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US Senate votes unanimously to make daylight savings time permanent

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Re: US Senate votes unanimously to make daylight savings time permanent

#501
post #320

My personal pet peeve is when people write the Standard Time acronym when scheduling cross-timezone meetings, despite the fact that it is Daylight Saving Time. (Eg. "I'll call you tomorrow at 4pm PST.") In the past, I've gotten paranoid that they may live somewhere that doesn't observe Daylight Savings, but I also don't want to seem like a pedant by bringing up their mistake. I'm curious if this change will make this…

My personal pet peeve is giving times in their local time zone when they know full well everyone is going to be in different time zones. Convert it to UTC so everyone can just worry about their offset.

I doubt most of my colleagues even know what their offset is – keeping track of that with DST is just not fun. Personally I just Google e.g. "2pm PT in CT," as Google has an info box that handles time conversions and is smart enough to know when you want DST.

Re: US Senate votes unanimously to make daylight savings time permanent

#503

Such a terrible idea compared to permanent standard time. There is plenty of light during the summer, so there's no need to optimize for that. The winter is when daylight is scarce, so that's what should be optimized for.

> The winter is when daylight is scarce, so that's what should be optimized for.

That is what this is doing. Make that scarce daylight available after work, when it is useful.

Re: US Senate votes unanimously to make daylight savings time permanent

#504

This is ridiculous. Why don't they make the regular time permanent? And if people want to have more light in the evening, then they just leave work earlier. Surely that is easier than permanent daylight savings time. I know people will say it's too hard to change habits and (clock) work hours, but with permanent DST you will have to change that anyway, when people realize how dark winter mornings will be. I predict a…

> Why don't they make the regular time permanent?

There's a pro-DST lobby because more post-work daylight hours is correlated with higher consumer spending. For that reason, permanent DST is more politically expedient in relation to permanent standard time.

> And if people want to have more light in the evening, then they just leave work earlier. Surely that is easier than permanent daylight savings time.

I don't think it's possible to lobby employers to change their shift hours. It is, in fact, much easier to lobby the government to change the clocks.

> I predict a lot of people will want to move school start to a later hour then.

This is probably a good idea, though... good ideas don't really seem to have much bearing on the way we arrange school schedules.

Re: US Senate votes unanimously to make daylight savings time permanent

#506
I'd kill for a peek into the parallel universe where it was permanent standard time that was likely to get adopted and see how much effort went into researching the ill effects of that choice to convince people with enough FUD to keep daylight time switching going.

Here's the thing: If you're a proponent of permanent standard time, you should be in favour of turning off the switching no matter what. Even if it means daylight time. Because you know what? Your local time zone is changeable. You can lobby to change it. If permanent DST really results in the entire country turning into sleep deprived zombies having spontaneous heart attacks as they arrive at work and crashing into children going to school, then there'll be pressure to change it -- but we will have at least already started the process of eliminating the worse thing: changing twice a year.

Re: US Senate votes unanimously to make daylight savings time permanent

#507
Just when you thought your timezone display code was finally functioning. Now what do you call non-DST timezones? Just PST? Will we refer to our timezone as PST (DST) for the rest of our lives?

Let's drop this madness and go to one worldwide timezone.

Re: US Senate votes unanimously to make daylight savings time permanent

#508

>Sunshine Protection Act Jesus, does everything need to be hyperbolic virtue signaling. Won't someone please think of the children!

Maybe "self aggrandizing" is a better description of this name if you take it seriously. I just find it amusing.

Re: US Senate votes unanimously to make daylight savings time permanent

#510

We did this before, about 50 years ago. Going in, close to 80% of people supported permanent Daylight Saving Time. After experiencing a single winter, that dropped to close to 40%, and it was repealed. Looks like we may be doomed to repeat the experience. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanent_time_observation_in_...

I wonder if our interconnected world will make this different. I’m guessing people are more adversely affected by DST than previously. Also from your link: > In the state of Florida alone, at least six school children were killed by motorists due to the dark mornings created by the new law. I wonder how in the world they attributed that to DST?

I had the same questions myself. I tried to follow the citation on wikipedia, but that links to a newspaper article that doesn't seem to mention it at all.

Edit: on the other hand, the claim "meta-analysis by Rutgers researchers found that Permanent DST would eliminate 171 pedestrian fatalities (a 13% reduction) per year.", does actually link to a paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00014...

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