Don't forget to set your clocks, both internal and external, ahead one hour today.

Daylight Saving Time. :-)

 

But yes, don't forget. Unless you live in Arizona or Hawaii or some other part of the US that doesn't practice DST.

Already?

Yep, daylight savings came as early this year as spring did -- OK, not that early! We had about two weeks of winter and now it's over, hopefully!! Or least during this coming week it will seem like winter is over.

This video about DST is awesome. Especially the part about Arizona's Indian reservations that do & don't observe DST:

 

Well this would be awesome.  
 

U.S. Senate approves bill to make daylight saving time permanent

 

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-senate-approves-bill-that-would-make-daylight-savings-time-permanent-2023-2022-03-15/

Good riddance to standard time if it actually passes.

My position on DST is that we should stop by twice-yearly time changes but standardize on Standard Time, which is the least popular opinion to have on the matter.

Sun's gonna come up pretty late in the Winter under this system. Almost 9AM around January 1st.

Just now, GCrites80s said:

Sun's gonna come up pretty late in the Winter under this system. Almost 9AM around January 1st.

Which is infinitely better than the sun going down earlier at any point during the year, including winter. 

Some people argue that kids going to school are going to be waiting for the bus in the dark. But don't they already? When I was in school, it started at like 7:15am. Which means I was at the bus stop by 6:30 or so at the latest. There were probably only a couple months out of the year where I would be out during twilight hours. The rest of the year it was early enough to effectively be considered night. 

 

If we switch to standard time all year round, we're going to enter twilight hours at like 4:45am in the summer. That's dumb.

 

You can see the hours of sunshine in Cincinnati below. From my understanding, civil twilight is when the sun starts to have a noticeable impact.

 

https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/cincinnati

I love that we're switching. What's universally agreed is that the shift is awful.

 

I think the disagreement between DST and ST stems in large part from geography. If you live in, say, the Florida panhandle, yeah standard time probably makes more sense because 5:30 PM would be the earliest the sun ever sets and 5:30 AM would be the earliest the sun ever rises. But if you live in Seattle, standard time has the sun setting as early as 4:15 PM in the winter and rising as early as 4:10 AM in the summer. As somebody with little kids, I'd kinda rather the sun NOT come up at 4 AM.

 

But the overall point is that the debate is stupid because we control what time things start and end. You don't want kids to go to school in the dark? Ok, make school start later! People have been arguing for that for a while anyway. Heck, you can even make school start at different times throughout the year if you want. In China there is only one time zone, but people don't all keep the same working hours across the country as if there's something magical about going to work at 9 AM and you have to do it even when the sun rises at 11 AM.

 

The time shift is stupid because everyone is thrown out of whack at the same time twice a year. But being afraid of getting stuck in DST is equally ridiculous. Human beings decide what time things start and end, and if we don't like DST (or ST) we can make things start later! (or earlier!)

15 minutes ago, LlamaLawyer said:

Heck, you can even make school start at different times throughout the year if you want. In China there is only one time zone, but people don't all keep the same working hours across the country as if there's something magical about going to work at 9 AM and you have to do it even when the sun rises at 11 AM.

 

Personally, I really do not care what they do in this matter. Keep it the time change, get rid of the time change, I am cool whatever way they choose.

 

I do not know if you can easily shift the hours that school starts through the year very easily at this point though. There are too many variables at play that create problems. First being that many families have adjusted their work hours to the school year calendar and it is difficult to make adjustments every couple months (not impossible but would certainly cause issues). Secondly, and probably the bigger impediment is that you are going to have teachers unions that would fight this tooth and nail. Even though it may be common sense and perfectly reasonable, this does not mean the unions would necessarily sign off (unless they can achieve other concessions) and that poses challenges too. 

 

My only concern about this bill is that it seems to be pushed through hastily and there are a lot of unintended consequences that are being overlooked in the process. I have no problem getting rid of ST, but make sure it is done right and we think about many of the issues that will come up and have plans to address them accordingly. 

1 minute ago, Brutus_buckeye said:

My only concern about this bill is that it seems to be pushed through hastily and there are a lot of unintended consequences that are being overlooked in the process.

 

Welcome to the modern-day legislative process, my friend.

Is it really that big of a deal to change the clocks twice a year?  Good grief.

^Are you retired? To people who work and have kids to take care of it is.

16 minutes ago, LibertyBlvd said:

Is it really that big of a deal to change the clocks twice a year?  Good grief.

I think this is an example of where people are in search of a perfect solution to solve a problem where there really is no perfect solution. 

1 hour ago, LibertyBlvd said:

Is it really that big of a deal to change the clocks twice a year?  Good grief.

It's not THAT big of a deal, but it's just low hanging fruit that's a relatively noncontroversial way to improve society. It's definitely a problem for people who have kids. For an entire week in the spring, you're fighting against your kids oversleeping, then for two weeks in the fall your kids wake up an hour before you want to every day.

6 hours ago, LlamaLawyer said:

I think the disagreement between DST and ST stems in large part from geography.

 

The reason I would favor Standard Time is because it is in fact the real time, where noon is the middle of the day/when the sun is at the highest point in the sky, and midnight is in the middle of the night. It seems silly to standardize on an incorrect clock where noon is actually at 11am and midnight is actually 11pm year-round because people prefer to work earlier in the day so that there are more hours of sunlight left after work. If that's the case, just keep the clock on Standard Time and have people work 8-4 instead of 9-5 and it's the same except that our clocks would be accurate.

Maybe the workday should be shorter in the wintertime. Even Puritanicals can get behind this since it was what was done on 1800s farms. Everybody's in a bad mood out on the roads from November to early March since they're having to engage in full commerce in total darkness. And crashes go up since you have the unusual situation of peak volume with midnight visibility.

Big American companies are increasingly setting up operations in India.  Work is lobbed in a continuous stream back and forth.  The companies want consistent shifts for their Indian, European, and American workers.  Time changes mess with that scheduling.  

 

So eliminating the time change has nothing to do with the supposed well-being of Americans.  Quit talking about the health benefits of eliminating the time change, especially when you're posting photos of your latest time zone hopping trip.  

 

It has everything to do with the non-stop flow of customer service, cybersecurity, and the other crap that now progresses endlessly as the earth rotates.