I loathe daylight savings. I’m sitting here with an eight-month-old baby boy who doesn’t know how to tell time — someone who, until this morning, was getting up during the (far too early) hour of 5. Now he’s getting up an hour earlier, because despite the best efforts of Paige and me, he can’t tell time. Our older two know they’re not supposed to get up before 7:00, and now we have to relax that rule because what their bodies think is 7:00 is really 6:00.
Besides the fact that I’m up way too early, here are some other reasons to dislike daylight savings:
— It kills people. I’ve read in several places that traffic fatalities are slightly higher during the week when we “spring forward,” and as far as I know that’s not balanced out by fewer fatalities when we “fall back.”
— It doesn’t save that much electricity. Even advocates of daylight savings say that it reduces energy usage by 3%. Granted, that’s a lot of power, but does anyone take into account the lost productivity for people whose lives are disrupted? Besides, energy is meant to serve man, not man to serve energy.
— It makes programming times and dates difficult. The content management system we built has to take into account the time change, because it runs a newspaper Web site and a 24-hour newswire. There are always users logged in at 2 a.m. on Sunday mornings (not many, but some).
— It’s hard to coordinate time with the rest of the world. Not only do you need to know how many hours they differ from GMT, but you have to know whether they’re on daylight savings (probably not). Again, at work we have people filing stories from all over the world, and they have to figure out the EST vs. EDT distinction.
— The daylight-savings junta says we’re doing this “for the children.” Whenever you hear that phrase, you know somebody is up to no good. Schoolchildren otherwise would be “coming home from school in the dark.” So it’s better that workers drive home in the dark? If the kids need daylight to wait for the yellow bus, adjust the time of the school day. Why do the rest of us need to adjust to them?
To save a small amount of electricity, we disrupt the entire nation and let people die on the highways. Smash your clocks!
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If you don’t like daylight savings time, move to Indiana. We’re on EST the entire year. We Hoosiers don’t go in for any newfangled ideas cooked up by old Ben Franklin.
Look at the positive side: maybe this is one kid that won’t need dynamite to wake up for school!
I have every sympathy with adjusting the school day: for three years of high school, I had to meet the bus at 6 a.m. and ride for an hour.
But you can’t please everybody. One of the columnists here in Boston is whining that if the school day is shifted to start as late as 9 am, the buses will be in traffic during both rush hours, instead of just the morning. Aw, that’s just too bad.
Anyway, would you clarify, Eric, what’s your preference: year-round standard-time, arguably “closer to nature”, or year-round “summer time”, shifted one hour and probably more convenient for economic activity?
this is the best line from your post:
“The daylight-savings junta says we’re doing this ‘for the children.’enever you hear that phrase, you know somebody is up to no good.”
Here no-one says we do it for the children. We do it so we can have our barbecues later on summer evenings. I guess we Kiwis are just a selfish bunch!!
RC, if I had to pick, I’d probably say “summer time” year round. The measurement of time was made for man, too — it should serve us in the best way possible. There’s something perverse about darkness about 4:30, as if the greater Washington area is near the Arctic circle. Plus, leaving work when it’s pitch black is darn depressing.
Here’s an idea for ya, Eric: move to Cincinnati.
Boston sunset: 4:46 pm
Washington sunset: 5:15 pm
Cincinnati sunset: 5:44 pm
I don’t like the suggestion of year-round “summer time”: it means that the clocks should lie all year rather than half. Doesn’t the intrinsic value of truth impel us to keep the clocks as honest as is practicable?
We don’t observe DST in Arizona either. The last thing we need in the summertime is more sunlight! We’re waiting for the sun to go down so we can do stuff.
RC: There is no such thing as an “absolute time” to which our clocks ought to conform. “Summer time” is no more arbitrary, and no falser, than “standard time”. Adopting the former as a year-round standard would be much the same as the adoption of the Gregorian calendar (when the day after October 4, 1582 was decreed to be October 15, 1582).
In true “standard time”, noon = the point at which the sun is at its highest. Even time zones are artificial in that respect.
I heartily agree with you! I remember the total frustration of having kids wake up an hour “early” after the change of time. When you have a bevy of kids and a baby, you never get enough sleep to begin with. No one cares about young parents, golfers must be given additional time in the summer!
If we kept noon as the time at which the sun is at its highest, we’d have to have time zones by latitude AND longitude, instead of having them by longitude alone, as we do right now.
If we defined “noon” to be the time at which the sun is highest, then we couldn’t have time zones at all. At the latitude of the United States (taken to be 40 degrees N for simplicity), if it’s “noon” (12:00) where you are, then it’s 12:01 pm at about 13 miles to the east, and 11:59 AM at 13 miles to the west; and why should your “noon” be privileged over anyone else’s “noon”?
I’m all for staying on DST all year round. I like it to be light when I get off work. I love riding my bike after supper.
Robert, thanks for the scientific confirmation of what I was struggling to say.
Eric –
You’ll been complaining about daylight savings since high school! Did you miss the bus one year when you forgot to spring forward?
Steve
Missing the bus would have been a good thing, Steve….
If Robert wants to take an absolutist position — putting absolute accuracy first — he’s free to do that. There’s nothing immoral or illegal about setting your household clocks according to your true local geographical time.
But that’s not what Eric proposed: he’s opted to keep the system of time-zones which compromise on accuracy for the sake of social convenience. This is an understandable thing to do, but instead of using the reference meridian’s time as a standard, he wants a time an hour different from that.
Under Eric’s proposal, *nobody* in the whole zone would have clocks that match geographical time. At least under standard (winter) time, clocks on the reference meridian (every 15 degrees) are in sync with the authentic time of their locale.
Eric,
You’re sounding as cranky and as passionate as my dad on this. He’s a political conservative as am I, but I swear he holds three things more sacred than all other matters (save of course his faith in Christ):
1) The National League is smarmy and arrogant and deserves to lose every All Star game and World Series.
2) The US needs to get with the metric system, dammit!
and
3) Daylight savings time must be eliminated.
What are your thoughts on #’s 1 and 2?
Hmm. Well, Ken, let me answer RC first: I am not particularly concerned if nobody’s clocks are correct at noon. After all, “midnight” is a fiction, too — every day is slightly longer than 24 hours, which is why we do strange things with the calendar (add one day every four years, except at the turn of the century, except when the turn of the century can be divided evenly by 400).
Napoleon said that the metric system robs measurement of all its poetry, and I agree. I can’t imagine cooking with hectiliters and quasigrams and all that. I know what a teaspoon is, and I like saying “teaspoon” rather than “five milliliters.” Jonah Goldberg had an excellent column on this a few years ago.
As for baseball, the American League is like the Orthodox: sure, they are part of the same game, but in their use of the designated hitter they deny something essential, namely the need for all players to take their turn at bat. The National League has preserved the faith.
I’m double-minded on the DH rule. I used to think pitchers should bat just like everyone else and that you just have to strategize around the poor batting average that pitchers often have. But yet, the fact of the matter is that they are only player on the field constantly throwing the ball, and at various speeds and pitches, unlike the basemen and fielders whose object or the catcher, who merely catches and tosses the ball back to the pitcher, or when need be, to second base to pick up a runner attempting to steal a base.
The pitcher is just way too important to subject to more physical strain by compelling him to hit.
But oh well.
I don’t think my dad is all about metric in recipes. I think it has more to do with the fact that our highway signs, speed limits, and commercially marketed goods are all marked in US measure as well as metric, although metric conversion has been the law since the mid-70s.
I must confess I’m a metri-skeptic, particularly since I like ordering deli meat by the pound, not the kilogram.
Contra RC, not only do I not want to take an “absolutist position”, but both of my previous posts were directed against such positions. My second was a rebuttal to the absolutist definition of “noon” in Peony Moss’s post and, in effect, a defense of the time zone system. My first was an assertion that *all* definitions of time are arbitrary, against RC’s absolutist assertion that standard time is “true” and summer time is “false”.
I have no opinion on which system of time measurement should be used. My position is that clocks were made for man, not man for clocks. Whatever system is being urged should be urged solely on the basis of its usefulness, not on its congruity to some alleged absolute time.
Arizona really need to observe DST during the summer between April and October. To assure that they’ll have a good taste of having daylight/twilight later in the evening if the government allow to use DST which means still on the MST. However, since Arizona do not observe DST which means they are on California time (PST) will get dark early and California will still have daylight a little while longer. If Arizonas were smart enough, they can tell the local government to move the clock 1 hour foward and still be on MST, not on PST. The Indian Reservation do observe daylight savings is on MST and the rest of the state is on PST. You may want to check on http://www.sunrisesunset.com and most of USA have daylight after 8pm. Best if the people in the state of Arizona to persuade the government or vote.
Advantages daylight savings for Amtrak, Airlines, Freight trains, other transportations, sports including Arizona Diamondbacks.
The heat will not make any difference during the summer. Texas heat remain hot and the state observe DST and so is New Mexico.
Farmers hate daylight savings and they try to activate people’s lives.