I don't know how someone ever could think this is a good idea and also got so many governments to implement this. Whoever is behind it, he or she is a genius of evil. Let's ditch this nonsense now.
Why is that? Whether or not it’s still a good idea, lots of people have thought so in the past. You don’t see the fact that governments have implemented it as evidence that there has been consensus and something legitimate there you might have missed?
I honestly don’t care if daylight saving is abolished, but when I was younger, I used to think like you do that daylight savings was nonsense and should be ditched. But since then I’ve looked at the sunrise charts and realized what happens in the summer without daylight savings, and I changed my mind, I like what happens. Without daylight savings, summer nights are short and summer mornings the sun comes up at 4am and I sleep through some of the usable sunlight. Daylight savings is an attempt to normalize sunrise time. What, exactly, is “evil” about that?
Take a look at the annual sunrise times where you live and check out what happens with and without daylight savings https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/san-francisco
Yeah, exactly right. Before industrialization, you’d simply wake up with the sun. If you ever go camping or on long outdoor trips, you might notice your schedule becomes suddenly much more aligned with sunrise. Mine does, anyway.
> I’d rather go to sleep earlier so that the 4am feels like 5am
That’s totally reasonable, but hard to achieve alone. We agree on the workday schedule norms together as a society. Flexibility would be nice, but much of industry depends on schedules and people physically working together, so they don’t (yet) have ways to relax the rigid schedules. Another thing to consider is the summer nighttime is less than 4 hours long (not counting any twilight at all). That means if you sleep 8 hours, you do have to choose which end to cut into.
I expect less rigid working styles to increase in popularity for some professions, but there will always be situations where people want to do things at the same time, which is substantially easier if they can agree about what time it is.
People literally die because of the change. Every year, extra people die so you can enjoy more sunshine in summer evenings. You dismissed these deaths because you "like what happens".
> People literally die because vending machines fall on top of them. Every year people die so you can enjoy more chips at lunch. You dismissed these deaths because you like what happens.
But if avoiding fatal car crashes is the goal... maybe getting rid of cars is the solution, rather than obsessing over the very marginal effects of DST?
Do you drive a car?
Therefore worktimes need to follow the sunrise, especially beyond 45° latitudes where the sunrise shifts by more than 3 hrs between winter and summer.
There's a huge [citation needed] to add here. Also, needs a citation for people still being able to focus better at the morning after their clock is switched.
That works for a lot of us in tech with online computer jobs, but simply is not realistic yet for most of the world’s laborers.
> Daylight is not saved, or extended.
This is a framing, it depends on your point of view. Certainly I’ll agree the term “daylight savings” was conceived as a positive spin on the idea. On the other hand, if you take it as a given that work hours are 9-5, and that most people will wake ~2 hours before work to get ready, then updating the clocks relative to the work day does, in fact, give you more daylight evening time in the summer.
And here we are.
Historically in France the saving was equivalent to the whole consumption of the city of Paris over the day (maybe 10-20% of the whole country).
It seems people don't care about energy anymore ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
(Maybe a tiny electricity decrease and heating usage increase on average, depending on latitude - which would lead to more CO2 emissions overall, depending on the power source).
I think the idea of "change time to save power" was a fine experiment, but it clearly failed to produce meaningful results so we can stop the experiment.
You have to think that daylight saving time was introduced almost a hundred years ago (heavily variable per region) when a significant amount of the electricity was going to (public) lightning, using lights available at the time that were very energy hungry and very inefficient.
There was a reason it was done. Seriously, it was not a failed experiment carried out by idiots, like some commenters seem to think. Usage evolved and might have made DST worthless or counterproductive, if anything removing DST might show the importance of adjusting time to match energy consumption.
When you trade lighting costs for heating costs DST may well be more expensive.
2) You don't live in a vacuum. Most people can't change their time by themselves because they depend on the rest of the world.
Maybe you take a train/bus at 7 to get to work at 8. There might not be a train at 6.
Maybe you have to drop your kids at school. The school is not taking your kid one hour back or forth as you wish.
Maybe you work in a factory/office that's opening and closing at some point, you can't work outside of these hours. You depend on coworkers who do other tasks, you may not be able to work by yourself.
That's the reality for most workers, outside of developers.
that means prior to 1916. I don't know about you but I don't have bills going that far. ^^