovens.
(2) DST certainly does not mandate when you wake up or feed your chickens.
(4) Maybe we should pass a law requiring the whiners to live on the equator, because those that do experience exactly 12 hours of day & night every day of the year. DST is only meaningful in the middle latitudes (farther to the poles and it is only useful for a short period).
(5)
Shift workers laugh at you.
If changing by an hour bothers you, then don’t do it. Just wake up at the same time no matter what the clock says, or do what the cows and chickens do.
Fact: the number of auto accidents explodes the week after DST ends.
* during DST, people hit the road to drive home over a ~3 hour window of time that begins with a trickle around 4, ramps up around 5, and remains relatively constant until 6:30 or 7. So, the traffic spreads itself out between ~4pm and ~8pm.
* The moment DST ends, EVERYONE runs for the door by 5pm, causing total gridlock everywhere by 5:15pm. As the week progresses, the crush of cars gets worse & worse until it’s gridlocked by 4:55pm. Sti
The same for the EU, abolishing DST was supposed to happen years ago, but it was postponed for unrelated reasons (what COVID has to do with DST? what the war in Ukraine has to to with DST?) and now it looks dead in the water.
DST sucks, and leap seconds suck. Clearly the right solution is to adjust clocks slowly, with 20 daylight-saving seconds being added or removed each day, except add 19 or 21 second when we need to adjust UTC as well. Over 180 days, this will give the full hour of daylight-saving time shift, without burdening everyone with a sudden clock change.
You may now admire my brilliance!</s>
Not quite. The politicians were sure that Alberta hated the time change (they were correct) but the option was keeping dst year round or the status quo. The majority of votes cast were against dst year round. Had the referendum been about abandoning dst entirely it certainly would have passed. It was a stupid referendum, entirely about some politician’s ego.

The same thing happened here in Alberta. The politicians were absolutely sure that DST was a bad idea and so we were supposed to switch to one permanent time and they took it to a referendum which was strongly in favour of keeping DST because most people want to not commute to work in the dark in winter and to have long, light-filled summer evenings DST seems to be one of those ideas that cause a little trouble twice a year that people love to moan about but when they actually think about it they realise it’s the best option, at least when you live a long way from the tropics.
Note that the honorable Marco Rubio is from Florida, where there is a lot less difference in day length, and he thinks DST is stupid. It’s sort of understandable, but he’s got blinders on – not taking other’s situations into account.
But in places like Alberta, Going full time Standard time, would really plunge people into darkness for quite a long period of winter.
Not really. With DST year round most people in Alberta would go to work in the dark and come home in the dark. On standard time there morning commute is typically light while the return commute is on the dark. Families with children going to school overwhelmingly prefer standard time one the winter. I think most people prefer some light on them morning too.
Albertans firmly rejected remaining on DST year round in the referendum. Had the referendum been about abandoning DST it would have passed easily.

That’s when the advantages of dst became clear.
That’s not a DST advantage, that’s an earlier clock advantage. You don’t need to keep DST, you just need to keep summer time.

Before 1883, towns across the nation set their own times by observing the position of the sun, so there were hundreds of local times. Instead of Eastern Standard Time, for example, there was Philadelphia Standard Time or Charleston Standard Time.
A short fascinating article about the history of standard time and DST: https://americanhistory.si.edu… [si.edu]
Taking into account that I usually get up before 6 am, I would
I’m on whatever time standard my cats use. I don’t even have an alarm clock in my bedroom. I get up, feed the cats before they use psychological warfare on me, make a hot beverage and digest my work’s inbox.
It’s strangely comforting to know we can count on these stories twice a year. Isn’t that worth a little inconvenience?
It is as if people like complaining so much about the time change that we keep the time change just so the news cycle is never empty. Just incase.

It’s strangely comforting to know we can count on these stories twice a year. Isn’t that worth a little inconvenience?
No this is new. It’s the first time you are being called stupid right in the headline if you support it.
“DST, is it a good idea?”
This. I live in the south of Norway, and it should even be more noticable here (we are closer to the pole than NZ). DST makes a real difference. The week before we switched now, I mentioned to my wife that I am looking forward to the switch, so we can have some daylight during the morning routine. Which involves having kids wake up, biologically sensing that is is morning, and driving to kindergarten/school/work preferably without it being utterly dark.
I understand that for people who live on latitudes clos
I live at 65N and I’m going to work in the dark regardless. Sunrise at 1030, sunset 1430, except it never bothers to drag its arse over the trees. The darker evenings are just an unnecessary kick in the balls, right as the weather turns to shit for a month.
We’re not talking about Norway, slightly south of Norway, the Tropics, or the Poles. This article is about the U.S., which needs to ditch DST, and switch to year-round Standard Time. DST in the U.S. makes little to no sense, and just needs to die.
I just read the thread about restaurants using QR codes instead of actual menus and waiters, etc… and had a thought about this DST stuff. What we need is a QR code that directs to a website that shows the current time and, of course, tracks DST. For convenience, maybe people could wear the QR code on their wrist and post them bed-side. Yes, I know people could simply wear watches and have clocks, but those have to be changed twice a year; this solves that problem.
What they sure as all hell cannot agree on is what time to fix on. And the closer to the poles you are, the more relevant this question becomes. And the critical issue is not sunset, but sunrise.
In Summer, sun rises around 4am normal time. In Winter, around 8am. I guess you see the problem. Sure, if we lock it to DST, we could win that extra hour in Summer, because 4am to 5am, barely anyone needs that sunlight and we sure love that the sun only sets at 10pm. But in Winter, locking the clock to DST means that the sun rises at 9am and your kids walk to school at nighttime.
And this is Central Europe. Not Skandinavia.
I’m not waiting for the bozos to come to a decision anymore. I have flexible work hours. And March to October, I come an hour later. That’s my simple solution and I don’t give half a fuck about DST anymore. Actually, I live on UTC year round. It makes coordinating with the people I know much easier, who just so happen to also live their life on UTC.
The rest of the world can do what they want, the impact they have on me is sufficiently minimal that I don’t give a fuck.
Like I said, I disconnected from this discussion a long time ago. Since I don’t go to bed before midnight, the evening-beer-topic doesn’t come into play (whether I drink that at my 7pm or your 9pm doesn’t matter to me), and since I don’t go to work before 7am my time (i.e. 9am DST/8amCEST), I don’t have a problem with sunrise either.
The whole clock adjustment madness can blow me.
Everyone who doesn’t like the time change is free to do the same thing. Except for most people it means getting out of bed up to an hour before they absolutely have to, so bitching about time changes it is.
Scientists/biologists also agree that it’s much better health-wise if you stop eating red meat, and get off your ass and exercise regularly. I don’t see a lot of people jumping on that bandwagon.

But in Winter, locking the clock to DST means that the sun rises at 9am and your kids walk to school at nighttime.
So? At some point they need to learn to not be afraid of the dark. Since you made the effort to point out that it’s Central Europe and not Scandinavia I feel the need to point out that kids still go to school in Scandinavia, even in winter and they are just fine.
Don’t “think of the children” this argument. Learn to be a proper parent.

Perhaps journalists/editors use writing the biannual DST story as a kind of forfeit or punishment, e.g. “If you lose this drinking game you have to write the DST article tomorrow!”
This is more accurate than you know. Newsrooms are workplaces like anywhere else, with various rituals and customs that determine who draws the short straw. I used to work in local news (IT side, not reporting) and saw all manner of silliness amongst the journalists to determine who got to cover the shitty/tedious stories. Thinking about it, most of the stories were pretty tedious for the reporters and cameramen. Building caught on fire? Sounds exciting, except, you’re gonna be there for at least 8 hou
You want to keep nice long summer evenings, and you do not want sunrise at 4am? Then just keep it. It is fine.
Every other /. story I checked that references a US legislator identifies either immediately or in context that the lawmaker is either a Republican or Democrat. “Democrat Elizabeth Warren” or “Republican speaker”, etc
Yet this one doesn’t. (The OP does, for that matter.)
Could it be that the author/editor here likes the proposed idea but … simply can’t stomach the idea of agreeing with (much less endorsing something proposed by) a filthy Republican?
You guys are hilariously childlike.
And, transparent.
Also, curious that both articles fail to note that generally the developed world (the part that matters) ALSO does daylight savings time (about 70% of the countries; those that don’t are like Azerbaijan, Iran, Jordan, Namibia, Russia, Samoa, Syria, Turkey and Uruguay). Apparently the “well Europe uses it” argument so favoredfavored by metric advocates doesn’t apply here?
Yet, the US still can’t get it done.
Is TFA referring to the ritual of the hour change or the republishing of the same story every six months?
for what, more than 25 years now? You haven’t missed a switch yet in all that time, so yeah, the whole process continues just for this tradition… …and hell, even if they did stop the switch (in either direction), you’ll probably still have the biannual post because then we have to talk about how it still sucks, one way or another.
So, there we are. It’s all about ranting on /., because if we didn’t rant here, we’d feel something more fundamentally wrong in the universe…
Mostly Republicans want to make DST permanent because they think it gives them a free hour of sunlight.
IIRC it was Sitting Bull who had strong words for such stupidity.
The irony is that plan approximates Solar Noon to 1PM.
This is an affront to all of: science, Nature, God, and Nature’s Creator. Pick any.
They think if schools had Summer Hours, like most businesses, the very fabric of society would fall apart. Imagine looking up hours on Google – inconceivable!
Meanwhile, they are elevating the State above G
I remember it being explained when I was in school as it gave farmers an extra hour of daylight to work. We haven’t been an agricultural based country in fifty years or more. We are moving into a tech based country and business being on a global market so there is no need for the Daylight Saving time
Well, the bickering IS about getting light and how much of it, that much is true…
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