Social Networking Fail

[beth_leonard]

I totally fail at social networking. Either that or most people like Daylight Savings a whole lot more than I do. My petition only has 21 signatures (it needs 150 to become public, and 25,000 by April 13th to actually matter). On the plus side, some of the signatures are from people/places I don't recognize. My kids are still adjusting to the time change.

If someone has better social connections than I, feel free to post this link to your other social networks: http://wh.gov/5lm

--Beth

Comments

[dushai.livejournal.com]

My concern is that, without specifying whether we'd be on "always summer time" or "always winter time", it's effectively a petition saying "Make some people happier and others sadder!" without my knowing which group I'll be in. :)

Also, I personally want to focus my government petitions on either high-priority requests (e.g. economy, justice, civil rights) or this-should-be-obvious-and-uncontroversial requests (e.g. eliminate plurality voting for either approval or some form of Condorcet) before the lower-priority requests that are still issues of trading one group's happiness off against another group's.

[altamira16.livejournal.com]

Well, a few years ago, our Congress wasted their time changing when daylight savings begins and ends saying that it had something to do with energy savings when it really had to do with pressure from the candy lobby (http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/31/an-extra-hour-of-daylight-thank-the-candy-lobby/). Why are you letting BIG CANDY waste the time of our elected officials?

Don't you think they waste their time on enough stuff that is relevant to the very few when they consider issues like steroids in baseball?

[feuervogel]

If the petition were to reinstate the pre-Bush-administration starting and ending of DST, I'd sign it. But as it is, I kind of like the sun not rising at 4:30 am in July and 8 am in December.

[beth_leonard]

When would you like the sun to rise and set for 8/12/16 hours of daylight? I'm considering doing a new petition.

--Beth

[feuervogel]

I don't know. It had finally started rising at a decent hour (6:30) when we had to set the clocks forward, so now it's rising at 7:30, which is far too late, because I hate getting up in the dark.

I wake with the sun, so if midsummer sunrise at 37N is 5 am rather than 6 am, I'm awake bright and early because of light coming through the bathroom window or the doorway. We have blinds *and* heavy curtains on the (east-facing) bedroom windows.

Midwinter sunrise on EST is 7:20 am, which is what it is *right now* with the premature time change.

Our day lengths range from 9h45m to 14h30m.

[beth_leonard]

So it sounds like you really like having a clock change, because in the winter you'd like your ~10 hrs of daylight to be from 7am to 5pm (centered around noon, with a very early sunset), and in the summer you'd like your ~14 hrs to be from 6am to 8pm (centered around 1pm) because you wake with the sun regardless of when the clock says it is.

Interesting.

[dushai.livejournal.com]

You don't need to convince me (or most people, I'd imagine) that Congress does stupid things. But how does that relate? Are you arguing that since other interests corrupt the political system to get their stupid favors, you should also? I don't agree with that.

Personally, I suspect that peons like me would have to work pretty hard to get Congress's ear on *anything*, and if I'm going to work that hard, I want to make my request count. (Thus, either high-priority or should-be-a-no-brainer issues.)

[beth_leonard]

I'm much happier with the shorter amount of time spent on Winter time. I like more light in the evening at dinner time than when I'm waking up and eating breakfast indoors. I'd prefer to eliminate wintertime entirely.

Getting things done in Washington requires big lobbying. If another groups interests happen to align with mine, that doesn't mean my interests are wrong.

As for wasting time, I think most legislation they pass makes things worse, so the more time they waste not getting things done, the better, from my perspective. I don't think this one is a time waster -- my family gets seriously messed up and cranky for a week after the time change on both ends. It's something the government does that messes up my life in a directly measurable way.

--Beth

[beth_leonard]

I could try again with an "always winter time" petition. I don't have a strong opinion either way, but making everyone change their clocks and their (and their childrens!) internal body schedules twice a year so that people get daylight when they want it is just madness to me.

Why not have the schools and businesses who would prefer to be open at different hours of the day depending on how many hours of daylight there are in a day change their operating hours? Businesses already change their operating hours for business reasons depending on day of week or time of year (extended Holiday hours anyone?)

Why make all the businesses and people who have regular meetings at a certain time of the week change their meetings suddenly by an hour with respect to the daylight?

Imagine a world where we didn't normally have daylight savings time, and had never had it. If someone proposed starting it, would it ever pass? Why would we ever start doing this to ourselves in our modern society?

I consider DST to be in the "this-should-be-obvious-and-uncontroversial" category, but perhaps it's not. This is something imposed by the government that very directly affects my life in a very negative way, and for my government petitioning time has the most likely chance of an actual payoff.

It used to be good once/year and bad once/year, but now that I've got kids, it's bad on both ends (the kids get us up early during the "extra hour" time, so I don't even get that extra hour, and I've got cranky kids for a week on the spring end.)

--Beth

[singerji.livejournal.com]

Our family gets somewhat cranky around the time change as well (though doesn't seem to be as cranky as yours). I like the idea of allowing individual enterprises change their operating hours as they wish depending on hours of daylight -- this already happens (how many more places stay open later during summer days, weekends, heavy shopping periods?). There's some argument for keeping schools and government office times consistent, but I think changes there can be adapted to pretty quickly.

The original argument for DST was that by evening hours being more day-lit, instead of morning hours, that since more people were out and awake in the evening this change would save energy costs. The effect is possible, but debatable.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time