Shimagnolo

That is a myth.
The truth: https://www.nber.org/papers/w14429

clubman 

About 30 years ago, Newfoundland experimented with double Daylight Saving Time for one season. A 2 hour offset plus they already have an additional 1/2 hour start on the rest of the country. At 6pm in August, the sun appeared to be at high noon. Double weird but also kinda normal for a unique place if you've ever been there.

Shimagnolo

The entire state of Alaska is on the wrong time zone;
They should be on UTC-10, but are on UTC-9.
I think the problem starts with Canada extending the Pacific timezone all the way up the AK.
The Canadian West coast runs diagonally, (NW<->SE), across what should be two different timezones.
Canada extends the Pacific timezone all the way North to AK, so if AK was on the correct time, there would be a 2-hour difference at the AK/Canada border.

madpogue 

Daylight savings time year-round is equivalent to the Spinal Tap amplifier that goes to 11. If any one jurisdiction wills it, rather than pushing the time forward all year, they should just push BACK the time they do everything.

KraneXL

Well its just after 5 p.m. here on the west coast and already dark. Its got my inner clock all messed up.

RiddleOfSteel

Being as far north here in Seattle, DST in the summer is enjoyable. A 10pm-and-still-light warm evening is something I like experiencing. Now that we're on normal time or whatever, it's a nice signal of late autumn/winter months and the changing of seasons. If a lot of people don't like being out when it's dark, that's fine by me as that means less people outside and on the roads, whether I'm biking or driving. Sucks for bike pictures taken outside--basically limiting me to a Saturday or Sunday that is also dry. I currently have front and rear lights that are or have just asked to be retired, so I'm working out the soonest date I can get to a bike shop (or REI) for replacements, and whether I actually have to take my car to do so. Amsuing, slightly inconvenient puzzle. I have a good plan.

verktyg 

Seattle is tied with Buffalo, NY for the most overcast days a year.

Portland, OR and Pittsburgh, PA are tied for second.

Having lived in 3 of the 4 places and experienced SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder) for many of those years, I look with apprehension as the days get shorter and it gets dark earlier. I start the countdown until December 21, Winter Stoltice, the shortest day of the year.... After that even though we're in the midst of leaden winter, every day the planet starts tilting back to normalcy and the days get longer!

I prefer that it stays lighter longer in the afternoons. Arizona is the only US state that doesn't practice this folly!

verktyg

smontanaro 

+1

For the past 10-15 years, I've worked in finance at firms which trade worldwide. After Bush 43 widened the DST period (the US now starts earlier and ends later than everyone else), so there are potential hiccups both when the US changes and when the ROW changes. Personally, I'd be happy with UTC.

The Golden Boy 

jonwvara 

When I lived in New Hampshire for awhile, back in the late 70s, I knew an old guy, Jasper Hogan, who liked daylight saving time so much he personally stayed on it all year. I learned about that when I stopped to say hello to his sister one day. Her name was Gladys. She lived by herself in a little place (now it would probably be called a tiny house) on the Androscoggin River. No electricity, and she hauled her drinking water from the brook in a pail.
Anyway, I noticed that she had two of those big old wind-up alarm clocks on a kitchen shelf, set an hour apart. I asked her about it, and she pointed to one of them and said, "Oh, that one's for Jasper. He stays on fast time." I wish I could write the New Hampshire dialect. "Jasper" is more like "Jaspa," and "time" is something like "toime."

MKahrl

Real time, where you set your watch by Local Apparent Noon, was what we had when all East-West travel was done at the pace a man walks. With the invention of the iron horse trains were now leaving a destination and traveling through several towns with their clocks set at different times before lunch. Since trains meet where there are sidings in order to pass each other according to a time table it was chaos when approaching trains were using different times. The creation of "Train Time" (now Time Zones) was a great step in organizing our lives to deal with the increasing speeds of travel and communication.

Anyone using celestial navigation would have their chronometers set to Greenwich Mean Time and not give one care about daylight savings time unless he was trying to schedule his arrival to opening time at the marina bar.

steelbikeguy

I'm retired now, but I always enjoyed this time of year because commuting home in the dark in the rural area was quite peaceful and pleasant.
Granted, now I just go out for an evening ride, but it was more special when I felt like I was getting away with something that most folks didn't get to enjoy.

As for DST itself... it's nonsense. After living in Arizona for 3 years, I learned that you can just go to work earlier when the sun is coming up earlier. The number of hours of daylight didn't change when DST was created. People just had a built-in excuse to change work hours.

Steve in Peoria

DiabloScott

Fascinating, does everyone do this on the same weekend?

HTupolev

We should ditch time zones altogether.

FlMTNdude

RobbieTunes

RobbieTunes

steelbikeguy

regarding my experience in Arizona, I was serving in the Marines at that time. My squadron ran our work in three shifts, and we just changed when the shifts started and ended. I don't recall what any other business did. I suppose that a store/bank/etc that had posted hours might have to announce a change in hours.

In some discussions about DST, there is an assumption that everyone works the same hours. This overlooks the factory folks who start at 6:30am and bankers (or other retail folks ) who don't start till much later in the morning (9am?). Here in the midwest, farming is a significant occupation, and they work at all hours.
As such, I don't see how DST is the only way to compensate for changes in the time of sunrise and sunset. Employers are free to set whatever hours they want, within the constraints of their business.

Coordinating across time zones is a concern for many, such as my work as an engineer. I had to deal with suppliers and customers across the world. That included folks in the UK who had the own version of DST (British Saving Time, I think?), which didn't change on the same date as we did. That made setting up phone calls more difficult. This was also the case with folks in Indiana, since a lot of it didn't observe DST.

The military had this problem solved, though. In regards to our squadron's flights, it was all coordinated in Zulu time, which is the same as GMT, IIRC. When your flight might take you across one or two time zones, it quickly becomes clear that such a standard time reference is needed.

Anyway... this seems more like a social problem rather than a technical one. I was happy to not observe DST, and think folks would adapt to life w/o it. If nothing else, more folks could squeeze in an early morning bike ride before work.

Steve in Peoria

madpogue 

Marking time by natural forces/changes worked for as long as it did because few people interacted with each other over long east-west distances. As we became more mobile, and esp. as we moved more across longitudes, standardizing time and setting time zones became more critical.

Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.

Shimagnolo

Around here roofers generally start at the crack of dawn, so they can get as much work done as possible before the hottest part of the day.
And the Home Depot also has different hours in the winter than they do in the summer.

When I was in networking for a large, multi-national company, it had become a PITA to correlate the log files from multiple network devices in multiple timezones, when diagnosing failure events. The people who had originally set up the network had foolishly put all the devices on local time even after the corporate network had grown beyond a single timezone. So our simple solution was to switch all the devices to UTC time. Switches and routers don't care what time it is when doing their jobs. But they put the timestamp into everything they log, and it is us humans who must examine those logs.

DiabloScott

I was on a submarine and we had 6-hour watches. When we crossed a time zone they'd make an announcement, we'd log it, and would have a 5-hr or 7-hr watch. No DST at sea and no daylight on a sub.

richart

If God meant for us to have Daylight Savings Time, he would have turned the Sun back an hour. Seriously though, I could care less if I am in standard time or daylight savings time, I just hate the switching back and forth. Pick one and leave it alone.

obentwan

No.

cqlink 

If it was administered correctly, it would be ok but like everything else government does, they get it wrong.

First, "spring forward" would be done at or around noon , eastern on a FRIDAY, so everyone truly benefits and gets out of work early. As for "fall back," you know. Set clocks back around 5pm on Sunday so we can get the hour before work.

As for big business? Toooooo bad .

bobwysiwyg

.. but then, I'm retired.