In the past six years, 19 states have made efforts to move to year-round daylight saving time. So what’s in the way?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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’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?
And what time is your sunset in first weeks of January on standard time?
Around 5:25pm
Ouch.
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
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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!”
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.
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.
Removed by mod
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.
I’ve spent my whole life with the time changing, I’m adapted now and expect being able to sleep in later when it stays darker out, I don’t want this to change
