This Turning-The-Clocks-Back Nonsense Needs To Stop

DST was designed to give people more time in sunlight, and ostensibly to conserve energy—but many prominent studies have proven we get little if any benefits from the practice. A U.S. Department of Transportation study in the 1970s concluded that total electricity savings associated with daylight saving time amounted to about 1 percent in the spring and fall months—and that was offset by the increase in air-conditioner use. Experts say that traffic accidents tend to spike the first Monday after daylight saving time, as motorists struggle with an hour less sleep and darker early morning road conditions.

And get this: DST can kill you. During the first week of DST, there's a spike in heart attacks, according to a study in the American Journal of Cardiology. The end of daylight saving time causes a decrease in heart attacks. According to a 2004 study in the journal Accident Analysis & Prevention, up to 366 lives could be saved a year if we abolished this silly back-and-forth system.

Okay, you might be saying to yourself about now: what about SUNSHINE? "Why would you want to deny us our precious extra hour of direct sunlight, you weather fascist?" Here's the thing: we can have it both ways! As it stands now, eight months of the year we're "saving" daylight, so we're almost there—will winter really feel all that different if we were saving daylight then as well? Why don't we just adopt the time frame we call "daylight saving time" as regular old "time"? Or vice-versa, whatever. Just pick one already!

a reply to: N3k9Ni
Well I also think it's mad. What is very very mad is that we change the clocks in summer supposedly to improve daylight hours and yet........summer is when we have MORE light! Right now our clocks are in synch with the sun. Midday matches the middle of the day for daylight.

The problem is not the sun or the clocks but our own fricking stupidity in setting "opening hours" or "school hours" or "work hours" out of sych with daylight. THe nominal "working day" is 9 to 5 which is 3 hours before the middle and 5 hours after thus we have less light at the end. Why not change this to 8 to 4 and then dah dah we have the same amount of light either side. It will be just as light in the morning as the evening for work travel.

Don't start me on farming. Cows can't tell the fricking time. They need milking when they need milking the time of fricking day makes no goddam difference.

a reply to: yorkshirelad

Add to this the fact that depending on what latitude you live, the daylight hours are going to be variable anyway, so changing an hour twice a year isn't going to make that much difference if any.

If God had meant us to live with Daylight Savings Time, he would have set it up that way originally!

I agree. Dump it. I don't even know how to set my truck's clock back so it stays wrong half the year!

On Daylight Savings Time!

Oh, wait.....

More daylight my ass, Right now I wake up and go to work, spend my day in the dark.
Come out, and see about a half hour of sunlight before night!

Next week, the sun will set an hour before I leave.

Plus, my internal clock is going to be completely buggered. It will start to adjust right around the time they switch it back.

I can't wait to abandon this hopeless society and its terrible ideas that have become common practice.

It was started by a man called William Willett, a London builder, who lived in Petts Wood in Kent.

Basically, he reckoned that he could improve the population's health and happiness by putting forward the clocks by twenty minutes on each of four Sundays in April, and by reversing this idea by the same amount on four Sundays in September.

Or was it

New Zealander George Hudson proposed the modern idea of daylight saving in 1895. Germany and Austria-Hungary organized the first implementation, starting on 30 April 1916. Many countries have used it at various times since then, particularly since the energy crisis of the 1970s.
wiki link

If I could go back in time & bash a brick into the head of the idiot who came up with this futile concept of DST, I would. Aside from making everyone's ass drag for no good reason other than to amuse some sleep sadists, this serves no other purpose. Any explanations I hear are tossed in the "WHO NOTICES THIS SH^&" mental bin.

a reply to: N3k9Ni

Precision time pieces mean little when they change time, huh.. Jussst when you get used to the last time they did it, bang, they mess with your inner clock all over again.

Keeps you off balance.

This is by design.

Like the little tag in your shirts at the back of your neck, itching, aggravating and nagging you, allll day long.

Like congested traffic, all sitting in cars dead stopped at the light. Nobody is going by and, you sit.

Like the commercial breaks on TV, like the people in the grocery checkout, the neighbors barking dog, the constant ad calls on the phone, the inlaws that never help you but always ask for your help.

The people that want you to conform, the laws, the taxes, the prices of goods and services, the boss, the co workers….

ahhhhhh! (runs screaming into the woods) Oh wait… I don't have to do any of that s***.

Agreed.Just pick one time and be done with it.I don't care which.

Every year we all hate this twice a year. No one likes it. No one wants it. And yet it stays. Why?

Can't we just REFUSE to do it? Some places (like Arizona) have.

a reply to: yorkshirelad

Don't start me on farming. Cows can't tell the fricking time. They need milking when they need milking the time of fricking day makes no goddam difference.

Actually it's for planting crops.

originally posted by: buster2010
a reply to: yorkshirelad

Don't start me on farming. Cows can't tell the fricking time. They need milking when they need milking the time of fricking day makes no goddam difference.

Actually it's for planting crops.

Well golly gee whiz, how in the world did the farmers ages ago ever make do without timepieces? Perhaps, IDK, relying on the glowing thing in the sky instead?

a reply to: N3k9Ni

I can never get it right, fall forward, spring back or spring forward, fall back? If for any other reason than that it has to go.

originally posted by: Nyiah

originally posted by: buster2010
a reply to: yorkshirelad

Don't start me on farming. Cows can't tell the fricking time. They need milking when they need milking the time of fricking day makes no goddam difference.

Actually it's for planting crops.

Well golly gee whiz, how in the world did the farmers ages ago ever make do without timepieces? Perhaps, IDK, relying on the glowing thing in the sky instead?

Because farmers a couple of ages ago wasn't trying to plant thousands of acres at a time.

originally posted by: buster2010

originally posted by: Nyiah

originally posted by: buster2010
a reply to: yorkshirelad

Don't start me on farming. Cows can't tell the fricking time. They need milking when they need milking the time of fricking day makes no goddam difference.

Actually it's for planting crops.

Well golly gee whiz, how in the world did the farmers ages ago ever make do without timepieces? Perhaps, IDK, relying on the glowing thing in the sky instead?

Because farmers a couple of ages ago wasn't trying to plant thousands of acres at a time.

And that's a logic fail if ever I saw one. The hours of daylight for them to use to plant said crops remain the same. Changing the sunrise/sunset does not increase the number of usable daylight hours. Instead of dumping DST on everyone else not a farmer, maybe it would make more sense for them to farm like their forefathers, and literally follow the sun's cue here and not dupe themselves with a time change.

a reply to: N3k9Ni

I'm with you - In the summer, I loved that I could get up when it's still dark, and yet, after work I could spend almost 3 hours in a park somewhere, removing the accumulated stress that work would give me. And now that we push that hour back, instead of enjoying all that sunlight, I have to go back to being so pale that someone would confuse me for a lighthouse beacon.

All it means right now is that instead of getting up 2 minutes before my alarm goes off, now I will be getting up an hour before the alarm goes off and won't want to fall back asleep.

-foss

originally posted by: Nyiah

originally posted by: buster2010

originally posted by: Nyiah

originally posted by: buster2010
a reply to: yorkshirelad

Don't start me on farming. Cows can't tell the fricking time. They need milking when they need milking the time of fricking day makes no goddam difference.

Actually it's for planting crops.

Well golly gee whiz, how in the world did the farmers ages ago ever make do without timepieces? Perhaps, IDK, relying on the glowing thing in the sky instead?

Because farmers a couple of ages ago wasn't trying to plant thousands of acres at a time.

And that's a logic fail if ever I saw one. The hours of daylight for them to use to plant said crops remain the same. Changing the sunrise/sunset does not increase the number of usable daylight hours. Instead of dumping DST on everyone else not a farmer, maybe it would make more sense for them to farm like their forefathers, and literally follow the sun's cue here and not dupe themselves with a time change.

Are you saying there are the same number of daylight hours in say March as there is in August? The main reason why it was started was to be able to maximized the number of daylight hours. So it was started to follow the suns cue.

we were told in the 70's that the implementation of day light savings time was because of the rise in rapes while ladies were waiting for the bus in the dark early morning hours.

Safety was the major reason when they started it.

a reply to: Nyiah

Ben Franklin was his name.

the uniform time act in 1966 was instituted and everyone was required to use DST.