This seems like such a simple thing to me, and yet the US just can’t seem to get it done. What are the issues preventing this?
DST is the time in the summer. I favor year-round DST so that the sun doesn’t set at 4pm.
Is it something we need to do? I’ve never felt like it’s a big deal. I like the sunrise/sunset times in the summer and it would effect my life if that changed. I don’t like them in the winter but there’s no great alternative.
Because the hour of light in the evening is nicer than the hour in the morning.
I prefer the hour of light in the morning, hands down. Helps me get out of bed and start my day.
Now, if we could somehow just make it so sunrise was like 645am in perpetuity, I’m on board with that, but the stupid sun keeps moving!
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Buy a head lamp. Same logic, no?
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Those are fair points, but the workday and my kids’ schooldays exist, and my workday and other parents’ workdays all coexist with this school day, and it probably does come at the expense of RC planing and hiking a couple months a year (except weekends), which also happen to be the months folks are most likely to not want to spend time outside because it sucks, although that’s just my opinion from Jersey, and I’m sure there’s places that are more temperate and allowing for outdoor activities in December through February.
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That is crazy, especially considering we’ve got places in the US that do permanent time.
Nope.
Oh, good point!
The only point I’m making is it’s personal preference and I’m not sure we will ever find a solution where everyone is happy.
Much rather have the hour later than in the morning.
Congress would actually have to do their jobs and pass legislation without throwing 500 riders onto it.
They literally have it completely approved, it’s just that they’re waiting to use it as the base for whatever else they want to get passed.
In theory, individual states could choose to not do daylight savings time. Two states already don’t use it and there was a proposal for Florida to get rid of it and move to the Atlantic Time Zone.
Yup. It’s switching to permanent DST (which is what most people want) that requires Congressional approval. A state can switch to permanent standard time on their own.
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I read that some senator was working on a bill to permanently switch to half-DST, which is where we set our clocks to halfway between regular time and DST. I’ve been advocating for that forever so I hope it will at least get people thinking/talking about it. It should solve the argument between whether to permanently stay on one time or the other. Split the difference and just get it done already!
As a software developer, that idea can fuck right off. India being on a half hour is enough of a pain in the ass. 6 more half-off time zones is just too much.
Yeah, I regularly deal with logs and its frustrating enough with them in UTC or local and trying to figure out which is being used. "This log is UTC and needs to be local? What’s 13:28 minus my offset which includes a half hour. " or vice versa and having to add the offset. A half hour time zone can fuck right off.
God forbid we finally get rid of DST and save people from car wrecks, industrial accidents, and heart attacks if it makes you have to adjust offsets once in some software.
*watches downvote counter while all the techies rage-click the down arrow*
People already complain about seeing the sun at 9pm or not seeing the sun at 9am. Not having DST would just exasperate that.
exacerbate
*ducks*
I’m saying it’ll be really annoying hearing the complaints.
Why must you always exacerbate the ducks?!
Howard knows
Someone like RFK would be given the job of co-ordinating it.
We keep DST for more months than ST so I think more people like it more.
I kinda think it runs backwards, making the sun set even earlier in the clock day during winter. So much more dispiriting to come home in the dark than to go to work in the dark.
My argument for ending it is that you can’t make days longer or shorter by moving the clock around, but I think we should just keep adding weeks onto DST and taking them away from ST until eventually it’s just DST. But settling on either scheme would be ok, better than switching back and forth.
We already tried year-round DST in the 70s. It didn’t last through the first year because kids were getting hit by cars on the way to school in the early morning darkness.
This has got to be bullshit. Or Americans are morons. There are so many places in the world where kids go to school in the dark anyways that I can’t even wrap my head around how this causes kids to be hit by cars.
Oh well, kids don’t walk to school in america anymore anyways so whatever.
/agree
Even with ST, my youngest goes to school in the dark all winter. Just now, as it’s light when he goes out, they’re about to swap it to DST and he’ll be in the dark again for a couple of weeks.
“Losing” that short window of morning sunlight is nothing to me. Gaining the ability to have normal sleep patterns and not changing the clocks is infinitely better.
I do not care what the time is, as long as it stays consistent. My sleep is fucked up for 2x2 weeks every fucking year for no good reason.
Or Americans are morons
You must be new here
For starters, those places have sidewalks, and street lamps, and generally care about pedestrians.
Some kids are straight walking on the side of a 4 lane highway to school right now.
But to be clear: the solution is not changing the time but adding pedestrian infrastructure. It would solve many more problems than kids getting hit.
Except haven’t we delayed school start times significantly compared to the 70s now?
So we issue Little Johnny a retroreflective PT belt, and/or start the school day 30 minutes later on the west end of each time zone. Problem solved.
It’s not the 1970’s anymore. The fact that a bunch of idiot boomers hated change is no reason to keep this idiot system.
People didn’t like the fact that it was still nearly dark when they got their lunch break at work either.
Yeah but it’s dark in the morning anyway. Elementary school here starts at like 7am, that is a bigger problem than the DST. I thought they hated it because they switched it back in January? If it just never changed I’m sure it would not feel so shocking.
Already we do 8 months of DST and only 4 of EST here.
Why the fuck do schools start so early and let out so early? It’s like everything is engineered by some asshole trying to make everyone miserable.
Agreed. I am so glad my kids are grown, but I can still remember personally walking to school so early. It’s nonsense. Also here if they were sensible they’d run school through the summer (when it’s too hot to do much) and give the kids long winter and spring breaks instead (when there is more going on here). But nobody can accuse the last 20 years of Florida’s government of being sensible. Not since Lawton Chiles have we had an actual good governor. Locally it’s more hit & miss but state level it’s been a string of misses.
I didn’t care until I had to take care of my niece. During half of the school year it’s dark outside going to the bus. And why are we fighting what nature intended our body clocks to be? I have to get up for work at 4:30AM, it’s hard even with blackout curtains to get the room dark at 8-9PM.
So why not keep time as a constant and if individual places want to change times they can do that
Even just single states can have vastly different sunrise and sunset times and changing 300m people’s schedules so that a few people can have a few extra minutes of sun in the morning for part of the year seems absolutely ridiculous
A local school district could very easily do a 1 hour shift as the sunrise gets later so that it properly aligns with their local school pickup times
Exactly! Why does no one ever consider changing the time they do something instead of making the whole country adjust to time change? I know with schools, maybe their starting times are geared to when parents have to be a work or something, but surely they can figure out how to adjust their particular schedules around their particular needs and leave the rest of us alone.
“but then things would be different from when i was a child and that makes me scared and angry.”
I’ll give you the only argument I ever give for this.
Congress once voted to end it, the backlash from constituents was severe and they could not reimplement it fast enough.
Congress once voted to end it, the backlash from
constituentsbusinesses was severe and they could not reimplement it fast enough.Ftfy. Fuck those greedy pricks
No they enacted permanent DST in the 70s. OP is asking for arguments against ending DST. The backlash against permanent DST in the 70s was because kids going to school in the early morning darkness were being hit y cars.
They went about it in a stupid way and now we’re doomed for all time because it gets pointed to as proof we can never end DST 🥲
But they changed it suddenly in January, instead of just not changing back in the fall. That was dumb.
I think we should just use sidereal and let the hours of the day rotate smoothly over the year.
Just hypothesizing here, but it wouldn’t surprise me if there was some union/club/cabal of industrial clock adjusters (you know, someone has to adjust the clocks of city halls etc) that spend a lot of money on ensuring that their members have a predictable income. I just made it up, and I have no reason for this claim beyond it being in line with how everything else works in the US. And Epstein was of course a high-ranking member of that too. And Bush somehow wasn’t.
There kinda is. Stores get more customers when there’s daylight in the evenings, specifically when most people are off work. So they tend to like daylight savings time because it maximizes that time window. These stores tend to lobby against bills for removing DST to keep their sales and profits high
Hey we only have about half the Clockwinder files, Bush could absolutely still show up
How big is the actual effect on most of the US anyway?
I mean, most of the US is located surprisingly far to the south (e.g. Washington lying on a same latitude as the southern tip of Italy, Los Angeles as Northern Africa), so I would assume it to be not that big a deal, as seasonal changes of daylight are limited?
