Oh, dear Lord. Somebody please kill this weed before it grows: Lawmakers move to extend daylight-saving time
House and Senate negotiators on an energy bill agreed to begin daylight-saving time three weeks earlier, on the second Sunday in March, and extend it by one week to the first Sunday in November.
I. Hate. Daylight. Savings. Time.
First of all, it’s an outmoded idea. Second of all, am I the only one that’s annoyed by the idea of it still being light outside at 9:00 p.m.? Or by it being dark outside at 7:00 a.m.? (at least, that’s how it is here on the western edge of the Eastern timezone).
On the bright side (no pun intended), I suppose it could fuel another surge of programming work, a la Y2K, whereby corporations are forced to spend billions of dollars in order to update all their software to accomodate the new schedule for time changes. Hurray for job security. I think.
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15 Comments
I propose we switch over to UTC. It would be a little weird going to work at 4:00 and have the Sun coming up but have you ever tried to schedule a worldwide conference call? How is it you wind up at work at 9:00PM to make it work?
I say we should get rid of the 24×60x60 format, and switch to something more decimal. It would make programming so much easier, and, heck, it would cost billions too.
Outmoded? How so? Last I checked, light patterns and their effect on energy consumption haven’t really changed in the past, oh, several centuries.
Swatch. Internet. Time.
(Not the greatest thing in the world; UTC would probably be better accepted, however, it would make things easier in that there’s no seconds/minutes/hours conversions to be done…
It’s a lame excuse for saving money. What about kids having to stand in the dark waiting for buses?
Spring ahead, fall back. The kids don’t have to stand in the dark waiting for buses. Think it through.
“The beauty of daylight-saving time is that it just makes everyone feel sunnier,” said Markey.
Ease up on the meds, congressman…
I think this is pretty silly as well, but then I’m an office worker and my 2-year-old doesn’t ride the bus – so I don’t see the benefit. I don’t mind DST but the cost of changing it is going to be exhorbitant. At least they’re taking the time to figure out if it will in fact reduce our oil dependance. I can’t see how it could at any appreciable level.
Last I heard, they wanted the legislation to take effect this year. I can’t imagine many large companies that could roll out such a change in that time frame.
Kids are already standing in the dark at the bus. School starts much earlier nowadays since parents work more and commutes are much longer. The extension they proposed will not make it light at 9PM, but it won’t be pitch black (and depressing) at 5:00PM when you have to slog home.
I wonder how Arizona gets away with their own time zone, unchanging with the seasons.
Easy: Arizona is overrun with sun and tourists. So they get to set their own rules for consumption and use of such.
IIRC, A state can exempt itself if it exempts the whole state or part of the state so that the whole state is on one time (the Indiana case). However, for it to work for me, two states would have to exempt themselves as I live and work part-time in Georgia and work full-time in Florida.
Dougal–
How do the comments automatically insert abbr tags for IIRC? Is that a WP feature?
Jack: On this site, I do it with my Text Filter Suite plugin.
But if all you want is acronym expansion is all you want, you might want to use something more focused to just that task, like Tag You’re It.
I can’t begin to imagine the havoc this would cause. Sure, companies like Microsoft could release patches to update their software, so Windows etc. would understand the new DST rules, but what about non-connected devices like VCRs? Most of those kinds of devices have DST adjustments built-in, but they’d have no way of being updated to follow the new rules. I think it’s fine how it is. When you count it up, we’re already on DST longer than we’re on standard time, which is kind of sad. It would definitely be like another mini-Y2K rush to get everything ready in time.
When we first saw this story on the news a couple of nights ago, my dad told me about his grandparents, who never liked the idea of DST in the first place, when it was first introduced decades ago. Apparently they would grudgingly set one clock in their house on DST, but leave all the rest normal in a sort of quiet rebellion.
IT’S ABOUT TIME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!