DST/BST: why do we keep this up?

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Well firstly, I'm not exactly sure where to stick this (quiet, you ) - here or Whatnots or Lingering Sighs; if a mod thinks it's out-of-place, I'd appreciate a nudge.


Anyways, North America (well, US & Canada; I'm not sure about Mexico) is two days into its latest incarnation of Daylight Savings Time (also known in other parts as 'British Summer Time' - guess where), and I wonder what's stated in the thread title: Why?

The first real push to bring about 'putting the clocks forward' was by golfers who didn't like cutting their round short due to dusk (their efforts in English Parliament, despite significant support, were thwarted). Then WWI saw it put into use, and at the time, it served its purpose - energy was saved due to less time 'working' without sunlight, so less burning of candles/gas or electric lights/etc.

But...

Nowadays more and more people work in shifts, or spurn the traditional "9-to-5" schedule, and this does almost nothing for them - they'll just have to keep their lights on later in the morning until the sun rises. And honestly, even the 'norms' get up early enough to bathe, get ready for work and commute that they rise before the sun; doesn't that mean that electricity one supposedly 'saves' in the evening is being 'wasted' in these pre-dawn hours as well?

And spare me the argument about helping farmers; these are people who live by the land; they rise with the sun, anyway. Assuming a theoretical 12h day, with normal dawn at 6am and dusk at 6pm, all this means is that the farmer gets to 'sleep in' an extra hour until 7am!

In short, I believe Daylight Savings Time has become a nothing more than an inconvenient anachronism. What with the US Gov't-mandated change this year to have DST start in mid-March, and the subsequent scrabble to 'fix' this "Mini Y2K" issue, it's starting to show JUST how much of a nuisance it is. As such, I'd be more than happy to see this annoying hassle go away altogether.

...or am I wrong?

What do y'all think?

 

I agree. Down with DST/BST!

 

Jaded Empath for prez!

 

There's a huge push in NZ to have it extended to last for longer over summer. People moan and groan about wanting to have more sunshine hours to do stuff. I just want to hit them on the head and say:

"You'll get the same amount of sunshine no matter what they do with the clocks. We're just changing the time. We're not redirecting the course of the sun itself. You moron."

 

Down with -Time!

 

Amen - I'd be rude enough to tack on one more thing to that rebuttle: "...so why don't you get up earlier to use the MORNING sunlight that you're missing out on."

You know, it's just that sort of sentiment that started people thinking about the whole DST thing - Ben Franklin wrote a satiric letter to the French people about them getting up earlier to save on candles.

(And, well, I was hoping that someone'd talk me out of my 'down with DST' idea...now I'm starting to be boldened by similar thinkers. )


EDIT: No sooner do I hit 'post' then I think of someone else: if people want DST, why don't we keep the clocks like this all year long? Just shift the temporal scale to something that people find most convenient and leave it there - it's the biannual change that gets on my nerves.

True, as a consequence 'noon' would lose it's particular significance, but I think most people don't care that it's supposed to be the moment when the sun reaches its zenith in the sky, anymore...

 

I hate, hate, hate, HATE (yells, screams, lies on floor drumming heels) DST. Dumb Stupid Time. I like BST for a name.

I don't know where the argument it "helps farmers" came from. I lived in Vermont for years with dairy farmers as my close neighbors and NO ONE despised BST more than they did. Messed up their whole day.

Let's pick one or the other and stick with it. I do care which - I'm on the side of shift workers (when I worked midnight shift and DST came into effect I had zero hours of sleep in actual darkness) and school kids (who are getting run over here every few weeks as they get on the bus in the dark) and farmers (see above) and everyone who faces the morning in darkness because of this idiotic law. But I'll live with permanent BST if I have to and ask the schools to change their hours for safety's sake.

 

Let's switch over to metric time while we're at it.

 

I, like most people, get up in the pre-dawn hours. My alarm goes off at 6 AM, meaning that there's only a few weeks a year around the summer soltice when the sun is up before the alarm clock goes off. That having been said, there actually is a sensible reason for DST.

Days when DST is in effect, energy consumption is reduced about 1% every day. That is a small, but not insignificant amount. The extra hour of sunlight at the end of the day saves more energy than what is used in the beginning of the day before the sun rises.

However, if we stayed on DST all year, the sun wouldn't rise in December until almost 9 AM, when most people have already started their workday. So in the winter time, the energy savings at the end of the day is less than what is used at the beginning of the day.

I'm sure everyone is for conservation, and if switching between DS and Standard time means we consume 1% less energy annually, I'm all for it. It's a minor inconvenince at most. I actually find it strange that most people would rather we stay on standard time. While it is always nice to wake up when the sun has already come up, I'll happily trade that for having an extra hour of sunlight at the end of the day all summer long.

 

Aldeth the Foppish Idiot has a point. Our calendar and our time system are not perfect. They fit the bill pretty will, but with out adjustments, even they will eventually get off the mark.

Go back through Western history and look at how people once told time and marked days. They used the "standard" ideas of 30 day months. Those calendars were so off that the October Revolution took place in December (I think...)!

 

Slightly rant to follow.

Red October happened in November, and it was because of a faulty calandar system, but not because they used 30 day months.

When they first started keeping track of years, it was determined that you needed to add one extra day every four years to keep everything in synch. These are leap years. Then, around 1000 AD people noticed the seasons started getting screwed up. That was because it turns out you usually, but not always, need a leap year every four years. After some calculations by people much smarter than I am, it was determined that two things needed to be done to rectify it. First - they had added about an extra week of days, so at the end of the year, they cut off the last few days. Secondly, they calculated that a leap year would not be done on the year of a new century (like 1100, 1200, 1300, etc) unless the first two digits of the new century was evenly divisible by 4. So there was a leap year in 2000 because 20 is evenly divisible by 4. However, there wasn't a leap year in 1900 because 19 is not evenly divisible by 4.

So why was the Communist Revolution off then? Simple. The recalculations were done by the Catholic Church, as it so happened that the most educated people in society at the time were in the clergy. The Russians, being Orthodox, decided not to go along with the Papal decree of the new calandar system. So they were already off by about a week, and the situation only worsened over the next 900 years or so as they continued having leap years on every new century. By the time the Communist Revolution took place, they were off by about two weeks from the real date. When the Communists took over, they re-synchronized their calandars to the rest of the world, but some of the remnants of the old system are still in place. That's why some people celebrate "Russian Christmas" on January 8th instead of December 25th - they are two weeks behind.

 

Wow, I honestly did not know that. Thanks for the info. I'm a glutton for knowledge.(no sarcasm intended nor implied)

 

Thanks, now I don't feel as stupid for not remembering that from high school history!

I grew up around farmers and can't recall any of them complaining about DST/BST. It's just something that happens twice a year. Nothing more.

I've even worked night shifts in fall and got stuck with an extra hour of work. But I didn't care. I was on over-time anyway!

 

actually Aldeth, the leap was originaly 10 days, it was decided that october the first should be followed by october the 10, by pope gregory (the smoething). it was decided in 1582 that the 4 of october should be followed by the 15 october. before that we had used the Julian calender for over 1600 years (it was introduced by the famous julius ceasar but was first used when octivan got the power and became pontifex maximus).oh and the change happened because easter got hard to determine, because easter followed a lunar calender, that didn't match very good with julian calender, easter kept coming earlier and earlier.


the russians and the rest of the orthodox countries did not follow this correction initialy and neither did the muslims or all does other countries which wasn't discovered by europeans yet

Several orthodox countries still celebrate christmas after the julian calender.

 

Two things:
1) sorry for 'throwing my voice' with Kuemper's login, but she and her hubby were by for dinner last night, and she did post once or twice from my PC, and I guess I didn't notice the login this morning.
I guess the Princess of Spam gets a couple more to her post count

more importantly, 2) I'd already knew about the Gregorian Correction, but it's still cool to review - technically there wasn't anyone ever born on those days that the Vatican just 'threw out', the days just never existed.

Around here, we newfies actually acknowledge the existence of 'Old Christmas Day' - we don't celebrate it or observe it, but everyone seems to know what day in January it'll fall on.


But, grudgingly, I understand peoples' arguments FOR the biannual mucking with everyone's clocks.

However...

The scales at my deli department give a time-stamp with every label we print. And the overall computer network for the supermarket chain manages the prices and specials and everything takes care of the 'internal clock' and makes the BST adjustment 'automatically'.

But funny that the labels I printed off this morning for the roast chickens that I cooked showed "8:04am" when my shift didn't even start until nine...

Sounds funny, but this fresh product has a FOUR HOUR SHELF LIFE, so if any customer happens to come along at noon (whilst I'm busy cooking the second batch - they have to be in the oven for 70min) and complains, me and my whole department are...well, in it up to our necks.

If they're just jockeying for a free chicken and I buckle to the customer, mgmt chews me out; if I stand the course and explain that the birds actually are NOT 'expired' and there was a 'computer error', the truth sounds like an excuse, we likely lose a customer and guess who gets called out on the carpet over the whole mess? Yeah, have I mentioned how much life eats it, at this point?

And the 'clock' on the scale isn't going to change for a while; thanks US gov't for dictating terms to the rest of the world. And thanks Big Business for ignoring this mandated change for almost TWO YEARS before it took effect!

And why did some personal computers get updated with new patches/whatever from Micro$oft and they changed automatically, and yet others, like MY PC which has "automatic updates" enabled and is left on 24/7 with a persistent (but soft- and hardware firewalled) connection, didn't? (I'm expecting to be suddenly one hour ahead of everyone else soon...)

Basically, I'm just griping about change - like that's an original thing that's never happened before. Grains of salt will be distributed for the cost of shipping & handling.

 

Queensland is the only state in Australia not to have daylight savings - it was defeated on two state-wide referendums quite a while ago and now there's another push for it. Thankfully the premier isn't a fan.

I really don't see the point of it. Seems like a pain in the arse for no real gain.

 

I believe GMT (Greewich Mean Time - Winter hours in the UK) is required so that children (or the majority of them) don't have to walk to school in the dark. Of course it might be simpler to set school hours back during the winter, but this would cause a problem with working parents who walk/drive the children to school. So basically GMT is a Health and Safety thing.
I don't see any reason not to get rid of BST, but most people seem to prefer the longer evenings so I don't see it changing.

Personally I don't, and never have had, a problem with it. What would be more weird is where you go to work in a different country which is an hour ahead - The Spain/Portugal border for example. Particularly as I believ ethe clocks change on different weekends - sometimes you're in sink, and sometimes you're not. Then again, I'm sure you'd get used to it.