US House to vote on bill to make daylight saving time permanent

When I lived up north by Canada, the logic was "you don't want kids having to walk to/from school when it's dark!!" Okay, so... wow, did you know they could change school hours.

The same argument works the other way. Keep noon as the point where the sun is highest. Then change the times of things for appropriate daylight. Daylight savings is just people agreeing to get up an hour earlier. Instead of "9 to 5", everyone agrees to work 8 to 4. Which coincidentally puts solar noon perfectly in the middle of the work day. Isn't that a surprise!

Also school: let's start activities at 6 AM in winter. And not finish until 10PM. No the bus only runs for school hours why do you ask?

School hours are engineered to make sure parents can drop their kids off at the state-funded daycare (which is what most parents consider school) and get to work on time...

And the reason the high-school kids get out first is so they can take care of younger siblings after school, which is a shitty way for teenagers to spend afternoons. (I was lucky, youngest of six.)

change the school hours for the shifting daylight hours, you'd also have to change parents' work schedules.. or provide some child care benefits, maybe. and we know how that would go over with this congress and administration.

I don't know, we tried it in the 70s and people hated it enough to switch back pretty quickly. Under permanent DST, sunrise in January would not be until after 8 AM, while under permanent standard time sunrise in June would be shortly after 4 AM.

I hope the Dems read all the small print, like, "Daylight Savings is now permanent...and brown people have no rights...."

As I always say, "A broken clock is right twice a day."

Just to argue counterpoint: nothing stops your schools or work from changing hours now, whenever the clocks change. Work and school 8 to 4 until dst. Then you work\school 9 to 5.

We've been ready to get rid of the switch for ages in Ontario and Quebec but because of international business we're stuck waiting for New York to also get rid of it

I believe that if this passes, Ontario immediately switches as well, since they passed intrepid leading-edge legislation to change if everyone else changes.

*modern day republicans

The OGs were cool back when the Republican Party was the progressive party that wanted to abolish slavery, give women the right to vote, etc.

Then they did pulled the uno reverse card about 90 years ago, and the GOP started becoming America’s Conservative Party.

^^^^ Legitimately one of the funniest things I've read in a long time.

I didn't even say anything!

It passed in the Senate. It died in the house.

It’s actually been gaining steam over the past 5-ish years. If it dies in the end, it’s because people can’t agree which time should be permanent.

It's, like, THE STANDARD

Yeah, no clue why everyone's going DST instead. I think having politicians make science decisions is a really dumb idea.

People like daylight time in the summers, because that gives them the opportunity to do things after work in sunlight. For places where they're getting 16 hours of sunlight, they'd generally prefer sunrise at 5am and sunset at 9pm, rather than 4am to 8pm.

But daylight time is terrible in the winters. Sunlight from 8am to 4pm is probably better than 9am to 5pm.

That's basically why we had daylight savings switching clocks to begin with. But the fundamental tradeoff in the higher latitudes was always summer versus winter.

Because I want it to be light out later in the day

Because most of the year is already daylight savings time. We're only in standard time for 4 months from November to March. It doesn't sound like a big difference from being 50/50, but we're in DST twice as long as we're in standard time.

North/West vs South/East in each time zone

There are 4 time zones in the US

The more North/West you live in a time zone the more you hate DST. The more South/East you live the more you like DST.

If you live in blue you probably hate DST, yellow probably like DST

All stems from states like Michigan should be in CST not EST. If Michigan was in CST then permanent DST would make it EST and they would be in "standard" time still.

"standard" time is only used about 1/3 of the year. We use DST most of the year. Minimizing disruption, we should just drop that exception.

With DST, solar noon is pretty close to 12PM on the eastern end of the time zone. With standard time, solar noon lines up closer to 11AM on the eastern edge. Standard time just doesn't make sense.

Because light in the evening is better than light at night.

I just saw that. What. The. Fuck.

Exactly.

Of course there might be somethibg horrible in this bill that they want to sneak through.

Was going to say. They already passed this, and then the Senate dragged it's feet

On your first question: the current law is that DST is optional, but if a state opts out, they have to be on standard time. The new bill allows them to stay on DST permanently and removes the ability for states to opt-out unless they are already on year-round standard time. So, if this passes, every state in the union will be on either standard time or DST, depending on their status before, with no option to either go back to standard time nor to go back to changing twice a year.

Dude.. time zones can go fuck themselves. I'm a QA and every quarter we deal with some random ass bug that rolls back to time zone issues.

I need a website like isitdns.com except isittimezone.fu

The only two things programmers hate more than time zones are DNS and SSL

States are allowed to opt out of DST. They are allowed to adopt permanent standard time. They are forbidden from adopting permanent DST.

Great point. From a quick websearch it looks like every state is allowed to exempt itself. The few states that opted out did so right near the creation of the daylight saving time law.

I think maybe it comes down to inertia and staying in the herd. No state wants to be the first one to stick their neck out and make a change from the rest of the country all still doing the status quo.

Let businesses change their hours instead of making people change clocks.

Most businesses in the USA can change their hours , but the hours that make sense for them depend on schedules they don't control.

False.

Standard time blows unless your work hours are something absurd like 5am to 1pm.

I assume you don't live somewhere where it gets dark at 3pm in winter. The morning will be dark regardless, let me have that little bit of sun coming home from work

Agreed. After living most of my life in the PNW, having summer twilight as late as 10 PM was terrible.

That is admittedly the best argument in favor of standard I've heard.

We are further north. I went daylight time because it leaves more daylight after work.

To be fair, Saskatchewan of all places actually did it right. BC surprised me. Alberta makes perfect sense with Marlena at the helm.

getting the u.s. to finally do to metric

Well, depending on how you measure that, the metric system was adopted in the US federally either 50 or 35 years ago...

https://usma.org/laws-and-bills/executive-order-12770

The US is supposedly already converted to metric.

Do you complain for 3/4 of the year?

Because of existing time zones aren’t we already different from the rest of the world? You make other good points but the rest of the world comparison seems odd. If anything just picking one is more consistent and safer regardless. I mean if you wanna talk about weird, the entire mainland china is one time zone, China Standard Time.

Why we don't move schools to start later in winter so they start in sunlight

That kids darkness thing is so stupid. Our kids start school in the dark they are not dying on the streets.

Why not just move school and work start times an hour or two later in the winter in Colorado then? Why hold the entire country hostage because of niche locations that already have the ability to make local decisions like this?

>more people will be driving to work or to the ski resorts in the dark

Trust me, if you aren't on I-70 before sunrise on the weekend, don't bother. You're not getting to the resort till noon

TIL in 1974 the U.S. tried permanent DST during an energy crisis … it saved little energy, fuel use slightly increased, and public support collapsed after one dark winter, so the law was repealed within 10 months.

God forbid we’d learn from past mistakes.

We wouldn't be the only ones. Several countries, territories and islands have half hour offsets from their neighbors. A few even have ±15 minute offsets.

Every three months, to capture granularity.

this is basically how time worked before we invented railroads

How about we don't do that, and instead ensure that workers can chose their starting hours so they match their rhythm?

I don't care which we choose. Just choose one and that's that. The day's length doesn't change; only the moment we start/stop things relative to the sun.

Feel free. There's nothing stopping you.

The reason it's not feasible is because most human activity happens during the daylight hours. As such, having the unit of a "day" cover what's typically a day makes things easier.
For example, banks , businesses and schools need to have a unified schedule across a jurisdiction. If the jurisdiction specifies a utc offset that defines the official business day you just have a less coordinated timezone system.
You also make knowing roughly what part of the waking cycle other parts of the world are in much harder. Right now it's 0100 in utc-5. So it's 0800 in utc+2, and people are eating breakfast, at work, getting kids to school and so on. If I want to know that without timezones I need to know where they are on the planet and what the relevant legal jurisdiction has mandated as coordinated business time. That's effectively just a worse version of timezones.

The human conception of time is intrinsically linked to spatial location. Fighting that is just making it hard for no reason. What we need to do is stop fiddling with the time. No more (major) clock adjustments. Daylight savings only sucks because of the switch , so we should just pick one and stay.

I keep hearing this and can’t believe people are serious with this suggestion. In my mind it’s the most ridiculous solution to time tracking.

It would save me some trouble at work for sure. We have to match timezones and calculate utc from local timestamps for millions of transactions a day from across the country. If local time and timezone was just utc, that saves me the extra steps.

Though days suddenly get really messed up. It would be "tomorrow" in the east coast before it is even dark in the summer. And, worse, it would be "tomorrow" in Hawaii a bit after lunch. In a practical sense that just seems confusing and annoying, so maybe it's not the most practical outside of datetime data.

The US isn't know for a well educates populace.

When fast food chains tried releasing a 1/3rd pound burger they failed horribly because people thought 1/3 was less than a 1/4 pound burger.

I get you and I've had similar thoughts for myself, but just want to make sure, you do realize that we're the weird ones here right?

Everyone would get used to it.

spring forward

It’s making what it is now permanent. So it gets dark at like midnight almost.

No, it’s about eliminating those.

Edit: Not sure why the downvotes. It’s pretty clear that this would remove the twice-yearly changes.

Hemp legalization? The thing at risk in this year’s farm bill?

Why? There is literally no argument for changing. It was proposed originally in a work of SATIRE by Benjamin Franklin. The US adopted a policy out of a satirical work

They aren't eliminating Time Zones, just Daylight Savings Time.

I think it's the height that's the real problem.

Closer to the poles you are the more important it is.