…And it will go on being 4:30 am at this time of night until after 2:00 AM on Sunday, November 1, 2020. Then it will be 3:30 AM again. At least I have that to look forward to in November.
I’m just not going to comply with Daylight Savings Time until somebody in authority can explain to me what we’ve been doing with all the daylight we’ve saved for the last 200 years.
I mean the interest alone on all those photons should be enough to power every solar panel in the country for the next decade.
I’m just saying, somebody owes me some sunlight here.
“I don’t really care how time is reckoned so long as there is some agreement about it, but I object to being told that I am saving daylight when my reason tells me that I am doing nothing of the kind. I even object to the implication that I am wasting something valuable if I stay in bed after the sun has risen. As an admirer of moonlight I resent the bossy insistence of those who want to reduce my time for enjoying it. At the back of the Daylight Saving scheme I detect the bony, blue-fingered hand of Puritanism, eager to push people into bed earlier, and get them up earlier, to make them healthy, wealthy and wise in spite of themselves.”
Every time I have to change my clocks (whether it’s to fall back or spring forward) the blood pressure goes up a few points just contemplating Daylight Saving Time.
I’ve tried just ignoring it in the past, and that didn’t work out too well. Missed appointments, extremely early arrivals, whatever. Not really a solution. I’ve tried going to bed earlier in advance of the change, setting the clocks ahead early, also not very effective. You name it, I’ll bet you I’ve tried it. No matter what, this time change thing always turns into a nightmare.
Modern DST was first proposed by the New Zealand entomologist George Hudson, whose shift work job gave him leisure time to collect insects and led him to value after-hours daylight. In 1895 he presented a paper to the Wellington Philosophical Society proposing a two-hour daylight-saving shift, and after considerable interest was expressed in Christchurch, he followed up in an 1898 paper.
They were apparently smart enough to realize that this really didn’t change anything about when the sun comes up. Leave it to the ever efficient Germans to think that they can control the sun’s motion in the skies through legislation. They were the first ones to pass DST into law, so that much of the Last Week Tonight segment is true. The Germans were hoping to conserve coal for the war effort during World War One, but current studies show that there is no energy benefit for instituting DST,
The result of the study showed that electricity use went up in the counties adopting daylight saving time in 2006, costing $8.6 million more in household electricity bills. The conclusion reached by Kotchen and Grant was that while the lighting costs were reduced in the afternoons by daylight saving, the greater heating costs in the mornings, and more use of air-conditioners on hot afternoons more than offset these savings. Kotchen said the results were more “clear and unambiguous” than results in any other paper he had presented.
Kotchen and Grant’s work reinforces the findings of an Australian study in 2007 by economists Ryan Kellogg and Hendrik Wolff, who studied the extension of daylight saving time for two months in New South Wales and Victoria for the 2000 Summer Olympics. They also found an increase in energy use.
I can clearly see why DST is cherished and loved by authoritarians everywhere. I’m sure the #MAGA are foursquare in favor of it. I can’t think of a better way to demonstrate the power and authority of government, that even the sun can be commanded by His Electoral Highness. Now that is a showcase of control on a grand scale (in China they only have Beijing time. Talk about authority) Trump can dictate what time the sun comes up and the sun will listen. Maybe he should tackle that Pi thing, try dictating that it will be 3.2 or something. I’m sure that will work just as well.
I can hear you laughing, dear reader, but I’ve had this argument several times with many different people. Inevitably the person who thinks DST is a good idea will exclaim,
Do you really want the sun to come up at 5:30 in the morning in the summer?
It still does come up at 5:30 in the morning, we just call it 6:30.
I’m coming to the conclusion that there should just be UTC and local time. Local time can then be set according to the city authority or whatever the farmer in the field wants it to be. UTC is really the only relevant time anyway. The only time relevant aside from where the sun is in the sky on a given day. Local sunrise or sunset is the only metric that matters in the end. Timezones themselves have been rendered pointless by modern mechanisms. Not even trains rely on timezones anymore.
Imagine just for a few minutes, what it would be like for your GPS to calculate time variance based on degrees of longitude rather than twenty-four one hour timezones. In the same way your phone can change times for daylight savings, it can change time to keep up with your actual position on the globe. The device that you already rely on to tell you what time it is could just do the time calculation for your location and actually tell you what the local time is. The satellites that control GPS already perform these calculations just to be able to talk to each other and establish UTC for themselves.
Cities could assert their own authority and set time for the regions they control. That measure of standardization for a specific local area is understandable, but why would a farmer care what time it is in the city unless he is going there? Why does someone in Austin need to care what the time is in Denver, Washington D.C. or Los Angeles? If you need to know, ask your phone like you do for every other thing you need during the day already.
Why is this so hard to figure out?
It is entirely possible that my hostility to time and time change hinges on my long struggle with dysgraphia and sleep apnea. With Meniere’s. Even with the CPAP machine and amitriptyline (for migraines) I can still find myself staring at the ceiling at two AM wondering what did I do in a previous life to deserve this torment? Repent, Harlequin! I have always hated punching a clock. Getting up in the morning. I am a night owl. I can be more productive from midnight to two AM than most people are at any other point in the day. What I have always hated the most though was the silly notion that eight AM was starting time. There is absolutely nothing I hate more than sitting in traffic trying to get to the office in the morning, trying to get anywhere in the morning.
“he walks unhindered through the picket lines today, he doesn’t think to wonder why”
“packed like lemmings into tiny metal boxes, contestants in a suicidal race”
It is a stupid energy-wasting exercise, to be sitting idling on the freeway adding to the toxic funk that hangs over the city. It amuses me now, sitting in traffic in the EV. Finally I don’t have to worry about the pollution from sitting in traffic since I’m not adding any. But why eight AM? Why not 6:30? Why not 9:30? If you are working in a downtown office like I did for many years (100 Congress, top floor of the building at one point. Fireworks were a blast to watch from up there) any time other than eight AM was a good time to start. Any time other than five PM was a good time to quit.
This topic is a frequent flyer around here because WE’RE STILL FUCKING DOING THIS STUPID SHIT. Posted here and here previously. Oh yeah and also in the Spring when we took the hour away that we now give back.
“I don’t really care how time is reckoned so long as there is some agreement about it, but I object to being told that I am saving daylight when my reason tells me that I am doing nothing of the kind. I even object to the implication that I am wasting something valuable if I stay in bed after the sun has risen. As an admirer of moonlight I resent the bossy insistence of those who want to reduce my time for enjoying it. At the back of the Daylight Saving scheme I detect the bony, blue-fingered hand of Puritanism, eager to push people into bed earlier, and get them up earlier, to make them healthy, wealthy and wise in spite of themselves.”
Every time I have to change my clocks (whether it’s to fall back or spring forward) the blood pressure goes up a few points just contemplating Daylight Saving Time.
I’ve tried just ignoring it in the past, and that didn’t work out too well. Missed appointments, extremely early arrivals, whatever. Not really a solution. I’ve tried going to bed earlier in advance of the change, setting the clocks ahead early, also not very effective. You name it, I’ll bet you I’ve tried it. No matter what, this time change thing always turns into a nightmare.
Modern DST was first proposed by the New Zealand entomologist George Hudson, whose shift work job gave him leisure time to collect insects and led him to value after-hours daylight. In 1895 he presented a paper to the Wellington Philosophical Society proposing a two-hour daylight-saving shift, and after considerable interest was expressed in Christchurch, he followed up in an 1898 paper.
They were apparently smart enough to realize that this really didn’t change anything about when the sun comes up. Leave it to the ever efficient Germans to think that they can control the sun’s motion in the skies through legislation. They were the first ones to pass DST into law, so that much of the Last Week Tonight segment is true. The Germans were hoping to conserve coal for the war effort during World War One, but current studies show that there is no energy benefit for instituting DST,
The result of the study showed that electricity use went up in the counties adopting daylight saving time in 2006, costing $8.6 million more in household electricity bills. The conclusion reached by Kotchen and Grant was that while the lighting costs were reduced in the afternoons by daylight saving, the greater heating costs in the mornings, and more use of air-conditioners on hot afternoons more than offset these savings. Kotchen said the results were more “clear and unambiguous” than results in any other paper he had presented.
Kotchen and Grant’s work reinforces the findings of an Australian study in 2007 by economists Ryan Kellogg and Hendrik Wolff, who studied the extension of daylight saving time for two months in New South Wales and Victoria for the 2000 Summer Olympics. They also found an increase in energy use.
I can clearly see why DST is cherished and loved by authoritarians everywhere. I’m sure the #MAGA are foursquare in favor of it. I can’t think of a better way to demonstrate the power and authority of government, that even the sun can be commanded by His Electoral Highness. Now that is a showcase of control on a grand scale (in China they only have Beijing time. Talk about authority) Trump can dictate what time the sun comes up and the sun will listen. Maybe he should tackle that Pi thing, try dictating that it will be 3.2 or something. I’m sure that will work just as well.
I can hear you laughing, dear reader. I’ve had this argument several times with many different people. Inevitably the person who thinks DST is a good idea will exclaim,
Do you really want the sun to come up at 5:30 in the morning in the summer?
It still does come up at 5:30 in the morning, we just call it 6:30.
I’m coming to the conclusion that there should just be UTC and local time. Local time can then be set according to the city authority or whatever the farmer in the field wants it to be. UTC is really the only relevant time anyway. The only time relevant aside from where the sun is in the sky on a given day. Local sunrise or sunset is the only metric that matters in the end. Timezones themselves have been rendered pointless by modern mechanisms. Not even trains rely on timezones anymore.
Imagine just for a few minutes, what it would be like for your GPS to calculate time variance based on degrees of longitude rather than twenty-four one hour timezones. In the same way your phone can change times for daylight savings, it can change time to keep up with your actual position on the globe. The device that you already rely on to tell you what time it is could just do the time calculation for your location and actually tell you what the local time is. The satellites that control GPS already perform these calculations just to be able to talk to each other and establish UTC for themselves.
Cities could assert their own authority and set time for the regions they control. That measure of standardization for a specific local area is understandable, but why would a farmer care what time it is in the city unless he is going there? Why does someone in Austin need to care what the time is in Denver, Washington D.C. or Los Angeles? If you need to know, ask your phone like you do for every other thing you need during the day already.
Why is this so hard to figure out?
This topic is a frequent flyer around here because WE’RE STILL FUCKING DOING THIS STUPID SHIT.
I’m a time travel story junkie. I have been into time travel stories for as long as I can remember. The problem with this film isn’t that it concerns time travel. The problem is that the story is not well-fleshed. The audio is hard to follow, and the story points are clearly added in later as an afterthought.
Even on rewatching it really doesn’t make sense. Not because it is time travel, but because the story is not fleshed out enough to leave breadcrumbs for the uninitiated (people who have not read the script) to be able to follow it. In the end you have to take the narrator’s word for it that the film makes sense.
There is a story here. I personally hope someone else takes the time to tell it well.
“I don’t really care how time is reckoned so long as there is some agreement about it, but I object to being told that I am saving daylight when my reason tells me that I am doing nothing of the kind. I even object to the implication that I am wasting something valuable if I stay in bed after the sun has risen. As an admirer of moonlight I resent the bossy insistence of those who want to reduce my time for enjoying it. At the back of the Daylight Saving scheme I detect the bony, blue-fingered hand of Puritanism, eager to push people into bed earlier, and get them up earlier, to make them healthy, wealthy and wise in spite of themselves.”
So, don’t forget that you’ll wake up still drunk Sunday morning because you will have had an hour’s less sleep. And don’t forget to thank Benjamin Franklin for joking about the idea with people who thought he was serious…
Here’s some proof that DST is a bad idea.
The result of the study showed that electricity use went up in the counties adopting daylight saving time in 2006, costing $8.6 million more in household electricity bills. The conclusion reached by Kotchen and Grant was that while the lighting costs were reduced in the afternoons by daylight saving, the greater heating costs in the mornings, and more use of air-conditioners on hot afternoons more than offset these savings. Kotchen said the results were more “clear and unambiguous” than results in any other paper he had presented.
Kotchen and Grant’s work reinforces the findings of an Australian study in 2007 by economists Ryan Kellogg and Hendrik Wolff, who studied the extension of daylight saving time for two months in New South Wales and Victoria for the 2000 Summer Olympics. They also found an increase in energy use.
Since it doesn’t save any energy, the only reason left for DST is the conclusion I came to before.
What glorious power is given to congress. They can dictate what time the sun comes up, and the sun will listen. Maybe they should tackle that Pi thing, try dictating that it will be 3.2 or something.
An oldie that never gets old, Because it happens again every year. The hour that never occurs. Can we stop the insanity, please?
Every time I have to change my clocks (whether it’s to fall back or spring forward) the blood pressure goes up a few points just contemplating Daylight Saving Time.
I’ve tried just ignoring it in the past, and that didn’t work out too well. Missed appointments, extremely early arrivals, whatever. Not really a solution. I’ve tried going to bed earlier in advance of the change, setting the clocks ahead early, also not very effective. You name it, I’ll bet you I’ve tried it. No matter what, this gov’t mandated time change always turns into a nightmare.
I just can’t wrap my head around how this ‘saves’ anything, and why this is a benefit. Farmers hate it. Merchants supposedly benefit, and traffic fatalities are said to be reduced. But these benefits argue more for just changing the hour permanently, rather than a seasonal change.
I can clearly see how DST is a benefit to government worshipers everywhere. I can’t think of a better way to demonstrate the power and authority of government; that even the sun can be commanded by congress. Now that is a showcase of control on a grand scale.
Don’t laugh. I’ve had this argument several times. Inevitably the person who thinks DST is a good idea will exclaim “Do you really want the sun to come up at 5:30 in the morning in the summer?” I’ve got news for you people, it still does come up at 5:30 in the morning, we just call it 6:30.
I have a compromise to offer. Let’s split the difference and call it 6:00; give up this whole notion that we can somehow save daylight by passing laws and changing clocks. My biorhythms (or circadian rhythm) will thank you for it.
What glorious power is given to congress. They can dictate what time the sun comes up, and the sun will listen. Maybe they should tackle that Pi thing, try dictating that it will be 3.2 or something…
These are the words that immortalize the Harlequin at the ending of “Repent, Harlequin!” Said the Ticktockman, by Harlan Ellison. If you want to know how that is, that these words mean so much, you’ll just have to read the book.
I’ve used this as a siggy for quite some time on some of the forums that I visit. “Why?” you might well ask. Well, I’ll answer you. I have a very personal hostility towards ticktockmen everywhere. People who tsk-tsk every time their clocks say somebody else is late, as if their clocks are always unerringly right. People who exclaim “You’re taking too much time with this!” as if there was a finite amount of this precious substance, and you were at risk of using it all. People who measure out the moments in life like the ticking of the clock.
Oh! …and since I’m posting this at 5:10 in the morning, on a morning when I need to be up in a few short hours, I’ll add: people who can go to bed at a ‘normal’ time, sleep through the night, and wake rested when they are supposed to. Something I have never been able to do. Something that employer after employer has commented on for years on end, all to no avail. I cannot change the pattern. Either I stay up ridiculously late, and have to be jolted awake in the morning; or I go to bed early and stare at the ceiling for hours on end, only to have to be jolted awake in the morning anyway. I am different, and different is bad.
Of course, as the Harlequin, I don’t have to be concerned with this. I simply relish the disruption of the pretty order, and hope that someone somewhere has a laugh over it. That is, after all, what we are all here for, right? To be happy?
“mrmee, mrmee, mrmee”
Postscript
Image screencapped from Goodreads. I discovered to my own horror that I had been misspelling the phrase all along. I really should have looked it up before getting all bent on the subject. The spelling is corrected now and I acknowledge the error with a petulant mrmee.
Every time I have to change the clocks I just fume over the whole subject of Daylight Savings Time. I’ve tried just ignoring it in the past, making a point to show up for things an hour earlier than the time stated, etc., didn’t work out well enough. I’ve tried going to bed earlier in advance of the change, setting the clocks ahead early, you name it. No matter what I try to get past this gov’t mandated time change, it always turns into a nightmare of insomnia and late wake-ups.
I just can’t wrap my head around how this ‘saves’ anything, and why this is a benefit. To anybody. Well, I take that last part back. I can clearly see how this is a benefit to statist types everywhere. I can’t think of a better way to demonstrate the power and authority of gov’t, that even the sun can be commanded by congress. Now that is a showcase of control on a grand scale.
Don’t laugh. I’ve had this argument several times. Inevitably the person who thinks DST is a good idea will exclaim “Do you really want the sun to come up at 5:30 in the morning?” I’ve got news for you people, it still does come up at 5:30 in the morning, we just call it 6:30.
How about we compromise, halve the difference and call it 6:00; give up this whole notion that we can somehow save daylight by passing laws and changing clocks. My biorhythms (or circadian rhythm) will thank you for it.
What glorious power is given to congress. They can dictate what time the sun comes up, and the sun will listen. Maybe they should tackle that Pi thing, try dictating that it will be 3.2 or something.
