DST Time shifts may come to end.

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ocelotl
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DST Time shifts may come to end.

Post by ocelotl »

I just read that we may see the end of the yearly back/forth time shift known as Daylight savings...

https://twitter.com/SenateCloakroom/sta ... 2745025542

Because of USMCA/TEMEC, we down here in México will follow suit and end this 25 year long experiment on our time schedules...

In my opinion the end result is "Shift everything an hour earlier from before we implemented this".

Having both gone to school/job before sunrise and/or returned home after sunset, just makes me not take much care about the people favoring just one kind of shift... The benefit here is to stop adjusting back and forth.

So, there it is, time shift adjusting period may disappear in the foreseeable future on the whole of North America. If true, I don't think anyone will miss it.
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yogi
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Re: DST Time shifts may come to end.

Post by yogi »

You might be surprised at how many people would miss the shift. I suspect both houses of our congress will pass the bill establishing permanent DST, but it is ominous that the White House, president, has not taken a stand. A lot of parents with children have voiced objections to their children going or coming from school in darkness. Apparently you did exactly that and are no worse for the experience. The people in this country, however, are a lot more paranoid. Personally it would not matter to me one way or the other. I don't like the changing of the clocks but I have lived with it for more than 70 years. I can do another 70 of it if I had to. :mrgreen:
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Kellemora
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Re: DST Time shifts may come to end.

Post by Kellemora »

We have no kids who have to work in the fields for planting and harvesting seasons anymore.
So the original purpose of DST has long past decades ago.

You still only have X number of hours in a day.
If you shift the clocks up so it is darker later, it is also darker earlier too.

When you have animals, they don't understand the time shift.
So, if you live and work on a farm, moving the clocks forward means you have to get up an hour earlier than normal to keep the critters from kicking the barn doors down, or raiding the feed room on their own.
Just because the days get shorter, don't mean shifting the clocks will make them get any longer.

Only a government thinks that by cutting a foot off the bottom of the blanket, and sewing it to the top of the blanket, you end up with a longer blanket. Old Indian Proverb, hi hi.
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yogi
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Re: DST Time shifts may come to end.

Post by yogi »

Some of the PROs for keeping DST include

Longer evenings to get out of the house and do stuff
Less need for artificial lighting
Improved safety, fewer pedestrians dying in the dawn and dusk hours

Some of the CONs for keeping DST include

No savings in energy in today''s technical world
Sickness increases due to lack of sleep
Costs increase as productivity declines and DST code added to computers

That's just one list I found, and the farmers in the field argument can be added to it all. DST is popular. As it stands today 70 countries still use DST which includes the most populated and economically advanced ones. But, it is quite obvious that all the arguments, both pro and con, are quite trivial and nearly irrelevant in the year 2022. About the best argument I have found supporting DST comes from none other than Benjamin Franklin:
The idea for daylight saving time was said to have originated in the 18th Century; Benjamin Franklin thought sleeping late in the summer was a waste of productive time, and that the extra hour of sunlight in the evening would reduce candle consumption.
I have to admit that we don't use many candles in these modern days of DST. :mrgreen:
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ocelotl
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Re: DST Time shifts may come to end.

Post by ocelotl »

As I've hinted before, in locations within the tropics, the variation between winter and summer sunrise and sunset times is not considerable, and reduces to minutes at the very Equator due to the eccentricity of Earth's orbit around the Sun. Rush hour in most urban areas is 7:00 to 9:00 and 17:00 to 20:00 no matter sunrise or sunset time... And morning and evening peak electricity consumption is 6:00 to 8:00 and 19:00 to 13:00 in residential areas, again no matter sunrise or sunset times...

Expanding for counterarguments regarding children school schedules, basic and intermediate school here in Mexico works two shifts, morning and afternoon, and the kids have to be enrolled in one of them.

Kinder is:
Morning shift: 9:00 to 12:00; Afternoon shift: 14:30 to 17:30. I went to the afternoon shift.

Elementary school (grades 1st to 6th) is:
Morning shift: 8:00 to 12:30, with a 30 minute rest between 10:30 to 11:00; Afternoon shift: 14:00 to 18:30, with a 30 minute rest between 16:30 to 17:00. I went to the afternoon shift for 1st and 2nd grade and to the morning shift for 3rd to 6th grade. I remember that between December and February, the morning shift was from 8:30 to 13:00.

Secundaria or Junior High (grades 7th to 9th) was:
Morning shift: 7:00 to 13:10, with a 20 minute rest between 10:20 and 10:40; Afternoon shift: 14:00 to 20:10, with a 20 minute rest between 17:20 and 17:40. I went to the morning shift for 7th grade and in the afternoon shift for 8th and 9th degree.

Preparatoria or High School (grades 10th to 12th) was:
Morning shift: 7:00 to 13:00, and afternoon shift 14:00 to 20:00. I went to morning shift and my sister to the afternoon shift. Since we didn't go to a campus that is within walking distance from home as before, I had to begin taking public transportation to get back home, and eventually, also had to take it at morning to go to school. We didn't have school buses or lockers in any school.

The classes on Metropolitan Autonomus University, Azcapotzalco campus, could be imparted in 90 minute blocks any time between 7:00 and 22:00. Few classes were scheduled between 20:30 and 22:00, or between 13:00 and 16:00, so we could avoid them.

As for work, In many companies that work three shifts, these are commonly 6:00 to 14:00, 14:00 to 22:00 and 22:00 to 6:00. Office shifts can get in from 8:00 to 9:00, and end from 17:00 to 18:30, depending on the company. I've avoided the night shift so far with the exception of urgent delivery batches or scheduled major maintenance, but have worked the rest.

Also, when having to travel abroad for work, I also had to comply to the local times and shifts... Worst was the 8 hour jump to go to Tel Aviv, Israel, but could stand it taking it easy.
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Kellemora
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Re: DST Time shifts may come to end.

Post by Kellemora »

The few times I flew overseas, I didn't suffer from jet lag going, but coming back home again got it real bad.
Some say it should have been the other way around, except for the excitement of being in a new strange area is what kept you hopping, while getting back home to known comfortable surroundings, and landing in the morning when you should have had a good nights sleep, and all you have to do when you do get home. I was out like a light for two days, hi hi.
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yogi
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Re: DST Time shifts may come to end.

Post by yogi »

For the most part we take circadian rhythms for granted. They are, however, very responsive to natural phenomena such as daylight and night time. Apparently there is some synchronicity which I believe in the end controls our sleep cycle. The sleep cycle is when we regenerate ourselves and it is important to keep it on a regular schedule. Sleep deprivation is not a good thing. All this has a baring on the effects of jet lag. The synchronization gets out of kilter when the sun doesn't rise at it's usual time. As we all know from this discussion, even one hour of variance in our normal synchronization affects us greatly. That's what the fuss is all about. People just are not built to change their circadian rhythms significantly.
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Kellemora
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Re: DST Time shifts may come to end.

Post by Kellemora »

And the older we get, the harder it is to get back in sync again too!
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