Let's abolish daylight savings time

[andymorton]

I'll support whatever gives me more time in bed!

[Bölvaður]

Um, daylight savings has nothing to do with teh position of the sun, beyond that when the sun is up, we spend less on electrical lighting (a lot less back when it was instituted). the idea is to realign the part of the day that most people are awake for with the hours the sun is up. if the sun is up but everyone is still asleep, then the sunlight is being "wasted".

heres some more info:
http://www.tnr.com/blog/jonathan-cha...ht-saving-time

Daylight savings are a poor hack if you change the clock.
If you want to have people sleeping when the night is and wake up and be active when the sun comes up you should change when you do the activities but not the clock. And if you really wanted to safe electricity you'd make people go to sleep when the sun goes down and wake up when the sun comes up.. not 4 hours after sundown and few hours after sunrise.

There actually should just be one universal clock everyone is going by, it makes everything so much easier when it comes to telling people on the internet when something is to happen.
The only objection to that I have heard is extremely stupid one and is based on the idea that people are used to go to sleep at 12 or what ever and waking up at 7 or 8. So when the clock is universal people would be go to sleep and waking up in no relations to if it is dark outside but follow the clock mindlessly like zombies.... it's just... unbelievable anyone would have thought this.

1 clock for all is my vote and never change it, you should change when you do things not what the clock is.

[JRV]

I think the entire world should be on Greenwich Mean Time. It works fine in Iceland.

[Sean Moran]

I think the entire world should be on Greenwich Mean Time. It works fine in Iceland.

Agree 100%.

Some people have parents that are not very tall, and some people have parents that are not very beautiful, and some people have parents that are not very clever, so then it is wrong to make special concessions for stupid people if we don't give advantages to the short and ugly people too.

Tropical climates don't need DST, so that is why I always set my timezone to Burkina Faso - Ougadougo or somewhere,but it's all the same country.

I don't see any reason why I should make allowances for stupid people who can't work out the time in Vancouver or Beijing with basic arithmetic, if they won't pay me some respect for the fact that both my parents were short and ugly, and I had no choice in that.

[Chilli Bob]

I think whoever invented daylight saving time got it backwards. Wouldn't it make more sense to have it in winter, so it's not dark when you finish work.

Or, alternatively, have it summer, but in the other direction, so the sun goes down earlier, and it gets cool earlier so you can go out and do something with your evening.

Maybe it makes sense in chilly old Europe, but it has no place in tropical and sub-tropical Australia.

[JRV]

I think whoever invented daylight saving time got it backwards.

It was invented by Ben Franklin.

[RiceMonster]

Daylight savings are a poor hack if you change the clock.
If you want to have people sleeping when the night is and wake up and be active when the sun comes up you should change when you do the activities but not the clock. And if you really wanted to safe electricity you'd make people go to sleep when the sun goes down and wake up when the sun comes up.. not 4 hours after sundown and few hours after sunrise.

And what's your plan to make that happen?

[Sean Moran]

I think whoever invented daylight saving time got it backwards. Wouldn't it make more sense to have it in winter, so it's not dark when you finish work.

Or, alternatively, have it summer, but in the other direction, so the sun goes down earlier, and it gets cool earlier so you can go out and do something with your evening.

Maybe it makes sense in chilly old Europe, but it has no place in tropical and sub-tropical Australia.

One thing a small percentage of people in Japan and Christchurch and Queensland might have possibly had the opportunity to take a little time out of their busy schedules recently and recognise, is that the only thing that humans can possibly do to the planet is to make it worse.

When the Sun is at the zenith, it is not the Sun's zenith that the Sun has any worries about. It is our zenith. All the Sun really cares about is that lots of us can open our first can of beer for the day. The angles are not all that important beyond the wrist and the elbow, but that's when it happens. That is when the Sun is at the zenith, and there is absolutely nothing that Bill Gates can do about it.

DST is about silly people with some strange and abberant imagination that they can move the Sun. Here on planet Earth, we have asylums for those sorts of people, and beds by the windows if you want to see the sunrise at dawn. Set your watch however you like. It won't change the Sun. The Sun wakes up when it wants, and it doesn't change, and nobody can change it.

[qamelian]

It was invented by Ben Franklin.

Not quite. Franklin only proposed a method to Parisians for conserving candles and did so as a form a satire. The first modern and serious proposal for DST did not occur until 1895 and was made by George Vernon Hudson.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time

[Sean Moran]

When my computer tells me (or any of my timepieces) that is 04:00, I know that it is 4AM in Burkina Faso, and noon in Perth, Au, and still an hour before beer o'clock in Thailand.

This is easy to keep track of, and anywhere on the Internet, I know that I'm on GMT without any need to adjust for my geographical location, but it's easy to learn to adjust to any local place around the globe if you know where you are on the planet. There are only 360 degrees in a circle, and roughly only 24 timezones. 360/24 = 15 degrees, and that covers a lot of longitude.

Once the idiots try to add in DST, everything becomes so confusing. eg. I used to add 8 for Perth and 7 for Bangkok, but now do I add nine or six or seven or eight? The jetsetting human mind does not take to DST when we already have the various lags calculated. If I'm an hour early or an hour late, don't blame me because I know when the Sun gets up in the morning.