Daylight Saving

[ChrisX]

In Australia, daylight saving season just started a few hours ago. This is the start of our summertime. Daylight saving will finish March 28th next year.

This is going to be a very long hot summer in Sydney.

Well, I know you guys in America will have your daylight saving ending in a few hours from now. You finish daylight saving from 2.00 am tomorrow morning and you're lucky to have an extra hour of sleep tonight.

In America, Daylight saving will resume on April 4th next year. So, enjoy the cold winter days with the snow and Christmas is just around the corner.

In Australia, Melbourne Cup is very near, the biggest horse race of year. This will be the day I'll enjoy and then Christmas.

Our days will be so very hot soon and the dangerous fire season is coming. It is very dry here in Sydney due to lack of rain and because of this we are having water restrictions.

The New Yorkers are so lucky to have so much rain. They can't complain now.

Cheers everyone.

[gmatov]

Chris,

I just learned more about DST than I have in my whole life.

I knew Ben Franklin first proposed it, and assumed it was a US innovation.

http://webexhibits.org/daylightsaving/index.html

This link says I am wrong. Interesting.

Take a glance.

Have a nice summer, you lucky dog.

Winter right around the corner, here.

Cheers,

George

[jeex]

damn farmers

[gooberguy]

wow Chriscjgs, u must have been really bored typing that...

[ChrisX]

wow Chriscjgs, u must have been really bored typing that...

I like to keep everyone informed and what amazes me is that DST ends in America and Europe on the same day as here in Australia when DST starts. It is our turn to enjoy the summer days.

Winter would be a very boring time in the US and nobody really wants heavy snow disrupting a normal day. A freezing day isn't any good either.

I've experienced snow a number of occasions in New York and I enjoyed seeing it fall and as to an American a boring sight to see. I don't get snow in Sydney.

New York should change its clocks in half an hour from now.

Chris

[holistic]

damm farmers

- nothing to with farmers

The main purpose of Daylight Saving Time (called "Summer Time" many places in the world) is to make better use of daylight ............so that golfers can spend more time playing wack ****. :P

[The village idiot]

It has already snowed a couple of times in many parts of NY and the North East

[ChrisX]

It has already snowed a couple of times in many parts of NY and the North East

I noticed this on WNBC's website the other day of expectation of snow.

I was discussing Canada the other day telling her as very cold country and I did mention that snow is on its way north of NYC.

[RabidDog]

Yup my pc clock is corrrect but my video clock is wrong. My microwave clock dont work and my alarm clock is also off. My two wristwatches need resetting too. my camera clock also needs adjustment. As does my central heating.

[Canoe164]

My unsolicited view is that I hate going back to standard time. DST should be standard time all year. I love living in the North and seeing the changes in nature and the changes in outdoor activities that winter brings, but I hate coming home in the dark. There are things that I need to do when I get home that would be easier to do with another hour of light.

If any of y'all have a dog, you understand that it doesn't want to go too far from the door in the middle of winter to crap. And one thing about another hour of light, I would see where they have been left on my way to the door :)

[iooi]

Why oh why do we still mess around with changing the clocks...
Causes more hassle than its worth...
FFS cant we leave them where they were ment to be ...
GMT

[The village idiot]

My unsolicited view is that I hate going back to standard time. DST should be standard time all year. I love living in the North and seeing the changes in nature and the changes in outdoor activities that winter brings, but I hate coming home in the dark. There are things that I need to do when I get home that would be easier to do with another hour of light.

If any of y'all have a dog, you understand that it doesn't want to go too far from the door in the middle of winter to crap. And one thing about another hour of light, I would see where they have been left on my way to the door

The early darkness sucks for a lot of reasons!

[pacmania_2001]

I already hate daylight savings.

Because our state doesn't go on daylight savings but New South Wales and Victoria do the cable television stations have their shows on an hour early so I have missed a couple of shows already.

[Doggiedaddy]

Hey, what's the point of daylight-savings time? It's so hard to remember when it happens, and everyone's an hour late to everything when it does. I'll bet it costs this country billions of dollars.
Jeremy, Seattle
Jeremy, you ask a good question. But you need to know a little something: It's daylight-saving time--not savings. Daylight savings makes it sound like a department-store sale. Prices WILL go up when the sun goes down. Hurry! Who needs that? Not me, not you.
Don't feel bad, though. Before I started researching the answer to your question, I also said "daylight savings."
You're not the only person out there who doesn't love daylight-saving time. Have you ever read anything by Canadian novelist Robertson Davies? He had this to say about the practice:
I don't really care how time is reckoned so long as there is some agreement about it, but I object to being told that I am saving daylight when my reason tells me that I am doing nothing of the kind.... At the back of the Daylight Saving scheme I detect the bony, blue-fingered hand of Puritanism, eager to push people into bed earlier, and get them up earlier, to make them healthy, wealthy and wise in spite of themselves.
The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks, 1947, XIX, Sunday
And he makes an excellent point: daylight-saving time doesn't actually save daylight. It's a stupid name, really. I never know whether we're in daylight-saving time (when we "spring ahead") or standard time (when we "fall back"). Outside the United States, many people use the term summer time for what we call daylight-saving time, which makes a lot more sense because it happens during the summer. So, while daylight-saving time has been an utter failure in actually saving any daylight (for a rainy night, perhaps?), it does accomplish three things, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation:
• It saves energy. When we're awake, we're more likely to have our TVs, VCRs, and lights on (among other home appliances). By shifting the hours we're likely to be awake to correspond with the daylight outside, we're less likely to have the lights on, so we use less electricity.
• It saves lives. When people's waking hours correspond with daylight hours, they're safer. Traffic accidents, for example, are less likely when it's light out.
• It cuts down on crime. Crime tends to happen after dark. As is the case with accidents, people are less likely to fall victim to crime when their waking hours are synched up with the sun.
And that's why most of the United States and many other countries take part in the twice-yearly clock-adjusting ritual. Most, not all. More on that later.
OK, so we've uncovered some good reasons for daylight-saving time. But who came up with the idea, and what were the reasons? When I got your question, I had no idea how interesting it would be to find the answer. Before starting my research, I asked my mom and my husband why they thought we messed with our clocks twice yearly.
"It has something to do with farmers and cows," my mom said.
"It was about Richard Nixon," my husband said.
And I'd always thought it was Ben Franklin's idea.
It turns out, we were all a little bit right.
I looked up daylight-saving time in Encarta Encyclopedia and confirmed right off the bat that it was an idea first suggested by Benjamin Franklin. The Encarta article also included a link to an in-depth essay from the California Energy Commission that explained how daylight-saving time cuts down on our energy use and improves safety.
The essay went on to give an interesting history of the practice. According to the essay, an Englishman named William Willett brought Franklin's idea back to life in 1907 after he noticed houses with their shades drawn during the daytime. He considered this "a waste of daylight."
The idea didn't get anywhere until 1916, however, when England figured out during World War I that the country could save energy by changing the clock. The United States followed suit in 1918--but people hated it and the law was repealed. Until World War II, that is. (Nothing like a war to get your priorities straight, I guess.) Until 1966 local governments in the United States followed a kind of free-form daylight-saving time. Some did it, some didn't. Some started earlier in the year, some later. As you can imagine, this was kind of confusing, especially for public transportation and broadcasters. So in 1966 Congress passed a law saying if you wanted to follow daylight-saving time, it had to follow the national pattern.
But the tweaking didn't stop there. In 1973, when Nixon was president and during the OPEC oil embargo, Congress enacted a special, two-year daylight-saving period. It wasn't continued in 1975 because agricultural states didn't like it.
Finally, in 1986, Ronald Reagan made one last change--moving the start of daylight saving to the first Sunday in April. It used to start on the last Sunday in April, but moving it up lets us save even more oil.
Once I'd read the Encarta article and the Energy Commission essay, I felt like I had everything I needed to know about daylight saving except one thing: which places in the United States don't abide by it. To me, the resistance is weird. And I cannot resist weird things.
So, I did a Web search on "daylight-saving time." Here are the holdout states: Hawaii, Indiana, and Arizona. The strangest is Indiana, which has THREE different time arrangements. Most counties (77 in all) stay on Eastern Standard Time all year. Another 10 counties use Eastern Standard Time and Central Standard Time. And five use a combination of Eastern Standard Time and Eastern Daylight Time.
Yes, this is totally confusing. Can you imagine crossing the county line and losing an hour? The full explanation, including a map, can be found on a really excellent site called Web Exhibits. Leave it to Hoosiers to do things their own way, I guess.

[ChrisX]

I already hate daylight savings.

Because our state doesn't go on daylight savings but New South Wales and Victoria do the cable television stations have their shows on an hour early so I have missed a couple of shows already.

I remember years ago holidaying at Coolangatta with my experiences of time on the border due to daylight saving in NSW and Queensland behind one hour. This was a very long time ago and I was in my twenties.

There was an elderly lady at the holiday lodge who got confused with the 6pm news on the TV. She says to me, “What happened to the news?”

I was helping her to find Australia’s ABC News on the TV and explained to her that the channel comes from NSW and she was viewing the wrong channel as the local ABC-TV. The station she was after came from Murwillumbah or Lismore across the border in NSW.

The border, daylight saving with the time differences and differences in state laws were of a convenience, if you like a bonus for me during that time.

I don’t have to wait an hour for service in NSW and also in NSW a hotel was trading illegally all day on Sunday and the Queensland hotels were on restricted hours.

Queensland’s retailers at the time were trading longer hours than in NSW and I think I can remember shopping so late in Coolangatta. This was also due to the fact Queensland as an hour behind NSW.

I just cross the border whenever I feel like using Queensland’s time on my watch and have a beer at Tweed Heads in NSW.

[The village idiot]

It screwed up the scheduler in my Bungholio PVR. Clock changed no problem, but for some reason the Pinnacle software decided to move things an extra hour, good thing I checked it before tonights recording.

[pacmania_2001]

I already hate daylight savings.

Because our state doesn't go on daylight savings but New South Wales and Victoria do the cable television stations have their shows on an hour early so I have missed a couple of shows already.

I remember years ago holidaying at Coolangatta with my experiences of time on the border due to daylight saving in NSW and Queensland behind one hour. This was a very long time ago and I was in my twenties.

Yeh, my family usually spends holidays at Tweed Heads/Coolangatta so its always fun trying to synch times between the NSW and QLD part.

The one advantage is having New Years in the one time period, walking across the road and celebrating it again an hour later.

[Canoe164]

Ok, Ok...Thick tread and dog do'ins are just a fact of livin' North. I hope that by the time y'all get this that we get some aroura.

[MOVIEGEEK]

DST sucks,what was Ben Franklin smoking when came up with that idea?
How does it save energy in the summer if it stays light one more hour and you have to run the air conditioner that much longer?I have never had to run the air cond. in the morning.The story about Indiana having 3 different time zones proves my point.

[Ironballs]

Well my take on the whole system is DST sucks.

Now in this day and age we can be a bit smarter! Rather than change our clocks by one hour, if we had ALL our timepieces synchronised to a central source, say the atomic clock at Rugby, then we can shift daylight hours by a few minutes each day. Our bodies wouldn't notice and we would get maximum daylight.

Also another idea of mine (but I'm sure others have thought of it) is Universal time. Do away with the bollocks of timezones and just have one zone for the world. That way when I phone America form here in the UK I don't have to worry about what time it is over there. Outlook might have a chance of scheduling meetings properly.

Naturally, Grenwich mean time must be used as standard!!!!!!

[indolikaa]

As DoggieDaddy noted, we here in Arizona don't celebrate DST. There is one exception, I believe. The Navajo Nation stays on New Mexico time throughout the year.

This does wonderful things for our TV schedule, though.

[gmatov]

Iron,

Yeah, I guess one time for the whole world would be great. You wouldn't have to worry what time it is in the States when you call.

You call at 10 AM, well, hey, Joe, what the hell you still in bed for?

Well, because as far as the sun goes, it's still the middle of the night, here. We don't work by the clock, we work by light and dark.

Now if we could surround the Earth with mirrors or something so it was light all over the world at the same time, then we would just have to rig some curtains to pull at 6 PM or sometime, make it dark all over the world at the same time.

I think more or less as we have it is better.

Cheers,

George