lovelier. Improves the mornings too.

Sorry, but 4:30 pitch black in December is fine for me. No desire to make that 3:30 while Nebraska can still see outside until 5:30.

It ain't broke, don't fix it.

And I don't care what time they pick. Just pick a time and stay with it. I can use lights or curtains accordingly.

because it would fix on the Eastern Standard Time.

The people affected in winter would be those in the Central and Pacific time zones. Sunrise in Bismarck, ND would be at 9:28 around Jan 1st. And 8:58 in Seattle.

Yeah, 9:30 in ND? While 'the world revolves around NYC' [sic], that is one good reason that isn't happening... So they drop us back an hour and everyone west suffers.

There are fairly good reasons for one hour time zones, as all this shows.

The OP talks about India and Brazil - those countries being closer to, or on, the equator, don't get short winter days (and a width measured in miles is also not so many degrees of longitude). For instance, of the 'extreme' Indian cities, all on the same time zone, Kolkata (Calcutta) in the east has an earliest sunset of 4:51, Amritsar in the north a latest sunrise of 7:30, and earliest sunset of 5:27, and Ahmadabad in the west latest sunrise of 7:20. Those are all pretty manageable.

The example of China shows what happens in a country further from the equator if you don't use time zones - Urumqi, in the north-west, has a latest sunrise of 9:44, and Harbin in the north-east an earliest sunset of 3:49.

Dammit, I'm tired of going to work in the dark, and coming home in the dark. I'm tired of days where the light is measured in shades of gray.

This has been a particularly long and hard winter for me on many fronts. I have been looking forward to today since DST ended in November. Already the light looks different and I'm looking forward to warmer days, which to me is what DST signifies. It may not be the most scientific argument, but for some of us, it's just as valid.

I'm looking forward to maybe actually being able to do something **outside** after 5 p.m. this week.

This winter has been darker than I have seen in years.

We got spoiled by last winter, when the temperatures were more springlike, and summer started basically in March. (We paid for it during the summer with the drought, though.)

This year it's been snowier, and colder, and darker than I can remember in years. I honestly can't tell you when the last truly sunny day was. Plus, my job currently sucks, so that makes things that much harder. Any kind of hope for better days I can get right now, I'll take.

I just came back from a run, and it was the first pleasant time out I've had since before the time change in November. The light is different, things just FEEL different. It may be all in my head, but I do feel better today.

because its in my head today too.

Been on a massive cleaning jag today - and I don't know why. Normally Sundays I just sit and read, but today is gogogo time.

I just don't get the hostility by some with DST unless they are people who whine about the supposed "hour" they "lose" in the early morning.

The body gets used to the time change very quickly.

It starts to get light about two hours before anyone is ready to wake up, and it's pitch dark by the time you're through with dinner. Yuck.

Even in summer, the sun went down by 7:30, so there was usually little or no daylight left by the time I got home from work.

Every few years the Japanese government floats the idea of introducing daylight saving time, and just like their periodic proposals to relocate the capital, nothing ever comes of it.

is a huge consideration. Times and timezones should be maximized so people use the least amount of electricity to light during waking hours. I'm not good with sunrise at 9am and sunset at 12am during the summer..If the US was going to 2 time zones, the logical choice would be central for the eastern half and mountain for the western half..

I guess you don't care about the extra hour of daylight at the end of the day, but a lot of us love it.

Standard time sucks big time, especially in the winter when the days are short anyway.

I love having more daylight after work.

And it's also terribly redundant.

Fucking. Love. It.

[font style="color:#ffffff; background-color:#ffffff;"]I'm not serious - there is a very good and logical reason for local time zones.[/font]

Then you just adjust your operating hours to match the local needs. So where someone in nyc might work from 8 to 5, LA might instead have a work day that goes from 12-9.

But there's no conversion factor. And no need for "day light savings". Ive seen plenty of places that have seasonal hours.

Last edited Mon Mar 11, 2013, 03:00 AM - Edit history (1)

... for your example of typical 8 am - 5 pm work hours:

[div style="margin-left:1em;"][div style="display:inline; font-size:1.1em; font-family:monospace; white-space:pre;"]City Typical work hours
[div style="display:inline; font-size:1.1em; font-family:monospace; white-space:pre;"]_____________________________________________

[div style="display:inline; font-size:1.1em; font-family:monospace; white-space:pre;"]London 08:00 to 17:00 ( 8 am - 5 pm)
[div style="display:inline; font-size:1.1em; font-family:monospace; white-space:pre;"]New York 13:00 to 22:00 ( 1 pm - 10 pm)
[div style="display:inline; font-size:1.1em; font-family:monospace; white-space:pre;"]Los Angeles 16:00 to 01:00 ( 4 pm - 1 am)
[div style="display:inline; font-size:1.1em; font-family:monospace; white-space:pre;"]Honolulu 18:00 to 03:00 ( 6 pm - 3 am)
[div style="display:inline; font-size:1.1em; font-family:monospace; white-space:pre;"]Tokyo 23:00 to 08:00 (11 pm - 8 am)
[div style="display:inline; font-size:1.1em; font-family:monospace; white-space:pre;"]Moscow 04:00 to 13:00 ( 4 am - 1 pm)
No time conversions necessary - everybody's clocks would be set to the same time.

I see no compelling reason that Chicago, New York, and Dallas should have the same standard time, when their natural times are rather divergent.

But Chicago and Dallas are both in the central time zone.

which cites having those cities (plus Philadelphia) all on the same time as an advantage to getting rid of two time zones.

Two or four, either is fine with me. But, this switching on and off DST is bullshit. Arizona has it right, IMHO. Speaking of which, are we East Coasters 2 or 3 ahead of Arizona now? It's this kind of crap I hate, along with the time changes totally screwing up one's biological rhythms.

And even more stupid is the idea that the time we use for four months a year is called "standard time". I'd prefer to go back to the original switchovers for DST, or better yet scrap it altogether.

Here in Indiana, they didn't use DST until recently. Since it came into use, I've found that I prefer having more light in the evenings rather than the morning. But I'm a night person, I guess. I wouldn't mind getting rid of the DST scheme, however, if we just stopped switching back and forth and kept the evenings long. I find winters even more depressing than in the past, now that it starts getting darker an hour sooner all of a sudden, with the switchover.

I don't like the idea of getting rid of time zones, however. That just freaks me out.

LEAVE IT THERE.

Not having much daylight at the end of the day causes depression.

Higher latitudes may benefit.

Daylight time was instituted to keep it light later in the evening, delaying energy use in households. It has worked well that way.

Want to increase global warming? Go to standard time year round.

the last thing I want is MORE sun and daylight. Give me the night and darkness.

all these people whining about daylight are cracking me up

...that delays sunrise to an unacceptable time, around 9am or so. And that seems unfair and possibly dangerous for school age kids.

I love having the maximum possible number of daylight hours at the end of my work day, while also maintaining a sleep cycle connection to daylight working hours. I don't particularly care if it's dark or dawn when I start my day, but I much prefer to end it with several hours of daylight left for my own pursuits (as opposed to my boss's).

I get really depressed in the winter months when it starts getting dark at 5 o'clock. I'm not much of a morning person, so I don't mind the later sunrises.

A shift of 1 hour is really that devastating? Crykee, and people complained about the hypersensitivity of the pampered baby-boom

One universal time for coordinating meeting times, shift starts, train schedules etc certainly works. THe US military has coordinated global communication and activity for decades with that system.

Ya, sure, because humans seem to be diurnal people need to match their activity with regional patterns of daylight around something stable like the Zenith.

Oh SHIT!! I think just rediscovered why there are time zones!

It's an incredible amount of work to develop, test and deploy solutions when the time changes around.

If we're going to do it, we need to do it, and stop screwing with it. The last time we did it, extending it by two weeks on both ends was awful.

If you do anything that has time correlation in it, flipping an hour is bad enough. Did somebody go through that door at 2:00, only to have it show as 3:00AM? Did that wire transfer go through?

Pain
In
The
Butt!

When I lived in PA, I never got the need for DST.

I first noticed this when I moved north to Mass, and now that I live in Maine, I desperately need the time changes. My body runs slightly ahead of schedule, so it's a huge relief when the clock change comes.

Without moving the clocks forward, by the summer equinox the sun would be rising at around 3am here, and would be worse, of course, for the far north. As it is, it rises around 4am and sets shortly after 9pm, enabling us to sleep a little longer in the morning and lighting the full day.

Without setting the clocks back in the fall, by the winter equinox my body would be begging to go to bed by 7pm. As it is, I struggle to stay awake. And the sun wouldn't be rising until 8am or later. A struggle to get up and head to work in a pitch black morning and a struggle to stay awake in the evening.

I seem to remember, too, that one reason for the time change in the fall is so that school kids aren't standing out in the dark to catch their school buses in the morning. They were getting hit by groggy commuters.

Because the country should actually have three or four time zones (judging from what the neighboring countries have), people in Tibet who follow standard work schedules always have to wake up in the dark and have to go to bed while it's still light for much of the year.

All the countries you mention have wide swaths without much industrialization. It's like Alaska going to one time zone. Two of its former three time zones covered areas where hardly anyone lived: a little strip on the panhandle and Nome, a town of 500.

We'd end up more like China if we had one time zone. Imagine: even if we all went to Central Time, if you started work at 9AM, the West Coasters would be starting work at what was 7AM by the sun (before sunrise in the winter in the Pacific Northwest), and the East Coasters would start at what was 10AM by the sun. At equinox, the sun would set at 6PM for Midwesterners but at 5PM for Easterners and at 8PM for Westerners. If we didn't have a modern industrialized society, it wouldn't make any difference. If we had an interior consisting mostly of jungle like Brazil or islands that are completely non-industrialized like Indonesia, we could get away with it.

By the way, Russia is just fine with TWELVE time zones.

I don't think we need to get rid of the 4 different time zones, it works just fine as it is. We live in such a 24 hour society today anyway that I don't think it makes much of a difference anymore. I was able to talk to both an EBay rep and a PayPal rep on the phone at 1am on Saturday morning to resolve an issue.

It's the time change twice a year that drives me insane, and is completely pointless. I grew up in a country that did not do a time change at all, and there was no issue with the time. It got dark earlier in winter, and later in summer. End of story. The idea of changing times is outdated and serves no purpose anymore.

I LOVE the extra hours of sunlight ... wish it for the winter months as well....I count down the days until Daylight Savings Time starts...and I so appreciated the extra hours of sunlight today..

Gah. This gets me every time. We have the same amount of daylight. The only difference is the time the sun rises and sets.

Pictures in our yearbook of going to school in the dark. Sun was rising at 8:30. Little kids had to walk to school in the dark.

And, by the way, China does NOT get along just fine; there are many, many practical problems with this, and, in fact, was originally a purely political(and not in a good way!) measure:

http://www.wisegeek.org/why-does-china-have-only-one-time-zone.htm

It hasn't benefitted the vast majority of Chinese or Indians.....what makes you think we'll be any different?