70% of Americans Hate Daylight Saving Time (inquirer.com) 231
"America is approaching one of its most contentious hours," writes the Phildadelphia Inquirer, "and officially, it's one that doesn't exist."
According to the National Conference of State Legislators, lawmakers in 32 states are considering bills that would change the current system of splitting the year into about eight months of daylight time and the rest, standard. "It's been a hot issue," said Jim Reed, an NCSL official. And it's getting hotter, he added. Every year more state lawmakers are considering changing the system.
The preponderance are pushing for year-round daylight time, although Congress has forbidden states from doing so. Pennsylvania has four different proposed time-change bills, and three of those essentially endorse year-round daylight time. Yet, if the issue were put to a national primary, all-standard, all-the-time would win decisively, according to a poll conducted last year. More than 70% of those surveyed said, Please, stop with the changes, period...
DST critics have pointed to studies pointing to possible connections to an increase in heart disease when the clocks go up, and the impacts of disrupted body rhythms resulting from disrupted sleep patterns. Proponents say later sunsets mean more Vitamin D and more opportunities to luxuriate in the later twilights.
The preponderance are pushing for year-round daylight time, although Congress has forbidden states from doing so. Pennsylvania has four different proposed time-change bills, and three of those essentially endorse year-round daylight time. Yet, if the issue were put to a national primary, all-standard, all-the-time would win decisively, according to a poll conducted last year. More than 70% of those surveyed said, Please, stop with the changes, period...
DST critics have pointed to studies pointing to possible connections to an increase in heart disease when the clocks go up, and the impacts of disrupted body rhythms resulting from disrupted sleep patterns. Proponents say later sunsets mean more Vitamin D and more opportunities to luxuriate in the later twilights.
obedient consumers (Score:5, Funny)
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Meh. (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't hate DST, I hate standard time.
Getting up when it's dark doesn't faze me, but the early nights here at 42 -71 take a toll.
k.
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We could always just adjust standard business schedules accordingly. Instead of the 9-5 workday, we just have a normal 8-4 workday.
The farmers who benefit from it can just have a summer schedule and a winder schedule.
DST is just out of date, and not reflective of the current economy.
Heck, I would be happy just working with GMT time and no timezones. For those on EST, you can go to work at 12:00 GMT. Being that we need to work globally it makes coordinating times available a little easier as we don't need
Meh. (Score:2)
I don't care either way, it makes absolutely no difference to me in any sense.
Re: Meh. (Score:2)
One thing about Slashdot hasn’t changed (Score:5, Funny)
Twice a year, we can count on a reasoned, calm discussion on the topic of daylight saving time.
Re:One thing about Slashdot hasn’t changed (Score:5, Informative)
Also the title is wrong. 31% of respondents wanted permanent daylight saving time, while 29% wanted to keep switching back and forth. 40% wanted permanent standard time.
Incorrect titles is another thing about Slashdot which hasn’t changed.
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The 70% includes the 31% plus the 40%. What they mean is that 70% of people don't like the switching part, which is what most people mean by Daylight Savings Time. If you switch to Summer Time permanently, you won't refer to that as "DST" anymore, it'll just be "the time".
Re: One thing about Slashdot hasn’t changed (Score:2)
I promise you, if people make such a stupid decision as to adopt "permanent DST", I will go to my grave reminding people what a stupid choice the country made as to choose a subjective time system because they liked getting up when the the clock says a certain number more than they liked objective standards.
Re: One thing about Slashdot hasn’t changed (Score:2)
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And about 90% of the targeted readers of the article would prefer to live closer to the equador. No one fuckin wants to retire in a location in the northern hemi above 25 deg.
Remember: it's always better to swear than to shiver.
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Latitude. And no way would I want to retire that far south, being perfectly fine at my current 50 degrees. 46 is as far south as I am willing to live.
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The title is correct. 29% want to keep daylight saving time (the practice of switching between 2 different time zones - dubbed "Standard" and "Daylight" Time in North America - depending on the time of year), while 71% want to abolish DST and stick to one time zone or the other. The 71% that wants to get rid of DST includes the 40% that want to stick with Standard Time and the 31% that wants to keep Daylight Time, but TFA doesn't mention how strongly they care about which.
DST is that practice of switching b
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He's really fun at parties, too.
How to fail (Score:4, Insightful)
Be in favour of DST. In any form.
Re: How to fail (Score:2)
It could be worse. You could one day escape from the land of TLA.
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70% (Score:2)
DST in winter is a bad idea (Score:2)
Especially in the north, early raisers would have to tolerate one more hour of darkness in the morning.
E.g. in New York, sun would rise only after 8 DST in the morning, and would still set at 5:30 DST in the afternoon, in December. For Anchorage, the day would even be only 11 am to 5 pm.
In the south, e.g. Miami, sun would at least set only after 6:30 pm DST, but is that small difference in the evening really worth it?
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However, in farming, the clock switch affects animals too. Cows get used to being milked at the same time every day, they start to freak out when the clocks change.
Re: DST in winter is a bad idea (Score:5, Insightful)
If this were a serious problem, farmers would either ignore the time change or implement it incrementally over a period of days or weeks.
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As a NY-er I hate standard time. If we stayed on it year round we'll have sunlight at 4:30 AM in the summer. As it stands now, we have darkness at 4:15 PM in the winter, and it's depressing leaving work knowing the day is over. And for all the "herp-derp change ur schedule" asswipes, even the most reasonable company out there isn't going to be thrilled at all their employees working 6:30AM-3PM. (not to mention public transit schedules don't even start that early).
No year round DST? (Score:2)
So, just do what most of Arizona does: No DST at all:
https://www.timeanddate.com/ti... [timeanddate.com]
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In general, emulating what Arizona does seems like a bad idea.
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I have an idea (Score:4, Insightful)
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The problem is that everyone has to be on a syncronized schedule. If we didn't all have to turn up at work at 9 AM and leave at 5 PM a lot of the reasons why we hate DST and why some people want DST would go away.
Re:I have an idea (Score:5, Funny)
Make the time what time is ACTUALLY IS...
My New Years resolution was to not ridicule anyone ever again. So I'm going to cut this post a little short.
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What DST looks like to me:
"I want to go to work one hour earlier (relative to sunlight), so I can have more sunlight after work. But my employer won't let me change my working hours, so I want the government to change the definition of hours for everyone."
Also, these arguments are always about leisure time after work. Nobody seems to worry about being more tired at work, about the decrease in productivity and increase in work related accidents, for example.
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Assume fixed time instead? (Score:2)
Whatâ(TM)s to stop a state keeping the time change but at the same time simply adjust the hours of government and public schools, etc by one hour? I.e. effectively assuming a fixed time?
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Whatâ(TM)s to stop a state keeping the time change but at the same time simply adjust the hours of government and public schools, etc by one hour? I.e. effectively assuming a fixed time?
Because millions of commuters and employees working for thousands of companies would need to adjust their schedules to drop off and pick up kids from schools and daycares, coordinate opening times of banks and government offices, etc. Some organizations would change their schedules but others would not. It would be chaos twice a year.
Re: Assume fixed time instead? (Score:2)
More likely that a lot of businesses would also adjust their hours.
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More likely that a lot of businesses would also adjust their hours.
Some would. Some wouldn't. Many businesses have their schedules printed on signs, posted on websites, printed in menus and brochures. It would be too much hassle to change. But their employees would still need to deal with schools that start and end an hour earlier or later.
If you want everyone to change, then that is no different than what we do now, except changing the clocks is easier.
Here we go again. (Score:3)
Every time we change the times. Let's stay on daylight saving forever.
If you absolutely MUST have Daylight Saving Time (Score:2)
If you absolutely MUST have Winter Time (Score:2)
Limit it to December only. Done.
The "Summer" time works better year around, including the winter times. We don't care whether it's still dark when we go to work, but we absolutely need the sun to be still there when we get home.
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I like that winter time is slowly being eroded. I propose the next increment be between the Thanksgiving and President's Day weekends.
Just adjust the school times (Score:2)
If Home Depot can change their summer hours, schools can change their winter hours. And do it in increments. So if your school starts at 8:00am after Labor Day, move it back 15 minutes in October. Do that again in November and December, and your school day is starting at 9:00am for the shortest days of the year. A fifteen minute adjustment is no big whoop, and it doesn't involve an hour time change that is a PITA on computing systems that don't handle it well.
Easy. Peasy. Lemon. Squeeze.
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Why not just make it year round and not force kids to go to school at 7am? Or let kids go to school in the dark because it doesn't fucking matter.
Good lord, I know some parents think the world needs to revolve around their kids, but in this case it's literally trying to dictate how we measure the revolution of the earth to better suit your kids.
Just split the difference (Score:2)
If year-round DST is too much to bear, split the difference, eliminate DST, and move all US timezones 1/2 hour east (so "Eastern" would be UTC-4.5 year-round, "Pacific" would be UTC-7.5 year-round, etc). We'd still get most of the late-sunset benefits, but the period of super-late sunrises would only be 3-5 weeks.
There's nothing that says timezones HAVE to be on one-hour boundaries. India, for example, merged its two former timezones into one that's a half hour ahead or behind the old ones.
We all love to hate DST (Score:2)
I would be all for permanent DST, no time changes. This is, apparently, a popular opinion. What I didn't remember - and TFA points out - is that this was tried once, back in 1974, and people apparently hated it. Permanent DST would mean a much longer period in the Winter, where people go to work/school in the dark. OTOH, permanent standard time, means all that extra summer sunlight comes early in the morning, when most of us would prefer to have it in the evening.
Maybe the real answer is that we all like to
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Nazi Time Saw It Coming? (Score:2)
Critical readings of Gravity's Rainbow speculate Pynchon's identifying the necessity of "matching" the measures and metrics of fascism to win the war while suspecting the likelihood of its victors and their cultures of gained wealth to maintain any enforceable measures of productivity. He did so with "pornographic" passages and those were
This was tried before (Score:3)
Congress went to year round DST back in the 70s and people hated it so bad it only lasted one year.
https://www.mercurynews.com/20... [mercurynews.com]
Why would it be different this time?
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i dunno, there's a huge gap tween the 70's and today ... like most people bathe now (really look at any photo from the 70's and they are always wearing dirty clothes and sweaty)
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Incorrect. People in the north hated it (Score:3)
The best fix is simple. If you are at a latitude where the time of sunrise varies considerably throughout the year, change your business/school hours to match sunrise. Don't drag the rest of the country along on an unnecessary (for them) time change just so you can maintain your business/
Put idiots in charge (Score:2)
Put idiots in charge and this is what you get:
- You know in the summer we should take advantage of the extra daylight in the morning, get people up earlier, they'll need less artificial light at night too.
- Sure, we could have summer schedules for work/school, it is quite common already for stores etc in many areas, we could expand it.
- That's stupid, we have to, like, print new schedules and stuff. I know, we'll just CHANGE TIME ITSELF!
And that's when a great disturbance was felt, as if millions of softwar
Twice a Year B****ing Session and never ... (Score:2)
... anything actually done. We are lazy creatures of habit.
So? (Score:2)
Google "70% of Americans..." and you'll find that 70% of Americans want/know/don't know a lot of really stupid things.
Nope (Score:2)
>"70% of Americans Hate Daylight Saving Time"
Nope. Most of us hate *CHANGING* time. I bet 70% of Americans would be very happy moving to DST (summer time) and just KEEPING IN THERE ALL YEAR ROUND.
Even with DST, it is still dark in the typical morning, and most people would rather have additional, usable daylight in the evening during the cold months, which is far more useful.
Just Change Work Hours (Score:2)
I used to hate it.... (Score:2)
But then, most of the clocks I rely on in 2020 automatically make the change for me: iPhone, iPad, bedside and kitchen clock, desktop computer, kitchen cable set top box and TiVo DVR....
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Massachusetts is also trying to cheat and get themselves moved into Atlantic Standard Time, same effect but less congressional effort required.
Woke up and didn't even realize we switched again. (Score:2)
Link it to school schedules (Score:2)
Daylight savings time would be great in the summer months around here. That way, it would not be light at 4:30am.
Link it to the school schedule. People are always saying teenages need an extra hour of sleep. Fall back the week school starts. Spring forward when school ends.
Right now we have less standard time than daylight time. That is wacked.
48% of Americans don't want polls properly phrased (Score:2)
When questioned further as to why, the vast majority of them said, "leave my damned poll alone". In other words, I wonder if they really made it clear to all those people that "standard time" is the one where it gets dark early in Winter.
This is such a stupid issue (Score:2)
Would there then be some weird issues to sort out, yes. But after that, it wouldn't matter what"time" the sun rise.
I'd bet... (Score:2)
Pick one! (Score:2)
I don't care about DST per se. It's the change I can do without. Pick one and stick with it.
People seem to want permanent DST, i.e. UTC-7, but the sun would still set at 1700 local time in December. After rising at 0900 local. What good is that?
...laura
I wonder how may extra coronairus deaths (Score:2)
I wonder how many extra people will die from coronavirus going into the severe form, thanks to the stresses of the time change - both now and in the fall.
Permanently get rid of it. (Score:4)
Rather than unnecessarily deviating from the international standard, we should just go with the international standard. Turn DST off permanently. Nobody else does it, so neither should we.
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Haven't several European nations adopted year-round Summer Time? It's so obviously the way to go. Everyone hates changing their clocks. Everyone like the extra hour in the evening. Where's democracy when you need it?
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It's always seemed to me that the main problem with that is all the little kids who are going to get run over in the dark on their way to school in the winter.
Then I realized that it could be the opportunity to kill two birds with one stone: We could also solve the problem of ridiculously early school schedules. When going to year-round daylight time, they could also stipulate that no K-12 school in the continental US can start less than 45 minutes after local sunrise on the winter solstice. That would allo
Re:Make it permanent. Problem solved (Score:5, Insightful)
People always trot out the kids going to school, but the one year ('72 IIRC) we stayed on daylight time, the stats don't back up the fear. The younger kids got an excuse to have fun using a flashlight in the morning (source, I was in school at the time) and a bunch of people were up in arms about all the imaginary accidents.
Besides that, there's so many streetlights and 'security' lights everywhere, the only time you're actually walking in the dark is rural enough that there's no real traffic or during a power failure.
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School can start any time. If they're worried about dark mornings, just start the school one hour later in the winter.
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In Florida? This doesn't even affect you, you should have no right to vote.
Ask somebody who lives a bit further north why it's a good system....
Re:Make it permanent. Problem solved (Score:4, Informative)
In Florida? This doesn't even affect you....
I also live in Florida. Thanks to the change, the sun rose here this morning at 0743 instead of 0643.
Result: The kids in my area who went to school in daylight on Friday will be going to school in the dark on Monday.
You were saying...?
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So let them have fun, give them flashlights of flashing LED arm bands.
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The kids in my area who went to school in daylight on Friday will be going to school in the dark on Monday.
You were saying...?
Yes. But ask a snowbird about how much worse it is in Michigan, and how many more kids were killed there during the year-round daylight-saving time fiasco during the Nixon-era energy crisis.
(Michigan is also about an extra hour earlier than it should be, because of the auto industry's desire to be on the same clock as the New York bankers, back during the establishment of standard t
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So what were the stats for kids killed going to school in the winter for the years 1971, 1972, and 1973? I have never been able to find any stats showing an excess of accidents attributable to kids going to school when DST was extended, nor even an indication of it. It seems to be one of those things that is just assumed without evidence.
In the particular case of Michigan, perhaps it's time to reconsider the whole time zone thing, Detroit doesn't have a lot of pull these days.
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Michigan can cry me a river. Try living in Sweden, where in December and January you can tell it's lunchtime by when it gets light outside, then get back to me.
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I understood another issue was the financial cost associated with delaying school schedules. A lot of jurisdictions take advantage of staggered school start and end times to re-use school buses. One of the difficulties with moving all school start times to after sunrise is that most schools would then start and end near the same time, requiring jurisdictions to purchase additional buses to accommodate the demand.
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I'd rather have the extra light when I'm going to work so I can see where I'm going.
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And I'd rather have the extra light at night when I am going home.
The problem is that my state, MA, and some of the surrounding states (i.e. NH, ME) really should be on Atlantic time given how eastern the states are. We have daylight from 7:00am to 5:30pm before DST kicked in today. We were finally having a bit of light in the evening. Now, after DST, we have light from 6:00am to 4:30pm.
During the summer, we have sun from 5:30am to 8:30pm. Does that make any sense? I would rather have the extra hou
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And I'd rather have the extra light at night when I am going home.
The problem is that my state, MA, and some of the surrounding states (i.e. NH, ME) really should be on Atlantic time given how eastern the states are. We have daylight from 7:00am to 5:30pm before DST kicked in today. We were finally having a bit of light in the evening. Now, after DST, we have light from 6:00am to 4:30pm.
I screwed up my post... I mixed up DST and standard... I want to be on DST permanently.
Prior to DST the sun was from 6:00 AM to 5:30 PM, now it's from 7:00 AM to 6:30 PM.
However because we are on the Eastern edge of the Eastern time zone, even with DST, we have sun from 5:30am to 8:30pm.
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.... during the summer....
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I'd rather have the extra light when I'm going to work so I can see where I'm going.
Buy better headlights. Replace the headlight pod lenses. If you can't see where you are going in the morning without the sun, you can't see where you're going in the evening either.
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I currently live in the rural areas of northern Scotland and all over the country there are long stretches of road that have no lights at all. In winter the sun doesn't rise until I get to the garage I work at.
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Re: Make it permanent. Problem solved (Score:2)
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I'm pretty sure people will want DST because they don't realize yet just how dark Winter mornings will be, all they'll think about is that extra hour of sunlight in Summer.
I don't care, I go to work at the same time year round, but for some this would mean they have to go to work while it's night in Winter.
Re: Make it permanent. Problem solved (Score:2)
Re: Make it permanent. Problem solved (Score:2)
We have an objective standard for time: Noon is when the sun is at its zenith. We compromise a bit to allow grouped time zones, and we can quibble which time zone is appropriate for a given location. But objective standards are great because they are objective.
You are welcome to get up at any marked hour on the objectively standard time that you like. I won't stop you.
Re: Make it permanent. Problem solved (Score:2)
The standard may be objective, but the choice of standard is not.
Choosing NOON as the point where the Sun disappears from the horizon is also an objective standard.
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please enlighten us on the positive effects, some arbitrary number on a man made machine does not change the sun's behaviour
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what the fuck was the point of this incoherent rant? half of it is about cable tv and mickey mouse and taxes, gee wonder why no one cares about your dipshit opinion, you can't even stay on topic for 1 paragraph.
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-Down with DST!
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The top marginal rate needs to be 99.999% for anything over $1million a year.
I'm confused, how would anyone be able to survive with that amount being taken away if $1,000,001 is the minimal for such an insane tax?
I say target the power that comes with having that much wealth, not the wealth itself, IMO.
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Using strong words for the sake of using strong words don't make your arguments any stronger.
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