They should add a provision for the bill to become null and void 5 years later without any intervention: the Sunshine sunset clause.
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I tried to represent an “understanding” attitude with my first comment in the thread, but it was actually kind of a lie. I guess I just don’t understand how an hour change can affect people so much. I pretty much don’t notice anything in terms of sleep or tiredness or anything like that. How can one hour get so many people riled up? Plus it happens on a Sunday which is usually pretty relaxed.
I’m not advocating for it, seems kind of weird, but I don’t think it’s worthy of the amount of criticism DST clock switching tends to get.
I mean, life is full of little hassles. But this one seems especially pointless. If we all (except Lucy who loves DST) hate switching clocks so much… why DO we switch clocks twice a year?
My co-workers with kids have been complaining that it’s especially hard to get the kids to adjust.
I adjust to time changes when I travel much easier because my whole routine is already upended anyway. But for DST it’s just the same routine minus an hour of sleep.
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Back before I sent my kids to school, we used not to change any of the clocks.
And Stu still keep his own devices on standard time (by some trickery into fooling the devices about the time zone he’s in… no, he does not switch to CDT or anything like that. I think he uses UTC+n, whatever n is supposed to be for EST)
Isn’t the ratings change by doubling the 1-2 time slot like some of the increased risk of cancers the media likes to get all up in arms about?
Doing this increases triples your chance of getting this cancer. Yeah, from 1-3,000,000 to 1 in 1,000,000. Seems similar to buying 2 Powerball tickets to double your chances of winning.
My wife watches the grandkids in the morning before school. My daughter brings them over at 6:30 each morning and my wife takes them to school at 8:15. This thread caused me to note the fact that they have been much more tired this week. Normally between 7-7:30 they are easily rousted to get ready for school. This week they are barely making it out the door on time.
The discrepancy with Europe may be about to become moot…or worsen…depending on your perspective.
A measure that would abolish the seasonal time changes starting in 2022 is making its way through the EU legislative bureaucracy.
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My understanding is that is causes issues with the advertisers who are paying based on the ratings during their commercial. It’s basically unknowable what those were for two hours a year so they have to guess. And when you’re buying ads you prefer to not guess. They end up selling that ad time at a discount.
I just do what my elected officials tell me to do.
If they say turn the clocks back/forward, I do it.
Clock-turning is for suckers.
Spoiler
I remembered today the other reason I hate the time change since they moved it earlier in the year: I drive straight east to work and the sun is in my eyes the entire time, under my visor. Very annoying. I need to remember to be early or late on Monday. Normal time should be ok in a couple weeks.
(Didn’t go to the office earlier this week.)
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Yeah if you live west of where you work then there’s roughly one or two weeks that are bad in the morning and another one to two weeks that are bad in the evening. But with daylight savings time you get to double that!
As twig notes, I like keeping the clock a little closer to the sun. But if we’re going to change our time rules at all, we should absolutely do what China did, and set the whole country on “US time”. Maybe exempt Alaska and Hawaii, because who cares, but maybe they’d prefer the simplicity of sharing the time with the rest of us.
Yes, that means schools would start at a different time in California than they do in NY. Maybe they’d make better choices, and not send high school kids, who naturally tend towards a later schedule than either kids or adults, to school at the crack of dawn.
It would make travel a hell of a lot simpler. We could announce that Thursday night football starts at 8pm, without giving a long list. I could set up a meeting with my CA colleagues without us having to think about which way the adjustment goes. No one would have to fret about the counties in indiana that make weird choices. We’d just all be on US time.
And some of us would wake up at 5 and others at 8. And that would seem normal.
Hawaii, sure, they could stay on HST if they want.
Alaska… it hardly matters. Switching on and off DST is pretty pointless in Alaska for the reasons that you like it. No one in Fairbanks is waking up close to dawn year-round. That would be absurd. Even in more populous Anchorage there are days when it never gets darker than civil twilight. So if the switch from nautical twilight to civil twilight is how you define “dawn” then it doesn’t even happen. Sunrise in Anchorage ranges from 4:20 AM to 10:15 AM even with DST. Without, it’d be 3:20 AM to 10:15 AM.
For Fairbanks those numbers are 2:57 AM - 10:59 AM with DST and 1:57 AM to 10:59 AM without… a whopping 9+ hour difference.
For reference, Boston without DST would be 4:06 to 7:13, about a third of the difference that Fairbanks gets. And DST eliminates almost a third of the difference in when the sun rises for Boston, whereas it eliminates only 11% of the difference for Fairbanks.
Alaska implemented DST for the sole reason that they found it more convenient to be a consistent number of hours different than the rest of the country. So they might prefer to just do what the rest of us do since there’s so little correlation between time of day and daylight there anyway.
I’m not talking about whether Alaska and Hawaii should switch between DST and standard time, I’m talking about whether they should adopt the standard US time zone, that all of the lower 48 ought to use.
I’m completely serious. You are complaining about the minor annoyance of changing clocks twice a year, but every time someone travels, every time you have a meeting (social or business) with someone across the country, you have to juggle time zones. It’s been especially obvious this year, since one benefit of moving our social lives on-line is that it’s easy to hang out with your friends on the other coast. I can’t tell you how many emails I’ve gotten this year that have more space devoted to explaining what TIME the event happens than to describing the actual event.
If we are going to mess with the clocks, let’s actually fix that, and have a single time zone for the whole US. And then people who live in the east or west of our current time zones can just go to work and start their schools at a time that makes sense where-ever they happen to be, instead of being held hostage to some “9-5” standard that doesn’t work for them.
So was I.
And I was looking at their (different) choices about DST as a gauge for what they might prefer with regard to a hypothetical UST.
I don’t understand what DST has to do with it. I truly don’t see the connection.
If we move to UST, there’s no particular clock time that means “we start the day now”, each employer, school, and household will choose their own.
Changing time zones when I’m physically traveling isn’t nearly as hard for me as changing time when I’m not.
Meetings are easy unless they are organized or attended by an idiot (which does happen, of course).
“The meeting is at 2:30 PM MDT” is perfectly clear. If the organizer doesn’t specify the correct time zone then they suck and should lose meeting-scheduling privileges until they learn. If people don’t know how to translate MDT into their particular time zone then there are apps for that.
Microsoft will take care of that for you.
Also, we don’t acknowledge it very often, but there’s already a lot of pressure for people across the country to do stuff at approximately the same time. New Yorkers start their work day later, and end it later, than Californians. That’s because they actually DO work with each other in many cases, and watch the same televised events “after work”.
And during the pandemic I took a work-from home job in a different time zone than where I live, so I’m quite familiar with the issue.
I was the only person not in the time zone but quickly everyone learned to append the time zone to the meeting time or say something equivalent to the “9 / 8 Central” that we are so accustomed to hearing on TV.
If you are working for a large national company, and you are all on the same MS server, then yes, MS will take care of that for you. That doesn’t work so well if you are not.
I’m completely serious that I’ve gotten scores of emails this year announcing events that literally have more space taken up describing the time of the event than describing the event. You are greatly overestimating the comfort of the general public with translating between ET and MT.