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.
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.
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!
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.
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!
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.
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 hope the Dems read all the small print, like, “Daylight Savings is now permanent…and brown people have no rights…”
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 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.
laughs in gettier.
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.
This would expand that to four hours a day.
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
*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?
I believe that if this passes, Ontario immediately switches as well, since they passed intrepid leading-edge legislation to change if everyone else changes.
Arizona doesn’t use DST at all