How many people are awake at least an hour before DTS sunrise? How many people are awake at least an hour after standard sunset? If the latter group is bigger (who's asleep at 4:30pm?), then they should get the extra daylight hour.
Can we retire the “commute in the morning in the dark and come home at dark”? This is already the reality on the east coast in winter regardless of time.
Yeah, that argument falls flat in the northeast, where not seeing the sun on the way to and from work for weeks is the norm, and boy does it make things gloomy.
Not as severe but Alabama basically does in the evening. In winter the sun sets at 430 because it’s so far east in the time zone. I lived in west GA and would still have preferred permanent DST but that’s just my vote
You are jesting when you say DST, i.e. changing the clocks, is “a wonderful and distinctly American tradition”, yes? It was first proposed by a New Zealander; the first bill to introduce it was in the United Kingdom; the first cities to introduce it were in Canada; and the first countries to introduce it were Germany and Austria.
America had less to do with developing DST than it did with almost any other innovation in the last 150 years. When one considers how much America has been involved in over that time in every other field, DST must rank as one of the least American traditions in modern history. Which makes sense, because it's a policy that is more useful the further away from the equator you get, and the US is a lot further south than Europe and Canada.
I don't understand why "Permanent Standard" is never brought up as an option. It's right there! Don't change the clocks! All you have to do is nothing!
But over and over again the choice between making it worse forever versus only making it worse for 8 months out of the year is the only choice we're given.
People have become so enamoured of clocks that they’ve forgotten that time corresponds to actual solar phenomena.
There are significant benefits to rising with the dawn. In less central latitudes, dawn moves significantly between summer and winter solstice. DST is a fudge to realign clocks with dawn by mis-aligning them with midday.
From that perspective, DST is a perfectly sensible workaround. If we called it “Summer Dawn Adjusted Time” people would at least be discussing what’s actually going on rather than getting distracted into stupid arguments about whether DST actually “saves daylight”.
“Permanent DST” is a nonsense concept. It’s mathematically identical to just scheduling everything an hour earlier. This also ensures that people at different latitudes but the same timezone keep their clocks aligned.
During summer in Australia, the southern states practice DST while the northern states do not. At times in the past, various southern states switched to / from DST at different dates. This is always a cause for tension, especially if you live near a border.
DST makes it administratively easier for the local region to implement distinct summer vs winter hours, at the cost of extra pain for anyone interacting with that region but not resident in it. Not doing DST would leave it up to individual organisations as to whether they wanted to adjust their hours for summertime (and leaves them free to make finer scale adjustments if this makes sense). There are advantages & drawbacks to this.
This is actually the first time I’ve encountered this argument. Perhaps what’s in order is parents (but not schools) getting the day off to honor our sacrifice lol
In an ideal world it will motivate schools and jobs in northern areas where it makes sense to implement summer/winter schedules, and there would be standard days to switch that become conventional by region. Southern states and people with real non office jobs that depend on daylight will go about life as they always have. The clocks will stay the same but the time you get up will be local and regional and set by popular consensus.
I am aware that in practice this will be confusing and chaotic and probably dangerous even. But we are Americans, we like it that way.
This is exactly the system we have now. It's called Daylight Saving Time. There is a standard day where regions change schedules. Southern states can choose not change theirs (only 2 opt out).
The time of the day is arbitrary as long as the date rolls offer when most of us are asleep. It's a question of whether organizations can figure out what time the day starts on their own or whether they need the federal government, bastion of wisdom, to step in and tell people what time it really is according to the season. But maybe we aren't disciplined enough to get out the door earlier in the summer. All I can say is screw the time change and screw all-year dst. Just put me in the Atlantic time zone, presumably in the middle of the ocean, and leave me alone.
Yes, let the people who crave that extra evening sunlight for outdoor activities get up early if they care so much about it, and leave the rest of us alone. It's not reasonable to move the entire country for their benefit.
I agree that permanent DST would be terrible, but I don't agree that it's worth having DST at all. Maybe I'm just biased because my preferred recreational activities don't depend on evening sunlight, but when I lived in Japan I did not miss it. Maybe some people don't mind, but the clock change is incredibly disruptive to people who are not particularly good at mornings or schedule-keeping to begin with.
Messing with the clock to buy people some more evening sunlight in the summer is a clumsy cheat forced upon all of society, obfuscating the natural day for a very narrow benefit for some people. I resent having my days thrown into chaos twice a year so that some other people can play sports or walk their dog for a little longer after work on a Thursday for a few months. Now that I'm thinking on it, I wonder what kind of overlap may exist between people who benefit the most from the artificially extended evenings and people who aren't greatly troubled by the logistics of the clock change.
The international time system exists for a reason. I support ending these games and returning to year-round standard time, like many other countries have always done and get along just fine with.
I like natural sunlight! I'm just not that pressed over whether the sun sets at 8PM or 9PM in the summer. Certainly not enough to accept clock tricks to make it happen.
If I were king, I'd establish permanent standard time as there are health benefits to aligning clocks with 12 noon with that being when the sun is closest to zenith. Or the way it used to be before the politicians fussed with it.
What if we changed the system so that the middle of the day is at midday? If people want to get up early, they would be allowed to change their alarms.
The winter will be fine because it is what it is now and…. What exactly is the problem with having the middle of the day at midday in the summertime? What do we gain by shifting it by an hour?
I’m not going to argue for permanent DST but I would argue for moving the fall back closer to or on Thanksgiving and pushing the spring ahead up a couple of weeks earlier to around the end of February if not President’s Day weekend.
I actually think DST goes on too long already, it should really stop around the equinox. Mornings in early November are too dark. But I don't really think we have the state capacity to make positive changes at this point, which is why I think we should leave it alone.
Evidently important news: summer evenings are great. More evening sunlight in the summer is not better. It just means responsible families can't stargaze, can't enjoy fireworks, can't enjoy campfires, etc. because it doesn't get dark until bedtime. People have fun after sundown all year long - bring back the summer evening!
Nature has always provided us with a clock. Sunrise and sunset. People have always adjusted to the longer and shorter days, but the twice yearly switch messes with your internal clock and disrupts sleep, which I think was always the intention.
Any system that separates solar noon from what people call noon rots our connection to the world.
How many people are awake at least an hour before DTS sunrise? How many people are awake at least an hour after standard sunset? If the latter group is bigger (who's asleep at 4:30pm?), then they should get the extra daylight hour.
Can we retire the “commute in the morning in the dark and come home at dark”? This is already the reality on the east coast in winter regardless of time.
Yeah, that argument falls flat in the northeast, where not seeing the sun on the way to and from work for weeks is the norm, and boy does it make things gloomy.
Is it really the east coast? Or just the northern latitudes?
People in Florida or Georgia don't have that problem
Not as severe but Alabama basically does in the evening. In winter the sun sets at 430 because it’s so far east in the time zone. I lived in west GA and would still have preferred permanent DST but that’s just my vote
You are jesting when you say DST, i.e. changing the clocks, is “a wonderful and distinctly American tradition”, yes? It was first proposed by a New Zealander; the first bill to introduce it was in the United Kingdom; the first cities to introduce it were in Canada; and the first countries to introduce it were Germany and Austria.
America had less to do with developing DST than it did with almost any other innovation in the last 150 years. When one considers how much America has been involved in over that time in every other field, DST must rank as one of the least American traditions in modern history. Which makes sense, because it's a policy that is more useful the further away from the equator you get, and the US is a lot further south than Europe and Canada.
My cursory research indicated Americans adopted it as law first, but in any case every country on earth belongs to America
DST may not be American, but complaining about it sure seems like it.
Haha I assure you that plenty of Europeans complain about it as well, in all the directions enumerated so ably by Kitten.
(Personally, I agree with him that DST is sensible, given that one can't rely on the masses to set their own times responsibly according to the sun.)
I don't understand why "Permanent Standard" is never brought up as an option. It's right there! Don't change the clocks! All you have to do is nothing!
But over and over again the choice between making it worse forever versus only making it worse for 8 months out of the year is the only choice we're given.
People have become so enamoured of clocks that they’ve forgotten that time corresponds to actual solar phenomena.
There are significant benefits to rising with the dawn. In less central latitudes, dawn moves significantly between summer and winter solstice. DST is a fudge to realign clocks with dawn by mis-aligning them with midday.
From that perspective, DST is a perfectly sensible workaround. If we called it “Summer Dawn Adjusted Time” people would at least be discussing what’s actually going on rather than getting distracted into stupid arguments about whether DST actually “saves daylight”.
“Permanent DST” is a nonsense concept. It’s mathematically identical to just scheduling everything an hour earlier. This also ensures that people at different latitudes but the same timezone keep their clocks aligned.
I like the idea of every town adjusting its local clock to solar noon. But timezones are too useful for coordination for us to get rid of them.
During summer in Australia, the southern states practice DST while the northern states do not. At times in the past, various southern states switched to / from DST at different dates. This is always a cause for tension, especially if you live near a border.
DST makes it administratively easier for the local region to implement distinct summer vs winter hours, at the cost of extra pain for anyone interacting with that region but not resident in it. Not doing DST would leave it up to individual organisations as to whether they wanted to adjust their hours for summertime (and leaves them free to make finer scale adjustments if this makes sense). There are advantages & drawbacks to this.
This is actually the first time I’ve encountered this argument. Perhaps what’s in order is parents (but not schools) getting the day off to honor our sacrifice lol
In an ideal world it will motivate schools and jobs in northern areas where it makes sense to implement summer/winter schedules, and there would be standard days to switch that become conventional by region. Southern states and people with real non office jobs that depend on daylight will go about life as they always have. The clocks will stay the same but the time you get up will be local and regional and set by popular consensus.
I am aware that in practice this will be confusing and chaotic and probably dangerous even. But we are Americans, we like it that way.
This is exactly the system we have now. It's called Daylight Saving Time. There is a standard day where regions change schedules. Southern states can choose not change theirs (only 2 opt out).
The time of the day is arbitrary as long as the date rolls offer when most of us are asleep. It's a question of whether organizations can figure out what time the day starts on their own or whether they need the federal government, bastion of wisdom, to step in and tell people what time it really is according to the season. But maybe we aren't disciplined enough to get out the door earlier in the summer. All I can say is screw the time change and screw all-year dst. Just put me in the Atlantic time zone, presumably in the middle of the ocean, and leave me alone.
Yes, let the people who crave that extra evening sunlight for outdoor activities get up early if they care so much about it, and leave the rest of us alone. It's not reasonable to move the entire country for their benefit.
I agree that permanent DST would be terrible, but I don't agree that it's worth having DST at all. Maybe I'm just biased because my preferred recreational activities don't depend on evening sunlight, but when I lived in Japan I did not miss it. Maybe some people don't mind, but the clock change is incredibly disruptive to people who are not particularly good at mornings or schedule-keeping to begin with.
Messing with the clock to buy people some more evening sunlight in the summer is a clumsy cheat forced upon all of society, obfuscating the natural day for a very narrow benefit for some people. I resent having my days thrown into chaos twice a year so that some other people can play sports or walk their dog for a little longer after work on a Thursday for a few months. Now that I'm thinking on it, I wonder what kind of overlap may exist between people who benefit the most from the artificially extended evenings and people who aren't greatly troubled by the logistics of the clock change.
The international time system exists for a reason. I support ending these games and returning to year-round standard time, like many other countries have always done and get along just fine with.
This sounds like the psychotic screed of someone who lives in the basement and never sees natural sunlight
I like natural sunlight! I'm just not that pressed over whether the sun sets at 8PM or 9PM in the summer. Certainly not enough to accept clock tricks to make it happen.
You don't think "thrown into chaos" is overselling things a bit?
Okay maybe a little, but it's annoying and I don't feel that I gain anything from it.
If I were king, I'd establish permanent standard time as there are health benefits to aligning clocks with 12 noon with that being when the sun is closest to zenith. Or the way it used to be before the politicians fussed with it.
Dick Minnis removingthecataract.substack.com
What if we changed the system so that the middle of the day is at midday? If people want to get up early, they would be allowed to change their alarms.
The winter will be fine because it is what it is now and…. What exactly is the problem with having the middle of the day at midday in the summertime? What do we gain by shifting it by an hour?
We gain an hour of daylight in the evening, when nearly everyone is awake.
You can just get up earlier. You don't need to change the clock.
I’m not going to argue for permanent DST but I would argue for moving the fall back closer to or on Thanksgiving and pushing the spring ahead up a couple of weeks earlier to around the end of February if not President’s Day weekend.
I actually think DST goes on too long already, it should really stop around the equinox. Mornings in early November are too dark. But I don't really think we have the state capacity to make positive changes at this point, which is why I think we should leave it alone.
Evidently important news: summer evenings are great. More evening sunlight in the summer is not better. It just means responsible families can't stargaze, can't enjoy fireworks, can't enjoy campfires, etc. because it doesn't get dark until bedtime. People have fun after sundown all year long - bring back the summer evening!
Nature has always provided us with a clock. Sunrise and sunset. People have always adjusted to the longer and shorter days, but the twice yearly switch messes with your internal clock and disrupts sleep, which I think was always the intention.