Jesse suggests Continuous Daylight Saving Time as an alternative to the twice a year ritual of futzing with our clocks:
I think a time system could improve health, energy use, and safety even more if it were to make small adjustments throughout the year instead of large adjustments twice a year. For example, a small amount of time might be added or taken away just before 2am every morning, in order to keep sunrises at 6am at a latitude of 40 degrees. The daily changes would be small enough for most people to ignore -- less than two minutes per day even around the equinoxes.
While it'd never happen in my lifetime for many of the reasons he goes on to list, I really like the idea of CDST. But it's clearly the sort of thing that's appealing to the programmer in me, not the part of me that has to deal with the real world.
Of course, I'm on record as not being a fan of DST in the first place.
Posted by jzawodn at November 01, 2006 07:44 AM
Want to never have to change your clock again because of Daylight Savings? Simply move to Arizona! We are one of the only states too stubborn to change our clocks. I think there is one other but can't remember who it is.
Not a fan either.
Why not just do away with the time shifts all together?
Sure, it's nice to "make better use of daylight"* and one can't argue that "about one percent each day"* in electricity savings is a small but significant amount - however, I don't buy the "there is more light in the evenings"* bit.
Speaking of savings, has anyone ever conducted a test for how many meetings were missed, people late for work, traffic accidents, etc that result from these silly time changes?
I say we do away with the time shift all together.
Or simply wake up and go to bed an hour earlier than everyone else for half the year.
But tweaking time by any fraction every day means you'd have to replace every single clock in the country. But it would be sweet to no longer be that guy who forgets to set my clock (fore|back)ward.
Why not move to Arizona, we don't "celebrate" daylight savings. It is MST all year.
Of course anyone who has spent time in Arizona in the summer knows that no one will save energy if we have to deal with an extra hour of sunlight.
Personally, I'd love to dispense with the notion of timezones altogether. 12:00 in Waterloo should be the same as 12:00 in Munich. Makes things a lot simpler in our globally connected world.
So what if their 'lunchtime' is at 11:00, and mine at 17:00? All you have to do is get over associating lunch with 12:00, and start associating it with mid-day!
And as far as the whole daylight productivity thing is concerned, individual businesses can shift their hours as they would want to -- so for a period of time, they can have summer hours, and then winter hours.
Maybe we should just split the difference, and move the clocks thirty minutes and leave it at that?
I don't change my clocks. They either change themselves, or I just know they are an hour fast. I'm a proponet of CDST, but not in the way it is proposed here. I just think we should be on DST all the time. Like it makes a fucking differance anymore if it's sunlight @ 7am in December. That hour is much more valuable to me after work than it is before work. And really, it's all about what works best for me.
Anyone wonder what screwing with time so much to suit those of us close to 40 N would do to everyone on the south side?
Plus you have problems with matching times. I don't think screwing with time a little bit every day is good for planes and other forms of scheduled travel.
Plus everyone needs a new watch. Mechanical watches just don't work well anymore.
I think time should be kept standard, no daylight savings time, no time switches at all. Adjust your schedules as appropriate for your location!
When I rule the world, everyone will use zulu time, no time zones, no DST.
http://www.linksmoving.com
Full Moving & Shipping Directory.
ad your link free.
Sigh ... we go through this every six months and never figure it out: if we could get everyone to set the clock back to the time of sunset the previous night it would NEVER GET DARK! :)
We get an extra hour of daylight? What moron said that? There is still the same hours of a daylight in a day no matter if you change your clocks or not. Also, Ben Franklin did not necessarily promote the idea of DST, if you read his excerpt closely it almost sounds as if he is joking or being sarchastic about it.
"Still thinking it something extraordinary that the sun should rise so early, I looked into the almanac, where I found it to be the hour given for the sun;s rising on that day... [others] will be as much astonished as I was, when they hear of its rising so early; and especially when I assure them that it gives light as soon as it rises!"---Ben Franklin
DST is a joke. It saves NO energy and is the biggest farce this country has ever been part of. Regardless of if you run your AC until Dark while observing DST, you will STILL be running your AC the same amount of hours no matter if you observe DST or not. All DST does is cause problems. There is no positive result from DST. Your politicians and anyone else who tells you that DST does save energy or whatever is WRONG.
