Hate is a rather strong word, even if you do disagree with the fundamental principles behind the practice. Without Daylight Savings, there wouldn’t be fine comedy gems such as this: http://www.ifilm.com/video/2830704/show/17676

As an early riser, I empathize. Getting up in the dark is a pain. But we already ‘cheat’ to get standard time zones. In D.C., for instance, solar noon was 12:18 PM government time today.

Amanda,

yes, hate is a strong word, and I mean it. I do not merely disagree with the principles behind the practise. Thinking of DST literally brings the bile to my throat and the rage to my chest. Perhaps it’s irrational to fixate on such a small matter, but I really really do hate it.

For instance, I also have a principled objection to double-digit income taxes, but I don’t hate the taxes, I merely dislike them. They may be oppressive and exploitative, but they’re not founded on an obvious bald-faced lie.

Mike,

it seems to me that the “cheating” involved in time zones is really approximation, and it seems to make a good deal of sense in theory. In practise I don’t know that the time zones are set up ideally. Nevertheless cheating in approximation seems different to me than intentional outright subversion of reality.

Interesting. DST merely seems like a quaint extra variation on the concept of standard time zones, for which I thank God on my knees every day. Sir Sandford Fleming, that great Canadian who saved us from the chaos of noon being different at every separate point of longitude on earth (there are, I remind you, an unbounded number of these points), receives my eternal gratitude.

You may keep your noon which is unique to you and all other people standing precisely between you and one of our two longitudinal poles. I like living in useful cooperation with other people!

By the way, Time Lord, the book that aroused such loyalty in me, is a very good read.

As I understand it, standard time zones really bothered a lot of people when they were first established, for this same reason: they’re telling you to pretend it’s noon when any fool can see it’s not, just to make things convenient for the railroads.

I tend to agree with Nate’s interpretation of DST, although I’m slightly less sanguine about the introduction of standardized time. As a side note, a book I read recently cited the invention of time zones as a strong example (and possibly instigating force) of the non-humanly-scaled size of our polity. The author was noting that many young proto-criminals grow up in a world without strictly-regimented time—they get up when they feel like it, work when they feel like it, eat, drink, fight, and have sex when the urges strike them. In short, they live in the moment, he said. While this becomes a failing that causes them no end of trouble once they hit the criminal justice system (missed court dates, etc.), the author is actually quite forgiving of their condition with respect to time—theirs was the pace of life for most humans until the last century or so. Now we tend to live in accord with the “useful cooperation” of other men thousands of miles away, instead of with the rotation of the earth and those men relatively near to us.

Also, Michael has at least one ally in Warren G. Harding. The comments in there are pretty hilarious, too.

The difference, of course, is that time zones have an advantage. Maybe DST did a century ago, but all evidence is that there’s no real energy savings advantage at all to this ridiculous early change. When they tried this in Australia, they used more energy as a result of the dark mornings. Shifting sleep-phase is not a good thing. This has been forced down our throats by Big Barbecue, which, frankly, is one industry lobbying group I really wish I were joking about the existence of.

Plus now I have to manually reset my damn laptop twice a year ‘cause, for reasons I won’t get into, it can’t get automatic Windows updates. And of course the only way to avoid having to reset it four times a year is to set it to East Indiana time. (Okay, I could just uncheck the “don’t automatically update for DST” box, but I’m hoping that claiming I have to set it to East Indiana time really brings the absurdity of it all crashing home for you.)

Mr Marks,

I’m glad to see someone’s on my side with this.

Though I have to say - honestly, I’d be far less incensed by a permanent shift, like in Spain and France or even the absolutely insane Chinese system. It’s the change that’s the most stupid part of DST. If you want to reduce all of continental America to UTC-6 and UTC-8, fine, just don’t fiddle with it.

Martin, your circadian rhythm is a wuss.

I, for one, am supremely amused by the fact that Monadology doesn’t appear to have adapted for DST.

Nate, I don’t have a circadian rhythm. There are creatures living in the darkest depths of the abyssopelagic zones of the Pacific Ocean who have a better connection to the sun than I do. This is sheer bloody-minded obstinacy, or, as I call it, “principle”.

(Also, you know, a general belief that it’s silly to do pointless things.)

For perhaps the outer limit of a roughly human-sized scale of time, see the following. (Ignore the dumb stuff at the very end.)

At the other end, have six twenty-eight hour days per week. Each day has a unique daylight-character, and it alleges to be in some ways more efficient a use of time. I’m curious about biological implications.

Robbie,

I remember being intrigued with the 28-hour day a few years back when that site was making the rounds. While it seems like a cool idea, my main objection is that it reeks of something those hyper-modern, insanely hard working people, like computer programmers in Silicon Valley or nurses, would live by. I myself don’t like being scheduled, and it seems like one would have to do a lot of that under a system that radically differed from the solar day.

Here’s that hate word again. I absolutely HATE daylight savings time and cringe each year when it comes around. I keep telling everyone around me that I’m going to deal with it the way the Amish do, or better, DON’T. From what I’ve read, they call DST “English time” and they keep their own clocks set at the regular time.
This year, with DST coming earlier, it has been a very hard adjustment for me. I’m all for lobbying to get my hour back and keep it-permanently!!

Here’s that hate word again. I absolutely HATE daylight savings time and cringe each year when it comes around. I keep telling everyone around me that I’m going to deal with it the way the Amish do, or better, DON’T. From what I’ve read, they call DST “English time” and they keep their own clocks set at the regular time.
This year, with DST coming earlier, it has been a very hard adjustment for me. I’m all for lobbying to get my hour back and keep it-permanently!!

Yeah, gotta say, it’s kind of bugging me that the Easter Vigil this year will begin outside in the twilight. That’s no good. It’s supposed to be frickin dark, damn it.

Not that it lets DST off the hook, but the decision when to begin the service could be adjusted for sunset. We’re starting ours at 10:30pm, and I’m glad for it. I agree about the whole “frickin dark” thang.

Mike, you of course make an excellent point. I’ll have to raise it with the rector now that we’re all going to be living with the Republican Congress’s latest gift for a long time. I’m officially ready to be done switching, by the way, bringing me to Martin’s position above. I hate the disruption in my sense of time, which still hasn’t gone away. I keep thinking it’s 4:00pm or so, only to have it turn out to be 6:00, which sucks for me (though I see how it could be nice for others).

The unlikelihood of the concerns expressed here being used or taken seriously as a “lobbying” force as KT suggests presents an interesting political question. Here we have this little line in a bill that massively affects the lives of everyone in the country (except maybe the Amish). It gets changed because it’s a favorite idea of one chairman and because it’s a pretend band-aid for our energy problems, and it’ll be super hard to change back, even though lots of people don’t like it (and it’s seriously debatable whether it even accomplishes its stated purposes). One could argue that this represents too great a power held in Congress’s hands.

Further DST injustice here.