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.
I need one of those “unpopular opinion” threads. I’m actually ok with it the way it is.
Why? There is literally no argument for changing. It was proposed originally in a work of SATIRE by Benjamin Franklin. The US adopted a policy out of a satirical work
JUST! DO! THINGS! AT A! DIFFERENT! TIME! DAMMIT!!!
If you feel like time should always be an hour ahead, just do things an hour early! There’s no need to change our entire reckoning of time
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.
This is just a half measure. They need to fix the tilt of the Earth for a real solution to this problem.
Who even fucking cares anymore? How about demanding proof of life from the Senate Majority Leader? Stop wasting your breath on this bullshit.
I’m too lazy to find my years old comment on this but they didn’t vote on it because they pocketed it to use as a rider base or ticket.
There is literally no opposition, they wanted to use it to pass other bills or measures at the same time because it has complete bipartisan support.
Congress sucks ass.
As someone who works too damn early, please let’s be sensible and do permanent standard time.
I’m sorry Canada, you’re usually right, but you’re wrong about this
To be fair, Saskatchewan of all places actually did it right. BC surprised me. Alberta makes perfect sense with Marlena at the helm.
We are further north. I went daylight time because it leaves more daylight after work.
Even here in the Midwest I feel the same. I’d rather have the sunlight during my time, not while I’m at work.
I tried to have the conversation of just doing away with time zones all together with my wife once. She could not understand that the number associated with when it gets daylight and when it gets dark is arbitrary. Instead of getting daylight around 6am it would be getting daylight around 10am (if we adopted UTC for example) or gets dark around midnight (12AM). The weird thing is she lived in Alaska far enough north that during the summer it didn’t even really get dark at night. I also wanted to talk about the alternative calendars like the IFC or the Gormanian but I’m pretty sure I would have broken her brain. She’s pretty sharp but apparently abstract thought about concrete things like dates and time are a bridge too far.
I get you and I’ve had similar thoughts for myself, but just want to make sure, you do realize that we’re the weird ones here right?
Oh absolutely but it would make everything SOOO much simpler in the long run.
Getting rid of this and getting the u.s. to finally do to metric are my two low bar societal dreams before I die
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.
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…
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 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.
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!
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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 believe that if this passes, Ontario immediately switches as well, since they passed intrepid leading-edge legislation to change if everyone else changes.
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.)
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.
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 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 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
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.
*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.
As I always say, “A broken clock is right twice 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.
That’s why I say “stopped clock”. Which is how I heard it as a kid.
laughs in gettier.
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.
I have also heard it as a stopped clock.
“Broken clock” is probably like “Play it again, Sam” or “Luke, I am your father.” Phrases you think were said but never actually are.
This would expand that to four hours a day.
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…”
Ending the clock change is a great idea. The question becomes, do we want to:
Go the permanent daylight saving route. Be an hour off from the rest of the world adding to the stack of weird and arguably stupid things the USA does different so we can have a bit of light after work instead of questioning why we’re working our lives away. Also, drastically increase the number of morning injuries and fatalities, especially among children, as schools will be starting in the dark.
OR
Be sane.
It appears Congress has spoken.
Why we don’t move schools to start later in winter so they start in sunlight
You’d also have to change working hours for parents so they can get their kids ready for school.
Cool let’s do it
But then you need to change the working hours for their co-workers who depend on them. Then some of the business partners of the companies that have a large number of employees that changed their working hours.
Eventually we get right back to where we started. The reason we change the clocks is because we decided that as a society, parts of the world that have a significant angle to the sun (which have a limited amount of daylight in the winter, and an excess amount of daylight in the summer) so we came up with a system to deal with that fact in a fairly organized way. There won’t be a good solution to this, but simply changing the clocks twice a year is probably the least worst of all options.
That kids darkness thing is so stupid. Our kids start school in the dark they are not dying on the streets.
Because of existing time zones aren’t we already different from the rest of the world? You make other good points but the rest of the world comparison seems odd. If anything just picking one is more consistent and safer regardless. I mean if you wanna talk about weird, the entire mainland china is one time zone, China Standard Time.
Or the fact that countries change to DST at different times if at all.
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.
I am very surprised by the push back to this I’m reading in the comments. Keeping time stable will on average, be a 30 minute difference relative to the sun, and folks are fearing they will spend their entire days mired in darkness? I don’t get it.
The US isn’t know for a well educates populace.
When fast food chains tried releasing a 1/3rd pound burger they failed horribly because people thought 1/3 was less than a 1/4 pound burger.
