Daylight Saving Time Ritual Continues. But Are There Alternatives? (apnews.com) 160
Would you move sunrise to 9 a.m. in Detroit? Or to 4:11 a.m. in Seattle...
Though both options have problems, "There's no law we can pass to move the sun to our will," argues the president of the nonprofit "Save Standard Time". The Associated Press explains why America remains stuck in that annual ritual making clocks "spring forward, fall backward..." The U.S. has tinkered with the clock intermittently since railroads standardized the time zones in 1883. So has a lot of the world. About 140 countries have had daylight saving time at some point; about half that many do now. About 1 in 10 U.S. adults favor the current system of changing the clocks, according to an AP-NORC poll conducted last year. About half oppose that system, and some 4 in 10 didn't have an opinion.
If they had to choose, most Americans say they would prefer to make daylight saving time permanent, rather than standard time. ince 2018, 19 states — including much of the South and a block of states in the northwestern U.S. — have adopted laws calling for a move to permanent daylight saving time. There's a catch: Congress would need to pass a law to allow states to go to full-time daylight saving time, something that was in place nationwide during World War II and for an unpopular, brief stint in 1974. The U.S. Senate passed a bill in 2022 to move to permanent daylight saving time. A similar House bill hasn't been brought to a vote.
U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers, a Republican from Alabama who introduces such a bill every term, said the airline industry, which doesn't want the scheduling complexity a change would bring, has been a factor in persuading lawmakers not to take it up. U.S. Rep. Greg Steube, a Florida Republican, is proposing another approach. "Why not just split the baby?" he asked. "Move it 30 minutes so it would be halfway between the two." Steube thinks his bill could get bipartisan support. The change would make the U.S. out of sync with most of the world — though India has taken a similar approach and in Nepal, the time is 15 minutes ahead of India.
Though both options have problems, "There's no law we can pass to move the sun to our will," argues the president of the nonprofit "Save Standard Time". The Associated Press explains why America remains stuck in that annual ritual making clocks "spring forward, fall backward..." The U.S. has tinkered with the clock intermittently since railroads standardized the time zones in 1883. So has a lot of the world. About 140 countries have had daylight saving time at some point; about half that many do now. About 1 in 10 U.S. adults favor the current system of changing the clocks, according to an AP-NORC poll conducted last year. About half oppose that system, and some 4 in 10 didn't have an opinion.
If they had to choose, most Americans say they would prefer to make daylight saving time permanent, rather than standard time. ince 2018, 19 states — including much of the South and a block of states in the northwestern U.S. — have adopted laws calling for a move to permanent daylight saving time. There's a catch: Congress would need to pass a law to allow states to go to full-time daylight saving time, something that was in place nationwide during World War II and for an unpopular, brief stint in 1974. The U.S. Senate passed a bill in 2022 to move to permanent daylight saving time. A similar House bill hasn't been brought to a vote.
U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers, a Republican from Alabama who introduces such a bill every term, said the airline industry, which doesn't want the scheduling complexity a change would bring, has been a factor in persuading lawmakers not to take it up. U.S. Rep. Greg Steube, a Florida Republican, is proposing another approach. "Why not just split the baby?" he asked. "Move it 30 minutes so it would be halfway between the two." Steube thinks his bill could get bipartisan support. The change would make the U.S. out of sync with most of the world — though India has taken a similar approach and in Nepal, the time is 15 minutes ahead of India.
All in (Score:5, Funny)
Decidays, centidays, millidays,
Or we could go for an SI-unit. Kilo seconds, megaseconds,
If I were in charge, I would fix this in a day.
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Re: All in (Score:5, Interesting)
You would fix something that most people already know how to use and are not really struggling with?
I'm fine with whatever time gets local solar noon roughly near the time zones noon most of the day, if it's off by 30 minutes in someplace at some times of the year that is still better than switching back and forth by an hour twice a year.
Re: All in (Score:4, Insightful)
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I schedule a lot of meetings over multiple timezones and it gets a little weird that not every country does their DST on the same date. It's not that we can't have a computer communicate the correct time, but we do try to avoid scheduling meetings too late (~9pm) or too early (~6am) and give everyone a reasonable time for dinner if it's a long meeting (more than 1.5 hours).
I think at least one person misses one of my meetings during every time change.
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I wouldn't say I don't notice it. Normally, I wake up somewhere b/w 8:00-9:00, but today when I woke up, it was b/w 9:00-10:00. The body doesn't instantly know that the time has changed, even if it adjusts to it over time
Also, some of the clocks, like the oven clocks, the car clocks still need to be manually changed
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Can't we go all in this time? Global time? Make it metric in the process. 0 days is at midnight. 1 is right before the next day starts. Global, as in 0 is midnight at Mar-o-laga. Decidays, centidays, millidays, ...
Or we could go for an SI-unit. Kilo seconds, megaseconds, ...
If I were in charge, I would fix this in a day.
Time is already 0 at midnight, epoch time is a pretty good global time. We could standardised time on the amount of degrees in a circle. 0 for midnight, 360 for 6am, 720 midday, 1080 6pm and back.
Re: All in (Score:2)
Re: All in (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: All in (Score:4, Informative)
Time is already global. That's what UTC is about. But local time zones make it much easier to say "it's 2am in that place, I'd better not phone them" instead of "it's 17:00 (everywhere) -- is that day or night in that place?" One I know that that place is "8 hours ahead" it's much easier to know when to expect if I can call, if the office is open, etc. Also the second is already an SI unit.
All this. I shift back and forth between UTC and local times seamlessly, and every day. It isn't difficult. And it is all based on the fact we live on an rotating oblate spheroid in orbit around a star.
Since we need to communicate globally, we need that UTC. Since we are diurnal animals, we need a local time as well. Daylight is when humans do most of their functioning and business
So that's most of the deal.
Problem is that that the earth also tilts on its axis This means that time of daylight is not constant.
So two forms of rotation, plus tilt means that the time of daylight is always changing. What is more, the time of daylight change depends on latitude. Near the Equator, the yearly changes are barely noticeable. At the poles, the angle of incidence is so extreme that there are months of darkness semi darkness and conversely, months where the sun never sets.
In the middle, there are times that can adjust their clocks to better utilize daylight.
There again, what they actually want is the long days of summer to happen year round. So Many people think that going permanent DST will do that. It won't. I've seen that some places in Canada are going permanent DST. I can hardly wait until next December when they see the totality of their effort.
Re: All in (Score:5, Interesting)
It was the kids getting ready for school in darkness, taking flashlights to the bus stop in the cold, dark winter mornings, along with some high profile deaths of kids in the morning darkness, that got it reversed when the US tried it about about 50 years ago.
People are great at imagining the late summer nights, but quick to forget the darkness of winter.
People are also slow to remember the location matters. East VS west VS center of the time zone matters. Latitude north matters. People on opposite sides of the time zone experience about an hour difference, one may see the sunrise at 8 am, the other side at 7 am. For latitude, southern Florida has about 3 hours of variance across the year, Los Angeles about 4.5 hours, New York City about 6 hours, Maine nearly 8 hours between the summer and winter. Juneau is a 12 hour daylight difference. Both matter tremendously in how someone experiences the daylight differences across the year.
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It wasn't really. That was the excuse. The real reason is that getting up in the dark is bad for you and feels like it. There are studies looking at people who live in the east versus the west of their timezones and the westerners have measurably poore
Only works so far north (Score:2)
I lived far enough north that we went to school in the dark, left school in the dark, and so on in the winter. It doesn't matter really.
If you have to, just have kids report to school an hour later. That can be done if, for example, one is especially far east or west in the time zone and need to adjust a bit.
Nothing really says that school has to start at 8 am, for example. It could easily be 8:30 am, or even 9.
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Is this really it?
Living in Northern Europe, when the clocks change in October is the most depressing day of the year. It's knowing that I won't see daylight for 4 months. And it happens on the day that the clocks change, there's no gradual "it's getting dark when I leave work" it goes straight to "it's nighttime when I leave work". The morning is already dark when I leave in the morning and it stays dark.
Having sunset at
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UTC is buggered up by leap seconds. I say we go to TAI and be done with it. No leap seconds, no DST, no more changes going forward.
Re:All in (Score:4, Informative)
Here is a nice blog post about the effects of abolishing time zones: https://qntm.org/abolish [qntm.org]
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Can't we go all in this time? Global time? Make it metric in the process. 0 days is at midnight. 1 is right before the next day starts. Global, as in 0 is midnight at Mar-o-laga. Decidays, centidays, millidays, ...
Or we could go for an SI-unit. Kilo seconds, megaseconds, ...
If I were in charge, I would fix this in a day.
If I were in charge, I would make the education of Zulu Time mandatory for all citizens.
Then I would politely tell them to collectively shut the fuck up already about a problem solved decades ago.
Re: All in (Score:4, Insightful)
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Okay, okay... Mufti Time.
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We're not all in the US military. UTC.
Whats in a name when it is a Universally Ignored Concept. Other than to massive military operations running in sync globally who have already proven the obvious value.
Perhaps the Meh generation who doesn’t even wear a wristwatch anymore, won’t be so adverse to a single whatever-dude time zone in the future. Gotta wonder how humans even survived those tens of thousands of years before DST came along and started killing people with nothing more than clock stress.
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They tried exactly this during the French revolution. Didn't last long.
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Still in use in astronomy as the fractional part of the Julian Date. Right now JD=2461107.97090 which you can read as day 2461107, time: 09 hours, 70 minutes, 90 seconds. JD has an epoch 4713 BC so is also adequate for (most of) human history. There are many variants setting different epochs. Most popular in practice is the Modified Julian Date, which offsets time by 2400000.5. Other variants have set the zero in 1900, 1950, 2000.
Jeez, not this shit again (Score:2)
.... most Americans say they would prefer to make daylight saving time permanent
Yes, they say that, until you actually do it. Then ...
.... an unpopular, brief stint in 1974
50+ years ago we went on permanent DST, and it lasted less than a year. When winter came, people didn't like that their kids had to go to school in the dark (among other things).
Here are your available options:
(a) Change the tilt of the earth so that we always get the same amount of daylight year-round
(b) STFU
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50+ years ago we went on permanent DST, and it lasted less than a year. When winter came, people didn't like that their kids had to go to school in the dark
As an elementary school kid who walked to school, I hated it. Michigan winters are cold enough when the sun is shining.
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(a) Change the tilt of the earth so that we always get the same amount of daylight year-round
(b) STFU
I'm betting there is startup working on "a" right now . . .
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Metric means having a single (or as few as possible) base unit(s). That's the second and it is arguably the sole base unit for the entire modern SI, cgs, natural and imperial metric systems. Yes, the modern imperial system is also metric.
A *good* metric system also has consistent modifiers of the base unit. The GP's powers of 10 modifiers are both decimal and are a better metric system than your 100 and 20 multipliers. Yours are more like, though not as bad as, the imperial system.
Re: All in (Score:2)
Seconds already are an SI unit. To have metric time, youâ(TM)d have to adjust the duration of seconds. Youâ(TM)ll still need to have leap seconds because the Earthâ(TM)s rotation is slowing.
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Can't we go all in this time? Global time? Make it metric in the process. 0 days is at midnight. 1 is right before the next day starts. Global, as in 0 is midnight at Mar-o-laga. Decidays, centidays, millidays, ...
Or we could go for an SI-unit. Kilo seconds, megaseconds, ...
If I were in charge, I would fix this in a day.
I used to be pro-metric, but now, in this age of computers, I'm now pro-binary. I'd come in w/ a completely new system
For example, for weight, instead of defining the number of molecules in a mole of an element as 6.023x10^23, I'd take 604,462,909,807,314,587,353,088 or rather 6.045x10^23, which would be exactly 2^79. Then make every binary based fraction or multiple of it - 1/2, 1/4/, 1/8 or 2, 4, 8....... the other units of measurement built around it. Similarly, for distance, I'd take the wavelength
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It should all be powers of two, for easy implementation in binary hardware.
Re: All in (Score:2)
clown show (Score:4)
Personally, I'd rather the politicians focus on producing a balanced budget (you know, like we all have to do at home) rather than waste time rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic.
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If they can't do something simple and popular like get rid of daylight saving's time they probably can't do anything like balance the budget. Its like saying "I don't care if you're incapable of washing the dishes, I want you to design a nuclear powerplant."
Re: clown show (Score:2)
You will not even find agreement among economists on if balancing the federal budget is useful or even desirable. I think in peacetime and during a period of economic growth that a balanced budget is a decent goal, but in bad times the debt is preferable to austerity.
Re: clown show (Score:2)
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That's a good idea. If governments spent less during economic booms when unemployment is low and wages are high, and spent more during downturns when unemployment is high and people are willing to work for less, it would help to stabilize the economy [wikipedia.org]. And as a bonus, we would get more for our tax dollar!
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You will not even find agreement among economists on if balancing the federal budget is useful or even desirable..
Uh, that probably has a lot more to do with obvious bias.
When asking about budget justifications, maybe not ask the 7500 economists in acedemia (including the 5000 extra ones in “administration”) currently living well off said corrupt “budgets”.
Balancing that budget might start to make too much sense. And that kind of shit is dangerous for people in pointless jobs.
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Economic colleges are funded mostly by tuition. Which is funded mostly by a regressive taxation system called student loans.
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I care less than I used to (Score:2)
I would prefer permanent daylight saving time, myself. But, then again, I'll be retired in a few years so it's not gonna matter much to me after that point anyway.
Either approach has its upsides and downsides. It would be nice to stop changing the clocks, regardless.
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If you want permanent daylight saving, go move somewhere nearer to the poles.
Oh, wait...
Re: I care less than I used to (Score:2)
How would that help? They have daylight saving time in Poland.
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Parts of the east haven't decided yet. Peace river country, East Kootneys. In BC, towns and regional districts can decide these things.
Slashdot posting ritual continues (Score:3)
Asking the question we've all answered already twice a year since Slashdot was founded. Are there alternatives?
Re: Slashdot posting ritual continues (Score:3)
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Asking the question we've all answered already twice a year since Slashdot was founded. Are there alternatives?
Nope, not as long as the stupid clock changing ritual continues.
End that, and we'll be happy to never discuss it again.
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Asking the question we've all answered already twice a year since Slashdot was founded. Are there alternatives?
Nope, not as long as the stupid clock changing ritual continues.
End that, and we'll be happy to never discuss it again.
The alternatives are standard time year-round, which means that in the summer you have the sun blasting through your bedroom window at 5 AM in the summer instead of getting that light in the evening, or DST year-round, which means that in the winter it's pitch black when your kids go to school and you go to work.
None of the options are good, but DST is the least bad.
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Only autists have problem with DST. (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't understand all complaints. I change my sleep cycle more than one hour between weekdays and weekends every week. One hour is nothing. People complaining about that should have their autism treated instead of complaining!
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People complain about 1) waking time of young children (they don't adapt the same as teenagers or adults), 2) the possibility accidents induced by drivers and machine workers being more tired on the morning after the change.
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It's also easy to avoid if you want to. Just stay on daylight savings time year round. In the winter you get an extra hour to read Slashdot before you have to be wherever you have to be.
The fact that nobody does this should be a big hint that year round DST is actually the worst of the possibilities.
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You obviously don't have a dog.
Everyone agrees to not agree (Score:2)
Everyone agrees, they want the biannual time change to go away.
On the other hand, there is almost an even split on which way to go about it. About 50% want it to always be DST, the rest want the opposite. So you're going to permanently tick off half the population depending on which way you go with it.
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Which is exactly why we should split the difference.
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History. . . (Score:3)
Some of us were around in 1974 for the US year round DST experiment.
It was not pretty. It was not safe. It was so dark at school bus stops, that many stores and even McD were giving out packs of reflective stickers for kids to paste on their clothes, shoes, and bookbags so they could be seen.
Just keep standard time year round. Happy farms, zero real harm, no more changing, no more kvetching about changing twice a year.
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That experiment was such a disaster. The better way to solve all of this is just move 30 minutes and then leave everything alone. Time doesn't care where we start or stop it, how we measure it, or how we calculate it. It is only human perception that seems to make a 30 minute move darn near impossible.
Re: History. . . (Score:2)
Re: History. . . (Score:2)
Sounds like somebody was playing politics. Lots of places see children going to school and coming home in the dark in winter and theyâ(TM)re not dying or being injured en masse.
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I was around and attending junior high in 1974. I remember a lot of (obviously successful) manufactured hysteria about kids "going to school in the dark". A lot of vague stories about horrible things happening everywhere, none of which seemed to be based on first hand reports.
Regardless - living in western Washington, even on standard time I was going to school in the dark during the first part of January.
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Not sure why you were modded down. All valid points.
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The kids were just an excuse for people to stop permanent DST without admitting they were wrong. Waking up in the dark is bad for you. There's piles of reasearch on it. It's worse than changing clocks. It's also bad in overly wide timezones. It also feels bad, which is why the US didn't last through more than one winter on it.
There's nothing wrong with permanent standard time, but people like sleeping in an extra hour in the summer.
Yawn (Score:2)
>"most Americans say they would prefer to make daylight saving time permanent, rather than standard time"
Me included. And most of the people I know. Still waiting.
>"the airline industry, which doesn't want the scheduling complexity a change would bring, has been a factor in persuading lawmakers not to take it up"
Yeah, I don't think that is a valid reason to oppose it. Plus, it is likely that States will "cluster" their decisions (if given permission to use permanent Daylight Saving Time). So I dou
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I'm glad for now this is over - for this is supposed to be the last time change ever. And everyone is predicting doom and gloom, and now we have the debates on "we should stick with standard time".
Honestly, I don't care. I just want to stop f*cking with the clocks twice a year and the disruptions it entails. We can have the whole "standard time" vs "daylight time" some other time. In the meantime, if you dislike it, change your routines. If you hate getting up at 8am because it's dark, get up at 9am and shi
Asking people if they want summer? OF COURSE (Score:3, Insightful)
Separate Normal Time and Sunrise Time (Score:2)
We could try keeping the clock standardized but base things that matter relative to the time of sunrise, each day. A clock could keep track of sunrise times just as it does regular time. We would sleep an extra 1 to 2 minutes per day half the year and that much less the other half of the year. It's not enough to be uncomfortable. Just use a standard time for certain things like when payments or deals take effect and airline schedules, etc. and give sunrise time for when school or work starts and ends.
More rage bait for a vocal minority (Score:2)
Twice a year we have to listen to this shit, how the sky is falling, how DST raped and killed my sister, etc.
Brazil managed to get rid of it (Score:2)
The current president threatened to bring it back, but i don't think ANYONE liked the idea, even his political base.
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Most of Brazil is so close to the Equator that daylight saving time makes no sense there anyway.
No. (Score:3)
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It is impossible to add daylight hours simply by fiddling with clocks. The Earth's rotation on its axis just doesn't work that way.
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Many shops are only open 9-5 or 8-6, when most people are at work. It kind of made sense when it was common for women to be housewives and do the shopping, but those days are long gone.
In some countries the shops open later, say 11 AM, and then close at 7PM or 8PM. Makes more sense than DST.
Two more alternatives (Score:2)
Here are two more totally serious alternatives.
1: From 1 March through 30 March, move the clock forward by two minutes a day. This gives us all the advantages of daylight saving time, with none of the disadvantages of the shock to the system of a sudden hourly change. Plus, we'll all get more exercise running around the house changing our clocks! From 1 October through 30 October, move the clock back by two minutes a day; same advantages. (Reverse these directions in the Southern hemisphere.)
2: Decl
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2: Declare that sunrise is at 06:00 and sunset is at 18:00. Then divide the daytime and nighttime into twelve parts each. Summer "light hours" will be longer than summer "dark hours", and the reverse in winter. Hour-long lectures in the morning in winter will simply fly by! What to do in places where the Sun never rises or sets on a given day is left as an exercise for the reader.
Given that the earth's speed around, and distance to, the sun varies somewhat - which leads to the apparent (sunrise to sunrise) day length changing over the course of a year - we'd also have to either adjust the length of a second during the year, or else vary the number of seconds in a minute.
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Well, with my scheme, seconds and minutes would change along with hours too. A daytime minute would be exactly 1/60th of a daytime hour, for example, and a night-time second would be exactly 1/3600 of a night-time hour. Everything would automatically adjust to the actual day length! What could possibly go wrong?
I guess the speed of light would no longer be constant. But meh.
I like changing my clocks (Score:2)
It gives me an excuse to correct accumulated drift. Some of them are so bad they must be using AC for timing.
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I already have to do that every few months for a couple of clocks! One of which is digital, which just seems weird...
Split the country (Score:2)
Have the east half of the country end up on permanent standard time and the west half end up on permanent daylight saving time. You'll merge two time zones and reduce the time difference between the coasts to only two hours. That's a win for a lot of people.
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China does this, except more so. The entire country just runs on Beijing's standard time. Except it actually doesn't because people hate it, ignore the edict and just use their own local customary time.
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That's different from what I'm suggesting. I wouldn't ask anyone to live on a time zone distant from the local time. In my suggestion, everyone would stay on one of the two times they already use for part of the year. They would just make different choices about which one.
Been there, done that (Score:2)
Here in British Columbia we just changed our clocks for the last time and will remain on UTC-7 indefinitely. Parts of B.C. (the northeast part) have been UTC-7 all year for a long time. The southeast part has been Mountain time (UTC-7/UTC-6) for a long time. Neither are changing how they do time.
I applaud losing the time change but I'm not crazy about permanent DST. People obviously haven't thought this through, what it's going to feel like come November.
...laura
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Yes, it will be interesting to see how BC does being on Mountain Standard Time. The part of BC that's on MST permanently is an isolated bit on the Alberta border that did so because it's much more closely tied to Alberta than it is to the majority of BC. On the other hand, Vancouver and Victoria, which are already on the western side of PST, will now experience what the Americans did to themselves in 1974.
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Eh, the way I look at it is this... Through the winter, I'm already driving to work in the dark, and driving home in the dark (I generally work 0800-1630). With this change, I'm still driving to work in the dark, but at least I'll have daylight in the evening when it's useful to me.
Yes, Standard Time (Score:2)
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Set it best for Winter--and leave it! (Score:2)
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Standard time works, I've done it (Score:4, Insightful)
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That's something I've said for a long time. And unlike permanent DST, going to permanent standard time doesn't require Congressional approval. Any state can do it any time by just passing a law.
Re: Another DST discussion? (Score:2)
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It's the traditional annual feel-good bitching. Every journalistic outfit takes the opportunity. Slashdot is somewhat unique in that they do it twice a year so we also get to bitch about being forced (FORCED I say) to sleep in an extra hour.
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But it's a lot more than just clocks [priuschat.com].
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Another thing about western Washington is - even with Daylight Saving time, in late June the sky is lightening up already before 4am. It's gonna be even more absurd to have that happening around 3am!
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