In the past six years, 19 states have made efforts to move to year-round daylight saving time. So what’s in the way?
Just so you guys know, Mexico did away with DST last year. It’s been great not changing the clock twice a year.
Come on US… Stop dragging your feet.
But dragging their feet is the only thing our government is good at now. What would they have left?
I don’t care what the offset is. it’s just fucking numbers. if I’m getting up at something called four versus something called six it doesn’t make a difference to me. I just don’t want the numbers to CHANGE twice a year
I’m with you. Either that or make the day it changes a universal holiday. One or the other.
there is absolutely no reason to change the offset
All I really care about personally in the “spring” ahead. It’s difficult for me to go to work with an hour less sleep. I have obligations that make it hard for me to go to bed earlier than I do.
Hear me out. We keep the fall back but remove spring forward. Yes, things will get really odd in like four years but think of the beauty of it.
I like it. It’s both subversive and predictable.
We should spring ahead at 2 PM on Friday. Everyone gets to go home an hour early from work and we have the whole weekend to adjust.
That would be great for salaried employees but hourly people would either lose an hour or just have to work an hour of mandatory overtime without time and a half pay.
Many people might not know. If your state wants to stop changing their clocks, they can do it right now. The problem is that a lot of vocal people want permanent DST which (literally) takes an act of congress.
I think SDT is the right way to go, but mainly I want the clocks to stop changing. If you want the time changes to stop, talk to your state legislators. Once the clocks stop changing, then we can convince our employers to allow shifting work hours.
Standard time is superior for the simple reason that the sun is highest in the sky at noon.
UTC is superior. Everywhere sets their local schedule by what they need to like if the sun actually matters to them, and it gets rid of confusion. The real issue is that people have some idea that work should start at 8am or whatever in all areas. Or that 5 o’clock should be happy hour. That’s not helpful in any meaningful way.
Exactly, people need to get over the fixation on the number the clock shows.
Yeah, the store should just open when it opens and close when it closes, and if shift B shows up an hour after shift A chooses to go home, so be it!
It’s almost like they could plan or something.
Hmm, planning would require coordination. The shift A team would need to agree to stay until the shift B team expects to arrive. How could we make sure they’re on the same page?
Maybe they could do it based on the sun being at a certain spot in the sky? That might be hard on cloudy days. Maybe we could invent a device that tells us approximately where the sun would be if we could see it. We could call it “cock” like roosters that crow to wake us up…but that might make 12 year olds chuckle so how about we call it a “clock” and then fixate on the number it shows?
(If you were being sarcastic / facetious in your initial post I apologize, but I took your original post as one of the “hurr durr just ignore the clock” posts some people have been making, which completely fail to recognize why we do make ourselves slaves to the clock).
Screw all notions of modern time… return to Japanese Time
Daylight and Nighttime, each divided into 6 periods, varying in length based on the season and labelled in order of 6, 5, 4, 9, 8, 7. Longer workdays when the sun is out, shorter workdays when it’s dark!
People arguing for our against really need to give their latitude. I’d imagine the further north you go, the more you are in favor of permanent dst.
I’m at 56°N. DST does exactly fuck all but mess with my sleep. I’d rather just stay at one time all fuckin year. In winter it doesn’t make a fuckin lick of difference if the sun rises at 8 or 9 or 10, it’s dark when I leave the house, and it’s dark well before I get back in.
I used to live at 49°N and that was actually worse.
The opposite. For northern latitudes, the time switch is actually somewhat beneficial. People generally don’t love waking up and going to work/school/whatever in the pitch black. DST doesn’t magically “save daylight.” The total amount is daylight is the same for either.
The only real solution is permanent Standard Time. Local businesses and governments already shift their business hours as they see fit for other reasons, so keeping “summer hours” and “winter hours” is totally reasonable.
While we might not love going to work in pitch black, we don’t care to have all our evening in it, either. As you say, the total amount of daylight is the same, so we have to pick our poison. I’d rather have more light in the evening. I will hate the 5pm darkness that comes tomorrow.
Morning our schedules is no better than moving out clocks.
We’re kind of having the same argument in two different threads … I’m not sure which thread is better.
Morning our schedules is no better than moving out clocks.
It’s objectively better! “Moving clocks” is effectively the same as moving schedules for individuals, but to practically coordinate with others, everybody must change their clock and therefore their schedule. Individuals and organizations already construct their schedules as needed.
Part of the issue is that we all work too damn much, anyways. The 40 hour, 5 day work week (and thus the 9-to-5) is an arbitrary concept that research has indicated may be just as effective as a shorter work week.
We have to have schedules. We have to have some consistency of time. I change my schedule, I will be out of sync with everyone else.
Yeah, we should work less, but we don’t have much of a choice. I think we are more apt to get year round DST than a shorter week.
I don’t mind dark mornings, since I’m already at work by 7am each day. But not being able to walk/bike in a park safely each afternoon, not being able to cook outside, or hang out with friends in the daylight is a bit sad. And also SAD as in the disorder since we are now inside during the only hours of daylight…
This right here is the reason I call for permanent DST.
I’m at latitude 42N and having less daylight time in the evenings during the warm months would be awful.
41N.
And yes, this is true. But why should we be denied just because those closer to the tropics don’t have a problem? Or perhaps time zones should be rather diagonal so the the north can get later sunsets.
And those wanting standard time should also give their latitude. And rather or not someone is on the east or west end of the time zone makes a huge difference. Those further east in the time zone sees earlier sunrises and sunsets and are also more apt for daylight savings. For instance, much of New England would probably be better off in the Atlantic time zone. As it is under DST, the sun rises before 5am in Portland, ME, and EST would put sunrise before 4am! Sadly, being in the same time as certain business centers like New York and Boston (Maine wants to be the same time as Boston, and Boston the same as NYC) have made many bad time zone boundaries.
Perm DST and cut the time zones in half. Sunset should be within ~15 mins from one side of the time zone to the other; not a 45+ min difference.
Except hasn’t it been well-proved that standard time is a better stopping state?
Simple. Just keep one. I prefer daylight saving.
More simple, everyone on UTC. Everything else is silly.
I would like to ask a question, and hopefully someone much smarter can explain why it is or isn’t a possibility.
Why is it that an automated DST couldn’t be implemented? In my head I’m imagining a time keeping ability that automatically adjusts, every day, to capitalize on the amount of daylight that is in a day during any given time of year. The amount of adjustment would be so incremental as to not even be noticeable really, to one’s everyday routines.
If clocks auto-adjusted each day, by milliseconds or whatever micro-amounts necessary, I feel like that would be so much easier than an abrupt 1 hour difference which throws everyone off because of how jarring it is.
I don’t like DST, but I can’t help but wonder. If we HAVE to have it, then why can’t it be better. I feel like we have the technology to be able to figure out a superior way of doing this.
I believe this is how Google handles leap years and leap seconds on all of their servers. They kind of smear the difference out over a period of time so the difference isn’t noticeable. Great for day to day activities, but people doing scientific measurements or other precision date work would probably have to use their own solution.
Not to sound negative towards those groups who use precision date work, but I think they should probably be using their own solutions anyway, and are probably more than capable of figuring out good solutions on their own. In my opinion, that definitely isn’t a reason why the rest of us shouldn’t have an agreeable (automated) standardization.
Are the potential difficulties that these specific groups could face so drastic/detrimental that it just wouldn’t work for some reason or another?
So everyone would have to throw out their clocks?
No, but you’d probably want to update them more frequently. Pretty much everything I use to tell time (phone, watch, computer) is automatic anyway.
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