Spring. Forward.

Jaybird

Jaybird is Birdmojo on Xbox Live and Jaybirdmojo on Playstation's network. He's been playing consoles since the Atari 2600 and it was Zork that taught him how to touch-type. If you've got a song for Wednesday, a commercial for Saturday, a recommendation for Tuesday, an essay for Monday, or, heck, just a handful a questions, fire off an email to AskJaybird-at-gmail.com

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97 Responses

  1. Mike Schilling says:

    Almost 8 months of it this year; Daylight Freedom Day doesn’t come until the end of August.Report

  2. Brandon Berg says:

    They can have my hour when they pry it from my cold, dead hands.

    I’m still applying for the refund this Fall, though.Report

  3. Rod says:

    Four months of “standard” time and eight months of “special” time. What’s wrong with this picture?Report

  4. Michelle says:

    Yeah. It seems they should pick one time or another and stick to it.Report

  5. Roger says:

    Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You stole my time. Prepare to die.Report

  6. Turgid Jacobian says:

    I say next autumn we fall back 30 minutes and never move again.Report

  7. zic says:

    Today, younger sprout turns 25.

    He’s been gipped of one hour of his birthday.

    But pi day is just around the corner, and that is elder sprout’s birthday.

    Today, I will make chocolate chip cookies. On pi day, I will make apple pie. I’ve posted both the recipes here. Feel free to join us in sweet celebration of another whirl around the sun.Report

  8. James Hanley says:

    I love daylight saving time because I’m not a morning person and I love that extra hour of light in the evening after work. But be cautious on the roads tomorrow. The spring forward disrupts sleep cycles and causes a short-term increase in auto accidents.Report

    • Jaybird in reply to James Hanley says:

      We need to abolish DST.

      If it saves even one life, it will be worth it.Report

      • aaron david in reply to Jaybird says:

        Get your hands off my clock, you dirty ape!Report

      • Michael Drew in reply to Jaybird says:

        Could we abolish ST instead? The accident increase happens due to the switch, not the time the sun comes up/goes down.Report

        • Nooo…. Well, I mean we could, and it would help with the auto accidents. However, there is at least some research that says making people get up earlier in the morning has detrimental effects of their own.

          Actually, I think the research is talking about high schoolers and below. But it could easily apply to adults as well.

          And I hate getting up in the dark. It is to be avoided.Report

          • Michael Drew in reply to Will Truman says:

            Hmm.

            Well, I would literally fight you to preserve DST against having no DST and only ST if it were unavoidably decided that we were adopting one of the two and the decision was not yet made which it was to be. I would dispense with persuasion and negotiating (because I suspect I have a losing hand in terms of arguments for my preference given the inclinations of my fellow countrypeople), and simply initiate a confrontation of strength between us. You can have my summer 9:00 sunsets once you’ve dispensed with me first.

            (Luckily I know you’re not actually looking to take them from me… well, looks like a few extra drivers’ fates per year remain sealed.)Report

      • Jason Kuznicki in reply to Jaybird says:

        This is by far the most interesting comment to me.

        Why is it that we sometimes say “If it saves even one life, it will be worth it,” while other times, we find saying that very same thing to be comically out of place?

        In the case of DST, it’s well proven that abolishing it will save lives. But there is no outrage about it. Is there? And yet we use “If it saves even one life…” about things like checking our kids’ Halloween candy for cyanide, which has only happened once in the history of trick-or-treating — and then it was a deliberate attempt to use the purportedly widespread risk of the same as a cover for an insurance-related murder.

        Or maybe try this: If it saves even one life, then it probably isn’t worth it.Report

        • Michael Drew in reply to Jason Kuznicki says:

          When someone says, Even if it will save just one life, we must do it!, I tend to pretty much pre-dismiss whatever they say next. (Obviously, that could change depending what I think of all the merits of what they actually say).Report

    • Michael Drew in reply to James Hanley says:

      +1.Report

    • dragonfrog in reply to James Hanley says:

      If early birds want to get up early, that’s great, and entirely their business.

      But why must the whole world pretend for their sake that it’s actually the sun that’s sleeping in?Report

  9. BlaiseP says:

    The world ought to run on one standard time, Zulu time, UTC. And someone ought to get India to quit running thirty minutes out from everyone else. They’re the biggest problem. Parts of Australia try to pull the same half-hour stunt, Venezuela and Newfoundland too. Nepal is offset by fifteen minutes.

    Every time I have to instantiate a Java Date object, I have to cope with some Calendar static method. And it’s an enormous class, one of the worst aspects of Java. The C language does a better job with time_t in milliseconds. The only sane approach to database design is to use UTC and let the client do to the offset work if they’d like.

    Daylight savings was supposed to save us money. All it’s done is make software design and calendaring a nightmare.Report

    • Matty in reply to BlaiseP says:

      The world ought to run on one standard time, Zulu time, UTC.

      You don’t mean every aspect of the world right? People in New Zealand getting up as it gets dark and going to bed at dawn would be funny but I can’t see it sticking.

      On the other hand apparently all of China runs on Beijing time despite problems in the west where the school/office day starts several hours before the sun rises so maybe if you bring in that one world communist government…Report

      • Matty in reply to Matty says:

        Slightly more seriously here is some support for my claim that we should not hold the work schedules of the whole planet to those of one time zone. Night work is not good for you and the human body clock is still influenced by daylight.Report

        • trumwill mobile in reply to Matty says:

          This. We should go by GMT and adjust our local wakeup/work/etc hours to what makes sense locally.Report

          • Kazzy in reply to trumwill mobile says:

            If I understand, you mean that everyone wakes up when the sun rises, but that might be 6AM for some folks and 10PM for others? Do I have that right?

            I can get behind that idea, but feel inertia is far too powerful a force.

            “HOW WILL I EAT DINNER AT 4AM!” “Because it is the same relative time of day that you always ate dinner… we’re just calling it something else.” “BUT IT’S 4AM!!!”Report

          • BlaiseP in reply to trumwill mobile says:

            It would make the world a politer place.

            I swear, Americans are the worst about this, though you’d think they’d understand the problem, what with all our time zones — some idiot on the East Coast calling up California, getting someone out of bed an hour before sunrise.Report

            • Michael Drew in reply to BlaiseP says:

              I don’t understand how all the clocks everywhere saying the same thing would help with this problem.Report

              • BlaiseP in reply to Michael Drew says:

                Neither does the guy on the East Coast. When polite people call someone far away, they consider the daylight window for those people. The farther east or west, the less likely they will both be in the same daylight window.Report

              • Michael Drew in reply to BlaiseP says:

                Okay? How does setting all clocks to one number help with that?Report

              • BlaiseP in reply to Michael Drew says:

                Both parties agree on what time to call.Report

              • Michael Drew in reply to BlaiseP says:

                Hmm. They can do that now. I’m still not clear how it being nominally the same time on the clock helps stop the early call. You’re either aware that an hour after the sun rises on the east coast it still hasn’t in Palo Alto or you’re not. And if you’re planning the call, you tell the person, “Don’t call me until X o’clock your time.”Report

              • BlaiseP in reply to BlaiseP says:

                Did you see that link I furnished, the one which provides the daylight window? Your time? My time? Such talk is as stupid as the day is long.

                It is now 1305 UTC. The conversation goes like this: “Let’s talk at 1500 UTC.”Report

              • Michael Drew in reply to BlaiseP says:

                I can see some potential benefit to that, but I think you’re not thinking through why the problem you discuss happens. Ignorance of the daylight window is ignorance of the daylight window. Knowing that the time on the wall is the same number in the place you are thinking about as it is in the place where you are doesn’t create accurate awareness of the window’s present location.

                And as to the convenience and certainty of that conversation, people who want to plan that way, using exactly those words, can do so *now*.Report

              • BlaiseP in reply to BlaiseP says:

                You think you can see some potential benefit. Every airliner you will ever fly in has a clock running Zulu Time. If you want to talk about UTC to GMT zone offsets, then here’s how the conversation goes.

                A: You’ve called me far too early.
                B: I’m so sorry! What’s your GMT offset?
                A: I’m at -8. The old Pacific Coast Time.
                B: I’m so sorry, I’m at -5, the old East Coast Time. May I call you in three hours?Report

              • Michael Drew in reply to BlaiseP says:

                Every airliner you will ever fly in has a clock running Zulu Time.

                Yes, exactly.Report

      • BlaiseP in reply to Matty says:

        No, certainly not. “Getting up at 6:30 and making it to work by 8” is silly talk. If the sun rises at 2300 UTC, somewhere in the world, so be it, that’s the best time for anyone to get up. That person might be at work come 0130 UTC. But everyone can schedule a meeting or ring up a sale without all the associated nonsense conversions. Every military in the world which doesn’t feature blunderbusses and cuirass armour runs on Zulu/UTC and every intelligent nation runs on 24 hour time, not this antique “o’clock” and “AM/PM” business.

        Delhi, India has a 77° 13′ 0.12″ Easting. Metairie, Louisiana has a 90° 10′ 39″ Westing. The current scheme says 10 hrs 30 mins of time difference separate me from Delhi, or so you’d think. But that’s not true.

        Earth circumference is about 40,075 km. 86400 seconds per day. It’s 13347 km distance from here to Delhi. I am thus separated from Delhi by 28775 seconds. That’s 7 hours 59 minutes 35 seconds.

        It’s all absurd: absurd on India’s part for this half-hour mess and absurd on the USA’s part for running Daylight Savings Time. It’s flat-earth thinking, an idiotic proposition only a politician could love.Report

    • Patrick Cahalan in reply to BlaiseP says:

      Yes.

      There should be one time. Because that’s how time works, when you’re traveling at non-relativistic speeds. We’re all on the same globe, mostly moving the same speed.

      We still live in a heliocentric world.Report

      • trumwill mobile in reply to Patrick Cahalan says:

        Wait, are you really suggrsting New Zealanders get up as the sun goes down?Report

        • Turgid Jacobian in reply to trumwill mobile says:

          I don’t think so? I think mostly they’re saying that the clocks would all say the same thing, not that business would start at a different solar elevation.Report

          • Patrick Cahalan in reply to Turgid Jacobian says:

            Right, this.

            12 am is 12 am, GMT. If you’re in the UK, it’s midnight. If you’re on the west coast of the U.S. it’s almost cocktail hour. If you’re in Hawaii, it’s early afternoon.

            You can be doing whatever is daylight appropriate. But that doesn’t mean that you’re on a different time.Report

            • Okay, whew, we’re on the same page.Report

            • So why does Midnight have to be set according to a prime meridian established by European imperial powers in the 19th century?Report

              • Patrick Cahalan in reply to Nob Akimoto says:

                I’m pretty sure that any particular time we pick as the baseline for the UTC will piss somebody off.

                The Kish tablet is the oldest known bit of writing, as far as I know. (Sumeria). GMT+3.

                Conceptually, Kelvin came up with the idea of the atomic clock in 1879. The first one was built at NIST (GMT -5).

                I’m open to other suggestions. Probably the Iraq one won’t go over well with the EU or the US.Report

              • Michael Drew in reply to Nob Akimoto says:

                I’ve actually been Googling around to figure out when/where (in Europe, though I think it’s the same question) it became set that the days started just after midnight, and that midnight was numbered 12:00 or 0:00. I don’t mean when that became standardized internationally via imperial decree (essentially), but just when the particular conventions we more or less still have today relating daytime activities to a certain sense of what the clocks say came into being. Like, day shifts starting at, whatever, 6, 7, 8 a.m. (rather than just, shortly before/after sunrise), lunch between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m., etc.

                Anyway, I think a global one-number system might have been doable had Europe not brought these customary, number-based associations with them to their imperial outposts before establishing a global system. But of course, the need to (or, interest in?) establishing a global system was always going to come after spreading those cultural customs. But anyway, yes, it’s basically imperial.

                Nevertheless, I’m interested in to what extent these associations have become strong enough that it’s not really worth instituting a universal change to the point of establishing just one global clock time. I’m pretty sure people in, say, Minnesota would resist the idea that you have your family dinner at 22:30 (10:30 p.m, though, of course, a.m. would cease to exist, since the very thing we’re trying t do here is obliterate the associations of particular numbered times with certain parts of the day… or is the idea to do that in only certain parts of the world, the more the further from Greenwich?). (Could be wrong about the Minnesotans, btw, they’re something of a foreign people to me, an ex-pat Wisconsinite in St. Paul.) But I also wonder how people in, say, Singapore, would feel about a proposal that would have them doing what they do now at 17:30 or 18:00 at 09:30 instead? Would they say, ‘Eh, these are foreign abstractions imperialists forced on us anyway, we don’t care…’? Or would they say, ‘F that, we’re used to doing what we’re used to, and you can go fish… what good reasons have you got to do this, anyway?!’?

                Not sure how the one-global-time-number proposal would actually go over with people, nor how great the improvement would be once the considerable transition was made.Report

              • BlaiseP in reply to Michael Drew says:

                Nothing would keep you from running your own private offset to UTC if you felt like it. Central Standard Time was established in Chicago, by the railroads, to keep trains from running into each other: before Central Standard Time everyone had his own version of noon.Report

              • Michael Drew in reply to BlaiseP says:

                Right, but they were within a few minutes of each other.

                And your suggestion actually suggests something else: whether such a switch could really be possible. Would conventional feelings about what time-number relates to “noon,” which predates the formal time-zone system, actually change? Or would we be adopting, essentially an “official” global business time, while retaining informal local times? Would that add to clarity and global efficiency? It might – just some degree of formality in the business world could help move the cultural practices. But there’d also be the issue of telling employees when to be at work.

                I’m still not sure how much is gained by one official universal time, since, as things stand now, businesses can use UTC all they want. But I’m not rejecting it out of hand. I’m willing to look at the pros & cons.Report

              • BlaiseP in reply to Michael Drew says:

                Here’s how it used to work. Everyone calculated local sidereal time. We get the word “noon” from nine, since the day started at six in the morning. Western society saw fit to change the day change it to twelve midnight and somehow we all adapted. But we kept the world “noon” around.

                As for telling people to come to work at a specific time and specific place, the military transfers its personnel all around the world. The order takes the form of a demand to appear in formation, at a particular place and time. And that time is Zulu Time, not local time.

                The British rail system was the first to keep standard time. The Americans followed suit not long thereafter.

                Without everyone keeping standard time, train schedules required astronomers to keep the Cleveland schedules reconciled with the New York times. But even then, trains would end up colliding. It was a mess. Local sidereal noon was calculated at the Elgin Watch Factory observatory and telegraphed down to Chicago on October 11, 1883. Thereafter, that was Standard Time.

                My grandfather was a telegrapher. He had been a telegrapher in France, during WW1. He had an old clock which had an additional hour hand for GMT.Report

              • BlaiseP in reply to Nob Akimoto says:

                Because the first good naval tables were published by the Astronomer Royal at Greenwich. Great little book called Longitude, by Dava Sobel lays it out.

                Firstest with the bestest, they establish the standards.Report

        • Matty in reply to trumwill mobile says:

          I’m suggesting specifically that they shouldn’t. That said I think I misread Blaise’s suggestion as saying we should all stick to one schedule regardless of local daylight in order to make it easier for computer programmers and people making long distance phone calls.

          Based on the additional comments I now think he is arguing we should divorce clock time from solar time so it will be 0914 everywhere but keep our schedules on solar time. I still think the number of people who would benefit by the ease of arranging a conference call for 0800 UTC will be dwarfed by the number who find calling dinnertime 0400 or whatever an irritating imposition but the idea isn’t quite as silly as I first thought.Report

          • Michael Drew in reply to Matty says:

            You can arrange a conference call for 0800 UTC now. Some people just have to look up what time that is for them, is all. But in the companies where that is done, the people who at some point had to look it up probably don’t anymore.Report

            • Matty in reply to Michael Drew says:

              So the benefit is even less?Report

              • Michael Drew in reply to Matty says:

                Than? Not clear what you mean.

                I see not much benefit to universalizing all clocks, in business, government, or elsewhere. All endeavors where world-time is really important (NASA, etc.) do exactly what they need to do as is. And: everyone currently has a common reference available, if they want to use it. I don’t see why dinner has to be at a different number-time all over the world just in order to make it easier to get people, when they come into work, to relate to the world-time that is being used there. And to what overriding purpose that, for that matter? The efficiencies to be gained from this in business strike me as slight on any reference, but certainly compared to the kind of worldwide adjustment for all of just about every society outside of Europe and West Africa that this contemplates. But perhaps I am ill-informed on that question, so I’m quite willing to hear an accounting of the benefits.Report

              • James Hanley in reply to Michael Drew says:

                Sounds like the French Revolution all over again, doesn’t it?Report

              • Michael Drew in reply to James Hanley says:

                Except, like, bigger.Report

              • BlaiseP in reply to James Hanley says:

                Yeah. The folks who gave us the metric system. Of course, you see no benefit to that, either. That stands to reason, I guess.Report

              • Michael Drew in reply to BlaiseP says:

                The units are presently aligned. Thanks, indeed, (if I am not mistaken) to the French. So touche’ on that point.Report

              • James Hanley in reply to BlaiseP says:

                Of course, you see no benefit to [the metric system] either

                Cite?

                It seems to me that the practice of trying to announce what other commenters believe is one of the most uncivil activities a person can engage in on this site.

                It’s particularly disenchanting when it derives from taking a tongue-in-cheek comment much too seriously.Report

              • Michael Drew in reply to BlaiseP says:

                Of course I see benefit to the metric system. I also do see some potential benefit to the one-time proposal. Just not nearly enough to impose the kind of adjustment we’re talking about with it. But I also am genuinely not sure if my sense of the amount of that adjustment is culturally dependent, and if it turned out that it was something of an outlier (that people in Japan wouldn’t care what time it said on the clock when they get up or eat dinner), then I’d be willing to look a little harder at exactly what the benefits to one time would really be.

                But the weight of established convention (just what people are used to) against not all that much apparent inefficiency that I can readily see makes me trend conservative on this idea.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to BlaiseP says:

                People from real countries that use the metric system can still tell you how many stone they weigh, how many miles it is from hither to yon, and how, jeez, it’s 80 degrees out there.

                The metric system is like “language laws”. Sure, maybe you can change people in public.

                You can’t change their heart of hearts.Report

              • BlaiseP in reply to BlaiseP says:

                While you continue to tack on “potential” benefit, I see actual benefit. The USA continues in its evil practices of feet ‘n yards ‘n miles and such — and Daylight Savings Time, which everyone acknowledges to be utterly useless — and we all complain about it and expect our computers and phones to cope —

                Yet somehow, we cannot wrap our heads around the idea of common time for everyone. It is the only unit of measure which we rely on others to keep and observe, calling people late or early or on time. These idiotic time zone lines go jagging across the landscape, various ninnies declare the time to be thus-and-so as if by imperial decree.

                And there stands America, like Canute in the waves, ordering the world to revolve forwards or backwards by an hour, twice a year. It’s ridiculous. Canute stood in the waves, knowing it was a joke on his fawning courtiers who said his every word was law.Report

              • BlaiseP in reply to BlaiseP says:

                You can’t change their heart of hearts.

                Yep. How did Ron White put it? You can’t fix stupid.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to BlaiseP says:

                The attitude that “people who don’t agree with me are stupid!” provides an amazing amount of comfort and I would never want to take something *THAT* important away.

                I just don’t want that attitude involved with setting policy.

                Which is completely different from DST which is, of course, stupid objectively.Report

              • BlaiseP in reply to BlaiseP says:

                Clearly, when two people’s version of time are in question, in this case, who’s stupid? Seems to me, if not to you, the guy enforcing his version on someone else. Wouldn’t they go to a common standard?Report

              • Jaybird in reply to BlaiseP says:

                Convinced me! Let’s get rid of DST entirely.Report

              • BlaiseP in reply to Michael Drew says:

                Michael, it’s pretty clear you don’t perceive the benefits. That’s because you don’t have the problems. I have laid out the problem, using real numbers. These do not seem to have much impact. I have often found this to be the case with numbers.

                Any firm operating in more than one time zone faces these problems every time they need to record the date and time of a transaction. That’s pretty much all of them, these days. And I have found very many stupid implementations of date and time in the course of my work. The better databases all keep their transactions in timestamp format, based on UTC.Report

              • Michael Drew in reply to BlaiseP says:

                As I’ve said I’m willing to look at all kinds of data about how much making this the convention would help businesses. But every time you mention a business solving a problem by individually adopting UTC for some particular purpose, it undermines rather than advancing the case for the need for a comprehensive, societally-embraced switch.Report

              • BlaiseP in reply to Michael Drew says:

                Every database implementation of TIMESTAMP uses UTC. It’s already been fixed.Report

              • Michael Drew in reply to Michael Drew says:

                It’s already been fixed.

                Fantastic!

                Dinner’s at 6. P.m.Report

              • BlaiseP in reply to Michael Drew says:

                Time format failure. UTC doesn’t observe AM or PM. You have to give me the number of milliseconds which transpired between 1 Jan 1970 and now for it to write it into a database.

                Now just call the getTimeInMillis() method on your Calendar object and you’ll have the answer right away and I can put it in the database. And it won’t matter if you use that laptop you brought from Delhi or Denver or Dunghill Flats to do that write, either. The computer has evolved to return the time UTC. Maybe some folks haven’t but that’s not the computer’s problem.Report

              • Michael Drew in reply to Michael Drew says:

                Point well-missed.Report

              • BlaiseP in reply to Michael Drew says:

                Is that “dinner” on the “breakfast – lunch – dinner” sequence or the “breakfast – dinner – supper” sequence?Report

              • Michael Drew in reply to Michael Drew says:

                The former.Report

              • Matty in reply to BlaiseP says:

                So why is keeping the databases in UTC and converting between that and the clock on the wall worse than setting the clock on the wall to UTC and converting between that and the local solar time?Report

              • BlaiseP in reply to Matty says:

                Because it’s stupid? Because you have to climb up there twice a year and change it? Because someone on the phone asks you what time it is and then asks you what time zone you’re in? It’s pitifully stupid.Report

              • Matty in reply to Matty says:

                More stupid than asking what time lunch is and waiting a couple of minutes while people mentally convert before answering 0300?

                No one is objecting to businesses using one time it is the societal imposition of telling people to ignore daylight in setting their clocks that is an issue. One you divorce time from observation why not go the whole hog and give every time in seconds since the big bang or something.

                Also whether you should change time twice a year is a different question to whether you should completely ignore time zones.Report

              • BlaiseP in reply to Matty says:

                Simply put, yes.Report

              • Michael Drew in reply to Matty says:

                Also, conflating the costs of the lack of of a single universal time with the costs of the idiosyncratic American practice of changing times twice a year is rather silly. If you want the U.S. to adopt either DST or ST and stick with it, that’s one proposal. If you want a single global time, that’s another. You can want both, but it’s still two different questions. Yes, the global UTC proposal includes eliminating the American switches. But we could also eliminate the switches without establishing global time, if that’s your main concern. If you want the global time, you need to stack its benefits up against the adjustment ask you’re making, which is for a lot more people, and more drastic for most of them, than the one for eliminating DST (or renaming it Standard and just going with it) would be.Report

              • Michael Drew in reply to Matty says:

                Also, what Matty said much more efficiently in his final sentence, which I blithely skipped over.Report

              • Chris in reply to Matty says:

                Now that “occasionally mildly inconvenient” is the same thing as “pitifully stupid,” I’m going to have to rework my mental distribution of the levels of stupidity almost completely. Particularly since in this case “occasionally mildly inconvenient” is accompanied by “but in almost every case much more convenient.”Report

              • BlaiseP in reply to Matty says:

                Beyond everyone resetting their clocks, for the last time, to UTC, there’s no pain and suffering, beyond a host of Dumb People wandering around clutching their heads, screeching and hollering about it. Anyone who’d been in the military or done any database work or pilots or sailors or anyone else with a goddamn clue would look at these jackasses, “Oh my God, they’re gonna make me eat breakfast in the middle of the night!”

                I’ll call such people the O’Clocks. For ’twas but recently they came to accept that the world was round. Some of them have not yet squared up with Evolution. The collective inertia of the O’Clocks is immense but finite.

                The Mayans had a solution for their own O’Clock dumbasses. The astronomers told them the year was 360 days long, plus an indefinite number of days called the Uayeb. The fearful O’Clocks stayed indoors, for the Uayeb was a terribly unlucky period. When the astronomers had determined the actual date of the new solar year, they told the O’Clocks all was well again with the world.Report

              • Matty in reply to Matty says:

                Still not seeing it I’m afraid. To reduce inconvenience to a relatively small number of people who need to call where the daylight window is different we impose on vastly more people the inconvenience of divorcing clock time from the daylight window entirely.Report

              • BlaiseP in reply to Matty says:

                The inconvenience of this Daylight Savings Time nonsense afflicts the entire world twice a year as America goes through this absurd hokey-pokey. My solution imposes reason and a one-time reset on the wall clocks of the world.

                As I’ve said, the computers and networks and everyone who is obliged to think in terms of a round world have already adapted.Report

              • Matty in reply to Matty says:

                Time nonsense afflicts the entire world twice a year as America goes through this absurd hokey-pokey.

                The entire world? I’ve gone for decades at a time neither knowing or caring what time it is in America so I can’t say your daylight saving afflicts me.

                As I’ve said, the computers and networks and everyone who is obliged to think in terms of a round world have already adapted.

                So the only ones left to adapt are those who would gain no benefit from doing so.Report

              • BlaiseP in reply to Matty says:

                Of course you haven’t. For you, it’s a strictly existential problem. If a tree fell on a French mime in the middle of a forest — would anyone care?Report

              • Patrick Cahalan in reply to Matty says:

                Matty:

                You’ve paid real money because of Daylight Savings Time. You just don’t know it.Report

              • Matty in reply to Michael Drew says:

                I mean that I was trying to be as generous as possible to the idea by saying that those who need to schedule a call to another time zone may find it easier if both places have the same clock time. If however businesses that do this sort of thing don’t actually find the conversion a burden then even that small gain disappears.Report

              • Michael Drew in reply to Matty says:

                And I don’t know if they do.

                So to both Blaise & you – I’m willing to say I don’t know how much inconvenience and inefficiency is caused by a lack of a single universal time. I’m willing to look at whatever data on the question you have. Just so long as you’ll not dismiss the adjustment ask that goes along with making this change, if it’s applied culturally rather than just in business (which it can be really at any time by any businesses that want to do it.)Report

    • KatherineMW in reply to BlaiseP says:

      I wouldn’t have remembered the time change if my computer hadn’t automatically changed its clock in line with it. So, thanks software developers!

      I’m equally impressed that my computer can tell when I cross time zones and change the clock in accordance with it.

      Maybe that just shows I’m easily impressed.Report

  10. Damon says:

    If you don’t support daylight savings time the terrorists win!Report

  11. Jaybird says:

    It didn’t really sink in yesterday but, today, the full effect of DST kicked me right in the face when the alarm went off.

    If we must do it at all, I suppose I can understand the benefits of doing it 6 months and 6 months. I do not understand the benefits from doing it 8 months and 4 months. Wasn’t the rationale that doing so would “save energy” but then they actually measured what happened and *MORE* energy was used?

    Why in the hell didn’t we go back to 6 and 6 when that was discovered?

    WHO IN THE HELL BENEFITS FROM THIS???Report

  12. I sprang forward one hour Taipei to Tokyo and then I took back 14 more to Chicago!. I have fallen back enough for this decade. You can keep your spring aheads!

    T-zoned in Chicago!Report