In May, the House Energy and Commerce Committee voted 48-1 in favor of the Sunshine Protection Act. The U.S. Senate voted unanimously in March 2022 to make daylight saving time permanent but the House never took up the measure in the face of opposition. The proposal the House will consider next week would allow states to opt out.
Standard Time should be the default. And sadly, we don’t even have that. Even our Standard Time has been mucked with. This website is a good source (not mine by the way). https://savestandardtime.com/ Let businesses change their hours instead of making people change clocks.
Let businesses change their hours instead of making people change clocks.
Most businesses in the USA can change their hours , but the hours that make sense for them depend on schedules they don’t control.
False.
Should split the difference and go with a permanent 30 minute offset just to screw with everybody.
Every three months, to capture granularity.
We wouldn’t be the only ones. Several countries, territories and islands have half hour offsets from their neighbors. A few even have ±15 minute offsets.
Of the two options they could have standardized on they picked the worst one. This literally defeats the point of noon
That is admittedly the best argument in favor of standard I’ve heard.
We should all just use UTC. To be honest. It’s not like noon has to be at 12’oclock everywhere.
It would save me some trouble at work for sure. We have to match timezones and calculate utc from local timestamps for millions of transactions a day from across the country. If local time and timezone was just utc, sm that saves me the extra steps.
Though days suddenly get really messed up. It would be “tomorrow” in the east coast before it is even dark in the summer. And, worse, it would be “tomorrow” in Hawaii a bit after lunch. In s practical sense that just seems confusing and annoying, so maybe it’s not the most practical outside of datetime data.
Feel free. There’s nothing stopping you.
The reason it’s not feasible is because most human activity happens during the daylight hours. As such, having the unit of a “day” cover what’s typically a day makes things easier.
For example, banks , businesses and schools need to have a unified schedule across a jurisdiction. If the jurisdiction specifies a utc offset that defines the official business day you just have a less coordinated timezone system.
You also make knowing roughly what part of the waking cycle other parts of the world are in much harder. Right now it’s 0100 in utc-5. So it’s 0800 in utc+2, and people are eating breakfast, at work, getting kids to school and so on. If I want to know that without timezones I need to know where they are on the planet and what the relevant legal jurisdiction has mandated as coordinated business time. That’s effectively just a worse version of timezones.The human conception of time is intrinsically linked to spatial location. Fighting that is just making it hard for no reason. What we need to do is stop fiddling with the time. No more (major) clock adjustments. Daylight savings only sucks because of the switch , so we should just pick one and stay.
I keep hearing this and can’t believe people are serious with this suggestion. In my mind it’s the most ridiculous solution to time tracking.
SHUT THE FUCK UP! OKAY? They vote on this every fucking year and it dies in the Senate. Big Clock is going to lobby this shit until I die. Just shut up. Stop talking about it. Daylight Savings will be in the USA for at least another hundred years.
I didn’t even say anything!
Dude, what did he say?! Shut up!
It’s actually been gaining steam over the past 5-ish years. If it dies in the end, it’s because people can’t agree which time should be permanent.
People in America can’t even agree on voting for a pedo or not. What makes you think they could agree on a timezone?
MAGAs have been pushing it because it’s one of the few innocuous issues they’ve got that isn’t a human rights atrocity.
It passed in the Senate. It died in the house.
I imagine it’ll be the same when they federally legalize weed. Each chamber will take turns killing it for decades.
^^^^ Legitimately one of the funniest things I’ve read in a long time.
So is this making “spring forward” permanent, or “fall back” permanent?
It’s making what it is now permanent. So it gets dark at like midnight almost.
No, it’s about eliminating those.
spring forward
Boo, the permanent time should be standard time, it’s standard for a good reason.
Standard time blows unless your work hours are something absurd like 5am to 1pm.
A 9 to 5 is still a 9 to 5 no matter which way you shift the clock
China has one timezone for the whole country - even though it crosses multiple time zones and no daylight saving. It’s that simple. When I lived in Australia, it was crazy. Some states had 30 minutes time difference.
Trump just fired the federal election commission and fucks kids. Epstien files.
I just saw that. What. The. Fuck.
Exactly.
Of course there might be somethibg horrible in this bill that they want to sneak through.
Getting rid of this and getting the u.s. to finally do to metric are my two low bar societal dreams before I die
getting the u.s. to finally do to metric
Well, depending on how you measure that, the metric system was adopted in the US federally either 50 or 35 years ago…
When I was in 1st and 2nd grade, maybe even 3rd (early 80s) we were learning everything metric. But by the time I was in middle school we were having to learn standard again.
We mostly didn’t learn about grams and ounces till highschool, but some Lebowski Overachievers figured it out in middle school…
The US is supposedly already converted to metric.
technicallythetruth
Per the Metric Act of 1866, the US customary units of length and mass were redefined based on the international metric system, making them essentially just weird conversion factors of the meter and kilogram.
Lucy removes the football in 3…2…
Was going to say. They already passed this, and then the Senate dragged it’s feet
This originally gained steam in the senate maybe 6 years ago? Shocked it is still kicking
I love living in one of the 2 states that DON’T change time . I absolutely hated it and always thought it was stupid all the back and forth it’s only an hour, just leave it at one time (honestly I don’t care which). I used to live in the Midwest and the time change was the bane of my existence
I like late sunshine.
I don’t care which we choose. Just choose one and that’s that. The day’s length doesn’t change; only the moment we start/stop things relative to the sun.
But this is the biggest sticking point. If you talk to experts, everyone agrees this is fucking stupid. The divide is over which way to go.
And that really doesn’t matter because you can just change what hours your office or school or whatever operates to suit your ideal daylight situation. And if you still want to change based on longer days in summer, plenty of places have “summer hours” and are open later to take advantage of later sunset, so this really isn’t a new concept.
That’s just not how businesses work. We need times to be consistent so that shipping, etc all works.
Yes, we all need to be in agreement about what time it is, but every business has different working hours. Starbucks opens before Staples for a good reason. And Starbucks has a later close time in the summer because there’s more demand later if the sun is still up. If we all change all clocks one way or the other, Starbucks keeps the same schedule relative to the sun and what other people are doing. They don’t strictly stick to the same open and close times if we decided to move the clocks by 6 hours, so there’s no reason to believe that they would if it only moved 1 hour.
Not sure you got my point though. Starbucks has a supplier. They need to be on the same schedule as their supplier for deliveries to work. And that supplier supplies numerous other businesses.
This would be about the only good thing Republicans have done ever if they pass this. Hope they don’t let states opt out. When I lived up north by Canada, the logic was “you don’t want kids having to walk to/from school when it’s dark!!” Okay, so… wow, did you know they could change school hours.
I don’t know, we tried it in the 70s and people hated it enough to switch back pretty quickly. Under permanent DST, sunrise in January would not be until after 8 AM, while under permanent standard time sunrise in June would be shortly after 4 AM.
i remember that. it was my first year in school and i still remember going to school “at night”. i was not a fan. yes, school was only across the street, but i did not like the dark–at all. mom had to walk me to school instead of just watching from the back steps like she usually did back then.
i am firmly on team standard time; and i’d rather keep changing (and preferably with the old time change dates and shorter dst) than be an hour ahead all year long.
I work from 7am to 5 pm. During the summer I need that extra hour of light to go fishing otherwise it’s not worth the drive. If I can fish for 3 hours after work it’s well worth it
As I always say, “A broken clock is right twice a day.”
This would expand that to four hours a day.
This saying bothers me, this assumes the clock is not running, a working clock could not be running, but a broken clock could just lose a minute a day, and it would never be right but a few times a year.
Or it could be a broken digital clock and then it’s not right at all.
I always heard the saying as, “A stopped clock is right twice a day.”
I’ve never heard it said that way, all the people I have heard say this saying have always used the broken term and it always bothered me.
“Broken clock” is probably like “Play it again, Sam” or “Luke, I am your father.” Phrases you think were said but never actually are.
I have also heard it as a stopped clock.
laughs in gettier.
That’s why I say “stopped clock”. Which is how I heard it as a kid.
Also school: let’s start activities at 6 AM in winter. And not finish until 10PM. No the bus only runs for school hours why do you ask?
When I lived up north by Canada, the logic was “you don’t want kids having to walk to/from school when it’s dark!!” Okay, so… wow, did you know they could change school hours.
The same argument works the other way. Keep noon as the point where the sun is highest. Then change the times of things for appropriate daylight. Daylight savings is just people agreeing to get up an hour earlier. Instead of “9 to 5”, everyone agrees to work 8 to 4. Which coincidentally puts noon perfectly in the middle of the work day. Isn’t that a surprise!
People have a weird fixation on the inherent meaning of certain times of day. Like 9:00 a.m. is ontologically when work begins. It’s strange.
Landscapers and construction want to start as early in the day as possible, but are restricted by noise ordinances designed to protect the sleep of everyone else. They have to wait until after sunrise, and work in the heat of the day in the summer. Daylight Savings Time pushes the summer heat back an hour, letting them work longer and safer.
On standard time, summer sunrises can occur as early as 3:30AM on the eastern edge of some time zones. Forcing landscapers and construction to wait four hours after sunrise until a noise ordinance expires is absurd. Standard time is terrible in the summer.
DST does push the morning back, with morning twilight as late as 9am at high latitudes on the western edge of a time zone. But the solution to that is to redraw the time zone boundaries, not force the entire country to continue doing something as stupid as the time change. These places can adopt DST of the next zone to the west, which is standard time for their current zone.
DST in winter takes an hour of morning daylight from the boss, and gives it back to us as an hour of daylight after work, where we can put it to use. Kids can enjoy year-round outdoor extracurriculars, instead of being limited from November to March due to entirely arbitrary clock settings.
Naw, cat, work begins at 6:30 am. 9 to 5 is just a song for the office folks.
You guys start work at 9?!
Holy shit I’d love to not be up at 5am every morning
I get confused, but what I prefer based on living far north is for evenings to be longer. It seems wrong to me when winter approaches and the sun starts going down around 6-7, then bam, the time change happens and the sun starts going down at 5. It’s the exact opposite of what I’d prefer. I guess people active in the early morning like it. Ultimately I just think it’s dumb to change the clocks. We should just pick one or the other.
Everyone agrees to stop changing. The only contention is how. Stay on DST, or stay on Standard Time. Lots of people say like you, “More daylight in the evening please!” But they don’t realise all DST does is trick people into getting up early by lying to them, and breaking noon from the sun. Staying on standard time keeps the time sun connection. Then the “standard work day” can be changed to the more appropriate 8 to 4. You get the same effect as DST without lies, tricks, and changing solar noon. It’s cleaner than permanent DST.
Isn’t people shifting their schedule by an hour and then back the entire reason the time change sucks? Who cares about “sun-noon connection” or the clocks “lying” to them?
It is. There no reason 8 to 4 would ever need to change. Keep it year-round
We live in time zones. “Standard” time is just as much a fiction as DST. I’ve never lived somewhere where the sun is directly overhead at noon. I suppose such places must exist; some of them might even be on standard time when it does. In my area, it’s closer to directly overhead during DST.
It used to be that towns would set their clocks so solar noon was noon. When time zones are invented they picked one place and that was the standard. I remember reading somewhere once that mountain time was defined as solar union at Denver Union Station because the most important function of time zones is railroad scheduling at the time when the first American time zones were defined
Well, we’re also in the 21st century and this jump an hour twice a year shit makes no sense. We could make timekeeping worldwide way more insane by having it adjust “imperceptibly” over time to auto adjust times worldwide based on true solar noon at each individual clock location using GPS. So all clocks would now have GPS as well to be able to ping their location to get the appropriate time. This… would be insane. We’d have seconds that are longer than a second. LET’S DO IT.
You wouldn’t necessarily have to have GPS in every clock. You could have all the clocks forming an “asynchronous mesh” network. They would all constantly ping each other on a standard frequency and estimate their location using triangulation. That, in combination with scanning for other things like phones, WiFi APs, BLE devices etc, could probably get you surprisingly accurate location data with a big enough network.
That’s, uh, that’s how clocks had always worked before railways.
Wow I didn’t know they had worldwide internet, atomic clocks, and network time protocol servers before the railways…
I mean sure it’s how clocks worked before the railways if you entirely ignore the technology involved!
This is my vote. If we’re going to mess with the clocks, let’s REALLY mess with them. I guess not messing with them would also be okay, though.
Also, right now I’m the central time zone “high noon” is about 1pm, so the noon logic is also bullshit. You’d have to add more time zones and make more changes to keep high noon always close to noon for everyone.
Right now your solar noon is at 1pm because we’re currently on DST, which specifically shifts solar noon to 1pm. That’s how it works. When you “Fall Back” to standard time, your noon will match solar noon again.
School hours are engineered to make sure parents can drop their kids off at the state-funded daycare (which is what most parents consider school) and get to work on time…
And the reason the high-school kids get out first is so they can take care of younger siblings after school, which is a shitty way for teenagers to spend afternoons. (I was lucky, youngest of six.)
We’ve been ready to get rid of the switch for ages in Ontario and Quebec but because of international business we’re stuck waiting for New York to also get rid of it
I believe that if this passes, Ontario immediately switches as well, since they passed intrepid leading-edge legislation to change if everyone else changes.
change the school hours for the shifting daylight hours, you’d also have to change parents’ work schedules… or provide some child care benefits, maybe. and we know how that would go over with this congress and administration.
I hope the Dems read all the small print, like, “Daylight Savings is now permanent…and brown people have no rights…”
*modern day republicans
The OGs were cool back when the Republican Party was the progressive party that wanted to abolish slavery, give women the right to vote, etc.
Then they did pulled the uno reverse card about 90 years ago, and the GOP started becoming America’s Conservative Party.
Just to argue counterpoint: nothing stops your schools or work from changing hours now, whenever the clocks change. Work and school 8 to 4 until dst. Then you work\school 9 to 5.
Conservatives really are doing everything to repeat the Nixon years.
Nixon tried it. Turns out people didn’t like it once they had it and it was switched back.
