Daylight Savings campaign poster

Welcome to Daylight Savings Time (AKA the week when I screw up all my overseas phonecalls while I wait for the UK clocks to spring forward, too). As this poster attests, messing with the clocks has always aroused passions.

Time is on Your Side, Yes it Is! (via Super Punch)

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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phisrow

While they probably weren’t on congress’ mind at the time, let me tell you that DST plays hell with IT systems, particularly the “everybody knows that it’s a legacy piece of crap; but it has its tentacles everywhere and would cost $20k+ to even look at ripping it out” box that every shop of a certain size has lurking in the corner somewhere.

I’ve got to get up at god-knows-when on Monday morning to apply the one-magically-wired-serial-cable-of-Antioch in order to communicate with ours…
Michael Smith

UTC never changes.
WaylonWillie

boy, i’m sleepy today.

one group that daylight savings benefits is those with small children. say, the baby normally wakes up at 7am. Now the baby wakes up at 8am, for a few days at least….
- Baldhead
  
  no, it’s now six am when baby wakes. we lost an hour. And of cousre, all the arguments in favour of DST are rubbish (if farmers liked it why does Saskatchewan not do it?). It always seemed stupid to me. I believed in Santa but could see DST as having logical flaws the size of a time zone.
  - jere7my
    
    no, it’s now six am when baby wakes. we lost an hour.
    
    Perhaps your baby is messing with you. It’s currently 3:57PM; 24 hours ago it was 2:57PM. If your baby woke up at 2:57 yesterday, and operates on a 24-hour cycle, it’ll wake up at 3:57 today. That’s an hour more sleep for the weary parent. (Unless your baby is awakened by the sun? In which case the answer is blackout shades.)
    
    I love the advent of DST because it means I’ll no longer come home from work in the dark, which I find depressing. (I know it would happen eventually; DST makes it happen sooner.) I’m about to start biking home from work again, and it’ll be a lot safer because of DST. I’d advocate for it all year round, but then we’d have sunrise at 8:30AM in December, which would suck for a lot of people.
    - jere7my
      
      Ignore the bit about waking with the sun in my previous comment â€” I was briefly befuddled. The sun rises an hour “later” now, too, of course.
Ronald Pottol

I say we all run gmt, and for stuff with locations, +/- sunrise, sunset, midnight, and noon. Easy enough to make anything that is location aware track that for you.

So for stuff you want to track the sun, it’s built in (we will meet to jog every morning 1h after sunrise), and have the meeting at 1800. Simple, once we’ve modified things.

Oh, and no more leap seconds.
cbm

I’m rarely up too early in the morning. I don’t care if it’s dark then. I love having more light in the evening. I say leave daylight saving time in place all year long.
Allen Garvin

“DST just means you have to get your ass out of bed an hour earlier, but that you get to pretend you didn’t.”

It’s the opposite for me! My cats wake me up every morning about 30 minutes prior to sunrise, by chewing on books or papers, or walking over me, or repeatedly hitting the window blinds next to the bed. Now, I can go to bed at my usual midnight, and sleep an extra hour.
Anonymous

Ever thought that you were the only real person and the rest of the world was robots? I do, because I seem to be the only person in the UK who remembers the 1970s experiment and why it was cut short after two years and not the full three that was planned.

There is not enough daylight for most people to go to work and come home from work in light in the winter months.
If you come home in the light, so do children, but we all go to work in the dark.
If we go to work and school in the light, children also come home in the light. Less accidents, less deaths. In the 1970s, every child north of London was issued reflective armbands and at 6pm every week night a TV program called Nationwide had a death-o-meter to show the number of children killed that morning.

As you go north the effect is greater. London only has a couple of weeks where the darkness is bad. By the time you get to Liverpool we are talking a good month and Newcastle is six weeks.
The excuses for moving the clocks forward permanently is gaining ground. Excuses range from it will help our athletes train better for the Olympics, reduce SAD, save energy for the country and allow us to trade with Europe rather than the Americas more easily.

There must be someone else that remembers this or even to have read Hansard. Is there anyone else alive?
SamSam

Personally I love DST. Sure, I have to get up an hour earlier and am bleary-eyed for a couple days, but then what do I get? Long summer days with an extra hour of sunlight in the evenings than I would otherwise have. That’s an extra hour after work to play in the yard and bike around the city, and we can eat dinner outside while it’s still dusk.

And the morning sunlight comes and hour later, so you can sleep in longer on weekends.

DST exemplifies everything that is “Summer” to me.
voiceinthedistance

Neither my hoe nor I ever liked daylight savings time. I’m happy to be somewhere saner now that doesn’t bother with it (Hawaii).

I’ve always found arguments about daylight savings time by farmers to be odd, though, as I thought they only had to negotiate between the sun and themselves.
- TooGoodToCheck
  
  IANAF, but I expect they would also have to negotiate with the farmhands.
- peterbruells
  
  Considering how very near Hawaii is to the equator, it’d be kinda pointless anyway.
  - Michael Smith
    
    Considering how very near Hawaii is to the equator, it’d be kinda pointless anyway.
    
    Probably similar to Malaysia. I was in the Perak equivalent of the DMV last year and noticed that a wall clock was out by 15 minutes. I reckon a campaign to reset clocks every six months would not go astray, even if the time never shifted.
- billstewart
  
  A lot of small farmers don’t just farm – they also have jobs in town. DST means you’ve got an hour less time between dawn and when you’ve got to get to the store or factory. Corn don’t care whether you do your work in the morning or afternoon, but cows need to be milked in the morning and they’re not getting up any earlier just because you have to go to work.
  
  DST just means you have to get your ass out of bed an hour earlier, but that you get to pretend you didn’t. And as far as we can tell from Indiana switching to DST recently, it doesn’t actually save any energy, and may even cost a bit.
  - hisdevineshadow
    
    A lot of small farmers don’t just farm – they also have jobs in town. DST means you’ve got an hour less time between dawn and when you’ve got to get to the store or factory. Corn don’t care whether you do your work in the morning or afternoon, but cows need to be milked in the morning and they’re not getting up any earlier just because you have to go to work.
    
    Still, when the farmer and his/her children get home from their respected work/schools, they now have one extra hour of daylight to work in the fields/gardens/pastures/orchards.
social_maladroit

It’d be nice if we could just go with DST year-round and stop with this “give up an hour of sleep once a year” nonsense. Or “standard time.” I don’t care; the days are longer during summertime anyway. Just pick one and follow it year-round.
- MythicalMe
  
  Aw, don’t worry. I used to work for a convenience store and they just love DST because people stay out later in the evenings. That never made much sense to me, but I’ll bet the push for earlier and earlier starts and later ends (we spend more time in DST than in standard now) will end up with full time DST soon.
  
  Personally, I’m with you. Let’s just get this clock changing crap over with once and for all.
jacques45

I think there’s a subliminal message in there somewhere – those “a” characters look suspiciously like the cyrillic Ð”.

DST is a trap!
Anonymous

Whenever we switch to DST I always hear the argument that the first day back to work is the most dangerous time of the year for accidents because people are more tired. Don’t forget that when we switch back the next working day is the safest day of the year!
Anonymous

I always hate DST, as it seem to take about a week for my body to get used to the time change. And its not just in my head, Michigan State University found that on the Monday after the change, workers had 40 minutes less sleep and 5.7 percent more injuries. Other effects are increased heart attacks and suicides. And that is not the only cost…

Maybe in the early 1900′s the main energy cost was for lighting, but in this era we use power for a lot more things. The biggest are heating and cooling, which far outway the lighting demands.

Indiana’s change to DST showed households payed $9 million per year, not to mention increased pollution emissions estimated at $1.7 million to $5.5 million

So thank the state of Indiana for being a testbed to show the value of DST and the governments to not be swayed by its cost.
Anonymous

Bitch, your pancakes look fine to me
SpaceGhost

Uncle Sam’s a pimp yo. Just check out his threads. And his pimp cane – is a hoe, ya dig?
Anonymous

So, if it’s more or less accepted that DST does not save energy, why do we still have this nonsense? Like Phisrow, I’m an IT guy who suffers twice a year as a result of federal time fiddling.

Maybe the tea party needs to latch onto this problem and rally in the streets until DST is abolished…
Anonymous

Okay, now leave the clock set as it now and forever.
ndollak

Darn DST. Every single year I have to re-explain that messing with the clocks does NOT cause more daylight to occur! We are going into Spring (and thence to Summer); therefore the sun rises earlier and sets later. The fact that we’re forced to mess with the clocks at that time does not cause this to happen. What it does cause is a rise in car accidents from people driving while tired. Insurance companies love DST. It’s appalling that so many people buy into the various myths surrounding DST.
widnoon

Uncle Sam is the Sandman?
hisdevineshadow

eucalyptustree beat me to it, almost word for word except the last part. I look forward to the time change! I enjoyed leaving work this morning while it was still dark, not having the sun blinding me on the drive home. I love that at this time yesterday it was dark but now the sun is just moments away from setting. I also like that I get paid for 8 hours, though due to the time change, I only worked 7 and if I work the Fall time change, I get 1 hour of OT just because it happens on my shift.
candycritic

At least I’m able to catch up on some internet surfing while I wait for my Skype calls.
eucalyptustree

Kinda sad that this post references Daylight “Savings” Time. While a common error, I’d have expected better from Cory Doctorow…

The clock adjustment is a “daylight-saving” mechanism — therefore, “Daylight Saving Time.”

It mucks with my internal clock just the same, though.
- adamnvillani
  
  While a common error, I’d have expected better from Cory Doctorow…
  
  You’ve never noticed how often the BB-written headlines and text misrepresent the content of the stories they link to?
Anonymous

I heard that extending daylight savings was supposed to save energy. I guess that was a lie too. Personally I like waking up with the sun rather than in the dark. Seems silly to trick or treat in the daylight. I take my kids out when its proper and dark. Also, in my opinion farmers don’t work, the farm hands do the work, the farmer is a business man with a completely different job. Daylight saving was likely a distraction to get us to ignore all the corporate welfare in the Energy Policy Act of 2005.
Boomshadow

My problem is that the top one percent of the population always gets 99 percent of the saved time.
Anonymous

haha,get your hoe ready america!
CLamb

Calling the time standards “Daylight Saving” and “Standard” seems kinda non-symmetrical. May I suggest that the summer time be called “Non-standard time” Or that the winter time be called “Daylight Spending” or “Daylight Wasting” time?