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.<p>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.<p>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).<p>My pet peeve, though, is leap-seconds. Life would be a lot easier if you could rely on days always having 86400 seconds.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
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?<p>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.
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.<p>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.
You should also note that Russia abolished DST a couple of years ago <a href="https://rt.com/news/daylight-saving-time-abolished/" rel="nofollow">https://rt.com/news/daylight-saving-time-abolished/</a> , with the president citing pretty much the same reasons as the petition in question.
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 <i>before</i> 11:30am on the same day.
This video explains DST really well: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84aWtseb2-4" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84aWtseb2-4</a>
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.<p>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.
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.
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.<p>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.
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.
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?<p>The argument would be a lot more convincing if sources or studies were cited for claims such as increased air conditioning costs, etc.
Interesting topic. I'd be interested to learning what are the main arguments for the two sides...<p>I just started this discussion on the topic:<p><a href="http://www.the-counterpoint.com/discussion/2G" rel="nofollow">http://www.the-counterpoint.com/discussion/2G</a>
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.
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.<p>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).<p>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.