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 know some think permanent standard time is best. But I respectfully disagree, for several reasons.
First, the argument for standard time is that we need the light in the morning to wake up. And, sure, that would be great. But with standard time, most people are already getting up in the dark. Sunrise only moves to 7am or later around here. A lot of people are already up earlier to get kids on buses (my bus went at 6:45) and to work starting between 7 and 8.
Meanwhile, look at what happens to evening light. Sunsets will go from 6 to 5, and many will travel home in the dark, or simply have no light when the get home, with hours to go before sleep.
The fact is, winter just doesn’t have enough light to go around. So we have to pick our poison. I’d rather get home with some light.
Second, no one considers what would happen in the summer. Here, sunrise would come at 5 am, too early and disruptive to sleep. If light would wake us up better in the winter, than it would wake us up too soon in the summer.
Third, people say we tried it in the 70s and everyone hated it. But when it happened, we didn’t just stay on daylight savings, we switched in the fall, and then back in January, an abrupt change in the darkest time of the year rather than the gradual change it should have been since fall.
And even then, many people lived it. There were people that didn’t, sure, but it is wrong to say it was universally hated.
But make we just need to compromise. Move the clocks 30 minutes and be done with it.
But make we just need to compromise. Move the clocks 30 minutes and be done with it.
I was with you until this. But that’s because I’m a programmer and time stuff is hard enough before you start using minutes instead of hours.
I think putting the sun’s zenith at 1pm would be better year round. Even with that my kids still wake up before dawn starting in October, and I’d rather have daylight when I’m awake.
I’m sure it’s already figured out. India is already 30 minutes off the rest of the world.
But I was mostly joking. Because I want the madness to end.
But I totally agree. 1 pm is mush more the meridian of most people’s day how we typically actually live.
I’d rather have light in the evening but I honestly just want to get rid of the changing.
I hate standard time, but I’d still rather stop changing even with it.
On permanent dst sunrise in Boise would be at 9:20 during the first half of January.
It’d be like 9:50am here in the Netherlands and I still support permanent DST. The daytime is basically our employer’s time anyway, I’d rather not waste any more precious daylight on that part of the day. It really sucks getting off work and it’s already dark outside. Hard not to crash when it’s pitch black out by 5:30 pm.
The daytime is basically our employer’s time anyway, I’d rather not waste any more precious daylight on that part of the day.
I feel like this strikes at the heart of the whole DST vs. ST argument. As I mentioned in a sibling thread, it boils down to how much control we have over our own schedules. Instead of a mutualistic relationship, we’ve sold our souls to our employers. Shifting to permanent DST may be a temporary solution, but if we can’t figure out a way to form healthy relationships and boundaries with work/school/etc, even those gains will eventually get optimized away from us.
That’s an interesting take. I think with respect to wanting more daylight hours “for myself,” perma DST is definitely a stop gap solution, but it’s also legitimately achievable on the near term and has a decent amount of support.
I do fully agree that work life balance is the bigger, more significant problem but also a lot harder to tackle. Society seems to be going through a big shift right in terms of how we view our relationship with all of this. I’m glad to see more mainstream discussion about stuff like 4 day work week and UBI. Feels like attitudes are changing.
Wholeheartedly agree. Though school factors in a lot, too
And sunrise would be 5am in June. And you ignore that sunset would be 6:20pm instead of 5:20.
The fact is, Boise gets just 9 hours of daylight. Pick your poison. I’d rather the light when I might be able to enjoy it.
I’d rather the light when I might be able to enjoy it.
There’s a subtext to every DST vs. ST argument that never gets talked about: how much control people have over their own schedules. If, instead of shifting your clock, you could instead shift your schedule, wouldn’t that achieve the same result?
I don’t want to change my schedule. I don’t want to have to go to work an hour earlier just so I can get daylight in the evening.
So you’d rather change everybody else’s schedule to meet your desires? Because that’s what DST is: the government telling its people to change their schedules by an hour.
Who says I’m changing everyone else’s schedule? I the one that DOESN’T want the clocks to change.
I’m not arguing for changing clocks twice a year. I’m arguing that permanent DST is no better than permanent Standard Time when it comes to scheduling. The difference is that people are falsely convinced permanent DST will give them “more daylight” when it will not. Schedules have always shifted between seasons. We can’t do anything about the motion of planets, but we can decide to go to work an hour earlier to maximize how much continuous time we have after work to do yardwork or whatever.
Today, we have this arbitrary “9 to 5” work schedule. Give it 20 years of permanent DST, and we’ll start wishing we “had more daylight” because we have a “10 to 6” work schedule. They’re just numbers. Why not choose the simpler standard?
In June on dst sunset is after 9:30pm. I don’t need it to be light at 10:00, it’s frankly annoying. I actually enjoy it being light when I drive to work in the morning.
The fact is, the US tried permanent dst in the 70s and everyone hated it. It’s why we took it back
I would rather it light at 10pm than 3:30am.
I enjoy having light in the morning. But I enjoy light in the evening MORE.
And I have discussed the 70s event elsewhere in this post. It was horribly implemented (changing clocks in both October and then in January) and even then some people liked it. It certainly wasn’t “everyone.”
I love how a purely factual statement somehow receives as many downvotes as it does upvotes … People are weird.
A had to upvote you to get your comment back positive
And what time is your sunset in first weeks of January on standard time?
Around 5:25pm
Ouch.
The question is basically: do you want school and work to start earlier or later?
Why change the time for everyone when you can just adjust “working” hours. People who do shift work or work retail and other non- white-collar jobs are collateral damage. Roofers and farmers change their start and stop times baes on light and heat conditions.
Just start at a different time. Time is based (roughly) on the global position from a reference mark. Stop fucking with it.
This only works if everyone in the country starts and stops work/school at the exact same time which isn’t possible.
Local businesses and governments already shift their hours to be open when people are awake and available regardless of whatever arbitrary thing the clock says…
If DST and Standard Time are functionally equivalent for all intents and purposes, why not just stick with the simpler one?
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.
Read an interesting article that said insurance companies lose tons of money because of time changes. Animals supposedly get used to traffic being low/high at certain times of day (based on the sun cause they don’t have watches). So when the time changes, they keep their same routine and end up causing more accidents while crossing roads they are used to being empty.
The week after we move clocks forward in the spring, thereby “losing an hour”, there is a marked increase in car collisions and heart attacks.
It’s kinda absurd if you think about it. We’re here arguing about Standard Time vs Daylight Saving Time while people are literally dying every year due to losing sleep every spring. I wish more states would just bypass Congress and revert back to Standard Time.
I’d prefer daylight time myself, but frankly I wouldn’t complain about either option being made permanent.
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).
There’s a big difference between “ignore the clock” and “simply adjust your expectations of times by an hour.”
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!
The only way it makes sense to do this is at the federal level so the whole country changes at once. Doing it at the state level is stupid, confusing and frankly just a waste of time. This country has very real and serious problems it needs to deal with, and daylight savings time is not one of them.
Let’s not fix anything until the things we won’t fix get fixed.
And even further, doing the easy stuff will help you get the hard stuff done.
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.
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.
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.
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.
States can only move to permanent Standard time without congressional approval, and when you consider that congress couldn’t agree who their own leader was for 22 days, there’s no hope getting them to agree on something like DST.
The real question, if states are serious about getting rid of the change to DST, why didn’t they just pick standard time? No approval is needed to switch to full standard time.
Because people prefer the extra daylight in the evening which is why everyone wants DST hours.
Because people prefer the [lack of] daylight in the [morning] which is why everyone [hates] DST hours.
Is that actually what you meant?
I really wish people would stop spinning DST as if it gives us any more daylight than Standard time. It’s literally just rotating a circular instrument by 30 degrees and whitewashing it with a nice-sounding name.
In not sure why you’re snarkily editing my words to write literally the exact same concept I wrote originally. Nobody said DST gives more sunlight throughout the day. I said people prefer more sunlight in the evening.
All earth time is arbitrarily assigned so noon could be labeled as 2am but it wouldn’t change the fact that people want it to be light out later in the evenings.
why you’re snarkily editing my words
That’s fair. That’s on me.
earth time is arbitrarily assigned
Excuse me if I’m misunderstanding what you mean … but, no, it really isn’t. UTC is defined quite precisely and accurately to track the mean solar time. Time zones are usually designed to balance the zenith of the sun (that’s “noon”) and regional boundaries (although some countries make some… creative decisions in that regard). “Morning” and “evening” are defined in terms of the position of the sun, not some number on a clock.
It’s amazing how you clearly understand the arbitrary nature of timekeeping, yet are still fixated on the numbers defining what is evening rather than the sun.
True, but driving home from work in the dark is much more dispiriting than going to work in the dark. So if your work doesn’t let you come in earlier and leave earlier in the winter (clock-wise) the change to standard time makes things worse.
work doesn’t let you come in earlier and leave earlier in the winter (clock-wise)
And that’s where the real problem lies. Instead of negotiating with our employers to help build equitable schedules, we’d rather ask the government to enforce it for us. Permanent anything, either DST or ST, will force us to face this fact. In light of that, I’d rather go with permanent Standard Time, as it matches mean solar time and thus circadian rhythms. Everything else is a social contact.
It doesn’t create more daylight. It creates more useful daylight. Daylight while we are sleeping is less useful to us than daylight while we are awake
Red herring to appear like they are doing something for the people. As was pointed out below, we tried year round DST in the 70s and people hated it so much we went back to switching our clocks. It seems that year round standard time would make the best compromise, but that would be doing something, rather than just appearing to do things.
Simple. Just keep one. I prefer daylight saving.
On permanent dst sunrise in Boise would be at 9:20 during the first half of January.
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More simple, everyone on UTC. Everything else is silly.
Except hasn’t it been well-proved that standard time is a better stopping state?
That would suck. They went the wrong way round.
I’d rather have sunshine left when I get off work than have some first thing in the morning.
I prefer the dark.
I dont care which one it is. Just stop moving it.
That’s what she said?
We already tried permanent dst in the 70s and people hated it so much they switched back to changing the clocks. Those that ignore history are doomed to repeat it.
As I said above, it was implemented incredibly stupidly. They didn’t just stay on daylight savings, allowing the sunrise and sunset to gradually change. Instead they changed in the fall to standard time and the AGAIN at the beginning of January back to daylight savings. They abruptly changed at the darkest time of the year.
Even then, it’s an exaggeration to say people hated it. Many hated it, but some others loved it. It’s also a different world. More people start at 7 or 8 rather than 9. And no doubt some people hated the horrible way they initially implemented it.
The numbers I found were they went from 76% approval to 46% approval in three months. Three months is enough to get over the abrupt change and apparently enough to figure out it’s a shitty idea.
The bad taste would linger. But even then, 46% approval seems pretty good. Hardly the universal disdain always implied.
Hahaha. Almost everyone but Indiana, which used to have permanent standard time until Mitch Daniels got elected and he’d always had a bug up his ass about adopting DST. And now Indiana is like, “we ain’t goin’ back to not moving our clocks around!”
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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.
