Submitted by DesiVegan_ t3_yjx6l8 in massachusetts
I’m not sure if this’d be the right sub for this question but WHAT is with Daylight saving time coming to an end 😭 I know the clocks are gonna be set back an hour but what’s the logic behind it? For reference, I’m an international student and it’s only my first year in the US so none of this seems to be making sense lmao
We set them forward in the summer to maximize daylight in the evening. But during the winter it stays dark too late in the morning so we set them back to standard time.
I don't understand the comment on being international. It seems to me that most countries have some form of daylight savings time. Not all, but enough where it wouldn't seem like a foreign concept.
Easy, cowboy. Apparently they are from Japan, India, or China where they don’t change time. It’s not their fault this is new to them. No need to be unkind.
When I went to college in the 90's), I met a fellow from a country that didn't have daylight saving time (Barbados, iirc). He legit did not understand the idea and thought we were pranking him.
Daylight Savings a really stupid idea that never really did what it claimed it would. But it claimed that it was going to reduce electricity use. Globally, it may have a reduction of ~0.3%.
But we did it because of the "you have to do something" mindset. Then, once we did the stupid thing for the sake of doing a thing, we kept it because "no no no, it's doing a thing".
At this point, undoing it means either someone in power sticking their neck out and saying "we're doing this", or getting a lot of people on board. And people are inherently resistant to change, especially when it's a thing they've always done.
Yeah, so the whole Daylight Savings Time thing here is a bunch of bullshit basically lobbied for by the US Chamber of Commerce (not an actual government entity despite its efforts to sound like one).
The pinheads here figured out that if we had more daylight in the afternoons and evenings when it is in effect, people would be more likely to go shopping and spend money in stores. Aaand they were kinda right.
So now we have two days a year (I would argue two weeks but I'm totally not going to bother backing my claims with anything like actual data) we have seriously elevated rates of traffic deaths until everyone adjusts to the clock changes.
Money > Life. Make sense, now?
Have at me with the downvotes, I don't have the energy to do fucking citations today :p
I just want to wake up at 6 and see the sun within a few minutes instead of darkness until almost 730.
The politics of "time" has alway fascinated me. All of China is "officially" on Beijing time. There was a single issue political part in Australia known as the DS4SEQ (Daylight Savings for South East Queensland). Their only issue was to enact Daylight Savings Time. Think of the "the Rents Too Damn High" party in NY.
Most countries not near the equator had DST at some point but now it is found mostly in Europe (known as Summer Time), US and Canada, Australia, NZ, and a couple of countries in South America. Some states like Hawaii and Arizona do not observe it. Though in Arizona, the Diné nation (Navajo) does observe it.
Historically, it was to promote energy savings because people would be active during sunlight rather than darkness. Ben Franklin thought it would save on candles, for example. Some argued that by extending sunlight in the evening, people would shop and have more leisure activities in the evening during Summer
As one who drives East in the morning and West at night, I always felt it was designed to give me more opportunities to head directly into the sun's glare in the morning.
Many here are probably too young to remember this, but we had non-connected transistor clocks that were programmed to fall back and spring ahead. The clocks got all screwed up when Congress changed the dayes for the time switch and there was no easy way to reprogram them.
China and Oz got nothing on Israel:
Are we not getting rid of daylight savings time, thought it was taking place next year?
Fascinating how historical events have shaped the clocks. Back when the History channel did history, there was a show How States got their Shapes. It would be interesting (probably only to me, but still interesting) to have a show How Nations got their Time Zones. So much was originally driven by colonialism.
US senate voted to make it permanent (no more falling back just stay on DST) but the house took no action.
Until he was late to his student visa renewal appointment by an hour and was then deported. Not so funny then, was it! 😜
I never want to wake up at 6am period!
I'd rather go to school/work in the dark then have sunset at 4pm. We do it every January anyways.
I think they tried this once, and what tanked it was kids going to school in the dark.
I don't really get it though because the kids are already going to school in the dark for like a month mid-winter anyways. Especially in Massachusetts where we have good public school bus coverage so nobody really has to walk if they don't want to.
Or Arizona
IF they were from Arizona they wouldn't be an international student in the USA.
Idk it might as well be another country out there
4:25 AM for the last 23 years for me. And I’m not a morning person at all.
endofthered01674 t1_iuqa3ce wrote
I believe it just started as a means of "maximizing the daylight."
So when you wake up at 6-7AM, the sun will be up, whereas if we didn't move the clocks back, it would be dark until almost 8-9am.