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Daylight Savings Time

November 7, 2010, 12:53 pm

Dear Rest of the Country

Hope you are having fun changing all your clocks.  Do you remember how to change that one on your oven?  Yeah, neither do we.

-- Sincerely, Arizona

My past articles on why, even if it once saved energy, DST likely is counter-productive here.

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Category: Arizona
  • perlhaqr

    Easy peasy. Wait until noon, then unplug it and plug it back in. :)

  • Paavo Ojala

    That U.S. and Europe change clocks of different weekends doesn't help.

    Did iphones still have problems?

  • Sandtiger

    Dear Arizona,

    I realize that when it's 115 degrees you'd prefer that more of your waking hours be spent in darkness. But for the rest of us, taking an hour of daylight from 4:30am and putting it at 8:30pm is a pretty cool thing. I could care less about its benefit to the environment.

    - Sincerely, Michigan

  • Dr. T

    I have hated daylight saving time since I was a child. I got one more reason for hating it today:

    HughesNet doesn't know how to change its clocks and penalized me for its error. HughesNet (a satellite internet service provider) applies rolling 24 hour download limits to all users. Connection speeds are greatly reduced (slower than a 14.4 kbps modem) for 24 hours if you exceed the limit. In order to let users download large files, downloads between midnight and 6 am Eastern Time do not count against your daily limit. I automated the downloading of large files so that they occur only during that free period. With the implementation of daylight saving time at 2 am, today's free period was seven hours. HughesNet, however, changed its clocks at midnight and did not include the "extra" hour in its free period. I had downloaded ~400 MB during that extra hour, and thereby exceeded my daily limit of 375 MB. I had to spend 15 minutes convincing a hard-to-understand tech support person in India to remove the speed penalty.

  • Noah

    Anybody know how to change the blinking 12:00 on the VCR to a blinking 11:00?

  • Bearster

    Dear Sandtiger,

    Please try to make a distinction between "I would like it" or even "it's a good idea" vs. "IT OUGHT TO BE A LAW!" (I used caps because laws are demands backed by force)

    Of course, in a hot desert it makes sense to get up before dawn, begin one's day at dawn, and be done by 11am or noon. But it never makes sense to give the power to take away one's freedom.

  • frankania

    Again, Where is the United Nations, the scientific community, the airlines, the international computer world, when this chaos comes up twice a year?
    Standardize times at GMT, standardize dates as day/month/year.
    A moment in time is a moment in time. One should not have to say, "AM, or PM, or CST or EDT or anything else. It will take a generation to get it right, but let's do it now!

  • marco73

    We are hosting a student from China. The Chinese are way ahead of us: all times in the entire country are standard to Beijing, and never change. So when we were stalking around the house changing the clocks on every silly device, he just laughed. And he'll laugh again when we have to do that all over again in the spring. I don't necessarily mind the multiple time zones here in the US, but this whole daylight savings time fiasco has got to go. What a stupid waste.

  • http://gmsplace.com/ John Moore

    Even worse is Arizona's not going to DST (except for the Navajo res), which means we shift in and out of phase with the rest of the country, which is really obnoxious. Also, having AZ on CA time makes the time zone issue with the East coast worse by an hour most of the year.

  • http://commonsenseliberty.com Terry Noel

    Change the clock? You can do that? I have been buying a new stove every six months.

  • James H

    I thought that here in AZ, we should institute "Daylight Losing Time" during the summer. Maybe do a 2 hour time shift, so that when I leave work at 5, the sun is low in the sky and the temperature has been able to drop 1-2 degrees below the high.

    OK, I don't really want to change the clock twice a year, so I'll just be happy with what we have.

    Where I work, we have many recurring meetings (teleconference) set up with coworkers in the pacific timezone. Twice a year, whoever is in charge of the meetings has to scramble around and find a new time to meet that accommodates everyone.

  • Adiff

    Terry,

    Don't stop that now! The economy needs your help.

    ;)

  • T M Colon

    For some reason the comments don't display on my outdated browser. If this has been covered, sorry.

    The only effect DST has for me is having more daylight after school and work so I could play outdoor sports longer. The rest of it... I don't know. Is that reason enough to have it... I don't know. But I like it for that.

  • Sandtiger

    Bearster,

    I'm not sure what the actual daylight savings 'law' says, but I agree that individuals ought to be able to continue to operate disregarding any sort of 'standard time'. That said, the government does itself have to determine what timing it is going to operate under, and has chosen this particular set of conventions. And I think, in this case, and perhaps for silly reasons, I agree with their decision.

  • greg

    How about we just give up on "regular" time and go to DST all year round. I mean, does anyone really give a shit about the extra hour of light in the morning? (you know, besides the whole kids at the bus stop BS)

    NO, what's really depressing is the day ending an hour early. We're already at a time of year when each day's sunset is a few minutes earlier than the day before and WHAM!! I wake up one day to learn I've lost a whole hour in just one day! why not just hand me a gun and sign me up for dentistry school while you're at it.

    So I say we just keep on with the DST, so what if my morning commute is done in darkness.

  • Rick C

    "The Chinese are way ahead of us: all times in the entire country are standard to Beijing, and never change."

    I bet that works out really great for people in the far west, where dawn comes at 3AM.

  • DrTorch

    Don't get too smug. When I was in AZ some state legislators were pushing for AZ to adopt DST. Their main logic was, "most every other state does it."

    Anyway, w/ an extra hour available, it's not hard to find the time to figure out how to change the clocks. It's the springtime that's the real killer.

  • mishu

    Pardon me while I call the waaambulance. Changing clocks. The horror. The horror.

  • Rick C

    The nice thing about cable boxes, cell phones, and computers, is that most of them properly handle DST changes automagically. I only had to do about 3 clocks yesterday, although my wife's phone didn't update until I power-cycled it.

  • Fred from Canuckistan

    Doesn't really bother me one way or the other, but our cats didn't handle the change very well.

    At 4:00am this morning they were wondering why I wasn't getting up, why they weren't getting their first round of treats and belly scratch of the day.

    "Somewhat miffed" would be a mild description of the crew this morning . . .

  • Dr. T

    "I bet that works out really great for people in the far west, where dawn comes at 3AM."

    It doesn't matter when dawn comes. Businesses can open at 4 am just as easily as at 8 am. National time standardization is sensible as long as opening and closing times are flexible.

  • Plungerman

    You're all crazy! The worst thing is that my tomatos will have to survive on one less hour of sunlight!

    All so that stupid kids won't get lost in the dark! Madness!

  • Craig

    I'm with Greg - keep DST all year. Winter sunset at 6 pm is depressing. Also, the local paper had an article about the guy who changes the clocks for all St. Louis schools. He's the only guy who knows how, and he retires in a few years.

  • http://evilredscandi.blogspot.com Evil Red Scandi

    You know what? Changing the clock on my oven is no sweat at all. Takes all of ten seconds. I only really have to manually change 9 clocks (including the cars). It takes a few minutes. No biggie.

    What really annoys me is that in the year 2010 it's still beyond the ability of the average electronics manufacturer to make a clock that's off by less than five minutes a month (I'm talking to you, iHome) or five minute a day (Sharper Image - I may be exaggerating but not by much). Seriously, is crystal oscillator timing such a frigging magical high-tech wonder that its intricacies escape your wizened engineers?

    That being said, DST is still frigtarded.

  • marco73

    Per China having only one national time: schools and businesses are allowed to set their own opening and closing times in response to local conditions. Yes, some children way out west in China start their school day at Noon.
    Per DST being reset automagically on their cell phone, computer, etc: some real live human beings had to code and test the software to handle the time change. Certainly not a difficult task, but software developers still have to code, test, QA, and install new software each time Congress changes the DST start and end dates. It isn't cheap, and most software folks (and their employers) would prefer to do real work instead of Congressionally mandated busy work.