Speaking from my experience of only living in places that don't use DST (Thailand), it was very disorientating to me this year (now living in California). The act of changing the clocks itself isn't difficult (mostly besides the oven everything does it automatically). It's that all of a sudden my perception of the day didn't match the external, agreed upon reality. I'd rather just adjust my personal schedule relative to a fixed time rather than have the time schedule change somewhat arbitrarily.
Are you talking about people adjusting their clocks and their bodies to accommodate the change in time? Very few people have a big problem with that.
The problems arise when accommodating the change programmatically in code. How many times did Apple fuck this up with the first few versions of the iPhone with alarms not going off at the right time?
Never had this issue. And again, at least in Central Europe they do the change from Saturday to Sunday when it’s understood that most people have less constraints with tight times and alarms.
Considering that heart attacks rise right after the time change, and other people have sleep issues, I would guess a lot of people have a problem with adjusting their internal clicks.
I agree, it would be like a travel magazine devoting an article of the difficulties of adjusting to the time change when flying from Stockholm to Helsinki.
:-) I’m somewhat sympathetic to the complaints of parents with young children but as someone who travels about 100 days a year, almost entirely to different and often distant time zones a 1 hour change isn’t even really on my radar.
This is a good question and I guess there are pros and cons. This would certainly simplify schedules and meetings between different time zones. On the other hand, it would totally screw up our understanding of when things are supposed to happen, specially when traveling. Like as in: it is 3am, is it time for lunch now ?
My biggest question anyway is how we will manage time once we become a multi planet species.
A better way to manage when things should happen is to create a schedule which could be defined in UTC. I don't think the time zones really solve this problem.
For example, I might assume that I can eat dinner when my plane lands in my destination around 8pm. But when I look for a local restaurant, they all close at 8pm because it's a smaller town. I still need to look at the hours of operation for that business.
So I can't really make assumptions based on the local time anyway so why do we need to adjust them.
> how we will manage time once we become a multi planet species.
Excellent question! We would probably need to remove the concept of "days" because that is relative to the current planet.
Time zones are valuable. They let me easily convert to local time which gives me a pretty good immediate intuitive feel (modulo differences in customs) for the types of activities appropriate to that time of day.
Mind you. I screw things up. Just did it with a meeting the other day. But with electronic calendaring it’s not too bad.
Added: when traveling, time zones let me change my watch once and I immediately more or less know time appropriate activities that more or less correspond to what I’m used to at home.
My kids are a slight pain in the ass for a few days after “spring forward”. Despite all attempts to ensure plenty of sleep, there’s always increased fighting, crying and - like today - increased physical clumsiness that results in a 6 year old skinning his hands and knees on the sidewalk.
Better yet, why not change your clocks slightly, every day, following the changing sunset/sunrise, to fully optimize each day? It'd only take 5 minutes a day to do all of my clocks.
I think most of the people who have a problem with it ( me included ) don’t mind the act of changing clocks, but dislike the effect it has on the sun. In my case I love sunny evenings and nights, but don’t care if it’s dark til 8am. Others would prefer to always have more sun in the AM and forgo the late evening rounds of golf...
Not really. People don’t want to change clocks. And I doubt anyone really has an issue with long light evenings in the summer. But at least some number of people, especially in the North, don’t want it to be pitch black in the winter when they’re getting up, kids are waiting for school buses, etc.
The main reason to dislike it is because it's pointless. There are all sorts of pointless-but-not-too-onerous activities that we could have the government impose on society, but that doesn't mean we should.
The ritual of DST mostly seems to survive because people are convinced it must be good for something. Otherwise, surely we wouldn't be doing it...
> I sincerely do not understand the problem people have with changing a single hour in a single day during a weekend in the year.
Other than the fact that it's a colossal waste of time for everyone who has to do it, and it kills people? Every year, people will be dead the Tuesday after the time change who would have been alive had the time not changed. Also, of course, it's not a single day — it's twice a year.
> There was a significant increase in accidents for the Monday immediately following the spring shift to DST (t=1.92, P=0.034). There was also a significant increase in number of accidents on the Sunday of the fall shift from DST (P<0.002). No significant changes were observed for the other days. A significant negative correlation with the year was found between the number of accidents on the Saturdays and Sundays but not Mondays.