Actually it's kist Hawaii and AZ that have no DST

I think it's a good idea though

just not kist lol

and by it being a good idea i mean DST itself

I think DST is a terrible idea...
So annoying.

After reading this thread, I have one comment.

If you go to GMT -42, then you'll be at HST, but if we think about PBT or DDT then we'll probably want to...

...this is all I got out of that conversation.

@‘And the clocks changing is for the farmers, or at least that's what I've always been told...’

That's a myth. Farmers wake up with the sun no matter what the clock says. They adjust smoothly, not when the government tells them to. Abruptly changing their clocks and the times that things open in town is as annoying for my grandparents (farmers) as it is for my parents (not farmers).

@‘The idea was first taken seriously when a huge group of parents wanted their children to not have to wait at the bus stops in the dark’

That's backwards. DST makes the children get up earlier, possibly while it is still dark. Parents need to lobby AGAINST extending DST if they want their children to continue to be able to sleep in until it gets light out. (Note that children don't wait at bus stops after school.)

@‘Actually it's just Hawaii and AZ that have no DST’

Much of Arizona is within the Navajo reservation; they also observe DST. A lot of DST and time zone maps will ignore this; those that don't let you see the very pretty shape of the Navajo reservation inside the Hopi reservation inside the Navajo reservation! Here's one: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:AZTZ.gif

Ill probably vote against DST. I can see why people want to keep in sync with sunlight hours, but its not worth the two days of confusion and everyone coming late

Once the tech is better and all watches keep in sync with a time source then there'll be less reason to oppose it

@Toby Bartels: No, the idea actually makes itself seem self-defeating, because relatively, it will seem like everyone else has to get up earlier in the summer. But the point was to save time in the winter, when it actually would help. And yes, I had to get up earlier too.

@aoe3rules:

I'm not sure what you mean. Daylight-Saving Time means that you really DO get up earlier in the summer (or whenever DST is running) compared to Standard Time. DST in the winter is the real danger; then you're sure to have kids standing in line in the dark. I would understand if parents lobbied to have DST start later or end earlier, but that's not the change that Congress most recently made in the U.S. (and obviously not the change that Congress made when DST was first used). Maybe the parents got rid of year-round DST the last time that ended?

Or maybe if the parents really wanted school to start later in the winter, but for some political reason they could only get that result if the school started later by the clock year-round and this was combined with DST to keep it starting at the same actual time in late spring and early fall. But that's kind of complicated.

just my 2 cents...

one of the most important factors is the energy savings. people tend to stay up late into the night more than wake up early in the morning... so the more 'daylight' there is at 'night' the less energy is used to light people's homes/businesses etc... I dont remember the numbers, but the estimated energy savings was equivalent to 2 or 3 days worth of national oil consumption... something like that.

the bus stop story, farmers, businesses etc are all rather auxiliary to the overall energy consumption savings from what I understand.

but what an enlightening conversation this has been ;)

Of course you're right Babak. Of course people should get up earlier (certainly no later than the sun rises unless you're so far north or south that the sun will be up for more than 16 hours) and go to bed correspondingly earlier. But almost nobody does this, because we're all lazy. Yet simply by setting their clocks wrong, suddenly they're willing to get up an hour earlier! What does that say about human psychology? (Or about the psychology of those humans who live in an industrial, clock-regimented society?)

I like DST because it means I can go to the beach after work.

@"I would understand if parents lobbied to have DST start later or end earlier, but that's not the change that Congress most recently made in the U.S."
Of course that's not true. I never said it was.

@spyman: Really?

@Toby: I think as this was a long time ago, what happened was one year they did not adjust forward but did adjust back. That's how it's earlier relative to the previous time system. I mean, I don't know that, I just guessed that right now. But it fits incredibly well.

(sorry for the double post, but had to clarify:)
Wait, not that I'm saying that's the recent change.

I'm not sure how you can say that Daylight savings time is the government abusing anything. Time is an artificial construct anyway. But if you want to make things standard, then there are 2 choices. Either make your days start at sundown or sunup (which some calendars do), or gradually move the the time forward and backward depending on the season, so that the Sunrise is always at the same time, for example, at 6am.

Or set 12:00 to noon. People colloquially call 12:00 'noon' anyway, even though most of the year 1:00pm is noon. (In fact, this is so common that I'd probably better define noon: the time during the day when the sun is most directly overhead, or the time when the sun is either directly overhead or due north or south of that).

Yes, there are complications, which is why people set standards. Successive noons can actually occur slightly less or slightly more than 24 hours apart, so you standardise on the average noon. (This is where the ‘Mean’ comes from in ‘Greenwhich Mean Time’.) And even then, you have to change your clock every time you change longitude just a little west or east, so instead of using local mean time, you use mean time for a nearby large city centre or other landmark. With long-distance travel, it becomes convenient to divide the earth up into Time Zones, each one hour apart (although some places like Newfoundland like to mess with this).

Already with Time Zones, governments began shifting the boundaries westwards (sometimes severely) in an attempt to get people to wake up earlier. (Newfoundland is a perfect example; you'd think that it has an odd Time Zone because it's straddling two of the standard ones, wouldn't you? But it's not! It's entirely within what should be the Atlantic Time Zone.) Then they add Daylight-Saving Time on top of that. They are no longer setting standards; they are trying to control behaviour.

In the long run, of course, it doesn't work. People in Nebraska (where I grew up) are lobbying to have the school day start (and end) later so students can get a better night's sleep beforehand. No surprise, since the Time Zone boundaries are shifted about half an hour west there and half of the school year is in DST to boot! The call to start school one hour later actually matches the average effect (half an hour early in the winter from being on Central Standard Time, 1:30 early in late spring and early fall from being on Central Daylight Time).

Pippin do beleave everything on that's the news. If you think about every time you traveled west through a time zone, you would increased your chance of an heart attack by 20%. That means after 5 zones you would have 100% chance of an heart attack.

Uh no Warsprite, but nice math.

Warsprite, if you have a baseline of 10%, then a 20% increase is only 12%. even if you compound it, it would be 24.8856% chance after 5 time zones.

@Toby: I wasn't going to mention that since I didn't think it was relevant to the original DST concept, but yes, that's probably the most common recent lobbying for it.

@warsprite, DingleberryJones, Draugnar: I think that's only if you actually stop and adjust for every single timezone. Because if you live in Washington and go to London, starting with a 10% heart attack rate, you've got 15 in 100 extra chances to have a heart attack. So 1 in 4 of everyone over 70 (or just anyone starting with a 10% base chance) on every plane would end up dead.

@DingleberryJones, Draugnar: Since he said to believe everything on the news, I think he was joking. Or, well, I really hope he was joking. Or possibly understands percentages, but assumed the first person to say that did not.

@aoe3 - My 10% was pulled from the air. Remember, it just said your odds within the next 2 weeks. For most people, even those over 70, that is probably no more than a few percent. So, a 2% person, which is also probably high for a specific 2 week time frame, would increase to about 5%. A person who may have a 5% in a year would have a a .2% in two weeks or about a 1/2% if they flew. In other words, 1 in 200 with that percentage or higher.

Also, the original statement was bout time shifts. Jet lag isn't quite the same thing as different people have different ways of aclimating to the new time zones. I take late afternoon transatlantic flights that become overnight over the ocean when I have to go to Germany so I can sleep, for instance. Then when I arrive the next late morning / early afternoon in Germany, I'm refreshed enough to get through the day and I go to bed at my equivalent usual time. Next morning, no jet lag.

Coming back is the bitch. Seems all the flights from Europe to the East Coast leave europe in the morning and get in sometime in the early afternoon, Eastern time. This makes for a long day before bed time. On those, just fly on a day when you don't have to do anything later. Then you can cat nap off and on throughout the day.

But I digress... The point is that jet lag is different from a 6 or 7 month shift in one's body schedule. Most people aren't even gone two weeks before they come back home.

aoe3rules and dingleberry. I was just joking, but I do question the severity of the stress DST causes. With all the traveling lack of sleep and other stressers people put them selves through DST stress must lost in the background.

Draugnar. Studies have shown traveling west through time zones is harder on you. It is not just you.

@warsprite:
Possibly one problem is that DST stress, however much it is, affects everybody. There are people who won't travel (etc) because of the stress that it puts them through; they prefer to stick to a daily routine scheduled around their 9 to 5 (or whatever the hours are) job. That will keep things consistent most of the time, but they can't avoid DST that way.

@everybody:
Although I usually don't have much trouble adjusting in any case, I find one-hour-westward jet lag easier than DST, because the sun moves with me (more or less). Although the sun does rise earlier in the summer, this change comes slowly; it doesn't jump an hour when DST starts. But if you move 1/24 of the way westward around the earth and change time zones 1 hour as you do so, then the sun will line up with the clock just as you're used to.

Does anybody have trouble adjusting when travelling east or when DST ends? There must be someone!

we need this implementation

Why? As people have said DST starts at different times in different countries anyway.

Traveling east depends on how many time zones. And travelling west is still a bitch. sure, the sun is in the relative (+/- 59'59") place in the sky, but you body has already been up an extra amount of time despite the new time and the sun being in the same position. Fly 7 time zones across the Atlantic and tell me that when you left at 9 AM and you arrived at noon you felt like only three hours had passed. There's no way you could make that claim. Your body says 10 hours have passed and doesn't care what the sun and the clocks are saying.

@Draugnar:

I certainly agree that travelling west is bad, but to me it's not AS bad as starting DST since at least the sun helps with the adjustment. (At least if I'm not inside all day.)

Of course, travelling east a long ways can be as bad as travelling west (until going halfway around the world is the same either way), but I wonder if anybody has trouble with just a 1-hour shift eastwards (or with ending DST). Maybe morning people don't like that?

Never tried a 1-hour shift to the East as that would be somewhere in the Atlantic (or maybe Newfoundland or part of Greenland). Your one hour shift though can be as bad if you live near the western edge and are traveling to the eastern edge of the next time zone as the sun doesn't change that much, but the hour still has. Living outside Cincinnati, OH and travelling to Indianapolid sued to be like that.

uups, "Indianapolis used"