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End Daylight Savings

petitions.whitehouse.gov

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Re: End Daylight Savings

#61

Post by mooism2 »

sxp wrote: post #20
zanny wrote: post #13

While we are at it, can we get rid of time zones and switch the world to UTC? I get that it is a jarring idea to not be getting up at 8am anywhere in the world, but for international travel, computing, shipping, etc not having to constantly adjust dates and times across arbitrary lines of longitude would be such a boon. I don't get why people inherently need 6am to be the early morning, 12pm being "high noon", and 6p…

Working off UTC makes a lot of sense for modern companies that span the world. And it would also simplify UIs for calendaring applications. (Try creating an event in iOS that starts and ends in different time zones such as a flight). I've switched to using a Casio 3319 ( http://www.casio-usa.com/products/Watches/Classic/AQ160_Seri... ) with the digital time set locally and the analog time set to UTC because it makes…

It makes calendar UIs more complex. I mean, I live near Greenwich, so telling me I've got to clean the house next Wednesday is fairly unambiguous, but if I lived in Sydney and we were using UTC there would all of a sudden we two days you could be referring to.

Re: End Daylight Savings

#62

Post by mooism2 »

tsotha wrote: post #42
jzwinck wrote: post #38

I was thinking of starting the very same petition just a few days ago. It is logical, and would save costs that laypeople fail to recognize or appreciate. DST is a fertile source of bugs in the operation of important computer systems. Financial markets are an example I'm all too familiar with, where systems in New York run at a 5-hour offset to London about 49 weeks per year. Making that work (relatively) smoothly ta…

DST is also a killer. Traffic accidents go up for a few days every year when you lose an hour as groggy people are out driving to work.

I am under the impression that traffic accidents increase briefly when the clocks go forward, and decrease briefly when they go back: there's no net difference overall.

Re: End Daylight Savings

#63

Post by ScottWhigham »

nhebb wrote: post #45
sliverstorm wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've achieved absolutely nothing that I've heard of. But, slacktivisim has such a low barrier to entry, I expect this is going to go on for a good long while. If not forever.

Slacktivism is like leveling up in a video game. It gives you the sense of accomplishment, even though you haven't done jack shit in real life.

Damn that's a great analogy. Love it. Stealing it.

Re: End Daylight Savings

#64

Post by aneth4 »

Firehed wrote: post #56
ghshephard wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great for Unix Log files, bad for pretty much everything else. I work in emerging markets, and in the last two weeks I've had conference calls in Brazil, Singapore, Australia, Luxembourg, Portugal, and the UK. Whenever I'm scheduling a call with any of these people, I need to know what time it is. For whatever reason - every company we deal with seems to work from 8:00sh (sometimes 9:00) to 5:00sh (sometime 6:00) - L…

UTC would eliminate the confusion - just say "We're in the office from 17:00-02:00" (currently 9-6 PST) A nontrivial amount of my time is wasted responding to emails with "3pm pacific or mountain?". Asking "does 23:00 work for you?" avoids the variable. This is twice as bad if you ever have to work with anyone in Arizona during the summer, as they already skip DST. Fortunately calendaring software does a decent job a…

A more nontrivial amount of time would likely be wasted changing the time system of 7 billion people and every computer system.

I think learning to include time zones in emails to people in different time zones might be an easier solution.

Re: End Daylight Savings

#65

Post by mooism2 »

Firehed wrote: post #52
haberman wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The idea was that in the winter there would be fewer hours with the sun up, and it made sense to put those hours in a more useful part of the day. Daylight Savings time happens during the summer, not the winter. Winter time is unadjusted and tracks a true solar day. Summer time is adjusted, and indeed it's adjusted in the direction you favor (to provide more daylight hours at night).

Tracks a true solar day? Is there actually a scientific definition of when a day starts and ends? As far as I can tell skimming Wikipedia, it's simply 86400 seconds. Certainly by my body clock, a "true solar day" is when I'm on DST.

Midday GMT is defined to be when the mean sun is directly over the prime meridian.

("Mean sun" as opposed to "apparent sun" because of the Earth being a naturally occurring celestial object, rather than an idealised mathematical model. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equation_of_time .)

Re: End Daylight Savings

#66

Post by aneth4 »

thematt wrote: post #4

Slightly off topic -- but these petitions have been cropping up more and more lately, but have they actually done anything? Are there any we can point to that actually caused some change in government behavior? All I see in every response is just politician-speak from random government officials. Typically they acknowledge the submission and then wave it off with no specific action to fix it.

The mandate is to respond. 25,000 people signing a petition doesn't mandate action.

With a response it is acknowledged that you have been heard, likely by people very high up in the administration. That's about all you can hope for for such a simple way of gathering support.

This is a good thing. Otherwise Piers Morgan would have been deported for pissing off right wingers. What do you really expect from 25, 50, even 500K people signing an online petition? Do you want that to create law? Introduce a bill?

If you want to effect change, you need a lot more people than this, you need an organization, you need lobbying, you need to demonstrate voter support and influence...

These petitions are useful for getting some level of acknowledgment and demonstrating some level of interest in the issue. I consider them a very positive development. When people complain, they should consider what exactly it is they expect instead.

Re: End Daylight Savings

#67

Post by seanmcdirmid »

haberman wrote: post #7
repsilat wrote: post #3

One real problem with daylight savings is that it goes the wrong way. The idea was that in the winter there would be fewer hours with the sun up, and it made sense to put those hours in a more useful part of the day. When daylight savings was introduced, that "more useful part of the day" was earlier in the day. That doesn't hold today, though - as TFA says, most people work indoors under artificial lighting, and shi…

> The idea was that in the winter there would be fewer hours with the sun up, and it made sense to put those hours in a more useful part of the day. Daylight Savings time happens during the summer, not the winter. Winter time is unadjusted and tracks a true solar day. Summer time is adjusted, and indeed it's adjusted in the direction you favor (to provide more daylight hours at night).

I live in China and we don't have daylight savings time. The sun rises at around 4AM in the summer, which really messes up my sleep habits if I forget to close the blinds before bed. Winters are about right.

Re: End Daylight Savings

#68

Post by seanmcdirmid »

zanny wrote: post #13

While we are at it, can we get rid of time zones and switch the world to UTC? I get that it is a jarring idea to not be getting up at 8am anywhere in the world, but for international travel, computing, shipping, etc not having to constantly adjust dates and times across arbitrary lines of longitude would be such a boon. I don't get why people inherently need 6am to be the early morning, 12pm being "high noon", and 6p…

China has one time zone for the whole country. Suffice it to say, the working/sleep hours in Urumuqi are very different from Beijing.

Re: End Daylight Savings

#69

Post by dear »

Lets abolish time altogether. Time is only a human concept. It doesn't exist in nature. There is only now. There isn't a now minus n, or now plus n. Because when you get to now plus/minus n, it is called now.

Re: End Daylight Savings

#70

Post by seanmcdirmid »

Firehed wrote: post #60
wesgarrison wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My method of killing DST would be to accept it year round. I would much rather have the extra time at the end of the day, after work. I'm not sure if we can just unilaterally say "All our timezones are +1 now, forever" though.

No more or less than we can say "We're staying on standard time year-round". We've adjusted when DST starts relatively recently (twice, I think), and it seems several countries have semi-permanently shifted to DST: http://www.timeanddate.com/news/time/ Computers pick up on published timezone databases automatically (there was a big mess a couple years back when someone tried to copyright it or something, and they end…

Ya, not counting any legacy systems, or poorly tested feature...
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