California may end tyrannical daylight savings

boing
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It’s hard to categorize, but here’s some indicators.

A real job makes you sweat from physical exertion for a significant part of your work day, which is at least seven hours long. Most real jobs are worked outside of heated or air conditioned spaces.

Any occupation that is primarily composed of typing and/or sitting at a desk is not a real job.

Any occupation that routinely gets you spattered head to toe, or in the face, with blood or feces is a real job.

Most real jobs pay extremely poorly, compared to aristo work. Surgery being a notable exception.

Jobs where the primary health hazards are obesity or haemorrhoids are never real jobs.

Jobs where the primary health hazards include incineration by molten metal, decapitation, joint breakdown, arch collapse, being swept overboard by anchor cables, having a limb pulled off by machinery, or starvation are almost always real jobs.

Not having to work a real job is a privilege. This privilege can be earned through merit, but more often it is achieved by luck and inheritance - one’s parents are able to afford the type of education and nutrition that makes one suitable for intellectual or pedagogical work, and one has the genetic capacity to make use of that inheritance, and one lives in a culture that has the capacity to support people who don’t work real jobs.

I’m only half kidding here. The people who hate DST are typically intelligentsia living in pricey, cultured environs and not slum-dwelling factory schlubs. I don’t think it’s people who go to bed early to save heating oil in the winter that are doing the complaining.

The point of DST is to save fuel (or, to put it in Benjamin Franklin’s terms, “to save candles”) although it also saves printers’ costs by allowing the mercantile classes to have a single set of year-round hours.

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Texas talk about going off and doing its own thing. But the West Coast is actually doing something about it one step at a time.

63

What about all the poor desk jockeys of the world?

Roosters?

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64

A lot of what’s being said is predicated on that whether people are driving in the dark, enjoying light in the morning or evening, and running the electric lanterns when they come to work can only be changed by redefining the clock. Because we all know that’s easy to tweak, but businesses open at this exact number of hours and close at that exact number of hours as an immutable law of economics.

I don’t hate DST, it’s never caused me more than some minor programming headaches. But I’ve also heard the suggestion that governments could simply say “our times will all be an hour earlier during the summer, and we encourage businesses to follow suit” instead. You’d think it would be a reasonable alternative.

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I would be very down with that, because it would make the summertime free afternoons feel longer, instead of the time after dinner.

If we had no DST, but were expected to leave work at 4:00, then we’d be home an hour early, but still have dinner at a nice, reasonable time. So we have lots of extra time in the afternoon.

With DST, however, we get home at the same clock time, and the sun may be up higher but half the people don’t notice because they go indoors and do whatever it is they do, and they’ll make dinner by the same clock time, and maybe the only thing they notice is that it’s still light outside while they’re doing the dishes.

(Of course, these two scenarios differ only in the psychological effect of the clock time, but the effect is pretty darn strong for most people.)

Problem is, even if businesses started earlier, many people wouldn’t really leave earlier in the afternoon, because of American’s damn addiction to long work hours.

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My ship welder daddy had me go to college to be one of those intelligentsia. He told me to not get a job where you had to sweat all day. Not evening kidding…

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67

They are still sleeping when I get up for work.

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I’ve always hated the twice yearly time change…mainly because I was either late to work, or 1 hour early to work every year for decades. Finally, I bought 3 very expensive ‘atomic clocks’ that would automatically reset when the time changed. That was great for one year…Then Congress changed the start and end dates and my 3 very expensive clocks, like milllions of other across the US became worse than a regular clock…Now I had to remember to change the time 4 times a year, because those clocks were programmed to the old dates. Grrrrrrr… Damn those Republicans! :wink:

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Idlers!

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Some kind of Doomsday Device to alter our angle of incidence? Actually, I’d be fine just with a plane ticket to somewhere not dark.

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Daylight Savings Time has NO EFFECT in winter months. Deleting it would just make the sun rise at 5AM in the summer, which will make construction jobs a bit hotter, but not more dangerous.

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My bad, I always assumed standard time was the summer mode. If winter is standard time, repeal it.

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EXACTLY. Came here to say this. DST was never the problem, standard time was, all along. We spend most of the year in DST anyway.

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Yes, yes, but perhaps we could have them as close as would reasonably be possible, within the limits of the timezone system, and no fucking with the clocks twice a year. That would be the simplest and make the most sense.

You might almost imagine Team Pedantry knew that’s what I meant the whole time.

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After having lived in Vancouver for years, I can tell you the real solution: move south! If you want longer days with less seasonal variation in day length, then move south. I did and am happier for it. The subtropics rock. The other nice thing is that it doesn’t stay daylight until 10PM in the summer and get light at 4AM. Nice and consistent.

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I am pretty sure that when I lived in Indiana it was, you know, regular people that hated the move to DST.

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To add a bit if gross pedantry to this thread, it’s daylight saving time, not daylight savings time.

And I am fully on board with the “fuck standard time” brigade. Maybe it’s worse for those of us above the 45th parallel, but the whole “dark at 4pm” experience gets really old, really quick.

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Those lists were great. Time is amazingly simple to screw up in programming. I like the ones about how it’s a bad assumption that thread.sleep(1000) will sleep for exactly 1000ms.

The black hole one was good too. In a a less fanciful example, GPS receivers do need to account for time dilation from the satellite’s orbit.

I once had to tackle a bug where a feature I was working on would exhibit strange behavior when run on cruise ships where the time zone was constantly shifting forward and backward.

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It’ll feel just as old just as quick if the clock says 5 p.m. when it happens. It’ll still be eight hours after sunrise.

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Maybe so, but at least it won’t be pitch black on the drive home from work.