
End Daylight Savings - brianl
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/end-daylight-savings/Vqmj9z6D
======
repsilat
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 shifting daylight hours earlier
into the day just means they're wasted while we're behind desks. What we
really need is more daylight in the evening, so we can make productive use of
our leisure time playing catch with our kids, practicing with the football
club, drinking beer on the porch etc.

Still, killing daylight savings would probably be better than "reverse
daylight savings", and more politically feasible. Certainly more feasible than
crazy ideas like moving to UTC (and probably better for the average person
anyway).

My pet peeve, though, is leap-seconds. Life would be a lot easier if you could
rely on days always having 86400 seconds.

~~~
haberman
> 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).

~~~
seanmcdirmid
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.

~~~
wr1472
Your problem is much more easily solved: remember to close the blinds.

------
zanny
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 6pm being "early evening". I'm sure different regions would
adjust quickly to just having different hours correlate to different states of
the sun wherever they live. Time should be measured the same around the globe,
not with arbitrary divisions.

You know, we could also get rid of the AM/PM arbitrariness too and switch to a
24 hour clock. Wouldn't it be nice if time made sense.

~~~
InclinedPlane
This is a hugely bad idea. You'd still need a system to keep track of local
relative time of day. For example, let's say you need to schedule a phone call
with someone in another part of the world, how do you determine what time you
should call? There are many, many other similar problems. How do you encode
all of that information? It turns out, you'll need something almost as complex
as the time zones we have today. There's no escaping the irreducible
complexity of the problem, there are just ways of shifting it around.

~~~
tsotha
It's still simpler than time zones. If you schedule a meeting for time x,
everyone knows when x is without having to do any translations.

~~~
anonymouz
But when scheduling the meeting for time x you'll have to look at the time
offsets of all the participants to figure out if x falls into their work day
or into the middle of the night.

If you schedule a meeting at 13:00 UTC, is the Chinese guy still in his
office? Is the one from the US already in his office? Instead of knowing their
timezones and their offset you'll now have to know their office hours in UTC,
which means things keep being just as complicated as they were before.

~~~
zanny
You still have to ask for times they are available. That never changes. With
UTC as the global time standard, you don't have to try to figure out time
offsets. You just say "I'm available from 8 to 12" and they say "I'm available
5 to 9" and you make the call at 8. The alternative is "I'm available 3 - 7
London time", the other guy is available 12 - 4 Pacific Time, and you have to
get out a calculator to figure out what those times actually are in relation
to one another.

~~~
lazerwalker
For prescheduled meetings, you're absolutely right. "I'm available 8-12, and
you're available 5-9, so let's chat at 8" is a clear improvement.

But what if it's not a scheduled meeting? If it's the middle of the day where
I am, and I need to give you a quick call to verify something, I need to
figure out if it's appropriate to call and if you're likely to be in the
office.

Currently, that means converting my time to your time, as easy as looking up
the offsets and doing a simple sum. Context clues make it easy to figure
things out: if it's 10:30am your time, there's a high chance that you'll be in
the office. If it's 3:30am your time, you're probably asleep. Sure, there are
still cultural fudge factors at play (do you come into the office late, do you
take a siesta, etc), but a ballpark estimate isn't hard. Assuming it's not an
emergency, I don't care if I get your answering machine if you're in a
meeting; I do care if you're offended that I woke you up.

If we're both operating in UTC time, this conversion now requires cultural
knowledge of what your working hours are before I can even get a big-picture
idea of whether it's appropriate to call.

~~~
mnutt
If we all operated in UTC time, you would probably very quickly get a feel for
when other people are at work. I'm on the east coast, and when working with
people on the west coast I often just imagine them as working 12pm-9pm.

Trying to remember the hours people work in Japan may be a problem, but I
don't think it's any worse than trying to remember timezone conversions and I
don't think it's a large enough problem to warrant _varying the way people
measure time_. It may have made sense at the time, but today it is vastly
overkill. That said, I doubt it will change anytime soon due to inertia.

~~~
tsotha
>I'm on the east coast, and when working with people on the west coast I often
just imagine them as working 12pm-9pm.

This is a good point. When you work with people in other time zones on a
regular basis you tend to do the conversion to your time zone once and treat
them like they were local people working odd hours.

------
thematt
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.

~~~
InclinedPlane
These petitions are utterly useless.

In fact, they are worse than useless, because they channel energy that would
otherwise be useful into such a feckless means.

If you care about something, write your reps in congress, your senators, and
the president. Clicking a button on on a whitehouse.gov petition is as useless
as liking a political post on facebook.

~~~
baddox
I would say that writing your politicians is also nearly or equally as
useless.

------
codex
In an era of smart timekeeping, I would much prefer the opposite: minute DST
adjustments every single day to ensure that sunrise is always at the same time
of day, everywhere. This is how we evolved, after all: to awake with the sun.

This would imply two dimensional time zones (one per state?) with a non-
trivial conversion function between zones. Once everyone's watch is GPS and
Internet enabled this should be straightforward.

~~~
henrikschroder
Where I am, in the summer, the sun sets, sort of, a bit after midnight, and
sunrise is about two hours later.

And in the winter, the sun rises at nine in the morning, and sets before three
in the afternoon.

Your suggestion is hilariously myopic. Go live in Alaska for a year, and then
come back and tell me if you've re-evaluated it.

~~~
codex
EDIT: By my calculations, even in Anchorage the average slew rate would be
only two minutes a day, which seems practical enough to me.

With two dimensional time zones, each region could choose the strategy that
works for them. If the slew rate is too great at peak, it could be smoothed.

Note that I am not suggesting that the hours in a day change (much), or length
of an hour, or an attempt to keep both sunrise and sunset constant; sunrise
would always be at seven, and sunset times would change. This way you maximize
sunlight time while still going to bed at the same time each night. They would
seem valuable for Alaaka.

To be honest, though, tus sounds a lot like an argument that humans are not
naturally adapted to live in the arctic. Perhaps there no time system makes
sense.

------
anonymous
You should also note that Russia abolished DST a couple of years ago
<https://rt.com/news/daylight-saving-time-abolished/> , with the president
citing pretty much the same reasons as the petition in question.

~~~
gpvos
One year ago, and actually they're on permanent DST now. (Or they shifted
their time zones, depending on how you look at it.)

------
daigoba66
I would also be happy if people in the US would adopt 24hr time in everyday
life. It's a lot less ambiguous than 12hr. And less stupid. For example, in
the US, 12:30am happens _before_ 11:30am on the same day.

------
drewjoh
This video explains DST really well:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84aWtseb2-4>

------
diminish
daylight savings creates useless complexity, confuses the electronic devices,
travel plans, flights and many other human and post-human activities.
artificial lighting, flexible working hours, remote working are all helping
better day for everyone.

beyond that, following bold suggestion exist; 1) the 'second' time unit must
be quicker to match average human heart rate. 2) time zones maybe abolished
totally and 1 single time zone maybe used.

~~~
ArchD
Using a time unit not related to the metric second would be a step back. If
you use a new unit equal to half a metric second, that's too fast for normal
human heart rate.

~~~
npsimons
Not to mention it's highly variable; I've easily gotten my heart rate up to
192 BPM; when I was in better condition, my resting was mid-forties.

------
overgun77
I live in a region where there is no DST. It's troublesome because DST applies
at different dates around the world, since I work with people from different
countries, this can get troublesome around the dates when the new times start
on the different regions, and when I was a kid I remember on winter when going
to school, I actually arrived at night at 7:00 AM and the sun went out until
~8:30, and the sun would set at 5 PM, but on summer, the sun rises earlier
than 5 AM and goes down at ~8PM. I like any kind of idea that helps the world
to, at least, alleviate some of our resources sucking activities. I don't
really believe these random claims people throw like "Recent studies show that
DST doesn't save enough energy" or something like that, at least provide some
facts and studies that prove that, I don't know much history around the DST,
however I'm pretty sure the countries around the world applied it for some
good reason.

------
codex
Given that Congress recently extended DST in the name of saving energy, I
doubt there is much appetite for abolishing it. While the benefits are
disputed, the benefits of no DST are also disputed, simply because almost no
industrialized region has abandoned DST, so there is no data. Clearly DST is a
stressor, but there may health benefits to stress induced hormesis.

Personally, I prefer DST simply because it gives a longer block of sunlight in
the evening, when I can be active, at the expense of daylight in the morning,
when I am asleep anyway. I'm not sure my sleep would improve with the extra
light in a non-DST world.

~~~
wesgarrison
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.

~~~
Firehed
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 ended up backing down), so any software that can handle any form of
DST should have no problem with a permanent shift - and probably by any
amount.

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

------
jzwinck
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 takes a lot more than the proverbial
"couple lines of code." If commissions went up by 50% during those three weeks
to reflect the costs, people would care more.

~~~
tsotha
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.

~~~
jzwinck
I think it may be counter-productive to mention this, because it is difficult
to prove. It is trivial to show that there are dead-weight costs incurred when
computer systems need to deal with DST across political boundaries. Those
costs alone should be sufficient to convince anyone to abandon DST (or just as
well, adopt it full-time, as Russia recently did). The fact that "normal"
people do not know these costs exist is, I think, the main reason they are
sympathetic to emotional arguments such as "DST will save children's lives on
Halloween" or equally your "DST kills drivers once or twice a year."

~~~
tsotha
>I think it may be counter-productive to mention this, because it is difficult
to prove.

Why would you think this is difficult to prove?

~~~
jzwinck
For starters, because it may not be true. Another comment here claimed that
the increase in traffic accidents (note: not deaths or even injuries, we're
just counting accidents) is offset almost perfectly when we gain an hour of
sleep. See <http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199604043341416>

I am completely in favor of abandoning DST, but am not convinced that it helps
the cause to argue in terms of deaths. The opposition may claim with even
greater efficacy among the general public that stopping DST will endanger
children on Halloween (as has been claimed before).

------
mvkel
If you think I'm going to be okay with driving home in the dark 365 days a
year, you've got another thing coming, buddy!

------
calvin
I like the points made here and the general thrust of the petition; however,
the big question I have: where is the data to back up these claims?

The argument would be a lot more convincing if sources or studies were cited
for claims such as increased air conditioning costs, etc.

------
luisp128
Interesting topic. I'd be interested to learning what are the main arguments
for the two sides...

I just started this discussion on the topic:

<http://www.the-counterpoint.com/discussion/2G>

------
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.

~~~
icebraining
You can get to now minus n? Can I use your time machine?

------
expralitemonk
How many people are killed or injured due to accidents caused by having to
wake up an hour earlier? What does this cost our economy?

------
vaadu
It's saving not savings.

------
drudru11
Thanks for starting this petition. I signed, tweeted, and facebooked it.

------
michaelochurch
I like DST, but let's not kid ourselves that it's about energy savings. It's
not, because energy savings are minimal to nonexistent. It's about culture.
People in northern latitudes like their 9:00pm daylight in the summer, but no
one wants 8:00am darkness in the winter, so we switch back to "standard" time
(which is now the anomaly, covering only 4.5 months) in the colder months.

This also explains the lopsided calendar of DST. It corresponds with the
warmth and outdoor activity, not daylight. That's why we start it near the
spring equinox and continue it into early November (a month and a half from
the solstice). That would make no sense if it were about daylight: it's not
symmetrical. It's also about weather. Daylight wise, October and February are
roughly equivalent. However, October is warm and has pretty leaves, and
February is cold and snowy. When it's warm, we adjust the clock to have an
additional hour of light in the evening. When it's cold, we adjust it back to
have daylight in the morning (most of us will be leaving work in the darkness
regardless of DST, so let's at least treat ourselves to a couple hours of
light in the morning).

So long as my life is semi-constrained by others' marking of time, I'll be in
favor of DST. I realize that it's a ridiculous hack that exists because the
sensible time to wake up (for me, 30-60 minutes before sunrise) shifts around
in terms of clock time, but it's a ridiculous hack that works.

~~~
handzhiev
I wish I could upvote this twice because it's the best explanation WHY we want
DST. Late daylight summertime is very useful for all kind of outdoor
activities. The late daylight is mostly applicable for those of us at northern
latitude, and exactly we are these who can enjoy most outdoor activities only
in the hot part of the year. So I guess DST makes much lesser sense to those
living near the Equator.

~~~
michaelochurch
Most tropical countries don't have DST, because there'd be no point in it when
there are no seasons, but some use a different time zone, which can have the
effect of "year-round DST".

