from the fuel-the-standard-vs-daylight-saving-fires dept.
March and April are the time of year where a decent fraction of the world shifts their clocks forward (or back, in the Southern Hemisphere) for Daylight Saving Time (DST). Every year, it seems to result in debate about whether to abolish DST, and, if so, whether to stick with standard time or daylight time.
Soylent News, being a science/fact-oriented site, would likely be interested in a comparison of time zones with Mean Solar Time (MST). There is a map showing the difference between the two in the Wikipedia article on time zones. The person who created that map has some short-yet-interesting articles on creating that map and later discussion about it. The articles are old (timeless?), but largely still relevant, as the time zones, and the existence of DST, are largely unchanged since the articles were written.
Interesting how standard time, over most of the landmass of the world, is largely ahead of MST, in some places (e.g. western China) by a lot. DST, where observed, makes that difference worse.
(Score: 2) by srobert on Monday March 09, @02:46PM (14 children)
The existence of DST, is my goto for demonstrating that the U.S. government is incapable of responding to the desires of the electorate, who overwhelmingly wish to abolish it. I sometimes think that the Powers that Be just want to be sure we don't have any examples of ordinary people having any influence over the republic. If the U.S. Congress were to abolish DST, the hoi polloi might get uppity and start to think their opinions were important.
(Score: 4, Funny) by DannyB on Monday March 09, @02:53PM (3 children)
I'm sure the wise people in our beloved government have their reasons for wanting to keep DST.
One obvious benefit is that an extra hour of daylight would provide more solar power generation.
(ducks, hides under desk)
Stupid people exist because nothing in the food chain eats them anymore.
(Score: 4, Funny) by JoeMerchant on Monday March 09, @05:38PM (1 child)
>an extra hour of daylight would provide more solar power generation.
Actual urban legend out of the Ft. Lauderdale Florida Police office, 1960s:
Old woman appears at the counter and demands to talk to... someone. Desk Sgt. asks her what her concern is?
"Well, Officer, we just have to get rid of this Daylight Savings extra hour of sunlight!"
"Why is that, maam?"
"Well, my lawn is already dry and brown and with an extra hour of sunlight every evening, it'll be burnt to a crisp!"
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday March 09, @06:56PM
Back in about 1978, the variation I heard was of a farmer writing to congress critter complaining extra sunlight would burn up his crops.
Stupid people exist because nothing in the food chain eats them anymore.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Wednesday March 11, @12:16PM
For humans who utterly refuse to adjust their wall clock schedule, ironically, it does provide an extra hour of sunlight during prime air conditioning time. There's "too much" solar and air conditioning now a days to ever hope to abolish DST, the window for that is past.
It would be a lot easier to tell people to adjust their wall clock schedule LOL than to make all of us adjust our wall clock settings instead.
The real danger of allowing representative democracy is the people generally disagree with the leaders and abolishing DST would embolden them to fix immigration and fix endless wars in the middle east and fix the tax system and fix health care and fix ... etc etc
(Score: 2) by DadaDoofy on Monday March 09, @03:52PM (7 children)
"the electorate, who overwhelmingly wish to abolish it."
Citation?
(Score: 2) by vux984 on Monday March 09, @04:54PM (3 children)
https://news.gallup.com/poll/657584/half-daylight-saving-time-sunsetted.aspx [gallup.com]
(Score: 4, Informative) by vux984 on Monday March 09, @05:01PM (2 children)
replying to myself to give additional context -- the article seems to say around half -- but you need to actually read it:
This paragraph sums it up nicely, emphasis mine:
There is a split on which time to permanently settle on, but their is overwhelming support to be rid of the time changes.
(Score: 2) by weirsbaski on Wednesday March 11, @09:07AM (1 child)
All the emphasis is mine:
That's one poll. Here's another one, with a different result:
https://www2.stetson.edu/today/2025/03/majority-of-americans-prefer-year-round-daylight-saving-time-stetson-survey-reveals/ [stetson.edu]
And this is why DST will never go away, because there won't be wide consensus on what to switch TO.
(Score: 2) by vux984 on Thursday March 12, @04:45PM
Structuring of the questions is sufficient:
Q1 - Do you want to switch to a single permanent time? [ ] Yes, or [ ] No
Q2 - If Q1 passes with a majority yes, choose [ ] Permanent Daylight [ ] Permanent Standard
If the above were put to the people, you'd get a strong majority to switch to permanent time, and a slim majority would get the permanent time they wanted. And end of the day, most people would think things had been improved, even if they didn't get exactly what they wanted; because among the people out there who want Permanent Daylight, over permanent standard, only a small minority would rather keep switching than get permanent standard. (And same for the people who prefer permanent standard - they'd by and large take permanent daylight over having to switch twice a year.)
I used to run HOA type Annual meetings, and when proposals needed a 50% or 70% threshold to pass, but you had split pluralities, it was simply a matter of structuring the resolutions properly do get past the paralysis, and get to a resolution that the majority agreed was better, even if it wasn't what a true majority actually wanted most.
A better system would be ranked choice voting; which would be ideal really for these situations, but the existing legal structures most places generally don't allow for that yet.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Monday March 09, @05:35PM
Just to put in my anecdotal bias, as someone who does not live in a city I find the clock switching approach preferable.
(Score: 2) by srobert on Monday March 09, @05:38PM (1 child)
https://www2.stetson.edu/today/2025/03/majority-of-americans-prefer-year-round-daylight-saving-time-stetson-survey-reveals [stetson.edu]
This article for example cites 75% as wanting to stop the changing of clocks. Some favor standard, some favor permanent DST. A small minority favor the current compromise position of part of the year this way, and part of the year the other. And yet, the Congress is paralyzed on the issue.
(Score: 2) by DadaDoofy on Monday March 09, @06:44PM
If 75% want to stop changing the clocks, they should take it up with their state legislatures. States are completely free to opt out of Daylight Saving Time, as Hawaii and Arizona currently do. With flex-time options available to a much larger segment of the workforce than when DST was conceived, it has become much less necessary. What the states can't do under federal law is change when DST starts and ends.
As far extending DST to the full year, it goes against common sense. Many areas in the Eastern parts of their time zone would experience darkness at mid-afternoon during Winter. You can only image the proponents of this actually believe they'd get an "extra hour" of daylight - throughout the whole year! Heh heh
(Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Monday March 09, @05:54PM
Define electorate. You mean those poor individual slobs who only think they have some say in their government, or the big companies who actually purchased all the laws.
Yea, you need to get up earlier so you can have more time to BUY STUFF in the evening.
But lets either keep DST as-is, or abolish it. Those are you ONLY choices, right?
Wrong. It used to be DST was not so horrible back when it did not start so early in the year. But around 2007 or so, they decided we had to get up earlier, earlier in the year to buy even more stuff in the evenings.
Just set it back to the way it was and a lot more people would be happier.
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Monday March 09, @06:23PM
Not really, you see a ton of people that don't know any better wanting to make DST permanent, any state in the union can right now go to permanent ST without any permission required from the federal government. The thing that requires approval is opting for something other than either permanent standard time or the current standard of switching time twice a year.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by pTamok on Monday March 09, @04:56PM (13 children)
I think a lot of people like to have extended daylight in the evenings in early and late summer, which they use as recreational time, rather than 'wasting' sunlight in the hours when they are asleep before they get up to go to work or school. This is probably why many want to go to permanent summer-time. In the winter, it would mean sunrise occurring well after you arrive at school or work, which is why some use a public safety argument to say that morning daylight in winter is important to reduce the number of traffic accidents.
i would vote for keeping timezone noon close to solar noon, but allow people to come to work an hour earlier in summer, with a transition date the time of the summer/winter switch now. No-one would be confused about the time, but would simply follow the idea of coming in to work an hour earlier on the last Monday in March (in the northern hemisphere) and on subsequent working days, until the first Monday in October (in the northern hemisphere)and subsequent working days where you come into work an hour later than in the summer. You would no longer need computers and automated systems to be set up to cope with the time transitions, which would be a huge benefit. I realise this will never happen.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Monday March 09, @05:42PM (9 children)
>In the winter, it would mean sunrise occurring well after you arrive at school or work, which is why some use a public safety argument to say that morning daylight in winter is important to reduce the number of traffic accidents.
And, we already have flex-time, 4 10s, early release days from schools and every other kind of schedule chaos you can imagine, why couldn't we just keep the clock steady and start school (and work) later in the winter?
Bumping the clock back and forth is a dirty hack for what should be handled at the individual scheduling layer, not at the system standards definition layer.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Monday March 09, @06:30PM (8 children)
Because moving when people do things around is more or less the same thing as changing the clock time around. If you're needing to be at work at say 9am at one point of the year and at another you have to be to work at 10am, that's at best as good as what we've got as you'd have either the case of everybody doing the same thing, which is the same as what we have, but with less clock adjusting, or worse as now you've got some people changing when they do things and others not.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday March 09, @06:52PM (7 children)
>worse as now you've got some people changing when they do things and others not.
In my view, the schedule chaos would be good for our infrastructure. Acknowledging that 9-5 isn't the only possible schedule, having people on the roads and in the stores at a more spread out range of times would be preferable to the 7:30 rush down our road every morning, followed by the 4:30-5:30 jam every day - regardless of where the sun is in the sky.
Our elementary, middle, and high schools have VERY different schedules, so arguing that synchronization of schools to work for the convenience of working parents is a non-starter.
Honestly, most workplaces also need to evaluate who really needs to be in an office, and how often, as well - but that's a whole different issue. At least breaking the "40 on the clock, present in the chair" norm would be a good start.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Monday March 09, @07:09PM (3 children)
I don't think you understand just how tightly things are integrated these days. For some things like office work, I agree with you, but the school issue is going to be an issue pretty much no matter what you do short of families having only 1 full time wage earner or free after school activities for the kids. 6.5 hours being roughly a typical school day means that regardless of how you line the hours up, at least one end of the day is going to be happening during a period when the parents are working.
For the rest of it though, there's a ton of very hard to really understand relationships, retailers, grocery stores, restaurants, bars, package delivery services, banks, and pretty much every other area that is necessary for modern living is impacted by schedule changes from other businesses in the area. And you should expect significant price increases if they have to start staffing on the basis of unpredictable and inconsistent schedules from other businesses.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday March 09, @08:08PM (2 children)
Time was, "everybody" showed up by 9 and was expected to be present until 5.
In the 1990s my field spoke a lot about "core hours" of 10-4 where everyone was expected to be present, I had a colleague who did 8-4, and I did 10-6... it didn't really increase staffing at all, even in larger businesses.
These days, you're already dealing with all kinds of people on all kinds of schedules, and in all kinds of time zones. E-mail takes messages far better than voice mail used to. Video conferences are cutting business travel significantly.
In my opinion, the baseline time shift just isn't as effective as it was when it was first legislated. It's not even as effective as it was 20 years ago.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Monday March 09, @08:55PM (1 child)
I don't think you're understanding. It's not just businesses, it's basically every area of our economy and lives that would have to adapt to this. If you've got friends whose work hours get shifted and yours don't, that means fewer opportunities to socialize with them. Businesses that rely on deliveries can't just shift hours unless the companies that are doing the deliveries can accommodate that, which they may very well not be able to as fish come off the boat at a certain set of times as the fish and the sun doesn't care about what our schedules say.
Yes, for certain types of office work, you can get away with it and if you were operating in a vacuum it would work. But I got really angry a while back because the IT department had my computer reset at 6pm in order to install updates and I got cut off midway through what I was doing. I'm generally off at 6pm, so it's not normally, an issue, but having things just abruptly cut off mid sentence and have no alternate way of communicating what happened because all the computers were doing the same nonsense is a real problem. I'm guessing that they do it at 6pm because most of the people are done by then and it's still early enough in the evening to fix whatever MS broke, but it's a real problem when not everybody is on the same schedule.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Monday March 09, @09:21PM
>it's basically every area of our economy and lives that would have to adapt to this
I don't think you're understanding: stop the time change. Nobody has to adapt to anything.
If the schools think it's unsafe for kids to be out in the dark (which they sure as hell don't care about today) they're free to shift their schedule seasonally to keep them in the sunshine. That's a very regional concern anyway, not something that should be addressed at a national level.
Businesses want their workers to have more sun-time after work in the summer? They can shift their schedules for those workers it works for - if they've got some rigid clock-matching stuff going on (like my daily 10am meeting scheduled out of Europe that shifted to 11am this week due to dyssynchrony betweeen US-EU DST schedules, it will shift back in a week, or two, I don't really care - my outlook calendar will tell me when it's time) - they can adjust, or not, like we did this morning. Our business actually proposed and implemented 4 10s through the summer for those employees who wanted more daytime off with the kids when they're out of school.
> If you've got friends whose work hours get shifted and yours don't, that means fewer opportunities to socialize with them.
All your friends, outside of your employer, have the same work schedule as you? WTF do you live? Most of our friends are through our son's school, their schedules are all over the place already, constant chaos trying to meet with more than 2 of them at a time.
>I got really angry a while back because the IT department had my computer reset at 6pm in order to install updates and I got cut off midway through what I was doing.
Sounds like IT as usual to me. Last time I bothered to get angry at IT was when they updated my OS (in 2004) and asked "what do you want migrated?" I said: "just my e-mail, everything else I can re-install if/when I need it, but don't lose my e-mail - that's the only copy." 2 hours later (speedy service) my laptop returns, updated, lots of my previously installed software is there ready to use, but you know what wasn't there... It was actually a liberating experience. A lot of my workday used to consist of "oh, I got an e-mail about that a while back... let me find it and I'll get back to you." That was suddenly replaced with "well, I got an e-mail about that a couple of years back, but IT wiped my archives so here's all I remember off the top of my head."
I'm guessing that they do it at 6pm because they don't like working at 2am...
>it's a real problem when not everybody is on the same schedule.
Or, IT could be less IT-like and actually respect the M$ setting that tells when you prefer to receive your updates, maybe prompt you with a "update pending, install now or defer?" but, I understand the limited capacity they have to do things like that... maybe they will learn to use LLM code agents to handle the simple stuff like that in the future - nah, this is IT we're talking about, they LIVE to screw with their users.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Monday March 09, @08:43PM (2 children)
There's a VERY specific reason for this: That way, they can run fewer school buses and pay fewer drivers, by having the same drivers and buses make 4-6 runs per day rather than 2.
And yes, it's inconvenient as heck for parents. Right now, US school schedules tend to operate on the assumption that there's a person in every household, generally assumed to be mom, who is assigned to full-time parenting duties, and idea which hasn't been true for everybody ever and hasn't even been true for the kinds of demographics being targeted by these policies for decades.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Monday March 09, @08:57PM
Yes, and I don't really know that there is a way around that which wouldn't require the rich paying their fair share of the taxes or paying workers a decent income so that parents could afford to work no more than 1.5 jobs to make ends meet.
So, essentially it can't be fixed at this time. It's not like kids, or really adults, can spend that much time engaged in intellectually rigorous work for the 10ish hours it would take for the kids to both go to school and return from school outside of working hours.
(Score: 3, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Monday March 09, @09:05PM
> US school schedules tend to operate on the assumption that there's a person in every household, generally assumed to be mom, who is assigned to full-time parenting duties, and idea which hasn't been true for everybody ever and hasn't even been true for the kinds of demographics being targeted by these policies for decades.
Yeah, we know all about the public school bus system around here, and it's a nasty piece of contractor work outside the school system but deeply in bed with it.
There are an awful lot of mostly moms who clog the roads around our elementary and middle schools doing parental pickup (and dropoff) of their precious progeny. Very few rise to the level of PTA participants, but its some kind of suburban status symbol to have to go sit in line in the SUV to drop off and pick up the kids 180 days a year. In elementary, I'd guess less than 40% ride the buses, that might rise to 60% by middle, and in high school it's even higher when combined with the cool kids driving themselves, of course.
A particularly annoying aspect around school busing and the special needs population in our county is the disappearance of the "short bus." Our (politically shielded) contractor has decreed that the 43' school bus is the ONLY school bus that they will be using for ALL public school students, including those with disabilities who must be picked up at their doorstep, at the end of a long dead end street with no turn around. Passive agressive, much? Our first bus driver raised holy hell about driving down our (1/4 mile-ish single lane, weaving through trees) private shared driveway, but pickup / dropoff on the street corner was clearly unsafe for a non-verbal 14 year old who tended to bolt out into traffic when agitated (and, of course, the bus environment frequently agitated him) - we went back and forth about it, within the rules she couldn't bitch about the width of the road or the turn around, all were more than adequate, so she fixated on the overhead phone lines which were only 24" clear of her roof... we had AT&T online about getting that situation resolved with to the satisfaction of the bus service when a hurricane struck, the wires sagged lower than ever, kids were out of school for two weeks, and after the hurricane we got a new driver - no more bitching, no more refusing to drive to the house, she just did it for 3 years. But, new school, new driver, new rounds of bitching 2/3 times. After COVID lockdown was lifted was the absolute worst, the drivers would run into things on purpose to "prove" it was unsafe - hillarious after literally thousands of trips in and out before them navigated the same driveway with zero incidents. The school system promised smaller vans for transport, but never delivered - we kept the kids home until tranport (40+ minutes drive for us in a car each way) was provided - the schools lost funding due to the absences, suddenly a bus driver who would drive the route without complaints appeared. But at every single new year, new driver transition, that contractor bus service management would be the most abrasive offensive abusive bunch of jerks about providing the same services they had already provided for years prior.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Monday March 09, @06:28PM (2 children)
I don't personally understand this obsession with shifting the sunlight around. It's worth noting that the typical standard hours for many jobs being 9 to 5 didn't happen by accident. That happened after time zones were already in place and because it was generally a reasonable set of hours for most people to be working. Sure, folks like me that would rather be up all night or have a couple sleep periods per day existed even then, but it was a reasonable compromise for most people in terms of when to be awake.
Around here we get roughly 8.5 hours of light at the Winter Solstice and approximately the same amount of darkness during the summer. There is no way of shifting the clocks that doesn't create some suckage or issues at some point during the year. But, at least keeping to something closer to what the sun is doing helps a lot in terms of not forcing people to do a lot of work maintaining an unhealthy sleep schedule due to the timing of the day light hours.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday March 09, @07:13PM (1 child)
Also, because unions fought like hell and people got killed so that "full-time" would be 40 hours a week divvied up into 8 hour days rather than 14 hours a day 6-7 days a week. You know, like a lot of people work in other countries. I know that all of that history was carefully sent to the memory hole for most citizens, but it's important to remember, especially as the work environment has been shifting towards more employers wanting the second thing from their drones.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Monday March 09, @07:21PM
Yes, but my point was that the 8 hours a day could have been at different times during the day. It's not like cutting back to 5 days of work necessitated those particular hours. They could have started earlier or later.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 11, @06:17PM
Down south it's just plain dumb. The day doesn't change that much. Personally, I just prefer that solar noon occurs a little after 12 o'clock as the best compromise