Proof Daylight Saving Time Is Dumb, Dangerous, and Costly

Megalith

Megalith

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I just think having to change the clock sucks, but people are always arguing about the supposedly profound impacts of DST, like how it creates health issues and increases accidents. The change is literally only an hour, so I don’t get it—do people normally sleep so well that they never lose an hour of rest? If you had a choice, which would you make permanent: standard time or DST?

The suffering of the spring time change begins with the loss of an hour of sleep. That might not seem like a big deal, but researchers have found it can be dangerous to mess with sleep schedules. Car accidents, strokes, and heart attacks spike in the days after the March time change. It turns out that judges, sleep deprived by daylight saving, impose harsher sentences. “Even mild changes to sleep patterns can affect human capital in significant ways,” two Cornell University researchers, Lawrence Jin and Nicolas Ziebarth, wrote (PDF) last year.Some of the last defenders of daylight saving time have been a cluster of business groups who assume the change helps stimulate consumer spending.
 
spaceman said:
Yeah tomorrow I get to wake up at "3:20" instead of 4:20 bc of coal conservation from WW1.

Great. Weeeee monday!
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Or you go to bed 1 hour earlier today and wake up 1 hour earlier tomorrow resulting in a net change of...zero!

There is a reason they do it on a Sunday ;)
 
Hey Strelok, how bout I give you a call when I get up? See how cheery you are when faced with the situation. My body is used to a schedule. I can go to bed an hour early but that does not mean I will fall asleep an hour early. On sunday it does not have an affect bc I can sleep in that extra hour.

Do NOT make fun of my plight. I will type sternly in your direction. It sucks man. It just does.
 
I wouldn't mind getting rid of it, but I have to say, I love getting the extra hour o=in the fall.
 
All things considered it would be great to just use standard time.

DST doesn't bother me any longer. I just want daylight. Adjusting times 2x a year seems silly at this point. If we are doing it and the reasons just don't make sense any more. Time change :D
 
20 bills in various states to change something as goofy as don't shift the time or do shift the time.. WTF!
 
spaceman said:
Hey Strelok, how bout I give you a call when I get up? See how cheery you are when faced with the situation. My body is used to a schedule. I can go to bed an hour early but that does not mean I will fall asleep an hour early. On sunday it does not have an affect bc I can sleep in that extra hour.

Do NOT make fun of my plight. I will type sternly in your direction. It sucks man. It just does.
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Go for it, my phone is on silent when I sleep ;)

Also sucks to suck I guess... :p
 
jfreund said:
No, standard time is dumb, dangerous, and costly.
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Yup, we need permanent DST. Essentially shifting our timezone over by one hour so that we have more light after the standard workday is over, instead of before it. And then don't go back to standard time ever, so there's no more clock changing. DST all year round.
 
EODetroit said:
Yup, we need permanent DST. Essentially shifting our timezone over by one hour so that we have more light after the standard workday is over, instead of before it. And then don't go back to standard time ever, so there's no more clock changing. DST all year round.
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Fine, permanent DST it is. But, what if it's locked after you've lost an hour rather than gained one??? I'd feel like like i was cheated! lol
 
I blame it all on Obama.

Edit: Just kidding. Come on, compared to Trumpy, he was a great president. Even some of you right-wingtards are probably starting to see that. Hell, Trumpy is making me miss Pres. Cheney and VP Bush. Cheney was just plain evil. We knew where he stood. GW was his bitch. Trumpy is just totally incompetent, and that's what makes him so dangerous.
 
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It's an hour. Get the fuck over it and have an extra coffee. If it was really that big a deal all the people that work swing shifts should have died in car wrecks by now. Or perhaps, the human body can easily be forced to adjust because that's how our minds work.
 
I vote we just stay on DST forever and get rid of standard time. Having the extra hour of light after work would be a lot better in the winter AND the summer. Around here, in the morning, it would generally mean that you drive to work when it's still dark outside -- which would be a major improvement over the current situation where, during the majority of the winter months, the sun is just over the horizon while driving to work and anyone headed eastbound is staring straight into it and anyone headed westbound can't check their rear view mirrors without being blinded. As far as the school kids go, the elementary/middle kids around here start class at 7:30am anyway and the buses run around 6:45-7:00am, so it's already full dark when they go to school in the winter anyway.

To me personally, it's a who cares either way in terms of sleep. I usually don't go to bed til 3 or 4 am most of the time anyway and get up between 10 am and noon. When you spend most of your time in a windowless office illuminated by computer screens and fluorescent bulbs ingesting Mountain Dew, sunlight isn't that big of a deal.
 
Just get ride of time, it kills more living things than everything else combined.
 
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It's basically comes down to where you live and what is your daily routine. You'll like either standard time or dst more depending on which fits your routine more. I like dst, because I never get up so early in the morning for dst to affect me negatively. But I understand it can be bad for people who have to get up earlier than me.. Because our sleeping patterns evolved around daylight, and if you get up to total darkness that can fuck with your internal clock. Of course there are easier solutions than pushing the clock back and forwards all the time, like people in the Arctic use artificial lights that gradually start coming on at a specified time. So it starts at 6am, and it gets to full brightness by 7 am, to imitate a normal sunrise. People should use something like that everywhere instead of this bs with setting the time back and forth.
 
For me it doesn't matter because I sleep like shit most of the time. An hour of more shitty sleeping doesn't mean anything.
 
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let me start by saying that i am a shift worker with a pretty insane schedule....its a 5 week cycle where i'll start with 2 night shifts, and then do a couple day shifts. back again to nights, back and fourth constantly. they're 12 hour shifts. well more like 12.5 since i have to turn over to incoming shift crew. and then try putting in overtime in on top of that. i'm lucky in the sense that my body handles it better than most. my situation is extreme, but i can say without a doubt that screwing with your internal clock is not a good idea! i like my job and am paid very well, so i take that downside knowing full well that i'm probably taking a couple years off my lifespan.

humans are not built to be doing this kind of thing. it may seem small, but changing your schedule even an hour can cause problems. keep in mind, this is not about losing or gaining an hour of sleep. this is about changing your entire sleep cycle. your body right now thinks its 4pm when actually its 5. some of us don't handle this well even if you think that you're fine.

there are many sources i could link here with evidence that this time change increases risk of heart attacks and road accidents including the article quoted for this entire thread and news post. and for what? a little more daylight? its more dark in the winter, get over it.

maybe because my sleep schedule is a compete mess anyways, i'm more a fan of shifting work schedules around to alleviate traffic congestion. there's really no reason that every office job must be 8-4. in fact i just did a training course for a week that ran 4pm-midnight. i loved the hours. but now i'm just rambling and proving that shift work has made me completely insane ;)
 
I want it lighter, later. Keep DST year round. I like having it still light out after dinner and into the evening. I don't care if it is light out in the morning when I get up for work.
Massachusetts is contemplating going to AST (Atlantic Standard Time) year-round. Which is the same as DST in the summer. NH is thinking of following suit if MA decides to do it. I like the idea.
 
I'd vote to get rid of it. Twice a year, it disrupts everyone's schedules.
A software company I used to work at also had to deal with software glitches in their calendar software. We won't even talk about leap years. I was just glad I didn't work in that part of the code. (Seriously, not sure why they had so many issues with it).
 
I love it.

I think it's hilarious, listening to adults whine like pre-schoolers who are 45 min late for their naps.
 
Got to love narrow minded people. Did everyone know that the world only has 4 time zones?

First off if we stop changing time regardless which side of the change we stuck to it all becomes standard time. Second, not everyone changes time so most likely the change would be to fall back to "normal" time as otherwise we are forcing the entire world to shift their time for the hell of it because a few areas think they are the center of the world. I think if anything we need to get certain areas to stop being fractions of an hour different from the rest of the world before we try to fix or force a massive world change for the areas that have DST. What about the parts of the world that are 15, 30 or 45 minutes off from everyone else around them?

While it would be nice to remove the change of time back and forth, at this point it would be nothing but another massive money sink. We already changed this not that long ago to adjust the time frame as we thought it would save power and be a huge savings to everyone. Instead it was a massive cost to update software for the change of days, also companies had to then upgrade their software so the IT cost was up there. After billons was spent they found it made no difference at all. So at this point trying to change it again would just be another large expense to remove it or change the dates again.
 
Used to be only mildly annoyed with it, like most, when I was younger. Now that I've got kids, it's fucking atrocious.

Simple fact of the matter is, there is no good reason to have it anymore. Zero. It's totally and completely pointless. Just get rid of it.
 
Got to love how pro DST'ers tell otehrs to just go to bed earlier and get up earlier so they dont lose any time.

How's about we piss off DST all together and NOT fucking change something that is unchangeable... and if you want an extra hour.. get the fuck up an extra hour like a normal person!!

Stop 'changing' time when you're really not!!

It was never a positive. Its still not a positive. And is a monumental waste of time. The amount of time wasted with mistakes and errors in many facets of time from programming to time zone changes etc etc. Its just not worth it for a perceived gain (and they are perceived gains).

Get rid of the failed experiment that is DST and lets move on from this WOFTAM.
 
I got a good idea. Instead of changing the time, let's just have companies shift the work schedule over. Instead of being at work at 8, you be at work at 9. Then in a few months, change it back to 8.
 
Look, the science is settled. There is no more debate about Daylight Savings Time. It's absolutely crucial to humanity's survival that we keep this government initiative on the books, and the Daylight Savings Deniers are simply paid off by Big Oil to try to make us use more energy. We can't allow anti-science people to gamble with our future. Just go watch Bill Nye or Neil DeGrasse Tyson or a TED Talk to understand the threat to the universe if we were to eliminate Daylight Savings Time. I hear that even ISIS ultimately was formed because the CIA trained Syrian rebels to ignore the switchover. How many must die to satisfy the Daylight Savings "skeptics"?
 
Well I run on Amish time any ways, my animals don't care if the clock is forward or back. When that sun rises they expect feed, when it goes down they like the doors shut and locked up. With my average of 4/5 hours of sleep the time shift is moot.
 
krotch said:
I got a good idea. Instead of changing the time, let's just have companies shift the work schedule over. Instead of being at work at 8, you be at work at 9. Then in a few months, change it back to 8.
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Some parts of the world do things like that. It isn't so much that they all shift because of daylight, but some I think might. Other areas do it because of temps. You work for a few hours in the morning while it is cool, then everything closes for the afternoon when it warms up and then reopens later at night once the sun starts to set and it starts to cool again. Spain and their siastas were an example of that.
 
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