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Daylight saving time in my region should be...

by Arunbear (Prior)
on Dec 01, 2011 at 10:39 UTC ( [id://941038]=poll: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??

Vote on this poll

Retained
[bar] 68/17%
Scrapped
[bar] 259/66%
Adjusted to be more useful
[bar] 68/17%
395 total votes
Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Daylight saving time in my region should be...
by ciderpunx (Vicar) on Dec 01, 2011 at 12:41 UTC
      I would vote to have it randomized daily. Hourly might make things too chaotic.

      Sparky
      FMTEYEWTK
      How about pseudo-randomized so if we found one we actually liked we would be able to repeat it indefinitely?!
Re: Daylight saving time in my region should be...
by ChuckularOne (Prior) on Dec 01, 2011 at 16:26 UTC

    I saw something a few weeks back on this topic that I thought was humorous.

    "Only a fool would think that cutting a foot off of the bottom of the blanket and sewing it to the top of the blanket will give you a longer blanket." It wasn't credited to anyone.

Re: Daylight saving time in my region should be...
by Plankton (Vicar) on Dec 03, 2011 at 01:56 UTC
    The time change should be made more useful by "springing" forward 25 hours and "falling" back 25 hours. On a Thursday we all move our clocks forward by 25 hours moving us right into the weekend. Then when it is time to fall back we do it on Monday morning givings a second Sunday :p
Re: Daylight saving time in my region should be...
by ikegami (Patriarch) on Dec 01, 2011 at 10:43 UTC
    Should be used year round. It gets dark to darn early in winter.

      That's what they do in Russia. A great idea! I hate it coming home from work when it is too dark for jogging (except in the streets) ...

      Rata
      Agree, but it also gets light too darn late.
      I can just about remember when I was a child, there was an experimant here in the UK of using Summer Time all thorough the year and it was very hard to get up for school in what felt like the middle of the night. Apparently the statistics from that period do should an overall reduction in traffic accident deaths but this is probably more due to the fact that drink-driving laws were introduced at about the same time.

        I thought folks were getting up in the dark as it is, so I checked, and sunrise was at 7:30am today. Most people who start at 9:00 probably do get a hint of light when they get up, or see light shortly thereafter. This is a good counter argument.

        One of the things that influences my opinion is that my time zone is incredibly large. When I went on a trip last month (6 weeks from the shortest day), the sun was setting at 3:30pm! (And I was still a 12 hour drive from the Eastern-most tip of the time zone!)

        I can remember that. It was strange going to school in the dark but the upside was being able to sneak into the school building early and hide in a dark but warm classroom rather than shivering outside! Happy days :-)

        Cheers,

        JohnGG

      Of course, there's nothing to stop you from going to work an hour earlier... (At least, usually. Most computer jobs are at least somewhat flexible on exact hours.)

Re: Daylight saving time in my region should be...
by SuicideJunkie (Vicar) on Dec 01, 2011 at 21:16 UTC

    At the very least, the time should not be jumped forwards!

    Far better to roll it back every day in February.

    Sure, February would have to be cut down to 23 days, but its already the runt month and nobody would mind having all those extra hours.

      Huh?...Not sure how losing an hour per day would add up to 5 days so quickly. I think you're saying that every day in February should be 25 hours long, which would make February just under 27 days long. By the time February is over, the clocks will have in effect fallen back a day + a few hours, which would REALLY mess everything up.

      Back to the drawing board...

        The point is that you'd roll back one hour in the fall. And then 23 hours in Feb.

        1+23 = 24 hours, and you're back to your original time zone

        February 24 and up would be moved to other months.

Re: Daylight saving time in my region should be...
by Anonymous Monk on Dec 01, 2011 at 14:47 UTC

    DST should be scrapped and we should all switch to UTC. It's just a number, and it doesn't matter in the slightest if the sun comes up at 1400 and $work starts at 1430.

    When the fastest method of communication we had was trains, time zones made sense. Now they are just in the way.

      I don't think you've considered the ramifications of switch to UTC..

      Take for example a company with offices across three time zones. "Our office hours are 9-5" would become "our office hours are 9-5, 10-6, 11-7 between these dates and 10-6, 11-7, 12-8 the rest of the time".

      Then, consider the shift in operating hours of most establishments in the spring and fall. Even if you officially abolish time zones, they're still going to persist unofficially because the chaos that would be caused by leaving it up to each establishment to decide if and when to shift their hours is just too great.

      They are still very useful.

        Not at all. If we ALL switched to UTC then office hours would be the same all year round all over the world and you could call anyone from your office without having to wait for them to wake up and get to work. If only we weren't so addicted to sunlight...
        -- Time flies when you don't know what you're doing
        "Our office hours are 9-5" would become "our office hours are 9-5, 10-6, 11-7 ..."

        I don't think so. You'd say "office hours are 9-7." The fact that some of your offices might be closed during that window is (presumably) irrelevant.

        I reckon we are the only monastery ever to have a dungeon stuffed with 16,000 zombies.

      While the minimalist, neat freak, wishing-I-lived-in-a-Shinto-shrine part of me agrees completely with anonymous and jdporter, the reality is that most humans aren't like me. Therefore, it is my belief, that even when we have space-based nations, and these space-based nations become economically dominant, the common rustic person on Earth will still use time zones. And, of course, there will be some American-descended space-based nation that refuses to convert to metric time like the rest of the solar system.

      What bothers me now however, is why does a new "day" start in the middle of the night? Shouldn't 00:00 be the time when the sun rises during the Spring/Fall equinox?

        Midnight or Noon are easy to track when they happen, and are measurable any time of the year. Sunrise varies, so you'd have to accurately track when the equinoxes are, and then accurately measure when sunrise happens, and then have an accurate clock to keep that time for the other 363 days of the year. We've only reliably been able to do that for a couple of hundred years. The definition of 'day' predates that by centuries.

        (By the way: In tropical areas, it's not uncommon for the historic 'day' to start at sunrise. Of course, sunrise varies by at most an hour over the course of a year for many of them.)

        Curse you! I come here to ask a work-related question about perl and I spend 3 centidays reading about metric time!

Re: Daylight saving time in my region should be...
by ramlight (Friar) on Dec 01, 2011 at 15:09 UTC
    I don't like it when children have to get on the school bus in the morning while it is still dark and half-awake drivers are on the streets. I'll give up some of my convenience for that.
Re: Daylight saving time in my region should be...
by hominid (Priest) on Dec 01, 2011 at 14:24 UTC
    Scrapped! I have to get up early for $work. In the summertime, it's still light outside at the time that I should go to bed, so I always end up staying up too late and dragging ass in the morning.
Re: Daylight saving time in my region should be...
by zwon (Abbot) on Dec 01, 2011 at 15:59 UTC

    In my region there's no such thing ;)

Re: Daylight saving time in my region should be...
by pvaldes (Chaplain) on Dec 05, 2011 at 16:31 UTC
    mmmh ... wormholed?
Re: Daylight saving time in my region should be...
by syphilis (Archbishop) on Dec 06, 2011 at 13:05 UTC
    Where I live, Daylight Savings is just fantastic.

    In the summertime we get to knock off work an hour earlier ... of course, at that time of day, it's too bloody hot to do anything outside - and by the time it's cool enough to venture outdoors it's bedtime.

    Fucken brilliant !!

    Cheers,
    Rob
Re: Daylight saving time in my region should be...
by cavac (Parson) on Dec 09, 2011 at 22:31 UTC

    Personally, i find DST a bit annoying, but i learned to cope.

    Speaking as a professional system administrator and software developer: Whoever invented the darn thing should be hung, drawn and quartered. Repeatedly. Make that a double feature together with whoever came up with leap years and leap seconds.

    Most governments would have probably already stopped using what is essentially two time zones in one region - but couldn't because that would be more complicated than just keeping that mess. I think this snippet of BBC's comedy series "Yes, Minister" illustrates it very well how that sort of political thinking works.

    Note: Since the clip seemingly was uploaded by BBC itself, i don't think it's any kind of copyright violation to link it here...

    Don't use '#ff0000':
    use Acme::AutoColor; my $redcolor = RED();
    All colors subject to change without notice.
Re: Daylight saving time in my region should be...
by jonadab (Parson) on Dec 14, 2011 at 20:09 UTC

    If we could get rid of it nationwide, I'd be in favor of that -- provided everyone got at least ten years' notice ahead of time.

    However, one thing worse than messing around changing the clocks twice a year is not changing them when everyone else around you does. I went to college in northern Indiana (which does not observe daylight savings), and figuring out timezone issues when communicating with family in Ohio was a royal pain. For part of the year, this configuration actually reversed the logical roles of east and west in determining whose time is ahead of whose. It was confusing and annoying, and we had to stop and think for 30 seconds or more every single time we planned anything involving somebody crossing the border.

    Another thing that's worse than changing the clocks twice a year is changing the schedule for changing the clocks, with only a few months' notice. We went through that a few years ago, and it was a nightmare, especially for a network administrator trying to keep track of exactly which systems had the timezone update to make the change correctly on their own, which ones still needed said update, and which ones weren't going to be able to get the update and would have to have their clocks changed manually twice per time change. Hence, I'm against changes to the schedule on short notice. Anything less than ten years is short notice, because systems deployed before the announcement might still be in widespread use.

    So, if we're going to move away from DST, we should do it nationwide, all at once, and we should plan the change at least ten years in advance. With those provisos, I'd be very much in favor, because DST is a bit of a nuisance.

    For that matter, I'd be in favor of getting rid of timezones entirely and using UTC everywhere -- but again, we'd have to do it (at least) nationwide, all on the same date, and we'd have to plan the switchover WELL in advance.

    I don't buy the argument that changing the clocks -- or using timezones for that matter -- gives us daylight at a different time of day. All it does is change what numbers we use to refer to a given time.

Re: Daylight saving time in my region should be...
by Anonymous Monk on Dec 16, 2011 at 21:48 UTC
    Scrapped! Global warming is real and it is being caused by the extra hour of sunlight in the summer. Hasn't anyone noticed how global warming started about the time Daylight Savings Time took off?

      I'm not sure if you're trolling or mean that as a joke. I, for one will take it as a joke.

      :-)

Re: Daylight saving time in my region should be...
by Anonymous Monk on Dec 01, 2011 at 12:18 UTC
    Other: no opinion
Re: Daylight saving time in my region should be...
by blue_cowdawg (Monsignor) on Dec 30, 2011 at 15:23 UTC

    If it it's Daylight Savings Time.. how much interest does it pay?


    Peter L. Berghold -- Unix Professional
    Peter -at- Berghold -dot- Net; AOL IM redcowdawg Yahoo IM: blue_cowdawg
Re: Daylight saving time in my region should be...
by chacham (Prior) on Dec 05, 2011 at 20:22 UTC

    DST is an example of creating our own problem, and then having funny solutions to fix it. The problem is that day is defined by the sun, but we try to define it with the 24-hour clock. No wonder we have to patch it twice a year, every year, to keep it working right.

    Instead the clock should simply be relative to sunrise/sunset. Then, even the notion of daylight saving would make no sense.

      So that would result in hours of varying duration (from, say, winter to summer)? And minutes would get longer at night, in the winter, except at the equator? And would it be a minute or a second or ?? that defines the period from sunrise to sunset north of the Arctic Cirle in the summer?

      And how should I calculate my location -- whether with a sextant and slide-rule or with a GPS? Either is going to have a hard time with definitions of units of time "relative to sunrise/sunset."

        In the ancient world of Greece and Rome, the day was indeed divided into twelve hours of daylight and twelve of dark so the length of the hour did vary depending on the time of year.

        Good point. I was focusing on my day not on interacting with others. :)

        As for hours changing, that has always been the case. Because the clock, that is how people worked, and quite nicely. People worked longer in the summer than the winter, and so on.

        As for matching up with other people, perhaps the 24-hour clock should indeed be used.

        Just a thought.

Re: Daylight saving time in my region should be...
by thomas895 (Deacon) on Dec 19, 2011 at 21:51 UTC
    It is handy for making the days "more useful", so to speak, but an hour at once? That should be adjusted, say a half hour to begin with.
    ~Thomas~
Re: Daylight saving time in my region should be...
by pileofrogs (Priest) on Dec 21, 2011 at 22:45 UTC

    Gah! I HATE dst. I'd love to see a calculation of the loss to the global economy from people (like me) who miss the bus TWICE EVERY YEAR because of this nonsense.

      On the other hand, I once overslept but was not late because fortuitously it was the Monday rigth after the clocks went back so I was on time after all.
Re: Daylight saving time in my region should be...
by TJPride (Pilgrim) on Dec 20, 2011 at 16:55 UTC
    Doesn't really bother me one way or the other, aside from the occasional programming headaches resulting from timestamps wrapping around to the wrong day due to an hour +/-
Re: Daylight saving time in my region should be...
by ksublondie (Friar) on Mar 16, 2012 at 22:18 UTC
    Unfortunately in farming communities, it's a necessary evil, like cleaning the toilet or going to Walmart. Hubby is a mild-mannered white-collar worker by day and AutoTrac drivin' farmer by night. That extra hour of light during the summer evenings makes a big difference.
      ksublondie,
      You have explained why shifting it during the summer is a benefit but not why shifting it back in the winter is also a benefit. In other words, would there be any downside to keeping the time the same year round provided the summer months worked out the way you need?

      Cheers - L~R

        Shifting it back for the winter gets us back on a schedule more in-lined with the "real world". I'm most thankful that the hubs comes home at a decent time for supper instead of some moronic hour which sets the tone for the rest of the evening.

        Yes, it doesn't sound like much of a difference, but shifting 1 daylight hour makes a big difference in getting kids fed, to bed, and up again in the morning for school. Subtle, but kinda huge. Kiddos getting one less hour of sleep? Disaster.

        Probably not the reasoning for the original plan, but it's the reason that affects me the most.

Re: Daylight saving time in my region should be...
by Kanishka.black0 (Scribe) on Dec 28, 2011 at 01:30 UTC
    i live in india ... nothing makes sense to me

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