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In Tuesday's Vote, California Opts for Year-Round Daylight Saving

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Re: In Tuesday's Vote, California Opts for Year-Round Daylight Saving

#131

Post by mtgx »

JBlue42 wrote: post #130
tssva wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the voters intent is clear. The question was whether the legislature should be able to make the change not whether they should. If I lived in California I would have voted to provide them the option but that doesn't necessarily mean I think they should. I would expect further debate around the subject at the time legislation is introduced. Let's accept your premise that a vote for the referendum was in…

Yes, this is kind of the issue with a lot of things (props/measures) we get on the ballots. Some are worth a direct vote, others should be phrased in the way you're describing as "this is an issue we'd like you to take up, research, and debate". I personally find it annoying that sometimes we end having to vote directly on things that really fall under the job of our representatives.

I think all democracies would benefit from referendums/petitions that simply force the legislature to put the issue up for debate/vote.

Re: In Tuesday's Vote, California Opts for Year-Round Daylight Saving

#132

Post by masonic »

tssva wrote: post #83
CalChris wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It passed 60-40. The legislature would be foolish to ignore the electorate's clear intent. CA has only a single timezone, the Pacific Timezone.

I don't think the voters intent is clear. The question was whether the legislature should be able to make the change not whether they should. If I lived in California I would have voted to provide them the option but that doesn't necessarily mean I think they should. I would expect further debate around the subject at the time legislation is introduced. Let's accept your premise that a vote for the referendum was in…

  The referendum requires 2/3rds of the representatives of the people to vote to affect the change
1) this wasn't a referendum. It was a Legislative Statute.

2) it needed only a simple majority.

3) California DST implementation has been in violation of CA law for decades. CA law has been late April to late September since 1949.

4) to actually change DST still requires an additional 2/3rds majority vote in BOTH houses of the Legislature in the same session.

Re: In Tuesday's Vote, California Opts for Year-Round Daylight Saving

#133

Post by rtkwe »

logfromblammo wrote: post #81
rtkwe wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then we start running into issues with the secondary/tertiary purpose of schools, daycare, which lets parents work normal 9-5 jobs more easily while having kids. If schools didn't start to 8:30-9 it'd be harder for parents to get to work.

There's no particular reason work should start so early, either, other than the perpetual punctuality pogrom promulgated by lark against owl.

Don't forget it's not just 9-5 office jobs that have issues with later school start times. Service jobs like restaurants/fast food are in arguably a rougher situation because they need workers when they have customers (and some time before for prep work).

Re: In Tuesday's Vote, California Opts for Year-Round Daylight Saving

#134

Post by recursive »

newnewpdro wrote: post #128
recursive wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a person who works on software that cares about what time it is, and already struggles with the existing DST rules, I think I would change careers if this were adopted. Measuring the elapsed time between two instants would become extremely difficult.

We're already in a world where you really need to rely on external date+time libraries to apply a locale-specific temporally-varying offset from UTC. I don't see it as being a significant implementation difference if that offset changes a smaller amount at midnight on a short sequence of days vs. a larger amount at midnight on just one of those days. Either way you need to be leap-aware.

The amount of information embedded in leap-awareness would be significantly different. Right now DST is modelled as two different time zones that are switched between. If you want to handle it the same way, I guess you'd need 365 (366?) "time zones" per time zone. I can't see how you can argue that's not a significant implementation difference.

Re: In Tuesday's Vote, California Opts for Year-Round Daylight Saving

#136

Post by masonic »

dragonwriter wrote: post #61
CalChris wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It passed 60-40. The legislature would be foolish to ignore the electorate's clear intent. CA has only a single timezone, the Pacific Timezone.

Prop 7 was submitted to voters by the legislature, since they couldn't do what they wanted without permission from the voters, because the law setting DST policy was from the voters, not the legislature. Of course, federal action is still needed, too.

  the law setting DST policy was from the voters
Absolutely correct; this law was set by Initiative Statute in 1949... and has been flouted for decades now.

If the law was obeyed, DST would still start in April and end in September.

Re: In Tuesday's Vote, California Opts for Year-Round Daylight Saving

#137

Post by masonic »

rconti wrote: post #75
CalChris wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It passed 60-40. The legislature would be foolish to ignore the electorate's clear intent. CA has only a single timezone, the Pacific Timezone.

It is kind of funny that it passed by less than the required % of votes in the legislature, though.

   it passed by less than the required % of votes in the legislature
No, it only needed simple majority.

Re: In Tuesday's Vote, California Opts for Year-Round Daylight Saving

#138

Post by masonic »

dragonwriter wrote: post #45
_kst_ wrote: post #37

Proposition 7 doesn't immediately change anything. It authorizes the state legislature to change the DST rules if authorized by federal law. Reading the text of the revised law, it does seem to emphasize the possibility of going to year-round DST as opposed to year-round Standard Time (which is what I would prefer). One thing I'm not clear about is how the state legislature didn't already have this authority. Prop 7…

> One thing I'm not clear about is how the state legislature didn't already have this authority. Prop 7 doesn't change the state constitution, just the state Government Code. The relevant Government Code provision establishing DST was adopted by the voters (not the Legislature on its own) and, therefore, the legislature can't change it unilaterally, only by sending an amending statute to the voters.

   it passed by less than the required % of votes in the legislature
... but existing law (1949 Prop 12) has been ignored for decades anyway.

Re: In Tuesday's Vote, California Opts for Year-Round Daylight Saving

#139

Post by newnewpdro »

recursive wrote: post #134
newnewpdro wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're already in a world where you really need to rely on external date+time libraries to apply a locale-specific temporally-varying offset from UTC. I don't see it as being a significant implementation difference if that offset changes a smaller amount at midnight on a short sequence of days vs. a larger amount at midnight on just one of those days. Either way you need to be leap-aware.

The amount of information embedded in leap-awareness would be significantly different. Right now DST is modelled as two different time zones that are switched between. If you want to handle it the same way, I guess you'd need 365 (366?) "time zones" per time zone. I can't see how you can argue that's not a significant implementation difference.

Let's say we wanted to turn it into a gradient where we instead shifted five minutes per night, so we need 12 days to transition an hour.

You could just add a transition countdown field "-" to the "S" and "D" timezones being transitioned to, dropping it once the transition is finished.

e.g. for Pacific time:

PST -> PD-12T -> PD-11T -> PD-10T ... PD-1T -> PDT and in reverse: PDT -> PS-12T -> PS-11T -> PS-10T ... PS-1T -> PST

If you already have the indirection of the table, it doesn't increase implementation complexity to put some more rows in it.

I don't see where you got 365 zones per time zone, unless you thought I was proposing we change the time a little bit every single day of the year. That's entirely unnecessary to eliminate the practical nuisance of the sudden 1-hour jump.

Re: In Tuesday's Vote, California Opts for Year-Round Daylight Saving

#140

Post by madcaptenor »

mark-r wrote: post #119
madcaptenor wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

William Willett, who was a promoter of DST in Britain, proposed advancing the clock by twenty minutes on four Sundays in April and taking it back twenty minutes on four Sundays in September ( http://www.webexhibits.org/daylightsaving/willett.html ), sort of a compromise between continuous adjustment and the one-shot that we have now.

I hope you mean either three Sundays or 15 minutes, otherwise you don't get an hour. It's enough of a pain to change all the clocks twice a year, I'd hate to have to do it 8 times.

No, four Sundays and twenty minutes. I was surprised too.
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