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Permanent Daylight Saving Time? Florida Says Yes, but It’s Not So Simple

nytimes.com

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Re: Permanent Daylight Saving Time? Florida Says Yes, but It’s Not So Simple

#231

Post by megaman22 »

dragonwriter wrote: post #56
benrbray wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes! I've always thought that we have it backwards. Why do we give ourselves more daylight in the summer when the days are naturally longer? If anything we should move them forward in the winter when we actually need it. That or eliminate it altogether, keeping "daylight-time" the default.

> Why do we give ourselves more daylight in the summer when the days are naturally longer? If Because: (1) Businesses want to keep consistent hours, (2) lots of work is more efficient with natural light (and people are better at getting up for work when it isn't significantly pre-dawn that they have to do that), (3) people seem more prone to do non-work activity out of the home after work and when there is sunlight;…

For white-collar office work, many of us would probably be happier if we shifted our indoor, artificially lit, never-see-the-sky-anyway working hours to something like 4pm-midnight. Get some daylight that you could really actually use.

Re: Permanent Daylight Saving Time? Florida Says Yes, but It’s Not So Simple

#232

Post by [deleted] »

birdmanjeremy wrote: post #189
castis wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Come on, acting dramatic without offering anything to the discussion is completely useless behavior. Why is it terrible?

It appears someone beat me to it, take a look above. It's been a topic of discussion here before, and there are some very good reasons why this is not the case. Like not knowing what time someone might be awake in a different location, or not knowing what business hours might be across the world.

[deleted]

Re: Permanent Daylight Saving Time? Florida Says Yes, but It’s Not So Simple

#233

Post by mikeash »

what10th wrote: post #128
wellactually wrote: post #101

> The problem? Florida doesn’t have the authority to adopt daylight saving time year-round. > The federal government controls the nation’s time zones, as well as the start and end dates of daylight saving time. States can choose to exempt themselves from daylight saving time — Arizona and Hawaii do — but nothing in federal law allows them to exempt themselves from standard time.

we're all familiar with the article in the constitution that gives the federal government the power to decide for states how to set their clocks, i assume. i guess you can always count on the times to advocate for centralized power

I don’t see any advocacy here.

Re: Permanent Daylight Saving Time? Florida Says Yes, but It’s Not So Simple

#234

Post by ghaff »

zanny wrote: post #212
bostonpete wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that in parts of the Northeast, permanent EST would have significant deficiencies in the summer while permanent EST-1 would have significant deficiencies in the winter. Permanent EST: As it is, the sun rises in Boston before 5:30 AM from May 9-July 25, 2.5 months. With permanent EST, the sun would rise before 4:30 AM for those 2.5 months. People would much rather have that sunlight later in the day whe…

You only have the cultural expectation of "always get up at 7am" because of the insane timezone system. If sunrise changes throughout the year, changing the time you wakeup is the natural answer. Having an obtuse and indecipherable timekeeping system instead is insane. The answer is to get up at 5 in the Summer and 7 in the Winter, or even better to get up at 10 in the Summer and 12 in Winter since you would put ever…

In other words, DST provides a convenient coordination function that more or less aligns to majority preferences.

>Its less overhead to change business hours than every clock

I'm not convinced. A LOT of customer-facing business (restaurants, retail, government offices, etc.) have fixed hours. Sure. They can individually publish their "personal DST" shift--which is of course just like having DST for anyone working for them.

Personally, I'm generally flexible enough these days that I don't really care much any longer though I'd be fine with New England moving to Atlantic time and eliminating DST.

Re: Permanent Daylight Saving Time? Florida Says Yes, but It’s Not So Simple

#235

Post by askvictor »

qbrass wrote: post #218
gt_ wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would mourn the full effect of "midnight" poetics, as in Eric Clapton's "After Midnight" or Gladys Knight's "Midnight Train To Georgia".

Change "midnight" to "mid-night" and things work well enough. "It's 5 O'Clock Somewhere" loses all meaning, along with anything else referencing the 9-5 workday.

And good riddance to the 9-5 workday; it's a relic of an work-era long gone. In terms of poetry and art, well yes, people will not quite understand the reference eventually, but this is already the case with older art (who understands the references in 20's folk music?)

Re: Permanent Daylight Saving Time? Florida Says Yes, but It’s Not So Simple

#236

Post by megaman22 »

stult wrote: post #66
inetknght wrote: post #28

> In parts of Maine, for example, between Thanksgiving and Christmas, the sun sets before 4 p.m. — more than an hour earlier than it does in Detroit, at the other end of the Eastern time zone. Why is the solution "permanent daylight savings"? Why is it not "let's split up the timezones better"?

Or, why is the solution not "who cares, we have electric lights."?

Hopefully they are expensive, full-spectrum bulbs that allow producing Vitamin D, or else everybody is gobbling a handful of supplements every day. SAD is a real thing.

Re: Permanent Daylight Saving Time? Florida Says Yes, but It’s Not So Simple

#237

Post by ThrustVectoring »

mkempe wrote: post #89
ThrustVectoring wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a ton of existing contracts and agreements that reference particular times. It's much more efficient to just move solar noon over an hour than to renegotiate all those agreements, assuming that the new time is considered "better".

What would be examples of such contracts, where you need solar noon to be at 1300 instead of 1200?

If you want to have a bunch of people who typically get ready at 0800 with their children for school at 0830 and work at 0900, it's much easier to adjust what time 0800 is compared to solar noon rather than have a negotiation between various employers, schools, school busses, school meal subcontractors, etc, to simultaneously replace times people need to be places by +/- 1 hour.

Most of the timing isn't formalized to contracts, but is to customary agreements.

Re: Permanent Daylight Saving Time? Florida Says Yes, but It’s Not So Simple

#238

Post by marshray »

Eliminating changes for DST - good.

Introducing a fifth timezone in the lower 48 - bad. Are they trying to open a stock exchange in Miami to open an hour earlier than New York?

Just dump this abomination of DST and stay on Standard Time.

Re: Permanent Daylight Saving Time? Florida Says Yes, but It’s Not So Simple

#239

Post by pc2g4d »

Ajedi32 wrote: post #81
fold wrote: post #17

I wouldn't mind everyone moving to UTC. Sure, only people in Greenwich would be able to eat lunch at 12 noon. But at least it would simplify my life as a programmer.

So you want to abolish time zones: https://qntm.org/abolish

This isn't actually discussing abolition of time zones---it's discussing going from ~24 time zones to having only 1 time zone. It essentially maximizes the errors inherent in having a finite number of time zones for an infinite number of locations on the planet.

Which is why we need not one time zone, but infinite time zones. Let time zones be continuous rather than discrete.

Now when somebody says "It's noon" we know the sun is exactly over their head. Not slightly off because they live to the eastern or western extreme of their time zone, but exactly.

Okay, so to the problem of "is it okay to call Uncle Steve in Melbourne?"

My increasingly-intelligent digital assistant (also known as a smart phone) knows who Uncle Steve is, and where he lives (thanks to his address and phone number, entered into my contact list). Based on his location and the (UTC) clock in the phone, the device calculates Steve's continuous local time. Now with greater precision than under the traditional discrete timezone system, I can determine where Steve is at regular to typical waking/sleeping hours.

Whereas lumping the world into a single timezone maximizes the divergence between the clock's reading and the sun's position, moving to infinite time zones minimizes the divergence to zero.

However, in this fully relative world it's more difficult to speak about specific moments of time. The State of the Union Address would be advertised as happening 7pm 77°00′32.63606″W

What does that mean in my own local time zone?

Well, once again technology will save us from this difficulty by automatically translating times on television announcements / Twitter posts / in telephone conversations from someone else's local time to ours.

---

It's fun to imagine a world with infinite time zones, but I think the "abolition" article and this exploration illustrate together that the time zone system we have is a reasonable, human-friendly compromise between extremes.

Re: Permanent Daylight Saving Time? Florida Says Yes, but It’s Not So Simple

#240

Post by saalweachter »

slowmovintarget wrote: post #225
saalweachter wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're at a latitude that only gets 8-9 hours of daylight in the winter, there just isn't much daylight to go around. If you're adding it to the evening, you're taking it from the morning. While I agree that the sun setting at 3:30 is a drag, I'm not sure pushing that to 4:30 really helps much. During the summer, when you push sunset from 8pm to 9pm, that's at least an hour most people get to use (they are still a…

For the New England states, they're far enough East that it makes sense for them to join the AST time-zone and do away with DST. Birds start chirping here at 3:30am... that ain't right.

They're not just East, they're North. If you throw Burlington, VT into the AST, you've then got 8:30 sunrises in the winter.

I think you could make an argument for "double daylight savings time", so that you're 3 months of UTC-5 in the winter and 3 months of UTC-3 in the summer, with UTC-4 in between (which I guess would be AST with "daylight savings time" in the summer and "daylight payback time" in the winter), but when you've got 16 hours of daylight in the summer you've got to put them somewhere. Do you really want to have the sun set at midnight so that it's easier to sleep in in the mornings?

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