Spring forward tonight! Are you a fan of Standard Time all year round or Daylight Savings all year round?

I wake up early anyways, so waking up in near darkness doesn’t bother me one way or another.

I do like having it be light until 9pm; that’s a big plus. So on balance, I’m OK with it,

I live in Arizona where the question does not even exist.

@SmartAZ The question isn’t state specific. Because you and Hawaii don’t change doesn’t mean you might not prefer one to the other.

Daylight savings all year!

@elbanditoroso Then I’m marking you as a Daylight savings fan also.

Standard Time all year! I go to work early, and I’d rather have a few months of light for my commute. And on hot days, DST just means it cools off later.

I say DST year-round. Darkness at 6 PM fucking sucks.

@kritiper

Damn, if only there were some way to not click on threads about DST. Then you wouldn’t have to be exposed to it. But, alas, there is not…

I like the ritual of greeting the spring with a dramatic change and then recognizing the deepening dark at the other end with the opposite turn. It’s a momentary click with natural forces, the movement of the earth, the timeless rhythms. By emphasizing the changing of the seasons and the move from dark to light and back, it feels like a tie to our ancient forebears, even though, of course, they didn’t change their clocks.

The period of “standard” time has been shortened so much, though, that it means almost nothing. Switching every six months, at the end of April and end of October, as we used to do, made more sense to me. Now it’s just a pointless inconvenience slapped onto some arbitrary time chosen by politicians.

I used to feel like you do about that, @Jeruba, in a younger, more vigorous day. Now that I’m older, and more tired, and my night vision isn’t what it used to be, I wish it were DST always. I dark-in-the-morning vision is fine, I’m guessing it’s fatigue related.

I like DST and don’t mind the change. I am also glad they made the time we spend on Standard time shorter. It helps make the winter seem not as long.

Either one has downsides. One means more darkness in the morning, the other more darkness in the evening. I care more about light in the evening than in the morning, not being a morning person, but I realize that more darkness in the morning, when people are out going to work and school, can be less safe.

@Demosthenes, read the thing I posted, it gives a different perspective on that very point.

I prefer Daylight Savings all year. I hate going to work in the dark and coming home in the dark. Plus I have about 47 clocks to change.

Regardless of either one the switching back and forth is what really sucks, I see no need for it in this day and age.

I will again propose my solution from last November when we turned clocks back: Spring Forward ½ hour, and leave them there forever. Do that everywhere that has a summer time.

I’m not into time man.

You can’t fool me, the dogs or even the cats by fiddling with the clock.

It’s now. It’s always been now. And it always will be now.

What @Jeruba said is beautiful. makes sense.

Daylight Savings Time is a perfect part of the transition into Spring and early Summer. But it needs to be shortened to six months, from mid April to mid October—the “times between times.” The prevernal season of March needs to be still part of late Winter.

What some of you who love Daylight Savings Time aren’t taking into account is that there is ALWAYS more daylight than dark due to an hour of twilight, and that daylight hours are much longer in Summer than Winter. so you’d get those long daylight hours starting in April and May anyways. And furthermore, its ALWAYS better when you have an extra hour in the early times. Look at a Daylight-Savings-Time set clock in midwinter and you’ll be glad its officially the earlier time and you have an extra hour.

But that extra hour of darkness on a Springtime morning, and those evenings filled with light and the rich fragrances of Springtime afternoons around Whitsunday…

Don’t be silly, @Yellowdog, we are all adults here, we know what twilight is.
As romantic and poetic as it all sounds, the difference in designation is about human convenience, and where the comfort zone is in our human experience.

I’m sorry, @Yellowdog, I just reread that and it sounds so harsh, that was not my intent. My point was that I look at it from a practical standpoint now, at this point in my life.

It is an evil blight that should be wiped from the face of the Earth.

I can never remember which is DST and which is Standard.

But thinking now they say it’s good for farmers. There isn’t a lot of farming in the winter. So Standard is winter, DST is summer.

Now I can remember.

@canidmajor It didn’t seem harsh— but I don’t think Daylight Savings Time is all that practical in these days where artificial lighting is ubiquitous, night and day, 365 days per year. We don’t need the light in stores and offices.

Daylight Savings Time puts working people, students walking to school, in the dark. That’s why it’s best only six months a year, when daylight hours are long already.

It goes with a warm and humid, fragment earth, not fields of ice in early March.

@Call_Me_Jay

DST wasn’t invented for farmers. That’s an old myth. Farmers don’t live by the clock. They rise when the rooster crows and stop working when the Sun sets. The arbitrary time on a clock has no bearing on that.

DST was for the folks who do live by the clock. Laborers, office workers, etc. To give them an extra hour of daylight for recreation after the end of the workday.

@Yellowdog I would argue school starts too early. Study after study shows kids do better if they sleep more, including sleeping later. Especially teenagers. Some school districts have taken this seriously, but it’s a very low percentage. Lots of kids across ge country wind up commuting to school in the dark anyway with how it is now. At least part of the year anyway. Moreover, much fewer children walk to school compared to 40 years ago.

Sleeping later is only possible when there is no daylight savings time.

Daylight Savings time is precisely why children and teenagers have to get up earlier and go to school in the dark. And every year, more than one of them in the local news area are struck by half-asleep drivers.

If we are going to have daylight savings time, it should start late enough in the year that the days are long enough that there is plenty of light at both ends of the day,

@Yellowdog Maybe the work day should be later also? 9–5 is rare in my experience. In Memphis I don’t think most office workers are starting at 9:00. I think most start at 8:00 or 8:30. Everyone is exhausted in our society. Something has to give. Most of the country wakes up in the dark at least part of the year, because of the demands of the start time of the work day. Why do we do this to ourselves? Central time I think is more prone to the early start, especially certain industries like banking and finance, because our financial center, NY, is on eastern time.

Some people like a very early start, but some people hate it.

Actually it was originally invented by a New Zealand entemologist George Hudson so he could have more time in the day to study insects.

@Caravanfan Bengamin Franklin started Daylight Savings to save on candles, a hundred years before Hudson was alive.

Agreed with all who have said that we should never rise before the morning light ANY time of year. Some may, but that which we are made to do, as in school, or is mandatory as a work day, we should never HAVE to rise before the sun. That should be the norm.

And, how are we SAVING on candles/electricity if we have to dress ourselves and even WORK in the dark?

The savings of candles or electricity is that people turn on lights in the morning already, even in summer. That’s why the US went to year round DST in 1973/74 during the oil embargo energy crisis.

The time change never bothers me and it never bothers my pets.

I enjoy the days with less sun during the winter and I enjoy the days with more sun during the summer.

But isn’t it more natural when Noon and Midnight are at 12:00 PM and !2:00 AM respectively?

And at the Spring and Fall equinoxes Sunrise and Sunset are at Six
We still get an hour of twilight on both ends.

@zenvelo No,
https://www.fi.edu/benjamin-franklin/daylight-savings-time

@Yellowdog, read the thing I posted in the details. More people are injured because of darkness in the afternoon when people are tired and distracted coming home from school/work than in the morning darkness.

I wonder if more people get in accidents when the sun is low in the sky rather than when it’s dark? My husband and I have always been lucky to rarely have an east commute during sunrise, or a west commute during sunset. Western sun can be especially brutal, and maybe worse for women because we are shorter and the sun visor is less effective.

@Yellowdog Back in the day, all cities and towns set their clocks when the sun was directly overhead. But it messed with the timing of the railroads, so it was changed (12 noon, 90th Meridian time, Nov. 18, 1883) and the time zones were created (by the Standard Time Act, March 19,1918). And it’s still important today since so many railroads use one track at different times, for one example.

Thanks, @kritiper— I always have thought that we ALL need a little more awareness of Coordinated Universal Time. It helps us to understand where we are on the globe itself and what time it is all over the world.

Coordinated Universal Time should remain consistent, even when/if the rest of the world changes for Daylight Savings Time.

I’ve just finished going around and resetting timepieces. The first three I set had Roman numerals. One of those is my wristwatch. Does anyone else love clocks and watches with Roman numerals?

@Jeruba I have some watches with Roman numerals. I always find it odd that the 4 is IIII rather than IV. The Roman Numerals have a certain old world elegance in my opinion.

https://monochrome-watches.com/why-do-clocks-and-watches-use-roman-numeral-iiii-instead-of-iv/