100 Years Later, the Madness of Daylight Saving Time Endures
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
During the summer in California, with daylight savings, the sun will rise at ~6 AM and set at 8 PM. The morning sun is mostly useless, at least for me. But 3 hours of sun after school ends is nice for kids to be outside, it's warmer, etc.
Without daylight savings, the sun would rise even earlier at ~5AM and set at 7 PM. So we've lost an hour of evening sun for an our of super-early morning. Sounds like a bad deal to me, but what am I missing?
It's pretty depressing to start the day in the dark, to be honest (with apologies to folks living in very northern or southern latitudes)
"But before the end of the first month of daylight saving that January, eight children died in traffic accidents in Florida, and a spokesperson for Florida’s education department attributed six of those deaths directly to children going to school in darkness."
On the other hand, leap seconds can die in a fire. Let's only correct that once a century, because no one outside of astronomy cares about that level of astronomical accuracy.
Why should your odd preference for reduced morning sunlight be enforced by law on everybody else?
In other words, because you want you and your kids to have more daylight at the end of the day, you like having your schedule moved up an hour every year in spring, and moved back in the fall when there are fewer hours of daylight.
What you're missing is that I don't want to move my schedule to accommodate yours, but the government has determined that I must do so.
There is no daylight "saved." It's just a massive schedule change for everyone.
If all the parents with school-aged children want their kids to have more daylight in the afternoon, great! Convince the school to change their schedule twice a year! If you want more daylight at the end of the day, great! Start work an hour earlier!
But why do I and everyone else have to change our schedules so you can have your way?
As for having DST year-round (mentioned by others), the starting point for marking time has generally been noon, when the sun is highest in the sky. (Some cultures start counting at sunrise.) Ignoring the question of "local noon" vs. "Time Zone noon" for the sake of this argument, DST just moves noon to 1:00 p.m. Really, this is even dumber than changing twice a year. Just start your day an hour earlier year-round.
If only we really could legislate the natural order of things caused by the rotation of the earth on its axis, then maybe we could also change the natural order of things caused by the orbit of the earth around the sun.
I propose that we have Summer Savings Time! We should start Spring three weeks earlier, on March 1 of each year, and end Summer three weeks later, on October 15 of each year. We can then eliminate six weeks of Winter, ending December on the 15th of that month and skipping straight to February 1. Think of all the bad weather we will avoid!!
This will also obliterate six weeks of unproductive holiday time, silly resolutions, bad music, and untoward self-reflection. It will reduce any rancor that might be caused by people celebrating Christmas and also eliminate New Year's parties and the associated debauchery. People who are suicidally depressed will experience far less social pressure, since families will only have to contend with Thanksgiving (in the U.S.).
I'm going to write to my congressman right now, in fact.
This is a perfectly valid reason, from which I assume you're not encumbered by any particular organizational schedule (such as school starting at a certain time, work starting at a certain time, regularly scheduled meetings year-round etc.); it makes sense that you would find these time changes annoying, although I'm not sure why it affects you if you truly don't care what the clock shows when the sun rises and sets.
There...are...no... benefit.
But I want to make one more point to counter a sentiment I've seen in these threads. Most of us who out of convenience characterize ourselves as "anti-DST" don't much care if we have permanent standard time or permanent "daylight-saving" (summer) time. The specific singular timezone we select is inconsequential in my mind, as long as it is in fact singular. What anti-DST means to me is being opposed to the twice-annual madness of changing every clock in the nation. As I said in my other comment, these clock changes cause countless small nuisances, immeasurable drowsiness and lost productivity, and a non-trivial number of injuries or worse. So shift every state one timezone eastward, but do so and be done with clock adjustments once and for all.
And yes, there are bigger problems in the world. But unlike solving healthcare, abolishing DST is just a decision. There's no hard problem to solve—just remove it.
Nowadays it makes sense to me how much our schedules have been dictated by the effects of daylight savings. Going to work at 9am, eating dinner at 8pm, going to sleep at 1am. It feels now like we need DST to function correctly.
...wait, what? What am I missing here?
The premise was that on the days right after the switch to the later sunrise schedule, sleepy people that were used to driving to work in daylight are now driving to work at night, and there's a statistically significant increase in traffic fatalities on those days.
My source has been lost to the sands of time, but it rings true for me.
My goal in life is to perform a us government sponsored cost-benefit analysis for ending "daylight savings time" and have it come out as an overwhelming positive.
I think it is mentioned in Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker.
Personally I deal with this problem a lot. It is a pain and expensive. Of course this is a problem because the time data my software ingests often doesn’t include the offset or zone. So I have to work around it. All for subtracting then add one hour for the year.