didn’t congress actually just pass a law to make it so we don’t have to change the clocks anymore? Or is that still in the works? I was thrilled to see it either way though. A bizarre occurrence of right/left unity, truly unprecedented in our contemporary times.
The US Senate passed a bill for permanent DST, but the House rejected it.
Adj
Or not. I may be stupid.
But I do know that this was tried in the early 70s, and Florida’s governor led the charge to repeal it because kids were getting hit by cars in the dark dark mornings.
The reason it wasn’t much bigger news, I’m thinking, was that it happened at about the same time as Watergate.
Rectilinear Propagation
Well, between the mass shootings and the pandemic response, it’s pretty obvious a whole lotta folks don’t actually care about kids dying so it might stick this time.
Felix
No streetlights in Florida?
Felix
Waitaminute, more importantly no reflectors on kids cloths and schoolbags either?!!
The Senate passed a bill to make DST permanent. The House has not. Permanent DST is the opposite of what we should do, permanent Standard Time is the proper answer but DST is what corporations prefer.
Devin
Yeah, but the Senate passed it in a really sneaky way that a lot of Senators are really ticked about. They used unanimous consent, which is not as unanimous as it sounds. It basically just requires nobody in the Senate to object, and they usually give a good heads up, but no notification was given and a whole lot of staff didn’t communicate to Senators that this happened, so nobody objected and it automatically passed. This was not a 100-0 vote.
I wouldn’t hold my breath for it to pass the House.
CallynD
I would hope not, because Daylight Savings Time is the literal devil and I hate it from the bottom of my being. I would support eliminating time zones and just having everyone run on GMT over making DST permanent. At least that makes some sort of sense.
butting
I’d hope we’d all normalise south-at-the-top maps before something as cursed as GMT/Zulu, which would lead to dates changing in the middle of the day.
Universal time should be based on the first time zone after the date line, and I’m not just saying that because of how, purely by coincidence, that’s where I live.
Mano308gts
Hear, hear! GMT universal time as a method of timekeeping is awful.
Honestly, I understand why standard time is preferable to DST *insofar as* it’s a more accurate representation of time defined as ’12 noon is when the sun reaches its zenith in the sky’, which was our historical definition….
But if I am being honest, I really actually far prefer DST over Standard Time, because it aligns the hours of day ever so slightly more with the numbers that I choose to be awake on the clock, meaning that I typically have one more hour of daylight during DST- and in the dead of winter, if I have no other obligations forcing me to get up, that might literally double my regular daily daylight hours. (Given that I tend to get up of my own accord by about 3pm, and go to bed by about 6am… Quite a bad schedule for someone whose employment is teaching in a school! Rip sleep…)
Saida
Obviously the answer is to just move to a timezone that matches your pattern better.
thejeff
Better yet, get a job working remotely in a timezone that matches your pattern.
khn0
We just got to this “no changing time non-sense” and now we’re stuck with nazi germany time at UTC+2 when we are in fact fucking one of the few UTC=GMT. No kidding, it’s a thing that first happened in the country by collaboration gov to coordinate better with nazi germany occupying half the country and therafter we somehow never came back to GMT.
So now we still don’t have any shared human rights in EU, but we got the same time zone, which is historically here the nazi one, even if it wasn’t the “point”, it’s still not a thing that should happen.
Victor
GAH! NO!!!!
It’s bad enough that it gets light early in the morning in the summer. There’s no need for that awfulness in the winter. And changing the clock twice a year is just stupid.
Permanent DST is the way to go.
Azhrei Vep
I just want whichever one means it gets dark sooner. Unless we can manipulate the earth’s rotation such that it always begins to lighten where I am once I’ve gone to sleep, and darkens again right before I wake.
I never want to see the sun again, is what I’m trying to say.
Keulen
I agree with you, if we’re gonna get rid of DST, the better way is to make standard time permanent, not permanent DST. And moving the clock forward even one hour causes increases in health problems and accidents for weeks after. https://www.businessinsider.com/daylight-saving-time-is-deadly-2018-3
TheScreenJockey
Permanent DST is superior because most folks don’t actually need daylight for their morning routine anymore. Most people do more outdoor things in the evening than in the morning, so shifting the workday earlier makes more sense for MOST people.
thejeff
But getting up is harder when it’s still dark out.
Agemegos
So change office hours to 0800–1600 rather than lie about the time.
To be fair, the recently-passed-by-the-House bill is just about the stupidest way they could have gone about abolishing it—and from what I’ve heard, the last time they tried this exact method of doing so back in the ’70s or ’80s, it was so unpopular that it got reversed by another bill after hardly a year, so.
isn’t it the usual USA thing of wanting to do everything different from everyone else, because they can’t be looking like they’re following other countries, see, they’re number one and all that.
Even the current time change, on the 15th, when most counties do it on the last sunday of the month.
Taffy
If Americans don’t do everything in a way that everyone else can make fun of, what will the rest of the world do for entertainment? We serve a vital purpose in the world’s ecosystem.
Decidedly Orthogonal
Oh it’s all good. There’s still plenty to mock while we don’t look under our own rugs.
Yeah, Nixon tried it to “save gas,” somehow. I remember it. School kids were going out to catch the bus in the middle of the night.
Taffy
If Americans weren’t so opposed to having more than one thing in a given category, they could just say “Yeah, school starts at 9am instead of 8am in the colder months.” and kids would adjust naturally. Instead, we have complete nonsense.
Freyja
and really they should always start later because we know its better for their brains
Taffy
What?? I’m given to believe that in Japan they go to school at like 5am and don’t leave until the sun is setting, and they allegedly have excellent test scores and also severe depression, crippling performance anxiety, disproportionate suicide rates, and most importantly the test scores thing please ignore the rest. Are you telling me that’s not a good thing?
Thag Simmons
I mean the way we did it gave me all of those things without the excellent test scores, so maybe they’re onto something here.
Miri
I was going to be shocked by schools starting at 8 instead of 9 (or 8:45 or 8:40)…
Fun fact: I only discovered about a decade after finishing school that I was supposed to have been there for 8:40. The entire time up til then I had been convinced that registration was at 8:50 and that was when I was supposed to get there.
I mean, I still didn’t get there for 8:50 consistently because my time management isn’t amazing, was a chronic insomniac, and hated mornings – but I may have had a CHANCE had I correctly understood when I should have been there. You would have thought somebody would have said at some point, even if only sarcastically!
Bathymetheus
I’m impressed you got through an entire school career violating system norms. This is an accomplishment to be proud of!
Stick it to the Man, yeah!
Needfuldoer
Nope, gotta get school finished early enough in the day so they can tend the fields before sunset.
/s
mrnoidea
And summer vacation is only a way for children to tend the fields full time before the harvest.
thejeff
Isn’t it teenagers who have the most trouble with early starts? Wonder if it would be an improvement just to switch the usual elementary and high school start times?
The Senate, not the House, and with a really wonky process that has a lot of Senators really ticked off. This is likely going to be a big old pile of nothing.
As someone who lives in Arizona, I can tell you it’s a constant source of bemusement that the entire rest of the country just does this bizarre thing twice a year like it’s totally normal, while we’re down here doing completely fine without it.
Usually, when something is bad, it’s existence at least makes a degree of sense. Like there’s somebody with power who benefits from things being this way, or at least thinks they benefit. You can understand the bad thing, see why it exists even if it’s a pain for everybody.
This is not the case with moving clocks back and forth every year. Nobody benefits, everyone thinks this shit sucks, abolish it already.
The idea was first proposed by a New Zealand entomologist who wanted more time to study bugs. This was stupid and nobody listened to him. Then it was picked by this English busybody who thought that people didn’t spend enough time playing cricket and hunting foxes and such. This was also stupid and nobody listened to him.
THEN, during WWI Germany and Austria-Hungary adopted it as a wartime productivity measure, which meant everybody else had to as well, even though there’s no evidence it actually accomplished anything. Unfortunately, it has stuck around on-and-off since.
In conclusion, it’s the Kaiser’s fault.
Taffy
I’m always baffled by how far people will go to avoid just waking up earlier on their own. They have to make up entire laws and rules and traditions to trick themselves into it, instead of just… setting their alarm a little earlier and not dragging all of us down with them.
RassilonTDavros
“Where’d that Daylight Savings Time come from, Kaiser?”
Taffy
“Step-Kaiser, I’m stuck in the Daylight Saving Time! Can you help me out?”
King Daniel
Is he called Step-Kaiser because he stepped on Belgium
Personally, I like the part where I get an extra hour of sleep so I think we should do that twice a year instead and see where it takes us after a few years.
Taffy
It’s not extra though. It’s all smoke and mirrors. If anything, you get an hour stolen from you on the opposite end.
Agemegos
I think you might have misunderstood Nathan’s suggestion, which is to put the clocks forward by one hour twice per year and never put them back.
Agemegos
Or vice versa I have never had a firm grip on the metaphor by which “later” and “earlier” are mapped to directions.
Miri
I have long argued for this, but apparently other people are not permanently jetlagged and have circadian rhythms tied to day and night..?
Bathymetheus
I recommend moving to Mars as soon as Musk gets his act together and sets up a colony there. Day length is about 37 minutes longer than here, which might help you to synchronise.
BONUS: one third gravity! Put a little bounce in your step! Or a lot.
Al
Glad to see someone else thinks multiplanetary is important. Kind of puts our timezone problems in perspective. Don’t have to approve of Musk as a person for this. This is bigger than him. He’s just a … vessel.
Wizard
Looking at history, many great things were accomplished by people who were, frankly, dicks. Pretty much the goal of civilization is to channel people’s more dickish impulses in a direction that’s socially useful.
All the science we have disagrees with you. DST makes people sad, standard time is much more healthy.
Mano308gts
I do believe there’s a flaw in that argument- all of the studies that I have seen use DST to refer to the practice of switching time twice annually. I don’t know of any studies that specify the psychological benefits/costs of referring to the time of daylight by x or y number, without adjusting that time otherwise. For myself personally, I know that my time of waking, based on the numbers on the clock, benefits from the hours given by DST.
Now, I also need to point out that neither DST nor Standard Time are accurate to the traditional method of telling time, that is noon being exactly at the peak of the sun; because our time-zones are too broad. If the time zone is set such that 12:00 PM is at the sun’s highest point at its Easternmost edge, then the Westernmost edge would not see the sun at its highest point until 12:59.59 PM. Therefore, I say we repeal the 24 one-hour based timezones, and implement the 1440 one-minute based time slivers! XD
Agemegos
You are overlooking the Equation of Time. Owing to the eccentricity of Earth’s orbit and the obliquity of its rotation the length of the actual solar day varies slightly through the year, and in a way that depends on latitude. We ought to slice each of your 1440 time zones into 180 latitudinal sections and have a spherical grid of 259 200 time-blocks with offsets from each other that change from day to day. Computers can look after the details.
Daylight Savings Time is stupid. The best explanation of it that I ever heard went something like this:
Daylight Savings Time is as if you had a blanket and you cut a foot off one end of the blanket and sewed it onto the other end, and then deluded yourself into believing that you now have a longer blanket.
Or it’s like getting up one hour after sun rise instead of two hours after sunrise and deluding yourself that you spend more time awake during daylight.
That’s just the result of living at higher latitudes, along with such other things as “seasons” and “temperate climate”. If you want sunsets to be at a fairly consistent time year-round, move to the tropics. 😛
126 thoughts on “Spoons”
Ana Chronistic
I imagine even if clock-changing becomes abolished, it’ll still take a minute to leave the public conscious
wonder how long it took for people to get used to stuff like not having an elevator operator or party lines anymore
Ana Chronistic
Dotty, I totes have a nightlight you can have
it comes with a humidifier attached
Rose by Any Other Name
… I think I have that same nightlight/humidifier. The one where you can set it to cycle through all the colors, right?
Ana Chronistic
they only had the one! =p
Cyrus Draegur
didn’t congress actually just pass a law to make it so we don’t have to change the clocks anymore? Or is that still in the works? I was thrilled to see it either way though. A bizarre occurrence of right/left unity, truly unprecedented in our contemporary times.
Adj
The US Senate passed a bill for permanent DST, but the House rejected it.
Adj
Or not. I may be stupid.
But I do know that this was tried in the early 70s, and Florida’s governor led the charge to repeal it because kids were getting hit by cars in the dark dark mornings.
The reason it wasn’t much bigger news, I’m thinking, was that it happened at about the same time as Watergate.
Rectilinear Propagation
Well, between the mass shootings and the pandemic response, it’s pretty obvious a whole lotta folks don’t actually care about kids dying so it might stick this time.
Felix
No streetlights in Florida?
Felix
Waitaminute, more importantly no reflectors on kids cloths and schoolbags either?!!
CallynD
The Senate passed a bill to make DST permanent. The House has not. Permanent DST is the opposite of what we should do, permanent Standard Time is the proper answer but DST is what corporations prefer.
Devin
Yeah, but the Senate passed it in a really sneaky way that a lot of Senators are really ticked about. They used unanimous consent, which is not as unanimous as it sounds. It basically just requires nobody in the Senate to object, and they usually give a good heads up, but no notification was given and a whole lot of staff didn’t communicate to Senators that this happened, so nobody objected and it automatically passed. This was not a 100-0 vote.
I wouldn’t hold my breath for it to pass the House.
CallynD
I would hope not, because Daylight Savings Time is the literal devil and I hate it from the bottom of my being. I would support eliminating time zones and just having everyone run on GMT over making DST permanent. At least that makes some sort of sense.
butting
I’d hope we’d all normalise south-at-the-top maps before something as cursed as GMT/Zulu, which would lead to dates changing in the middle of the day.
Universal time should be based on the first time zone after the date line, and I’m not just saying that because of how, purely by coincidence, that’s where I live.
Mano308gts
Hear, hear! GMT universal time as a method of timekeeping is awful.
Honestly, I understand why standard time is preferable to DST *insofar as* it’s a more accurate representation of time defined as ’12 noon is when the sun reaches its zenith in the sky’, which was our historical definition….
But if I am being honest, I really actually far prefer DST over Standard Time, because it aligns the hours of day ever so slightly more with the numbers that I choose to be awake on the clock, meaning that I typically have one more hour of daylight during DST- and in the dead of winter, if I have no other obligations forcing me to get up, that might literally double my regular daily daylight hours. (Given that I tend to get up of my own accord by about 3pm, and go to bed by about 6am… Quite a bad schedule for someone whose employment is teaching in a school! Rip sleep…)
Saida
Obviously the answer is to just move to a timezone that matches your pattern better.
thejeff
Better yet, get a job working remotely in a timezone that matches your pattern.
khn0
We just got to this “no changing time non-sense” and now we’re stuck with nazi germany time at UTC+2 when we are in fact fucking one of the few UTC=GMT. No kidding, it’s a thing that first happened in the country by collaboration gov to coordinate better with nazi germany occupying half the country and therafter we somehow never came back to GMT.
So now we still don’t have any shared human rights in EU, but we got the same time zone, which is historically here the nazi one, even if it wasn’t the “point”, it’s still not a thing that should happen.
Victor
GAH! NO!!!!
It’s bad enough that it gets light early in the morning in the summer. There’s no need for that awfulness in the winter. And changing the clock twice a year is just stupid.
Permanent DST is the way to go.
Azhrei Vep
I just want whichever one means it gets dark sooner. Unless we can manipulate the earth’s rotation such that it always begins to lighten where I am once I’ve gone to sleep, and darkens again right before I wake.
I never want to see the sun again, is what I’m trying to say.
Keulen
I agree with you, if we’re gonna get rid of DST, the better way is to make standard time permanent, not permanent DST. And moving the clock forward even one hour causes increases in health problems and accidents for weeks after.
https://www.businessinsider.com/daylight-saving-time-is-deadly-2018-3
TheScreenJockey
Permanent DST is superior because most folks don’t actually need daylight for their morning routine anymore. Most people do more outdoor things in the evening than in the morning, so shifting the workday earlier makes more sense for MOST people.
thejeff
But getting up is harder when it’s still dark out.
Agemegos
So change office hours to 0800–1600 rather than lie about the time.
King Daniel
To be fair, the recently-passed-by-the-House bill is just about the stupidest way they could have gone about abolishing it—and from what I’ve heard, the last time they tried this exact method of doing so back in the ’70s or ’80s, it was so unpopular that it got reversed by another bill after hardly a year, so.
King Daniel
(And I say this as someone who loathes the idea of arbitrarily changing clocks, for the record)
Yumi
Yeah, I haven’t looked into much, but the idea of having Daylight Savings Time always be “on” instead of standard time all the time seems…wrong…
Darkoneko
isn’t it the usual USA thing of wanting to do everything different from everyone else, because they can’t be looking like they’re following other countries, see, they’re number one and all that.
Even the current time change, on the 15th, when most counties do it on the last sunday of the month.
Taffy
If Americans don’t do everything in a way that everyone else can make fun of, what will the rest of the world do for entertainment? We serve a vital purpose in the world’s ecosystem.
Decidedly Orthogonal
Oh it’s all good. There’s still plenty to mock while we don’t look under our own rugs.
BarerMender
Yeah, Nixon tried it to “save gas,” somehow. I remember it. School kids were going out to catch the bus in the middle of the night.
Taffy
If Americans weren’t so opposed to having more than one thing in a given category, they could just say “Yeah, school starts at 9am instead of 8am in the colder months.” and kids would adjust naturally. Instead, we have complete nonsense.
Freyja
and really they should always start later because we know its better for their brains
Taffy
What?? I’m given to believe that in Japan they go to school at like 5am and don’t leave until the sun is setting, and they allegedly have excellent test scores and also severe depression, crippling performance anxiety, disproportionate suicide rates, and most importantly the test scores thing please ignore the rest. Are you telling me that’s not a good thing?
Thag Simmons
I mean the way we did it gave me all of those things without the excellent test scores, so maybe they’re onto something here.
Miri
I was going to be shocked by schools starting at 8 instead of 9 (or 8:45 or 8:40)…
Fun fact: I only discovered about a decade after finishing school that I was supposed to have been there for 8:40. The entire time up til then I had been convinced that registration was at 8:50 and that was when I was supposed to get there.
I mean, I still didn’t get there for 8:50 consistently because my time management isn’t amazing, was a chronic insomniac, and hated mornings – but I may have had a CHANCE had I correctly understood when I should have been there. You would have thought somebody would have said at some point, even if only sarcastically!
Bathymetheus
I’m impressed you got through an entire school career violating system norms. This is an accomplishment to be proud of!
Stick it to the Man, yeah!
Needfuldoer
Nope, gotta get school finished early enough in the day so they can tend the fields before sunset.
/s
mrnoidea
And summer vacation is only a way for children to tend the fields full time before the harvest.
thejeff
Isn’t it teenagers who have the most trouble with early starts? Wonder if it would be an improvement just to switch the usual elementary and high school start times?
Devin
The Senate, not the House, and with a really wonky process that has a lot of Senators really ticked off. This is likely going to be a big old pile of nothing.
Evil Fairy
As someone who lives in Arizona, I can tell you it’s a constant source of bemusement that the entire rest of the country just does this bizarre thing twice a year like it’s totally normal, while we’re down here doing completely fine without it.
Ana Chronistic
that ALMOST makes me want to move to Arizona
ALMOST
The Wellerman
AWE!!! ?
Hope these lovely dinosaurs have the the sweetest dinosaur dreams!!!
? ?? ?
*plays “Emerald Tide” by Michael J. Murphy on Hacked Muzak*
ThunderNight
Dinosaur Dreams is a good album name
RassilonTDavros
I hate Daylight Savings Time with a burning passion.
King Daniel
Yep.
Thag Simmons
Usually, when something is bad, it’s existence at least makes a degree of sense. Like there’s somebody with power who benefits from things being this way, or at least thinks they benefit. You can understand the bad thing, see why it exists even if it’s a pain for everybody.
This is not the case with moving clocks back and forth every year. Nobody benefits, everyone thinks this shit sucks, abolish it already.
Nathan
The idea was first proposed by a New Zealand entomologist who wanted more time to study bugs. This was stupid and nobody listened to him. Then it was picked by this English busybody who thought that people didn’t spend enough time playing cricket and hunting foxes and such. This was also stupid and nobody listened to him.
THEN, during WWI Germany and Austria-Hungary adopted it as a wartime productivity measure, which meant everybody else had to as well, even though there’s no evidence it actually accomplished anything. Unfortunately, it has stuck around on-and-off since.
In conclusion, it’s the Kaiser’s fault.
Taffy
I’m always baffled by how far people will go to avoid just waking up earlier on their own. They have to make up entire laws and rules and traditions to trick themselves into it, instead of just… setting their alarm a little earlier and not dragging all of us down with them.
RassilonTDavros
“Where’d that Daylight Savings Time come from, Kaiser?”
Taffy
“Step-Kaiser, I’m stuck in the Daylight Saving Time! Can you help me out?”
King Daniel
Is he called Step-Kaiser because he stepped on Belgium
Opus the Poet
In the US the Idea was first proposed by a B. Franklin as a way to conserve candles pre-Revolution.
Illjwamh
Daylight Saving Time out here taking all the crap when it’s Standard Time that sucks.
Taffy
Just wake up around when the sun’s up like a normal hunter-gatherer. Or when it goes down, like a night watcher.
Nathan
Personally, I like the part where I get an extra hour of sleep so I think we should do that twice a year instead and see where it takes us after a few years.
Taffy
It’s not extra though. It’s all smoke and mirrors. If anything, you get an hour stolen from you on the opposite end.
Agemegos
I think you might have misunderstood Nathan’s suggestion, which is to put the clocks forward by one hour twice per year and never put them back.
Agemegos
Or vice versa I have never had a firm grip on the metaphor by which “later” and “earlier” are mapped to directions.
Miri
I have long argued for this, but apparently other people are not permanently jetlagged and have circadian rhythms tied to day and night..?
Bathymetheus
I recommend moving to Mars as soon as Musk gets his act together and sets up a colony there. Day length is about 37 minutes longer than here, which might help you to synchronise.
BONUS: one third gravity! Put a little bounce in your step! Or a lot.
Al
Glad to see someone else thinks multiplanetary is important. Kind of puts our timezone problems in perspective. Don’t have to approve of Musk as a person for this. This is bigger than him. He’s just a … vessel.
Wizard
Looking at history, many great things were accomplished by people who were, frankly, dicks. Pretty much the goal of civilization is to channel people’s more dickish impulses in a direction that’s socially useful.
CallynD
All the science we have disagrees with you. DST makes people sad, standard time is much more healthy.
Mano308gts
I do believe there’s a flaw in that argument- all of the studies that I have seen use DST to refer to the practice of switching time twice annually. I don’t know of any studies that specify the psychological benefits/costs of referring to the time of daylight by x or y number, without adjusting that time otherwise. For myself personally, I know that my time of waking, based on the numbers on the clock, benefits from the hours given by DST.
Now, I also need to point out that neither DST nor Standard Time are accurate to the traditional method of telling time, that is noon being exactly at the peak of the sun; because our time-zones are too broad. If the time zone is set such that 12:00 PM is at the sun’s highest point at its Easternmost edge, then the Westernmost edge would not see the sun at its highest point until 12:59.59 PM. Therefore, I say we repeal the 24 one-hour based timezones, and implement the 1440 one-minute based time slivers! XD
Agemegos
You are overlooking the Equation of Time. Owing to the eccentricity of Earth’s orbit and the obliquity of its rotation the length of the actual solar day varies slightly through the year, and in a way that depends on latitude. We ought to slice each of your 1440 time zones into 180 latitudinal sections and have a spherical grid of 259 200 time-blocks with offsets from each other that change from day to day. Computers can look after the details.
Bicycle Bill
Daylight Savings Time is stupid. The best explanation of it that I ever heard went something like this:
Daylight Savings Time is as if you had a blanket and you cut a foot off one end of the blanket and sewed it onto the other end, and then deluded yourself into believing that you now have a longer blanket.
Agemegos
Or it’s like getting up one hour after sun rise instead of two hours after sunrise and deluding yourself that you spend more time awake during daylight.
Needfuldoer
Counterargument: Sunset at 4:30 PM suuuuuuucks.
King Daniel
That’s just the result of living at higher latitudes, along with such other things as “seasons” and “temperate climate”. If you want sunsets to be at a fairly consistent time year-round, move to the tropics. 😛
Agemegos
And to the western edge of a timezone.
Sunny
The sun only getting over the horizon once it’s 9am would be even worse, though.
Keulen