[littl3chocobo]

/or/ instead of people not doing jack-shit to ready themselves for a shift that comes every single year at the same time they should, and this will blow minds, take into consideration that this regular occurrence will occur and spend the days leading up to it adjusting their schedules so that they are not running on an hour less that day

can i also point out that the main point was to save electricity and oil >x>;;;;

[Coda]

No, you can't point that out, because it's not actually true, and even IF it were true when it was implemented, it's not true now. Ben Franklin made a JOKE about saving candles and lighting oil by waking up earlier to take advantage of early-morning sunlight.

The origin was ACTUALLY to try to make an industrial society, which operates by the clock, integrate more comfortably with an agrarian society, which operates by the sun. The guy who first proposed DST as we know it today was actually interested in having more time after work to catch insects.

It IS true that many countries picked it up as an energy-saving measure during an emergency fuel shortage, because in a world fueled by manually-controlled coal-based heating, it DID save coal, because people could sleep through another hour of cold. (As I mentioned, the advent of the automatic thermostat has mostly negated this benefit.) It should also be noted that most countries that adopted it DROPPED it within a few years, and the farmers that were supposedly the ones most helped by it are among the ones who complain most about it.

And no, you can't expect people to adapt gradually to it. That's not a question of being stupid and unprepared. It's a matter of the way the industrialized world works. The modern world operates on strictly-defined schedules, and a very large population of people (particularly working-class people) don't have the flexibility to choose to vary their schedules like that. If you have to be at work at 8:00 AM or you get fired, there's really not a whole lot you can do to slow your mornings down.

[Lucid:]

Thing is, you can't force anybody to actually do that. And since it does affect the safety of others, it's better to make that change instead of expecting other people to be responsible. You're always going to be disappointed by other people if you do that. :P

[littl3chocobo]

i am talking in the contest of the us and, surprisingly(not) the us adopted it explicitly to conserve energy(and does) so it very much is true, not only that but there have been studies showing that daylight savings directly saves around a billion kilowatts of energy which is no small number

dude, you can teach people to do it and there is flexibility. if you can teach people to sit in front of a box for 2-6 hours a day and sit still then you can teach them to be aware of impending time changes and teach them to make elective decisions to help be productive and safe. people can take an hour to watch a tv show every week they can adjust their bedtime and wake-up by 10 minutes a day for a single week. the only exceptions are persons who are not allotted any hours of the day to make living choices and those with very small children. it is a matter of being able to take that five minutes either from your free time or else exchange it for five minutes elsewhere. for two years i got up at a quarter to 5am so i could go to school instead of 6 like my peers and every year when the first week of school rolled around i was able to do it by going to bed earlier at night and doing stuff in the morning. the sum total of available hours is not changed guys, if you can stay up an hour later in the summer and sleep in an extra hour then you can just as easily go to bed an hour earlier and get up an hour sooner. this is one of the few times where you can effectively say that it IS a lack of self-motivation that causes problems


a big part of the problem is that we as a society do not put any effort into taking care of ourselves until we start having problems and taking no personal responsibility when it does happen. i do understand there are exceptions but those are few and far between and for the bulk of adult human beings this is not outside of reasonable




darling, i totally know most persons are unwilling to be responsible for themselves i am saying it is something that can be done not something i expect to have happen. i live with two people who i watch intentionally and directly harm themselves out of sheer laziness and unwillingness to change even for their own sake. it's a culturally accepted method of shifting the blame and absolving themselves of responsibility(though i do wish that there were effective advertisements for it, if people can get up at 3-4am for black-friday without being 'too tired' because tv told them to then the same advertising power can be used to get people to be able to adjust their clocks both mentally and physically and not hurt themselves and each other during daylight savings time)

[Quiet Man Cometh]

We don't have daylight savings where I am. Dairy farmers wouldn't use it (so I heard) so we took a vote. A couple areas here don't use it and at least one more is thinking about quitting. It makes doing business awkward with other parts of the province when we're an hour out (like we are now), but otherwise we hardly notice the time. We're north enough that this time of year, we go to and from work in the dark anyway. The hour doesn't make a difference. The sun is maybe one width of itself above the horizon right now.

[Coda]

Yes, it CAN save energy to have clocks set forward an hour during the summer, in SOME parts of the US. I specifically SAID this was true, although I continue to assert that it's less of an impact now than it was when the policy was implemented, and in the warmer latitudes and in agricultural areas it has substantially less impact.

My point is that it DOESN'T save energy to set them BACK in the winter. Creating arbitrary schedule shifts causes a lot of damage in terms of life, health, money*, and psychology, and there is negligible benefit to doing so in the latitudes that the US spans except for in Alaska.

Supporting my point: The US has been expanding the range of DST since the policy was introduced. Originally, DST started in mid-spring and ended in early fall. Now DST starts BEFORE THE BEGINNING OF SPRING and runs through mid-fall. Russia did a three-year trial of year-round DST without shifting back and the only complaint was that it got too dark in the morning in the northern parts of the country, but since that comprises a large and very vocal segment of Russia's population due to it being farther north than the US, the complaints forced the government to revert the policy despite the other benefits.

By the way: You should probably cite that "billions of kilowatts" figure, because there's only been ONE case study done on the matter in the last 30 years, when the state of Indiana adopted DST for the first time in 2006, and they found that energy consumption INCREASED (by about 1%) because while there was less electricity spent on lighting there was more energy spent on heating and cooling (net increase, approximately $3.5 billion dollars). The last study done before that dates back to the 1970s and it showed a small energy savings but a possible increase in traffic fatalities ("possible" because they didn't have enough data to prove that the increase was due to DST or due to unrelated factors).

* From 2005 to 2009, I developed time and attendance systems for small-to-medium-sized businesses. DST shifts are a NIGHTMARE in terms of legal compliance and accounting workload, especially for companies that maintain 24-hour operation, and ESPECIALLY for companies who have employees that don't work fixed schedules. The easiest solution for these companies is to ignore DST entirely for their payroll operations and just accept the fact that paychecks get cut an hour later (according to the clock on the wall) during the summer.