Posted on 11/01/2013 3:31:05 PM PDT by Sergio
Daylight saving time ends Nov. 3, setting off an annual ritual where Americans (who don’t live in Arizona or Hawaii) and residents of 78 other countries including Canada (but not Saskatchewan), most of Europe, Australia and New Zealand turn their clocks back one hour. It’s a controversial practice that became popular in the 1970s with the intent of conserving energy. The fall time change feels particularly hard because we lose another hour of evening daylight, just as the days grow shorter. It also creates confusion because countries that observe daylight saving change their clocks on different days.
It would seem to be more efficient to do away with the practice altogether. The actual energy savings are minimal, if they exist at all. Frequent and uncoordinated time changes cause confusion, undermining economic efficiency. There’s evidence that regularly changing sleep cycles, associated with daylight saving, lowers productivity and increases heart attacks. Being out of sync with European time changes was projected to cost the airline industry $147 million a year in travel disruptions. But I propose we not only end Daylight Saving, but also take it one step further.
More at the source...
No.
I assume you are talking about the lower 48.
+1
Wouldn’t you think they could take a stroll outside during lunch? That’s what I did took a brown bag outside and munched on lunch while walking.
I think we should have inverse logarithmic time.
+1.
I’m all for two time zones, but arranged a bit differently, with a 12 hour difference between the two.
One zone would be the east and west coasts, and the second zone everything in-between.
With a 12-hour difference between these two zones, the country will get along a great deal better.
Excuse me, I have to leave to put my house up for sale. [currently live in MA]
And here I thought no one was going to really care one way or the other about this. lol!
They sort of cobbed in one but if you look at a map you’ll see there are only three fifteen degree longitudes across the US.
I love DST. Where we are, sun sets at 9:05 at the latest and doesn’t get dark until 9:30. It gives so much time to do things outdoors at night. I would hate to see it set an hour earlier and rise long before most people wake up. Early and late summer would have very short times with sunlight.
Why not, this is already done with radio and tv call signs, with stations to the west starting with the letter "K" and those to the east with "W".
Daylight savings time MIGHT make sense if you define midnight as 1 a.m. and noon as 1 p.m. !
What the heck was so hard about having summer and winter schedules for work ,school , and whatever but leaving the dang clock alone?
Are people so dim-witted they actually can’t keep track ? Wait, don’t answer that....
This is covered on page 349,185, paragraph 5, section 5, subsection 32, little roman 5 of the Obamacare Regulations, under
“Standardization of Treatment Procedures and Options: Uniformity of Scheduling Times”
In order to deal with the problem with patients being on the phone for hours to schedule their appointment, or sitting in the “clinic” for 12 hours waiting for someone to see you, hours will be standardized so that it is always “9:30 a.m.,” no matter the actual time, and thus Obamacare will have a perfect record in terms of getting coverage and in to see their doctor when they were told they would.
First observation.
In November, the change of clocks should be called “Daylight Losing Time” since the sun goes down around 4:30.
Second, having just two zones for the entire continental USA is dumb. There’s a reason why we have 4 time zones.
It’s because people don’t like to get up in the dark to go to work, or to come home in the dark.
Under a two time zone system, people on one coast would be getting up at 4 AM and on the other coast would be driving home at 7 PM.
But there’s more dumbness in the article. It says that people who live on one coast and do business on the other would benefit.
Sure, but change everybody’s schedule just for those few people? Dumb.
So “Americans’ schedules are determined by television more than daylight.” Doubly dumb. Changing everyone’s clocks for the dumb bunnies whose life revolves around TV, is really dumb.
This lame-brained idea would not eliminate jet lag. The sun and earth would not pay any attention to this nonsense, and so the sun would continue its apparent path through the sky just as it does now.
I see no need for daylight savings time, and I see no need for the authors suggestion of just two time zones in the continental U.S. - the suggestion is out of sync with reality.
While daily savings time is artificial, the time zones are a close geographic approximation of the world, divided up into 24 time zones approximating - from one to the next heading west, about one hour between each at set, at the starting point at about noon, so that noon, on the clock, occurs at about the same earth-solar moment - when the sun is directly overhead in each zone. It is an approximation of the natural time of the 24-hour day. Slightly artificial yes; mostly not.
That’s all we need to do, is restore and keep the basic orginal setting and leave it alone.
IF anyone should want, for their business, government office or organization and their customers to have some sort of “daylight savings time business hours” (open from 10 to 6 instead of 9 to five for instance), doing so should be at the discreation of each place, not a mandatory monkeying with the time on everyone.
We won’t get it changed just like we won’t get anything changed. However, I love DLST. Putting ourselves through the twice yearly insanity is, well, insane. it serves absolutely no good purpose at all that I can see.
Why the hell do we do it?
Here’s what I do. I simply don’t participate. I go to bed and get up an hour earlier.
The Earth’s rotation is the amount of time that it takes to turn around once on its axis. There are actually two different kinds of rotation that you need to consider here. How long does it take for the Earth to turn once on its axis so that it returns to the same orientation compared to the Universe, and how long does it take for the Earth to turn so that the Sun returns to the same spot in the sky.
Let’s answer the second question first. It takes exactly 24 hours for the Sun to return to the same spot in the sky. It’s obvious, right? That’s a day. But the second question is more interesting. It actually takes the Earth 23 hours, 56 minutes, and 4.09 seconds to turn once on its axis compared to the background stars.
Earth takes 365 days 6 hours 9 minutes 9.54 seconds to circle the sun.
I say we stop messing with the clock and the calendar and stick with the slowly shifting time of day and year. In time day will be night and winter will be summer.
My little girl Spike is preggers....:)
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