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.
Trump just fired the federal election commission and fucks kids. Epstien files.
I just saw that. What. The. Fuck.
Noon should be noon, not 1.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
They’ll pick the wrong one, and we’ll have to live with it getting dark at 5 PM for the rest of history.
Why not just move school and work start times an hour or two later in the winter in Colorado then? Why hold the entire country hostage because of niche locations that already have the ability to make local decisions like this?
TIL in 1974 the U.S. tried permanent DST during an energy crisis … it saved little energy, fuel use slightly increased, and public support collapsed after one dark winter, so the law was repealed within 10 months.
God forbid we’d learn from past mistakes.
>more people will be driving to work or to the ski resorts in the dark
Trust me, if you aren’t on I-70 before sunrise on the weekend, don’t bother. You’re not getting to the resort till noon
Why not standard time?
People like daylight time in the summers, because that gives them the opportunity to do things after work in sunlight. For places where they’re getting 16 hours of sunlight, they’d generally prefer sunrise at 5am and sunset at 9pm, rather than 4am to 8pm.
But daylight time is terrible in the winters. Sunlight from 8am to 4pm is probably better than 9am to 5pm.
That’s basically why we had daylight savings switching clocks to begin with. But the fundamental tradeoff in the higher latitudes was always summer versus winter.
Because most of the year is already daylight savings time. We’re only in standard time for 4 months from November to March. It doesn’t sound like a big difference from being 50/50, but we’re in DST twice as long as we’re in standard time.
North/West vs South/East in each time zone
There are 4 time zones in the US
The more North/West you live in a time zone the more you hate DST. The more South/East you live the more you like DST.
If you live in blue you probably hate DST, yellow probably like DST
All stems from states like Michigan should be in CST not EST. If Michigan was in CST then permanent DST would make it EST and they would be in “standard” time still.
Because I want it to be light out later in the day
You like not being able to be outside?
I’d rather have them move the clock an hour backwards in summer. Summer days are so hot nowadays that you can’t be outdoors until after the sun goes down. Summer nights are nice, summer evenings aren’t. With DST you have to go to bed by the time you can be outdoors so you effectively can’t be out during weekdays.
It’s, like, THE STANDARD
Yeah, no clue why everyone’s going DST instead. I think having politicians make science decisions is a really dumb idea.
It’s “standard”, yet only applies 4 months out of 12 a year.
Science?
DST has always been a political decision.
Because light in the evening is better than light at night.
The numbers on the clock have no effect on the amount of daylight.
No, but they have an effect on the amount of daylight you have on your free time, in the evening. Evening being defined by the numbers on the clock.
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.
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.
Is it though?
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.
MAGAs have been pushing it because it’s one of the few innocuous issues they’ve got that isn’t a human rights atrocity.
People in America can’t even agree on voting for a pedo or not. What makes you think they could agree on a timezone?
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.
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.
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 solar 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.
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.
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.
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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!
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’s no reason 8 to 4 would ever need to change. Keep it year-round
Well let’s consider that misunderstanding corrected then. Thanks.
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 wish that were still so. I’m fixated on 9am being the time work used to begin.
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?
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 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
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.)
I hope the Dems read all the small print, like, “Daylight Savings is now permanent…and brown people have no rights…”
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.
That’s why I say “stopped clock”. Which is how I heard it as a kid.
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.
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.
laughs in gettier.
This would expand that to four hours a day.
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
*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.
Sure, but that is such a long time ago. The relevant thing is liberals vs. conservatives. In the 1850s Republicans were the liberal party. It’s funny how now they try to claim credit for Lincoln and it’s uh okay, so who is it that displays confederate flags now? Democrats?
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.
You know, waking up outside of your circadian rhythm can really fuck with you. So, I propose daylight fairness time. Instead of splitting up timezones by hours, we should split timezones by one (1) minute increments. This allows people to most effectively decide their living location to match their own personal circadian rhythm!
this is basically how time worked before we invented railroads
How about we don’t do that, and instead ensure that workers can chose their starting hours so they match their rhythm?
No, that won’t work, and it sounds like you HATE FREEDOM!
Seems like a bad idea for such a wide country.
They aren’t eliminating Time Zones, just Daylight Savings Time.
I think it’s the height that’s the real problem.
Closer to the poles you are the more important it is.
North/West vs South/East in each time zone
There are 4 time zones in the US
The more North/West you live in a time zone the more you hate DST. The more South/East you live the more you like DST.
If you live in blue you probably hate DST, yellow probably like DST
All stems from states like Michigan should be in CST not EST. If Michigan was in CST then permanent DST would make it EST and they would be in “standard” time still.
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
