Permanent Daylight Saving Time
Here’s an article about the move to make Daylight Saving Time permanent.
Hear, hear! I say. Being a nightowl, I very much prefer having more hours of daylight at the end of the day. But I’m aware that for those who must get up very very early, permanent Daylight Saving Time would mean a lot of darkness in the morning and even for the morning commute.
If you live in more southernly latitudes of the US, it probably wouldn’t affect you too much. But the further north you go, the more extreme the winter darkness. So this question could pit the morning people against the night people.
I’m a night person:
This was attempted in 1973 / 74 if you recall. The net effect was that it was dark out at 9:00 am. Quite a boom in reflective tape and armbands for youngsters commuting to school at our latitude. Mr. Nixon was persuaded this would lower fuel consumption. When it was a bust the policy was repealed.
(The national 55 mph highway speed limit was another such gambit. CAFE standards were another. Federal subsidies to mass transit were another. Tax credits for home insulation were another. Anything but (1) removing price controls on petroleum products, (2) financing road construction and road maintenance out of tolls, registration fees, and excises on motor fuels; (3) market pricing of public hydroelectric power; and (4) experimenting with indexed controls on utilities’ employee compensation plans, dividend issues, and retained income in lieu of controlling customer prices. One thing politicians do not do is act to make the cost of consumption less opaque, in part because that causes confused people and special-pleaders to squawk).
Not in favor of year round DST. But I’ve always proposed a solution to us photon depleted New Englanders: move New England to the Atlantic time zone. Being on the far eastern end of the EST is not good for sun lovers. After visiting Ohio and seeing the extreme difference between the west side and the east side we get way too much early sun in the summer and way too early darkness in the winter.
If you are much north of 45deg, morning darkness is pretty brutal, even if you don’t get up until an unseemly hour. And in the canyons in parts of the rockies, where the sun doesn’t come up until 10.30am, and still goes down at 4pm, for some reason, beyond the brevity, it seems “wrong”. I don’t lament the early onset of night (I like the evening/night darkness!), but I kind of like the morning(s) to be clear and bright in order to get my engines started.
And, yes, I realize that personal preferences are no basis with which to form a national/public policy! 🙂
I just wish states would choose a time zone and stick with it, without changing every six months. If that means putting states in the northern tier of the country one zone east, so be it.
One can’t keep on switching it around. Every time it gets switched the cows get all confused and don’t know what time to get milked.
It’s not so much north vs south, it’s east versus west within the time zone. If you’re in Boston or New York, it gets dark very early, so year-round DST is attractive. If you’re in Michigan or Ohio, it gets dark late (and stays dark later in the morning), so DST isn’t so desirable.
I’m a night person but it is just too dark in the morning in winter with year-round DST.
I live in central Texas and I wish we didn’t have to change every 6 months. Also when we had young kids, when it was DST, we had to watch the kids playing outside too long into the evening.
I just wish states would choose a time zone and stick with it,
Arizona has chosen to ignore DST. We are Mountain Time Zone and my “smart clocks” all went to DST Sunday morning. The clock in my car, a Honda Pilot, thinks it is DST in spite of the owners’ manual assuring me that the Honda clock recognizes those states that don’t do DST. There is no way to manually set it. My electronic alarm clock resets its self from a satellite every night and is also ignoring my attempts to reset it. Fortunately, the house is full of old clocks that work just fine if I remember to wind them every day.
Being in a Northern latitude (42N or so) and at the eastern side of the Eastern Time Zone, making DST permanent would make the latest sunrise ~8:10am. First light is 30-40 minutes earlier. That would be fine by me.
I am on the western end of a time zone, so I agree with Jimmy – it is the location. How about a compromise – make more time zones – in 1/2 hour increments.
Mike K, not being able to correct the clocks must be really annoying! On my car, I have to manually set DST, which I did easily yesterday morning on the way to church.
Liz, India, being longer than it is wide, decided to have a single time zone half an hour between its two natural choices. Right now, at 8:45 p.m. EDT, it’s 6:15 a.m. in India.
Oh, darn. Reminds me I have to trundle out to the garage and change the car’s clock. Thanks.
I am a night person who LOVES DST.
Also a photography buff. The longer the ‘Golden Hour’ the better.
Well I can think of one reason for making DST permanent: it means I don’t have to get up at 2:00 am twice a year to change my clocks.
Ok, I know I could do it the night before or the next morning, but it’s a good joke and I only get to use it twice a year!
Mike K on March 9, 2020 at 7:13 pm said:
I just wish states would choose a time zone and stick with it,
Arizona has chosen to ignore DST.
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Time to follow Arizona – quit messing with the clocks.
Nobody needs DST for the reasons it was first promulgated (not including the one actually cited in Neo’s link to Rubio’s bill).
With flex-time, working from home, stores open 24/7, international companies, etc. — the clock-time is less important than ever before.
Somebody is always being inconvenienced for the benefit of somebodies else.
Let’s just call the whole thing off.
When it is Noon the sun should be (almost) directly overhead. Anything otherwise is fooling around with mother nature. I am something of a night owl myself, but for me changing the time twice a year makes things worse, not better.
Somehow, people in Northern Alaska survive weeks without the sun coming up and weeks without it setting. I have relatives that are missionaries in North Alaska. I just wish they would leave time one way or another.
neo, if you are a night owl why do you want more daylight?
No. Get rid of it completely. We already have more daylight in the summer, so there is no need for it. The kids already have to wait for the bus in the dark in the portions of the year where DST intrudes into the late fall and early spring. It’s also hard to get the kids to bed in the summer when it’s light outside. I want to get rid of, not extend it to the whole year. That just seems foolish, and I’m surprised that it has gotten this much traction. The article seemed to be parroting arguments that the writer read from somewhere and and didn’t completely understand. I’m also an amateur astronomer in Texas, and we HATE it. It means having to wait an extra hour before it gets dark.
neo, if you are a night owl why do you want more daylight?
Not to speak for neo, but as a fellow night owl: It’s not that we like darkness. On the contrary, we like daylight, but our waking hours are shifted a couple hours later than average. So we prefer daylight shifted in that direction. If nothing else, it’s harder to sleep till 8am if sunrise is at 5am.
AesopFan, “Let’s just call the whole thing off.” Amen! As the margarine commercial said, it’s not nice to fool with Mother Nature. Go with the time zone that places noontime sun and warmth more or less at noon, and live with it. Arizona has it right.
It occurs to me that rather than changing the clocks we could simply adjust the start and end time of the typical day; school day, work day, store hours. For example, sometime around early March school opens at 7:30am rather than 8:30am.
That might be more difficult for people to adjust to.
We have time zones to try to get the mid-day sun in the middle of the sky. We live on a sphere, and we use the Babylonian’s system to divide circles and spheres, so 360 degrees and 24 hour days (the Babylonian’s liked things evenly divisible by 6). 360 divided by 24 is 15, so roughly every 15 degrees we have a new time zone.
Except the Chinese. They love government and administration, so when the sun is overhead in Beijing it is noon in the entire empire, no matter where the sun actually is, or isn’t. Degree-wise, China should have 5 time zones, but they stick to one,
For the record, I’m with those voting to abolish DST. Oh, and the folks complaining about a lack of daylight on the western edge of time zones and the folks making the same claim in more northern latitudes (and southern) are both correct.
I would be much happier if the clocks didn’t change twice a year. It bothers me to have to adjust my sense of what time it is. If they would stop changing it that would be great, I don’t care what time they settle on.
It occurs to me that rather than changing the clocks we could simply adjust the start and end time of the typical day; school day, work day, store hours. For example, sometime around early March school opens at 7:30am rather than 8:30am.
A half-hour adjustment between 1 November and 10 January (5:00 to 4:30, 9:00 to 8:30) would provide for closing times before nightfall just about everywhere. No clue if it would irritate people more than DST does.
This is an anachronism that should go. We are growing ever less dependent on natural sunlight for our activities.
Sh##canning DST altogether is the best solution. It was a federal government initiative so it’s obviously of no merit. The double-nickel speed limit was dumb beyond belief, conceived by the same kind of morons. I’m with an earlier comment that New England should move to the Atlantic time zone. Makes great sense so it won’t happen.
An Oldie but a Goodie:
https://youtu.be/0x4GQDoN0Lk
Makes great sense so it won’t happen.
I’m thinking your post must be an attempt at parody.
Why don’t people and organizations adjust their own schedules to use daylight how they like it instead of demanding a sweeping change that applies to all people?
Steve walsh on March 10, 2020 at 6:35 am said:
It occurs to me that rather than changing the clocks we could simply adjust the start and end time of the typical day; school day, work day, store hours. For example, sometime around early March school opens at 7:30am rather than 8:30am.
That might be more difficult for people to adjust to.
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IIRC, that’s one reason DST was implemented. The government even then thought the peons were too stupid to do something this simple.
Another reason, probably more practical, was that nothing with times on it had to be reprinted with the changes. It is, IMO, a case of good for one side, bad for another — but the balance is moving toward getting rid of the changes in any case. People can and will adjust easily; businesses (public, private, whatever) have the bigger problem, but it’s not as bad as before we did so much on-line and 24/7.
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Frederick on March 10, 2020 at 3:02 pm said:
Why don’t people and organizations adjust their own schedules to use daylight how they like it instead of demanding a sweeping change that applies to all people?
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As I speculated above, the PTB make other people change because they can.
It’s a matter of control, and their convenience taking priority over that of the general public.
Rufus T. Firefly on March 10, 2020 at 7:59 am said:
We have time zones to try to get the mid-day sun in the middle of the sky. …
Except the Chinese. They love government and administration, so when the sun is overhead in Beijing it is noon in the entire empire, no matter where the sun actually is, or isn’t. Degree-wise, China should have 5 time zones, but they stick to one,
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Only people in one rather narrow slice of each time zone have the sun directly overhead at what we call Noon.
IMO, the Chinese system actually makes sense, in a grotesque kind of authoritarian way, given that people and businesses probably adjust their activities to the actual sun-time in their locality.
It may be like having Greenwich Mean Time as a “standard” for certain activities, regardless of local time (can’t bring them to mind right now, but I seem to remember reading somewhere….).
Why don’t people and organizations adjust their own schedules to use daylight how they like it instead of demanding a sweeping change that applies to all people?
It’s a coordination problem. It’s hard for a single entity to do that if no one else is doing it. DST allows for a coordinated shift.
As the clock changing has become simpler and easier – my bedside clock and programmable thermostats have a DST switch and my electronic devices and autos adjust themselves – the time change has become less burdensome.
steve walsh on March 10, 2020 at 8:17 pm said:
As the clock changing has become simpler and easier – my bedside clock and programmable thermostats have a DST switch and my electronic devices and autos adjust themselves – the time change has become less burdensome.
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True, but it’s the principle of the thing.
First you mess with time, by government force, then you end up with socialism.
The exercise of agency just becomes less burdensome.
https://babylonbee.com/news/virus-that-has-killed-many-people-overseas-now-spreading-in-the-us
Today the clocks, tomorrow the health care system.
Beautiful dancing, Neo — thank you.
Of course, it helps if you like Chopin. And soft purple, and twilight….. :>)))