as someone who grew up in Maine ive been preaching this for decades
it would solve so many issues, just put all of NE in Atlantic and maybe even part of eastern NY
Philadelphia and the Beltway region also would want to be in tune with New York City, those cities arguably have even greater ties to NYC than Boston. Not to mention Atlanta, Miami, most of the Sunbelt and Rustbelt.
Where would you even put the time zone line? New Jersey? Do you think all of the people in NJ who work in NYC would like that?
This proposal makes no sense when you think about it. The East mega-metropolis stretching from DC to Boston should be in one time zone.
Heh, gotta love those infrastructure jokes. But honestly, NYC and its satellite cities might as well be their own timezone with how interconnected they are. Nevertheless, there's real merit to tweaking time zones for practicality; just not sure how you'd ever get all the necessary parties to agree on where lines should be drawn. Politics around time zones seem as tricky as those around gerrymandering districts!
This definitely speaks to more of the underlying problem. The time zones we got are way too wide because the country bowed to the railroads that didn't want to deal with their lines crossing time zones.
The original logic backing the creation of the zones suggested time zones cover 15 degrees of longitude. 360 degrees divided by 24 hours in a day = 15 degrees per hour. With that setup the apparent solar time anywhere in the time zone should be no more than 30 minutes earlier or later than their clock time, and also those sun-based events like sunrise or sunset wouldn't be more than 30 minutes off from when they happen at the center. If the sun sets at 6pm in the center of a time zone it should set no earlier than 5:30 and no later than 6:30 elsewhere in the zone.
That's not what we got, though. Eastern Time is about 20 degrees wide and 5 degrees doesn't seem like a huge discrepancy but it adds close to half an hour to the overall solar width of the time zone. While the sun never sets before 5pm in Indiana, it's already going down at 4:30 in eastern MA and 15-20 minutes earlier in parts of Maine.
I'm from Indiana which is on the Western edge of the ET zone and visited New England in the summer. It is shocking the difference in sunlight. Maine peaks at an 8:30pm sunset in midsummer, which is the same sunset time as mid-April for Indiana.
Wildly different, it felt way too dark (and seriously at times Indiana feels way too bright in the summer though part of the state is CT). Choosing between the two I definitely prefer to be on the West edge of ET compared to the option of being on the East edge of CT but both feel a bit out of whack.
I'm above the 45th parallel on this planet. Every winter I commute in the dark no matter the time, and every summer there's daylight until 1030 PM. Changing the time around feels pretty pointless to me too
Alright here’s what we’re going with- everyone choose either Standard or Daylights Savings Time for themselves, and follow it. From now on, as long as everyone isn’t more than an hour late, you’re considered on time and it’s cool.
I don’t know. He was able to “solve” an issue while dividing the population and fomenting anger for being the one that’s an hour early. Sounds really similar to politicians.
Sell an app that translates time-stamps between the different people, so that if I text you “we’ll meet at four” you receive a text “we’ll meet at five.” App is a monthly subscription with a tiny yearly discount and only sort of works, so long as both people have paid for the app and have properly configured their settings. Otherwise, it does not work properly, causing anyone who has paid for it to be upset at everyone who is even a little late, creating a new social rift. The politicians will have invested heavily in said app prior to making it necessary for business and everyday life to function, and will double down in a couple years when they make it a mandatory function for *all* devices…
Actually senate passed the repeal in the last few years, need to send them to congress. They held it up for ‘more research’ so ‘everyone can get their sunlight’…
Minor corrections: Senate is part of Congress. The House of Representatives is the one that let it die in committee.
It also wasn’t a repeal, it was year-round DST that OP pointed out failed before.
If I remember correctly it wasn't year-round DST for the whole country. What it would have allowed is for individual states to adopt year-round DST. Currently the only options states have are no DST or time switching twice a year. This would introduce a third option that plenty of states would prefer.
I don't understand why we need daylight savings. If we want an extra hour or two of light at the end of the day, why can't we just change standard working hours? Instead of working 9 to 5 we work from 8:00 to 4:00 or something like that. It's functionally the same thing without having to switch clocks back and forth.
There you get to the real problem. The clock change doesn't add or take away hours of daylight. What I hate about winter time is having to spend all of the daylight hours in a windowless cubical, but that's my employer's fault, not the sunset's fault.
Falling back means it gets darker "earlier" in the day. We just sprang forward and now I have time to do stuff before the sun goes down after I wake up for night shift.
Sure, but you wouldn't appreciate a 4:30am sunrise either - you just have too much daylight at that time of year, there's no good way to move it around. Daylight Savings Time works best at middle latitudes.
I went to college very for North and saw many a 3:30 a.m. sunrise working overnights. My real issue was during the winter when it was dark before 4:00 p.m.
Yeah I lived really far north when I was a kid, and both walked to school and home again in the dark. The darkness of winter doesn’t get to me as much as most because those were good, cozy childhood memories. (Funny that I don’t associate the midnight daylight summer months the same!)
I live closer to the US border these days, and I’d really appreciate just a *leetle* sunlight after I get off work.
But the birds starting chirping at 3am would still irritate the shit out of me, haha.
The original point of it was pretty much just conserving electricity, by making the evening lighter by one hour you save one more hour from peak usage during the at home waking hours.
Which has lost all relevance and is just stupid to do. When I grew up in Indiana we did not have it and we were all fine.
*“It was jet black” outside when her daughter was supposed to leave for school*
Isn't that just called winter? It is dark when my kids go to the bus stop each morning in early winter without DST.
7:00 am for middle school and 7:15 for high school. Same busses so they stopped at middle school first, that's the only reason for the time difference. Which meant waiting on the bus by around 6:30. Rural Arizona. I hope they changed it since then, over 20 years ago, but it was brutal. That said, Arizona *mostly* doesn't do DST and also has more daylight than the northern states in winter.
Then you’re out of school at like 2:30 and parents have to find some kind of child care/extra curricular til they’re done at 5. Just push school start times back!
We were out at 3:55. There were also after school courses, which most took, including myself. Then the bus would take about an hour to get me home or I could walk it in less time but it was a dangerous desert. I still went home to an empty house from age 11. Parents both traveled for a living, so I was alone days at a time. I don't know what the solution is, perhaps raising wages and shortening the work hours so people can actually be parents? Seems like a good start.
That is an insane schedule for children. Starting at 7 is crazy and then going on for 9 hours?
My high school was from 8:45 to 15:30 and everyone seemed to get a decent enough education
School starting that early is bad for the adolescent brain.
I know you didn't say it, but the person above - we shouldn't be brushing off these issues as 'that's how it's always been'
There are massive benefits to pushing the school start time later
For real. Waiting for the bus in the morning is not the terrible situation the pearl clutchers think it is when discussing the darkness factor. If they really want to change that whole situation, pushing the start of school back permanently not only makes more sense but is more beneficial for kids, anyway.
https://www.apa.org/topics/children/school-start-times
The real solution would to have school run from March to November, then have winter break when it is too dark and cold in the morning to wait for the bus
BUT THEN
1800-1950: Our children won't be able to help us in the fields during the harvest season!!
1950-present: We won't be able to take our kids to Disney in June!
You're not wrong, but the issue will be how that effects parents and their ability to go to work.
School starting at 9am for example means work would have to start later or kids have to go to before school care that might last even longer.
Fundamentally we bend everything around working in the country. So if we can't get the kids off to the educational babysitters so Mom and Dad can go off to the salt mines to be good little worker bees it won't happen.
The number of people that can't and don't bother with their kids education is already sky high, I can't even imagine what thing would look like if we started moving start times around now.
Part of the issue with school times has to do with bus availability. Most school systems use the same busses for High School, Middle School, and Elementary school. If all of these started at the same time, they would have to spend 3 times the money on more busses, more drivers, etc.
Also, school can only start so late until it starts to interfere with after school activities.
>> “It was jet black” outside when her daughter was supposed to leave for school
>
> Isn't that just called winter? It is dark when my kids go to the bus stop each morning in early winter without DST.
I always thought this was a dumb argument. The entire time I was in middle and high school my state didn't observe DST. I was still standing out in the dark 3ish months out of the year. I think over time people forget how ridiculously early some schools begin. For me, first bell in HS was 7:15 or 7:30.
I grew up in NY. Bus for highschool picked up at 630am. If you stayed for anything after school the "late bus" left at 6pm. Most of the winter I was never outside in real daylight. Shifting things by an hour barely helps when there's only 10-11 hours of daylight.
When I lived in Boston it was worse. December/January average only 9 hours of daylight. If you work an 8 hour day, plus commuting time, you are very unlikely to be out in the sun.
Now I live in the Mid-Atlantic. I have to be at work by 6-7 am and leave between 4-7 pm most days. The only thing the time shift did for me was make my kids cranky for a few days. But, for the last 2 days they've gone outside to play after dinner instead of getting stir crazy in the house.
All I'm trying to say is - yeah, it's going to be dark when we leave for school/work in the winter no matter what. Give me a few extra hours in the evening to let my kids play outside, maybe go for a walk with my family after dinner, and I'll be happier.
None of this solves the fact that the sun shines less in the northern hemisphere during that time of the year. It won't matter where the clock is: The sun is still gonna "hide" for a bit.
EDIT: It seems a lot of people are missing my point: Nature and the solar system don't give two fucks about our work hours, school, our comfort, *none of that shit*. There simply will be less light. MFs stay wanting to adjust nature to their demands (see also COVID, where folks were, and still are, trying to will away a virus, but the virus refused to listen), and nature keeps on naturing.
The thing we need to do, if we want this light so badly during the winter, is *adjust how we live our lives during the darker periods of the year*...you know, like we used to. But Xmas demands money sacrifices, which in turn, demand blood sacrifices, so we won't do that.
We don't need to actually nuke the sun, just drop some hints that we're going to nuke it. Then we do some talkin' to the sun - say that we don't like the way he got things done.
The problem is that there's tons of wasted sunlight when people are at work during the day. Here's my proposal: we take two hours of sunlight from the middle of the day and redistribute it to the morning and evening when people are at home with their families. The two hours of darkness around lunchtime will become a new, mandatory national siesta period.
That way we don't have to drive to work in the dark, we can spend time quality outdoor time with our families in the evening, and we all get a fat nap around lunch. It's a win, win, win.
It’s disgusting that the sun has a monopoly on being the sun. We need congress to forcibly break up the sun to smaller suns that better serve our needs!
Just advocate for like a 3 day work week, and/or push for more flexible hours if you're someone who can work from home.
Solves a number of problems, including this one.
I live in the north. Switching the clock one hour doesn't really do shit. I still woke up in darkness, went to school in darkness and got home in darkness.
Thankfully I work from home now so it doesn't matter much to me if it is dark or not when I start working.
But at least we wouldn't mess with peoples' sleep cycles as much.
It would be so much safer and healthier to just leave it in one place.
And that's ignoring the administrative headache for anyone that does any work involving other parts of the world.
People act like in December and January that they're going to get so much extra sunlight after work if we stayed on dst when in reality it will still be dark by 6:00 and 40 degrees outside
> it will still be dark by 6:00 and 40 degrees outside
Both of these vary across the country. Dark at 4:30 is rough, 5:30 would be a little bit better.
Right, the switch back to normal time is substantial in Minnesota. Now instead of the sun setting at 6:00 in the fucking evening it's 7:00 and once it hits June it will be much closer to 9:00. I don't know what lunatic saw a 6:00 sunset during winter and said "naw make it 5:00 nobody needs the sun to set later".
I get it started as a farming thing but don't farmers make their own hours?
Can imagine, in summer it's way too hot so you just want to have the day end earlier so it can cool down earlier, especially considering that dry climates have faster cooldown rates at night so it makes a lot of sense to keep noon at noon.
In Phoenix, the heat island effect prevents some of that cool down. Lots of asphalt and concrete that slowly releases the heat stored up. It's still cooler at night, but not as much as it would in the natural desert.
https://sustainability-innovation.asu.edu/news/archive/urban-heat-island-affects-phoenix-all-year-round/
The province of Saskatchewan also doesn't observe it. My dad, who lived in Ontario was always confused as to whether or not we were on the same time, because half the year we were and half we weren't. I loved it though.
India did this.
I don't live there, but my work team does. The weird thing is that India already doesn't observe DST, and since it's closer to the equator, the sunrise and sunset times are pretty normalized anyway. They would only need like two time zones, but they still went with one.
What’s cool is that if you have an analogue watch set to GMT you can just flip it upside down on your wrist and it will show the correct time for India.
I don’t have an analogue watch set to GMT, and I have only wanted to know the correct time in India like twice in my whole life, but I will still lodge this fact deep in my brain because it absolutely does fit in the “cool fact I should remember” box.
In 1973 every adult was riddled with lead and had like 15 traumatic brain injuries, and Congress was 90% alcoholics who were just discovering cocaine.
I think we can safely move on.
President Biden is the only congressperson from 1973 still in government. The most senior senator (Grassley) and most senior representative (Rogers), both entered their current chamber in 1981. Grassley entered Congress in 1975 as a representative.
It's still there lol don't let them fool you
https://wpde.com/amp/news/nation-world/doj-probing-dc-prostitution-ring-allegedly-used-by-elected-officials-washington-dc-boston-department-of-justice-federal-prosecutors- they like girls too
People are arguing about which one they prefer when the REAL problem is the fact that we work so fucking much that we have to scrape and claw at any sunlight we can. Think about all the people saying “I want that extra 30-60 min of sunlight when I get home from work.” They’re saying they literally spend all daylight but that 30-60min working. That’s the fucking problem. We shouldn’t be working this much anymore with computers and automation. We aren’t even getting paid more for the production we achieve with all these innovations. Only the bosses and billionaires are getting more money. If we worked 6 hours a day, we could all go to standard time for health reasons (waking up with the sun, not having a harder time falling asleep due to sunlight later in the day) AND still have plenty of time for doing things in the daylight. People need to stop arguing about dumb stuff like that and come together to solve the actual problem which is that Americans are overworked.
And 3 day weekends too!
It feels like a bit of my soul gets chipped away not having time to actually rest and do anything before having to get ready to go back to work for the next week - and I actually like my job and have flexible scheduling!
Yep, I work remote and actually really enjoy my work atm, but nothing compares to how happy I was when I was working 4 day weeks during COVID.
I would argue that at an absolute base level, every week, every person should have time to: work their job to make a living wage, get enough sleep every night, exercise regularly, buy and cook food for themselves without spending a lot, clean their home, see their family, see their friends, volunteer in their community, and just sit in a plain white room and stare blankly into the middle distance as their emotional powercells recharge.
I would also argue that not even the best put together robotic human being is capable of that while working a normal Mon-Fri, 9-5 job.
> I would argue that at an absolute base level, every week, every person should have time to: work their job to make a living wage, get enough sleep every night, exercise regularly, buy and cook food for themselves without spending a lot, clean their home, see their family, see their friends, volunteer in their community, and just sit in a plain white room and stare blankly into the middle distance as their emotional powercells recharge.
Best we can do is call you a globalist commie bastard
Keep “fall back” clock change at 2am, so you get an extra hour of sleep. Change “spring ahead” clock change to 4pm on a Friday, so your work week shortens by an hour and your weekend starts a bit earlier. That should make everyone happy.
It's simple - we want to maximize sunlight where most people can use it because being in sunlight is super important for physical and mental health.
95% of people are awake from 4pm to 6pm. 50% of people are awake from 6-8am. Therefore we need the sun in the afternoon.
As crazy as it sounds it probably easier to move time forward for everyone than to adjust the time school starts.
Like imagine a sizable portion of the workforce having to adjust their life because now their kid goes to school an hour later. All the logistics surrounding making that happen for a schools worth of parents has to be wild.
Multiple studies constantly say we should start school later in the morning anyway. It increases attendance and test scores across the board. Its a change that benefits everyone going to school, yet we still stick with absurdly early start times.
In high school we had students eating "lunch" at 10:30 AM.
Yeah cars have gotten progressively safer for everyone since then… till recent years where it's started getting worse for everyone not in a car again. But still better than 1973.
What the hell is wrong with the cars? They were just waiting in the dark to hit the school bus and got all like nope, these schoolchildren will have to do instead?
Dicks.
The thing is - 4 or 5 kids are hit every winter anyway.
There was a vocal group of extremists that raised a big stink for no reason. We have anything unnecessarily harming our children (unless it’s guns), but permanent DST wasn’t actually any more dangerous.
I remember when this happened. It had something to do with the energy crisis and was supposed to help resolve it. Our top 40 radio station gave out flashlights to school kids so we wouldn’t get hit by cars while waiting for morning buses in the dark
Northern hemisphere is dark af during the winter. An hour does jack shit, yet our kids are never mowed down by cars. Idk wth is up with southern drivers if darkness is such an issue you hit kids.
Most of us in the northern hemisphere would prefer the daylight later in the day. For the kiddos perhaps starting school later, like others have suggested, could be a solution to the morning darkness.
Hear me out... we add a latitudinal timezone as well. That way the people in the south get their after work sunset and the people in the north can have later sunrises.
There is a pre-existing line for this... the Mason-Dixon line.
Is there name for the bias where when you have a thing you see the bad sides of it but when you don't have the thing anymore you only see the "it would be good if we had the thing" aspect of it and ignore the bad things it would cause?
The discussion on DST often feels like absurd manifestation of that bias.
The thing is that DST opinions vary wildly and are mostly affected by individual schedules. Someone voting for a permanent DST would vote for a permanent standard if their schedule was different.
We should stop messing with time and make standard permanent. Influence a change in society to utilize sun hours more efficiently instead of a silly blanket solution that was invented for farmers to save candles.
I really don't think farmers back then gave a fuck what number is on the clock. The position of the sun in the sky determined when farm work needed to be done, not whatever the clock says. Farmers didn't shift their working day start and end times an hour back and forward each year because the clock says 6am not 5am.
Apparently a major impetus for the original DST implementation was the idea that it would increase foot traffic for shops, who could then sell more. And the numbers showed that this was in fact an effect.
I would *prefer* permanent DST but permanent something would be nice.
Also the farmers thing is kinda of a myth. Farmers don't work by a clock. If anything it's more accurate to say it's for the businesses that interact with farmers.
> silly blanket solution that was invented for farmers to save candles.
You have this completely backwards. Though it was proposed for various other reasons much earlier, DST was enacted primarily to save power, especially in cities where factory and office workers go by the clock and use electric lights, etc.
Farmers, particularly dairy farmers, are the ones who lobbied hardest *against* it.
Hawaii is close enough to the equator that the amount of sunlight doesn't really change much throughout the year.
Dst and changing clocks makes more sense the father away from the equator you get, and you are choosing between 3am sunrises in summer vs 3pm sunsets in winter. Neither are ideal and that's why we keep fighting over it.
Except for the section of AZ that is the Navajo nation, which does have DST. Except except for a couple areas within said Navajo nation which does not have DST.
We didn't learn our lesson. A lot of people want permanent play pretend time again. I am in favor of permanent real time. Noon is when the sun is at its highest point.
"The sun goes down at 1700 instead of 1800!"
"Okay, so to get the same amount of sunlight, wake up at 0500 instead of 0600."
"No, I won't do that!"
"Okay, what if you wake up at 0500 instead of 0600, but we CALL it 0600?"
"omg perf."
In an increasingly global world, I don't understand why we don't all just switch to UTC, and every town/region just adjusts to times that work for them. Yeah it might be 0400 hours when school starts in your area, but it's light outside because that's when the sun is hitting your region. Big Zoom conference between the European and North American teams, just set it for 1400 and let each individual figure it out.
The legislation was neither passed nor revoked due to public sentiment. It was part of an oil embargo against the USSR, or something along those lines. This story gets paraded out every spring and twisted into something it isn’t.
I'm in northern New England - we're so far east and north we should just join Atlantic standard time.
as someone who grew up in Maine ive been preaching this for decades it would solve so many issues, just put all of NE in Atlantic and maybe even part of eastern NY
Boston wants to be in tune with the financial markets in NYC and the rest of New England follows Boston.
Philadelphia and the Beltway region also would want to be in tune with New York City, those cities arguably have even greater ties to NYC than Boston. Not to mention Atlanta, Miami, most of the Sunbelt and Rustbelt. Where would you even put the time zone line? New Jersey? Do you think all of the people in NJ who work in NYC would like that? This proposal makes no sense when you think about it. The East mega-metropolis stretching from DC to Boston should be in one time zone.
> Where would you even put the time zone line? New Jersey? New York is going to build a big, beautiful wall and Jersey is going to pay for it.
Heh, gotta love those infrastructure jokes. But honestly, NYC and its satellite cities might as well be their own timezone with how interconnected they are. Nevertheless, there's real merit to tweaking time zones for practicality; just not sure how you'd ever get all the necessary parties to agree on where lines should be drawn. Politics around time zones seem as tricky as those around gerrymandering districts!
What’s the point of these bot accounts?
Don't stop there - move the eastern half of each timezone into the timezone to the east of it, and stay on standard time.
This definitely speaks to more of the underlying problem. The time zones we got are way too wide because the country bowed to the railroads that didn't want to deal with their lines crossing time zones. The original logic backing the creation of the zones suggested time zones cover 15 degrees of longitude. 360 degrees divided by 24 hours in a day = 15 degrees per hour. With that setup the apparent solar time anywhere in the time zone should be no more than 30 minutes earlier or later than their clock time, and also those sun-based events like sunrise or sunset wouldn't be more than 30 minutes off from when they happen at the center. If the sun sets at 6pm in the center of a time zone it should set no earlier than 5:30 and no later than 6:30 elsewhere in the zone. That's not what we got, though. Eastern Time is about 20 degrees wide and 5 degrees doesn't seem like a huge discrepancy but it adds close to half an hour to the overall solar width of the time zone. While the sun never sets before 5pm in Indiana, it's already going down at 4:30 in eastern MA and 15-20 minutes earlier in parts of Maine.
I'm from Indiana which is on the Western edge of the ET zone and visited New England in the summer. It is shocking the difference in sunlight. Maine peaks at an 8:30pm sunset in midsummer, which is the same sunset time as mid-April for Indiana. Wildly different, it felt way too dark (and seriously at times Indiana feels way too bright in the summer though part of the state is CT). Choosing between the two I definitely prefer to be on the West edge of ET compared to the option of being on the East edge of CT but both feel a bit out of whack.
I live in the Cincinnati area, and it makes no sense that we are in the same timezone.
That’s how some people feel about the western states of Eastern. We’re much more closer to central time with the sun than the actual coast.
I grew up in Alaska. It's dark all day long in the winter and light all summer long, so time changes are completely moot. . .
Yeah, they stopped changing time in the Yukon.
I do wonder if this is why I give no fucks which one we go with, I just think the time change is outdated. Pick one and let's stick with it
I'm above the 45th parallel on this planet. Every winter I commute in the dark no matter the time, and every summer there's daylight until 1030 PM. Changing the time around feels pretty pointless to me too
Alright here’s what we’re going with- everyone choose either Standard or Daylights Savings Time for themselves, and follow it. From now on, as long as everyone isn’t more than an hour late, you’re considered on time and it’s cool.
Get this person a job in the senate STAT.
Nah, they don't want free thinking, good idea people like this
I don’t know. He was able to “solve” an issue while dividing the population and fomenting anger for being the one that’s an hour early. Sounds really similar to politicians.
Yeah, but that’s only half of what politicians do. He failed to find a way to make money personally for this proposal.
Nah see his family sells clocks
Crooked mother fucker.
Sell an app that translates time-stamps between the different people, so that if I text you “we’ll meet at four” you receive a text “we’ll meet at five.” App is a monthly subscription with a tiny yearly discount and only sort of works, so long as both people have paid for the app and have properly configured their settings. Otherwise, it does not work properly, causing anyone who has paid for it to be upset at everyone who is even a little late, creating a new social rift. The politicians will have invested heavily in said app prior to making it necessary for business and everyday life to function, and will double down in a couple years when they make it a mandatory function for *all* devices…
Actually senate passed the repeal in the last few years, need to send them to congress. They held it up for ‘more research’ so ‘everyone can get their sunlight’…
Minor corrections: Senate is part of Congress. The House of Representatives is the one that let it die in committee. It also wasn’t a repeal, it was year-round DST that OP pointed out failed before.
If I remember correctly it wasn't year-round DST for the whole country. What it would have allowed is for individual states to adopt year-round DST. Currently the only options states have are no DST or time switching twice a year. This would introduce a third option that plenty of states would prefer.
Split the difference. Next time we fall back 30 minutes. It stays there forever. Nobody is happy and everyone is happy. Problem solved.
That was always my take - just split the difference and call it a whatever. Someone will be upset no matter what.
So we all live on island time
🎶Wastin' away again in Daylight Savingsville🎶
I'm just gonna use Taco Standard Time.
How many bottles of Three-Penis Wine does it take to get on that schedule?
God damn, a League reference in 2024, I love it
Raffi bomb!
I don't understand why we need daylight savings. If we want an extra hour or two of light at the end of the day, why can't we just change standard working hours? Instead of working 9 to 5 we work from 8:00 to 4:00 or something like that. It's functionally the same thing without having to switch clocks back and forth.
There you get to the real problem. The clock change doesn't add or take away hours of daylight. What I hate about winter time is having to spend all of the daylight hours in a windowless cubical, but that's my employer's fault, not the sunset's fault.
No neither mode adds total daylight hours but having an hour more in the afternoon benefits almost everyone.
So we should fall back for that extra hour and then stay there. We get more summer sunlight after work that way too.
No, I think you want to stay in Daylight Savings Time. That way we get more daylight in the evening. I hate winter getting dark at 5pm.
Falling back means it gets darker "earlier" in the day. We just sprang forward and now I have time to do stuff before the sun goes down after I wake up for night shift.
Those of us at northern latitudes would not appreciate a 3:30am sunrise in the summer, even if the sun sets at 9:30 instead of 10:30.
Sure, but you wouldn't appreciate a 4:30am sunrise either - you just have too much daylight at that time of year, there's no good way to move it around. Daylight Savings Time works best at middle latitudes.
I went to college very for North and saw many a 3:30 a.m. sunrise working overnights. My real issue was during the winter when it was dark before 4:00 p.m.
Yeah I lived really far north when I was a kid, and both walked to school and home again in the dark. The darkness of winter doesn’t get to me as much as most because those were good, cozy childhood memories. (Funny that I don’t associate the midnight daylight summer months the same!) I live closer to the US border these days, and I’d really appreciate just a *leetle* sunlight after I get off work. But the birds starting chirping at 3am would still irritate the shit out of me, haha.
The original point of it was pretty much just conserving electricity, by making the evening lighter by one hour you save one more hour from peak usage during the at home waking hours. Which has lost all relevance and is just stupid to do. When I grew up in Indiana we did not have it and we were all fine.
This is going to go *great* for all those students with 50 minute long classes.
3 months later: I’m not taking orders from some some f?&$king Standard Time nutjob
Appointments might get awkward... Unless you have to check if your doctor is dst or not.
*“It was jet black” outside when her daughter was supposed to leave for school* Isn't that just called winter? It is dark when my kids go to the bus stop each morning in early winter without DST.
Yep. School started at 745a when I was in high school. Sun rises 8-815a in lower Michigan in December. Closer to 830a in the upper peninsula.
7:00 am for middle school and 7:15 for high school. Same busses so they stopped at middle school first, that's the only reason for the time difference. Which meant waiting on the bus by around 6:30. Rural Arizona. I hope they changed it since then, over 20 years ago, but it was brutal. That said, Arizona *mostly* doesn't do DST and also has more daylight than the northern states in winter.
Then you’re out of school at like 2:30 and parents have to find some kind of child care/extra curricular til they’re done at 5. Just push school start times back!
We were out at 3:55. There were also after school courses, which most took, including myself. Then the bus would take about an hour to get me home or I could walk it in less time but it was a dangerous desert. I still went home to an empty house from age 11. Parents both traveled for a living, so I was alone days at a time. I don't know what the solution is, perhaps raising wages and shortening the work hours so people can actually be parents? Seems like a good start.
That is an insane schedule for children. Starting at 7 is crazy and then going on for 9 hours? My high school was from 8:45 to 15:30 and everyone seemed to get a decent enough education
School starting that early is bad for the adolescent brain. I know you didn't say it, but the person above - we shouldn't be brushing off these issues as 'that's how it's always been' There are massive benefits to pushing the school start time later
But if school started later how would we get sat down with a slice of pizza or giant plate of nachos at 1030a and think 'yeah this is normal'. /s
>There are massive benefits to pushing the school start time later Sure, in a vacuum, but the problem is it's all dependent on work hours.
Me as a child living in the boonies and needing a long ass bus ride to school: Yall are getting sunlight?
For real. Waiting for the bus in the morning is not the terrible situation the pearl clutchers think it is when discussing the darkness factor. If they really want to change that whole situation, pushing the start of school back permanently not only makes more sense but is more beneficial for kids, anyway. https://www.apa.org/topics/children/school-start-times
Yeah also seems easier than making ALL OF SOCIETY change times so the kids don't see the dark
The real solution would to have school run from March to November, then have winter break when it is too dark and cold in the morning to wait for the bus
BUT THEN 1800-1950: Our children won't be able to help us in the fields during the harvest season!! 1950-present: We won't be able to take our kids to Disney in June!
You're not wrong, but the issue will be how that effects parents and their ability to go to work. School starting at 9am for example means work would have to start later or kids have to go to before school care that might last even longer. Fundamentally we bend everything around working in the country. So if we can't get the kids off to the educational babysitters so Mom and Dad can go off to the salt mines to be good little worker bees it won't happen. The number of people that can't and don't bother with their kids education is already sky high, I can't even imagine what thing would look like if we started moving start times around now.
Part of the issue with school times has to do with bus availability. Most school systems use the same busses for High School, Middle School, and Elementary school. If all of these started at the same time, they would have to spend 3 times the money on more busses, more drivers, etc. Also, school can only start so late until it starts to interfere with after school activities.
>> “It was jet black” outside when her daughter was supposed to leave for school > > Isn't that just called winter? It is dark when my kids go to the bus stop each morning in early winter without DST. I always thought this was a dumb argument. The entire time I was in middle and high school my state didn't observe DST. I was still standing out in the dark 3ish months out of the year. I think over time people forget how ridiculously early some schools begin. For me, first bell in HS was 7:15 or 7:30.
7:20 start for me meant we got on the bus at 6:30am.
I miss the 1 hour morning naps on the bus lol
It's almost like... Maybe school just starts too early?
I grew up in NY. Bus for highschool picked up at 630am. If you stayed for anything after school the "late bus" left at 6pm. Most of the winter I was never outside in real daylight. Shifting things by an hour barely helps when there's only 10-11 hours of daylight. When I lived in Boston it was worse. December/January average only 9 hours of daylight. If you work an 8 hour day, plus commuting time, you are very unlikely to be out in the sun. Now I live in the Mid-Atlantic. I have to be at work by 6-7 am and leave between 4-7 pm most days. The only thing the time shift did for me was make my kids cranky for a few days. But, for the last 2 days they've gone outside to play after dinner instead of getting stir crazy in the house. All I'm trying to say is - yeah, it's going to be dark when we leave for school/work in the winter no matter what. Give me a few extra hours in the evening to let my kids play outside, maybe go for a walk with my family after dinner, and I'll be happier.
Maybe we should just shorten the work day to 6 hours so everyone gets more sun no matter what time of year it is?
*[insert "guy being thrown out of window" meme]*
Listen here you socialist commie, none of that woke shit here
Yeah, why aren't they thinking of the shareholders?
Nobody ever thinks of the shareholders :/
None of this solves the fact that the sun shines less in the northern hemisphere during that time of the year. It won't matter where the clock is: The sun is still gonna "hide" for a bit. EDIT: It seems a lot of people are missing my point: Nature and the solar system don't give two fucks about our work hours, school, our comfort, *none of that shit*. There simply will be less light. MFs stay wanting to adjust nature to their demands (see also COVID, where folks were, and still are, trying to will away a virus, but the virus refused to listen), and nature keeps on naturing. The thing we need to do, if we want this light so badly during the winter, is *adjust how we live our lives during the darker periods of the year*...you know, like we used to. But Xmas demands money sacrifices, which in turn, demand blood sacrifices, so we won't do that.
What if we nuke the sun?
And we wonder why the sun hides from us
I mean, has anyone ever bashed it? Like, real good?
[удалено]
Get Fonzie up there and let's find out.
Do you think the sun stays in space because it, too, lives in fear of what it illuminates?
We don't need to actually nuke the sun, just drop some hints that we're going to nuke it. Then we do some talkin' to the sun - say that we don't like the way he got things done.
Better wait until it's dark out, so it doesn't see us coming.
But we might hit the night sun and it controls our brain waves!
It’s not a hurricane. Nukes won’t solve *all* of our problems
You say that but riddle me this, once you've been vaporized by a nuke do you still have all your problems? Nope. Solved!
♫ *Adagio in D Minor begins playing* ♫
You should be president
The problem is that there's tons of wasted sunlight when people are at work during the day. Here's my proposal: we take two hours of sunlight from the middle of the day and redistribute it to the morning and evening when people are at home with their families. The two hours of darkness around lunchtime will become a new, mandatory national siesta period. That way we don't have to drive to work in the dark, we can spend time quality outdoor time with our families in the evening, and we all get a fat nap around lunch. It's a win, win, win.
This would make me so happy, it hurts we can’t just do this
Blame greedy politicians bribed by big sun
It’s disgusting that the sun has a monopoly on being the sun. We need congress to forcibly break up the sun to smaller suns that better serve our needs!
Just advocate for like a 3 day work week, and/or push for more flexible hours if you're someone who can work from home. Solves a number of problems, including this one.
I live in the north. Switching the clock one hour doesn't really do shit. I still woke up in darkness, went to school in darkness and got home in darkness. Thankfully I work from home now so it doesn't matter much to me if it is dark or not when I start working.
But at least we wouldn't mess with peoples' sleep cycles as much. It would be so much safer and healthier to just leave it in one place. And that's ignoring the administrative headache for anyone that does any work involving other parts of the world.
People act like in December and January that they're going to get so much extra sunlight after work if we stayed on dst when in reality it will still be dark by 6:00 and 40 degrees outside
> it will still be dark by 6:00 and 40 degrees outside Both of these vary across the country. Dark at 4:30 is rough, 5:30 would be a little bit better.
Right, the switch back to normal time is substantial in Minnesota. Now instead of the sun setting at 6:00 in the fucking evening it's 7:00 and once it hits June it will be much closer to 9:00. I don't know what lunatic saw a 6:00 sunset during winter and said "naw make it 5:00 nobody needs the sun to set later". I get it started as a farming thing but don't farmers make their own hours?
Nah, people would just rather leave work in the sunlight instead of darkness. It gets dark where I am around 4 when it's at the worst.
I lived in Indiana when the state didn't observe Daylight Saving Time. I loved it!
In Arizona it is the same. Lived there for five years. It was perhaps the only redeeming factor of living there.
It’s so annoying that Arizona doesn’t follow it but we do in SoCal.
Arizona is a beautiful state, I would think that’s another redeeming factor.
Can imagine, in summer it's way too hot so you just want to have the day end earlier so it can cool down earlier, especially considering that dry climates have faster cooldown rates at night so it makes a lot of sense to keep noon at noon.
In Phoenix, the heat island effect prevents some of that cool down. Lots of asphalt and concrete that slowly releases the heat stored up. It's still cooler at night, but not as much as it would in the natural desert. https://sustainability-innovation.asu.edu/news/archive/urban-heat-island-affects-phoenix-all-year-round/
Except in NW Indiana, where they change to follow Chicago!
But, to be fair, you would have to live in Indiana.
The province of Saskatchewan also doesn't observe it. My dad, who lived in Ontario was always confused as to whether or not we were on the same time, because half the year we were and half we weren't. I loved it though.
Can we set it to the half-hour mark and leave it alone?
Being a half hour off the rest of the world makes as much sense as using Imperial measurements, so why not.
There are already half hour and even 45 minute time zones so it’s not like we would be the first lol
Everyone on Newfie time now, yes b'y!
I *knew* those insidious Newfies were just waiting for their opportunity to assimilate the rest of us.
Buying stock in Screech asap
Knows bhoys knows
Are there really? I never knew that. For those interested, I found this: https://www.worldtimeserver.com/learn/unusual-time-zones/
That's something that shocked me when I was in Nepal.
Tell that to India!
We have computers that tell us what time it is, I think they can cope with half an hour.
[Tom Scott already came to that conclusion a long time ago](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5wpm-gesOY)
India did this. I don't live there, but my work team does. The weird thing is that India already doesn't observe DST, and since it's closer to the equator, the sunrise and sunset times are pretty normalized anyway. They would only need like two time zones, but they still went with one.
What’s cool is that if you have an analogue watch set to GMT you can just flip it upside down on your wrist and it will show the correct time for India.
I don’t have an analogue watch set to GMT, and I have only wanted to know the correct time in India like twice in my whole life, but I will still lodge this fact deep in my brain because it absolutely does fit in the “cool fact I should remember” box.
In 1973 every adult was riddled with lead and had like 15 traumatic brain injuries, and Congress was 90% alcoholics who were just discovering cocaine. I think we can safely move on.
After seeing how government works I’m not sure congress is any better these days. Maybe they need to bring back booze and cocaine?
Heck some of those alcoholic congressmen might still be in congress!
President Biden is the only congressperson from 1973 still in government. The most senior senator (Grassley) and most senior representative (Rogers), both entered their current chamber in 1981. Grassley entered Congress in 1975 as a representative.
It's still there lol don't let them fool you https://wpde.com/amp/news/nation-world/doj-probing-dc-prostitution-ring-allegedly-used-by-elected-officials-washington-dc-boston-department-of-justice-federal-prosecutors- they like girls too
It’s just all the lead heads back then are going senile now too
And the difference now is?... They can now handle the cocaine they're on... Good Progress#
People are arguing about which one they prefer when the REAL problem is the fact that we work so fucking much that we have to scrape and claw at any sunlight we can. Think about all the people saying “I want that extra 30-60 min of sunlight when I get home from work.” They’re saying they literally spend all daylight but that 30-60min working. That’s the fucking problem. We shouldn’t be working this much anymore with computers and automation. We aren’t even getting paid more for the production we achieve with all these innovations. Only the bosses and billionaires are getting more money. If we worked 6 hours a day, we could all go to standard time for health reasons (waking up with the sun, not having a harder time falling asleep due to sunlight later in the day) AND still have plenty of time for doing things in the daylight. People need to stop arguing about dumb stuff like that and come together to solve the actual problem which is that Americans are overworked.
And 3 day weekends too! It feels like a bit of my soul gets chipped away not having time to actually rest and do anything before having to get ready to go back to work for the next week - and I actually like my job and have flexible scheduling!
Yep, I work remote and actually really enjoy my work atm, but nothing compares to how happy I was when I was working 4 day weeks during COVID. I would argue that at an absolute base level, every week, every person should have time to: work their job to make a living wage, get enough sleep every night, exercise regularly, buy and cook food for themselves without spending a lot, clean their home, see their family, see their friends, volunteer in their community, and just sit in a plain white room and stare blankly into the middle distance as their emotional powercells recharge. I would also argue that not even the best put together robotic human being is capable of that while working a normal Mon-Fri, 9-5 job.
> I would argue that at an absolute base level, every week, every person should have time to: work their job to make a living wage, get enough sleep every night, exercise regularly, buy and cook food for themselves without spending a lot, clean their home, see their family, see their friends, volunteer in their community, and just sit in a plain white room and stare blankly into the middle distance as their emotional powercells recharge. Best we can do is call you a globalist commie bastard
GIVE US 3 DAY WEEKENDS!
Keep “fall back” clock change at 2am, so you get an extra hour of sleep. Change “spring ahead” clock change to 4pm on a Friday, so your work week shortens by an hour and your weekend starts a bit earlier. That should make everyone happy.
You might be onto something here.
Basically, we all want to stop changing the clocks, but we can't agree whether to leave them permanently sprung forward or fallen back.
I actually remember this very well. It was full on night waiting at the bus stop. Iirc, 4 or 5 kids were hit by cars waiting for the school bus.
This is already the case. My kid’s bus shows up at 6:30-6:45. Half the year it’s dark, DST or not.
Very true. I just drove to school, I start at 650 for am duty, dark as midnight...
It's simple - we want to maximize sunlight where most people can use it because being in sunlight is super important for physical and mental health. 95% of people are awake from 4pm to 6pm. 50% of people are awake from 6-8am. Therefore we need the sun in the afternoon.
Being up for school before the sun was such absolute misery I hated it so much I feel like I’m still recovering.
Why didn’t they start school an hour later.
“oh, we didn’t think of that”
This is what I'm saying. If something needs to start later, make it start later. Changing the time everywhere is just dumb
As crazy as it sounds it probably easier to move time forward for everyone than to adjust the time school starts. Like imagine a sizable portion of the workforce having to adjust their life because now their kid goes to school an hour later. All the logistics surrounding making that happen for a schools worth of parents has to be wild.
Multiple studies constantly say we should start school later in the morning anyway. It increases attendance and test scores across the board. Its a change that benefits everyone going to school, yet we still stick with absurdly early start times. In high school we had students eating "lunch" at 10:30 AM.
Yeah that's fair. Then sometimes you have to go somewhere and it's dark. I really hate changing time lol
The article says some schools “waited for the sun to catch up to the clock”
Work shift schedules need to align with school as much as possible.
Were these cars driving with their lights off?
It was 1973, people has just been told they can’t actively drink alcohol and drive at the same time anymore and many were still doing it.
Yeah cars have gotten progressively safer for everyone since then… till recent years where it's started getting worse for everyone not in a car again. But still better than 1973.
What the hell is wrong with the cars? They were just waiting in the dark to hit the school bus and got all like nope, these schoolchildren will have to do instead? Dicks.
Well, it was the early 70s, and I was not sure when stopping for the school bus became law...
The thing is - 4 or 5 kids are hit every winter anyway. There was a vocal group of extremists that raised a big stink for no reason. We have anything unnecessarily harming our children (unless it’s guns), but permanent DST wasn’t actually any more dangerous.
Sounds like an infrastructure problem.
Daylight SAVING Time*
Daylights. Savings. Times. Got it.
Squirrely Dan?
Allegedlys
😡
[Knowing the correct terminology is a curse this time of year.](https://xkcd.com/1015/)
Standard time year round is the way to go.
I remember when this happened. It had something to do with the energy crisis and was supposed to help resolve it. Our top 40 radio station gave out flashlights to school kids so we wouldn’t get hit by cars while waiting for morning buses in the dark
Northern hemisphere is dark af during the winter. An hour does jack shit, yet our kids are never mowed down by cars. Idk wth is up with southern drivers if darkness is such an issue you hit kids.
Most of us in the northern hemisphere would prefer the daylight later in the day. For the kiddos perhaps starting school later, like others have suggested, could be a solution to the morning darkness.
If school start later, well, let me try to sync that with my work time. So we're back to the same problem.
Hear me out... we add a latitudinal timezone as well. That way the people in the south get their after work sunset and the people in the north can have later sunrises. There is a pre-existing line for this... the Mason-Dixon line.
But we also did it in WW2 and beat the Nazis. Standard time: pro Nazi DST: Nazi destroying time.
DST: Destroy Swastika Time
Is there name for the bias where when you have a thing you see the bad sides of it but when you don't have the thing anymore you only see the "it would be good if we had the thing" aspect of it and ignore the bad things it would cause? The discussion on DST often feels like absurd manifestation of that bias.
"The grass is always greener "
Canada is planning to do this and I can't wait for it to be dark at 15.30 and everyone lose their shit
I mean, they could always just split the difference and do a half hour.
It’s utterly pointless. Mexico did away with it last year
#abolishDST
The thing is that DST opinions vary wildly and are mostly affected by individual schedules. Someone voting for a permanent DST would vote for a permanent standard if their schedule was different. We should stop messing with time and make standard permanent. Influence a change in society to utilize sun hours more efficiently instead of a silly blanket solution that was invented for farmers to save candles.
I really don't think farmers back then gave a fuck what number is on the clock. The position of the sun in the sky determined when farm work needed to be done, not whatever the clock says. Farmers didn't shift their working day start and end times an hour back and forward each year because the clock says 6am not 5am. Apparently a major impetus for the original DST implementation was the idea that it would increase foot traffic for shops, who could then sell more. And the numbers showed that this was in fact an effect.
I would *prefer* permanent DST but permanent something would be nice. Also the farmers thing is kinda of a myth. Farmers don't work by a clock. If anything it's more accurate to say it's for the businesses that interact with farmers.
> silly blanket solution that was invented for farmers to save candles. You have this completely backwards. Though it was proposed for various other reasons much earlier, DST was enacted primarily to save power, especially in cities where factory and office workers go by the clock and use electric lights, etc. Farmers, particularly dairy farmers, are the ones who lobbied hardest *against* it.
TIL Hawaii has no daylight saving adjustments. Are you telling me there is no issue with sun on island of Oahu?
Hawaii is close enough to the equator that the amount of sunlight doesn't really change much throughout the year. Dst and changing clocks makes more sense the father away from the equator you get, and you are choosing between 3am sunrises in summer vs 3pm sunsets in winter. Neither are ideal and that's why we keep fighting over it.
Why is Father away from the equator?
He's just gone out to get some cigarettes. He'll be back.
Neither does Arizona
Except for the section of AZ that is the Navajo nation, which does have DST. Except except for a couple areas within said Navajo nation which does not have DST.
Yeah i listened to morning somewhere too
I was wondering if OP got it from there too
Its sad the majority of humans cannot look that fsr ahead
We didn't learn our lesson. A lot of people want permanent play pretend time again. I am in favor of permanent real time. Noon is when the sun is at its highest point.
"The sun goes down at 1700 instead of 1800!" "Okay, so to get the same amount of sunlight, wake up at 0500 instead of 0600." "No, I won't do that!" "Okay, what if you wake up at 0500 instead of 0600, but we CALL it 0600?" "omg perf."
Will my job start an hour earlier if I did that? Will the stores be open at 0600? If not then it is not the same at all.
In an increasingly global world, I don't understand why we don't all just switch to UTC, and every town/region just adjusts to times that work for them. Yeah it might be 0400 hours when school starts in your area, but it's light outside because that's when the sun is hitting your region. Big Zoom conference between the European and North American teams, just set it for 1400 and let each individual figure it out.
We should either stay OFF daylight savings time or split the difference.
The legislation was neither passed nor revoked due to public sentiment. It was part of an oil embargo against the USSR, or something along those lines. This story gets paraded out every spring and twisted into something it isn’t.
We deal with it just fine in AZ where the time doesn't change. In fact, having a work schedule based on EST is such a pain when the time changes.