Daylight Saving changes for United States users (except Arizona & Hawaii)

[ItazuraNhomango]

Re: Daylight Saving changes for United States users (except Arizona & Hawaii)

Once again, some people actually have to deal with people in different parts of the world.

My work used to involve scheduling deliverables across three continents. In game, I've scheduled events dealing with people from four continents. When partying with JP players, I often have to look up translating JST to PST. Time zone sucks, especially with added complications like different daylight savings dates.

My opinion isn't due to the lack of understanding of how time zones/daylight savings works, mind you--I am the guy in the LS who started posting of event times in multiple time zones.

Still, I groaned I had when I had to explain why BST (British Summer Time) and PST (Pacific Standard Time) do not (usually?!) coexist to people from Europe and U.S. It's tiresome dealing with international date change calculation, too.

Switch to 24 hour clock, get rid of time zone, set the entire planet to be the same day. Time designations are just numbers marking time passage--there is no inherent meaning. All those junk are needless complications.

[KamuroIshigami]

Re: Daylight Saving changes for United States users (except Arizona & Hawaii)

Sorry, it is Saturday Night, Sunday Morning.

[Mhurron]

Re: Daylight Saving changes for United States users (except Arizona)

If your on the east coast and it's 10:00 ONLY IN THE EAST COAST. NOT EVERYWHERE ELSE. You want West coast time, you subtract 3 hours. Same as usual. It'll always be 3 hours difference. The reason behind this is simply to remove the PM and AM and the location (pacific, central, mountain etc.)
If your calling your friend in england it's always 5 hours difference, so add 5 hours and you get 15:00. Calling in Japan, it's going to be 0:00.

Very good, those are time zones. Get rid of them and 10 everywhere around the world means something else. On the east coast it's the middle of the day, on the west its early morning, in Japan its the middle of the night and in England its late afternoon. That's what would happen when you got rid of time zones. How would you keep track of it? Well you'd have to remember offsets from UTC, oh wait, thats time zones again.

I groaned I had when I had to explain why BST (British Summer Time) and PST (Pacific Standard Time) do not (usually?!) coexist to people from Europe and U.S. It's tiresome dealing with international date change calculation

Ya, adding or subtracting a maximum of 12 is rocket science isn't it.

[ItazuraNhomango]

Re: Daylight Saving changes for United States users (except Arizona)

Very good, those are time zones. Get rid of them and 10 everywhere around the world means something else. On the east coast it's the middle of the day, on the west its early morning, in Japan its the middle of the night and in England its late afternoon. That's what would happen when you got rid of time zones.

What's so bad about that? Right now, the sun is at different angles in the sky at different part of the world--time zone or no time zone. All the anti-zone people are proposing is that don't bother keeping different numbers. Less complication is a good thing.

Barring a very good reason, the simple solution should be preferred over the complicated.

Ya, adding or subtracting a maximum of 12 is rocket science isn't it.

Did you miss the fact that even time zone designation can be a pain?
BST = used only in summer in Britain
PST = used only in winter in U.S. West Coast.

* * *

Maybe a scenario will make the idea of "less complicated" more concrete.

Let's say I want to tell someone in Austria that an event will be at Sunday, March 11, 3 p.m. EDT. He wants know what is it in his local time, otherwise he can't figure out if he can attend or not.

Now, I have to look it up. So, find a website which can translate time, then I'll have to ask him which of the 5 cities listed is he close to. THEN, finally, I can ask "Is March 12, 6 a.m. EST good for you?" (Note: that's not the EST in U.S.--it's Aussies' EST.)

If the website is right, he can actually answer truthfully "No". If the website I used is off, then it's time for more misunderstanding and confusion.


Now, how about if we had no time zones or daylight savings time, and everyone is on UTC?

(US person) "How about March 11, 19:00?"
(Aussie) "No way! I don't wake up before 21:00!"
(US person) "Fine. We'll take you next run."
(Aussie) "OK."

Seems a heck of whole lot easier.

[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

Re: Daylight Saving changes for United States users (except Arizona & Hawaii)

Someone didn't inform my local Taco Bell of this change, I got my Steak Taqutos at 2am, technically

Suckers

[Murphie]

Re: Daylight Saving changes for United States users (except Arizona & Hawaii)

Well, the joke is on you for eating that processed crap. And at 2 am no less.

[KamuroIshigami]

Re: Daylight Saving changes for United States users (except Arizona & Hawaii)

The middle ground is to keep time zones and remove daylight savings.

If you remove time zones, and say now is 10:00 PM all over the world, you still have to figure out when is mid-day at another place, and you still have to do clock math. However, if you just have GMT offsets and literially divide the earth in to 24 equal pieces and then move the lines a little based on political lines (to keep a country or state in one time zone), and stick to the standard time; then it is fine. But once you use daylight savings, then you screw with the proportions. Noon is no longer mid-day; and 12:00 AM Midnight is no longer mid-night.

STANDARD time is a standard. The savings crap is full of crap in general. You don't save time, you have to move the clock back in November anyways. If you want people to take advantage of more daylight, just make a law to force businesses to start earlier at a certain time of year, don't mess with the clock. The clock is an instrument to measure time, not to make people wake up. Geez.

I think we should all protest this by asking our employers to come to work at 9:00 AM and leave at 6:00 PM when they use daylight savings, so it will still be 8:00 AM and 5:00 PM on standard time.

[eticket109]

Re: Daylight Saving changes for United States users (except Arizona & Hawaii)

Someone didn't inform my local Taco Bell of this change, I got my Steak Taqutos at 2am, technically
Suckers

those things are like half the food for twice the price.

[tdh]

Re: Daylight Saving changes for United States users (except Arizona & Hawaii)

Meanwhile, I think I'd vote to do away with DST, but doing away with Time Zones would just cause more confusion.

Hell, the current system we in time zone's been in place for like 200 billion years, and people don't know how to calculate time zones in the country they live it! Now you expect them to remember that, "Well it's 1500 where I'm standing now, meaning it's the middle of the night, but in Bangladesh it's early morning." (No idea why I picked on Bangladesh, just sounded goo at 0545 or wait... is it really 1545?) Then it comes down to where we "start" time. Keep it GMT? Since the western world is obviously more important despite there being far more people in Asia. Or in the U.S. since we're obviously more important than the rest of the world's population combined.

But yeah, if you suddenly have to remember that "9-5" is really 1200 to 2000 in some part of the world, you're still doing the conversion for a "time zone." You haven't changed anything, just stopped adding 12 then +/- GMT. Took something you didn't like, and made it more complicated.

[WishMaster3K]

Re: Daylight Saving changes for United States users (except Arizona & Hawaii)

Or in the U.S. since we're obviously more important than the rest of the world's population combined.

QFT

[Caspian]

Re: Daylight Saving changes for United States users (except Arizona & Hawaii)

I didn't read the whole thread, but caught a few posts about DST not being needed anymore. When infact, its need is the reason for it being extended here in the states. The idea is if you're up for more of the daylight hours and less of the dark hours, you'll use less energy on using lights in the house. Supposed to save you a few pennies a month (and thats probably pushing it), but it saves the energy companies money and saves quite a bit of energy when the whole country goes by it. Does it make things more complicated? Yes. But it does save energy, and plus, I like it being light outside until 9pm. I like getting off work at 8 and still seeing the sun. Doesn't depress me quite so much.

And, yes, we are more important than everyone else combined, now only if we could convince the rest of the world of that fact.

[ItazuraNhomango]

Re: Daylight Saving changes for United States users (except Arizona & Hawaii)

I guess people like their traditions--it's going to be time zones and miles and pounds forever. (Has it even been all that long since the 12 hour clock face became the "standard"? lol. Some people make it sound like the world will cease to make sense if 12 isn't noon. )

No matter how much people love their archaic notion of time, it won't stop me from feeling absurd when crossing time zones--one foot West is 1 p.m., one foot East is 2 p.m. Whee...

Edit:

The idea is if you're up for more of the daylight hours and less of the dark hours, you'll use less energy on using lights in the house.

Or, you can just have people get up and go to work earlier/later, depending on time of the year? That is essentially what is supposed to happen, right?

If memory serves, in The Three Musketeers, they already get up earlier in Summer than in Winter. Don't think they have Daylight Savings Time back then...

[tdh]

Re: Daylight Saving changes for United States users (except Arizona & Hawaii)

I didn't read the whole thread, but caught a few posts about DST not being needed anymore. When infact, its need is the reason for it being extended here in the states. The idea is if you're up for more of the daylight hours and less of the dark hours, you'll use less energy on using lights in the house. Supposed to save you a few pennies a month (and thats probably pushing it), but it saves the energy companies money and saves quite a bit of energy when the whole country goes by it. Does it make things more complicated? Yes. But it does save energy, and plus, I like it being light outside until 9pm. I like getting off work at 8 and still seeing the sun. Doesn't depress me quite so much.
And, yes, we are more important than everyone else combined, now only if we could convince the rest of the world of that fact.

Don't get me wrong, I like having sun at 9PM. Still a park playing basketball at 9PM is fun as hell, but I was just deprived of an hours sleep. Odude don't like when you mess with his sleep!

The other factor is, how many people are going to be late to work today and tomorrow? The city appears to have neglected in setting the clocks back as well. All the lights on the road were behaving as they would at 5AM and not 6AM. So we have two days worth of people late to work. Man hours lost, people losing jobs, and the rest of the world finds another reason to hate the U.S. Instead of everybody going to DST roughly the same time, we decided to jump ahead and do it first. Appearing like another power play.

And honestly that saving money on energy thing just sounds like some forced fed crap. Considering the price of energy in some place, they're trying to save the consumer 5 cents? I dunno man.

[Nymphadora]

Re: Daylight Saving changes for United States users (except Arizona & Hawaii)

I personally like DST... to me, it's always been something that says, "Summer's on it's way..." I donno about anyone else around here, but I can say that I'm at least ok with it. This messing around with it from year to year is what I'm not too pleased about.

And I think it's likely more of a situation where public lighting [street lights and things] can be reprogrammed for part of the year so that less light is being used during the day, and the cities, gov't, whoever the heck is paying for this pays less, than the average citizen's cost. I'm sure most of us probably actually stay up later than 9pm, and pretty sure most have at some point in our lives been awake and fully alert and functional until about 2 am before. At least I know this is common with students, being one myself. So, to play devil's advocate a little, I'm pretty sure the average person isn't saving much at all by setting our clocks up an hour for half the year. If we even are saving anything...



I have to admit though, I was surprised lol... I set my alarm clock an hour ahead so that I'd get up on time this morning, and when I woke up I noticed that apparently my computer already had that update that was supposed to adjust for early DST, so not going to have to deal with that later today, after all... ^_^

[Nakti]

Re: Daylight Saving changes for United States users (except Arizona & Hawaii)

go go New Daylight Savings

I don't know about other regions, but according to our highway dept, all the traffic lights need to be manually recoded for the change. Lots of time and money going to be spent on this. Yeah, this is a much better way to spend tax dollars than on fixing the axle-breaking potholes. (And wasn't Congress' decision based on 30 year old data or something?)

I don't see how 1 hour difference is going to save anybody anything. Our electric rates have already doubled since a couple of years ago. We switched over to fluorescents long before that. Long commute time means still getting up and driving in the dark (and now additionally tired).

Congress would be spending their time better working on getting healthcare for everyone that's even only half as good as what we pay them to get.

yeah, I'm a bit miffed. yeah, I'm tired. -_- I feel like Sisyphus.

Gotta remember JP midnight is at 11am now...