Massachusetts is considering leaving the Eastern Time Zone
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Actually, it occupies area in 3 states. The Hopi Reservation is surrounded by the Navajo Nation.
I'm happy that you can set your life to the digit displayed on the clock no matter what that digit actually means in real time, but please spare a thought for those of us whose biological clocks can't readjust and help us abolish DST.
If I'm going to a store I don't visit often I'll have to look up their opening hours on a map anyway. Whether that says it's 08-20 or 16-04 couldn't matter less.
And that's before getting into the even more ridiculous stuff:
> First of all, we need to straighten out some terminology. The terms "a.m." and "p.m." (ante meridiem and post meridiem) are strongly deprecated now, because they refer to the position of the Sun, not of the clock.
So use 24-hour time? Somehow the rest of the world manages just fine.
> So, you have to say "solar noon" to refer to the instant when the Sun is at its zenith, and "twelve hundred hours" to refer to the instant when the clock reads 12:00. Similarly "solar midnight" and "zero hundred hours". And you have to use the twenty-four hour clock, it's the only way to be unambiguous.
12:00 is just an arbitrary time anyway, and even now it might not have much to do with noon anyway, depending on where you live. Hell, look have a look at the arctic circle, where noon (or day/night) doesn't have much of a meaning anyway.
> Even in the best case scenario, it is impossible to retroactively scrap time zones. The past will always exist, and the people who lived there will never adopt your new standard. Nor can all of past history be renumbered. The history of timekeeping will remain exactly as complicated as it always has been, and the zoneinfo database can never be abandoned.
Do you also refuse to use epoch timestamps, because they can't represent dates before 1970? Sure, you'd need to handle zones for historical data, but that'd get progressively less relevant the further away from cutoff you get.
> If it's any consolation, all of this is extremely unlikely to happen, since it relies on an international agreement between every single nation in the world. Or on China attacking and conquering the entire world and installing China Standard Time as part of a totalitarian regime, which is slightly less unlikely but still very unlikely.
In fact, the procedure is the same in both systems:
1. Look at your clock.
2. Add 11 hours to clock time.
3. Ask yourself if it would be daytime at your location when your clock says that time.
4. If yes, call your Uncle.
• Under the current multiple time zone system that works because clock time is close to local time. Step #2 computes the clock time at your Uncle's location, which gets you close to the local time at his location.
Daylight hours are approximately the same in his local time as in your local time, aside from the seasonal variation which you can ignore if you allow yourself a reasonable margin of error (e.g., aim for calling him a couple hours or so after sunrise rather than shooting for the crack of dawn), so you can use your local time as a proxy for his [1].
• Under a single worldwide time zone system it works because your local time is about 11 hours behind his local time. The time you get in step #3 is what the time will be on your clock (and on his clock, and on everyone else's clock) when your local time is the same as his local time is right now. So if that clock time will be a good time for you to receive a call, now is a good time to try your Uncle.
Of course, you probably wouldn't actually have to do any of that. Just as in his first example with the current time zone system where he Googles "time in melbourne" rather than looking at his clock and adding 11 hours, in the single worldwide time zone you would Google "local time in melbourne". In such a world, where local time can be quite a ways off from clock time, Google would surely recognize such queries and do the right thing.
Heck, it might even assume you mean local time if you just did "time in melbourne" because in the single time zone there would be no need to Google for the clock time for a particular area. I'd expect "time in melbourne" to probably give something like "The local time in Melbourne is X at world time Y". That covers everything.
[1] If you really are aiming for crack of dawn calling, then you will have to take into account the seasonable variation in sunrise relative to local noon, but you have to do that in both the multiple time zone system and the single worldwide time zone system.
I too want the same time worldwide but I guess the best we can do is UTC. I mean we could do it but I fear we'd just be sweeping the ugliness under the rug. I don't want this kind mess https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_China
> Currently, timezone usage within Xinjiang is roughly split along the ethnic divide, with most ethnic Han following Beijing time and most ethnic Uyghurs following Ürümqi Time.
Social life and timing mostly revolves around how early you get up. "Its late" kind of means "I am behind schedule to get enough sleep before waking up".
Biologically, we are programmed around sunlight. Whilst our mornings aren't really controlled by the biological clock (that is what the alarm is for), the evening really are. Besides, the for many people, the evening is what separates 'civil life' from 'private life'.
No it doesn't.
If you say you got two hours of sleep, that tells me something. When you sleep is your own choice.
The US is far wider when you consider Alaska, Hawaii and the island territories in the Caribbean and the Pacific. It spans from UTC+10 (Guam) to UTC-10 (Hawaii / Aleutians).
You would still need to create a system to keep track of local time of day. Hey, guess what, we already have such a system, people already use it and are familiar with it, let's keep using it.
However, they still have an unofficial separate time that locals use to coordinate the meaning of noon, morning, and night.
By the way, what you describe is how things worked prior to standardization of time which was driven in part by the expansion of the railroad. There's a brief history on Wikipedia:
If Dante's Inferno were to be written today, their would be a 10th Circle for those who came up with daylight savings time. It would involve the sound of screaming children, important appointments & clocks that change at random.
Wakening before the sun is not only biologically counterproductive, but the late morning dark would further hinder ability to exercise in the morning for months out of the year.
Just Kill DST, stay on standard time and be done with it
Because if my commute involves driving fifty miles east in the morning and fifty miles west in the evening, I don't want to have to adjust my clock by about 5 minutes twice a day.
(At the equator, this would be 3 minutes - the further you go from the equator, the greater the difference that fifty miles would represent).
You seem to think that I'm arguing against time zones. I'm not (here, anyway): I'm arguing that the time within a time zone be that of noon at its midpoint, so that no point within the timezone is more than 30 minutes from true noon (yes, some timezone are larger than an hour …), as opposed to those who want permanent DST, or even double DST, where clock noon might be hours from true noon.
May I suggest leaving for home earlier?
And a child comment of yours wants an extra hour of light in the mornings. You can't have it both ways! There's a finite amount of light in the day: not everyone can have everything he wants. So why not just settle for making noon be noon, rather than taking an hour from Spooky23 and giving it to you, or taking it from you and giving it to Spooky23?
Not trying to be patronizing as I realize you are not dumb and know this but I’m explaining the disconnect between sides of this argument.
And it's utterly missing the point, keeping track of time is an inherently social issue. If I didn't care about other people (and again, had no time-related obligations to work or study), I'd most likely just use UTC everywhere and wake up whenever I wanted. I want more light in the evenings exactly because that's when I'm outside, and if I went to bed at 8pm, my social life would suffer.
Making solar noon 12 o' clock would be giving the all light to Spooky23 (and wasting most of it), as practically everyone wakes up at most 6 hours before noon, but are awake for 10 hours after. Noon isn't the middle of normal waking day. Making solar noon 2 hours late is exactly the compromise!
5am Sunrise in mid-June, Sunset around 830pm.
6am Sunrise in mid-December, Sunset around 3pm.
EST year-round:
6am Sunrise mid-June, 930pm Sunset.
7am Sunrise mid-December, 4pm Sunset
Right now it's the first and last times with our spring-forward, fall-back switches. I'm thinking EDT year round would be most beneficial in the AM in winter, as it is realllly hard to get out of bed in the dark. I already go to work in the dark in winter, so it being dark an hour earlier wouldn't make any difference there.
Maybe just a half-hour difference in the switch would be a good compromise?
As a rule, people don't go to sleep in 20:00 to wake up at 04:00 (anymore - in the agricultural era that was quite common), and midnight is not even close to the middle of our nighttime; in the same manner, noon is not in the middle of our days, we're spending much more of our time after noon. Changing all of that is hard and difficult compared to changing a time zone - so we'd want a timezone where the astronomical midnight is at 1:00 or 2:00 local time, it would better align the daylight with our activities.
Better to just stick with real time and be done with it. We're adults, are we not? Have we not the tools at our disposal to take responsibility for our lives?
And you'll be doing the same thing, but in the opposite (and wrong ;) direction. Non-DST isn't some heavenly ordained moral high ground.
No, I'll continue arguing that clock noon should be solar noon. Midnight should be the middle of the night. Nothing more nor less.
[1] “Daylight Savings Time explained”, CGP Gray. https://youtu.be/84aWtseb2-4. Skip to the 5 minute mark for Arizona.
Also, I'd prefer a switch to 24 hour time notation. AM/PM is cumbersome.
(I live in the US.)
What's stopping you?
I'd vote for sixteen hour or something similar.
“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen."
I don't know why, but the 12 hour clock is just so ingrained that I can't stop thinking that way. The good news is, the conversion is trivial for me, but its just strange how it never 'took' in my head.
For example I see kids walking to school at around 7:15 AM (6th-8th grade and high school) and around 8:30 AM (K-5th grade).
This is at latitude ~47.7° N (same latitude as the city that is part of your name, in fact).
Here is what various DST options would do in terms of kids going to school before sunrise:
Elementary: Middle/High:
No DST: never Nov 20th - Feb 10th
Current DST: never Oct 10th - Mar 16th
Permanent DST: Nov 23 - Feb 2nd Oct 10th - Mar 16thIn the case of elementary school, though, you are dealing with kids young enough that they probably cannot reliably be counted on the get ready and leave for school on their own, and so you need to fit school times in with their parent's work schedule.
I know live in a wealthy school district (with very good athletic programs) and high school starts at 9am.
In both places at least some of the athletic/band programs started before school.
Just an anecdote though, I never heard that rationale from an official source.
It's slightly different from no-DST in that "the sun is directly above" is no longer approximately noon, ever; the TZ is effectively 1 hour off of what is should be and DST is abolished. (The sun would be overhead at ~1pm year-round.)
(It would also mean that during winter, in some locales, the sun would not rise until after 9am. I personally like seeing the sun in the morning.)
It's elementary school kids that it would make a big difference with. Under the current system here they are always going to school after sunrise. If we went to permanent DST, they would be going in the dark for about 2.5 months.
As other have pointed out, starting school later (around 8:30-9 AM) would have students coming in after sunrise, but then school would go until ~3:30 PM and you run the risk of all students getting home after dark during December and January.
As an aside, what a brilliant marketing name. Daylight is in peril and we all adjust our clocks to save it from the treacherous grasp of morning. We're heroes!
That's because without DST as the day lengthens the extra daylight is split evenly between morning and evening.
But WHY does it split evenly? It's because we historically use noon as our reference. We think of noon on day N+1 as being exactly one day after noon on day N. Noon is a sensible reference, fairly easy to determine with ancient technology.
Suppose that instead we had historically used sunrise as our reference. By definition, then, sunrise would be 8 AM every day. As the days lengthened in the summer, all of the extra daylight would then have shown up in the evening automatically.
It's interesting to ponder whether or not such a reference could have worked. I think that in the days before clocks, when the sundial was the most sophisticated timepiece, this could have worked quite well. It would also fit in well with work schedules, meaning people who needed to wait for light to work would be going to work at about the same time every day. It would also fit in with animal sleep schedules.
With clocks, though, a noon reference is easier. A sunrise reference requires a much more sophisticated clock, or it requires frequent manual adjustment.
Nowadays, though, clocks easily have the sophistication to handle that. We probably could actually reasonably handle using sunrise as our reference, and have our clocks adjust daily to keep that so.
It would mean that a given clock time on day N+1 is no longer exactly 24 hours later than that same clock time on day N, but I don't think that would matter for ordinary life. I'd be willing to put up with that if it means I get the benefits of DST (more evening light in summer) without the two big discontinuities a year.
Edit: to be clear, I am assuming that if we did a sunrise-based system instead of a noon-based system we would still do time zones. 8 AM would be simultaneous everywhere in the zone.
[1] In this comment "day" refers to sunrise to sunset.
https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/38270/why-is-the...
Then we invented trains and railroads and you couldn't schedule anything with such a system. Thus was born standardized time zones where it is the same time across large swaths of land. Noon is no longer strictly correlated to the sun being directly overhead.
I think there are all kinds of things we could do, including promoting the gig economy. If I work when, where and as much as I choose, it makes little difference what time it is (as long as I meet deadlines).
The world population is both high enough and mobile enough that you can now find 24 hour establishments in a lot of places, even relatively small towns. The small town I am in has enough 24 hour places that I have quite a lot of latitude on when I shop, when I get lunch, etc. I don't care all that much when the sun rises or sets. I care much more about things like if it is raining, and that is because I live without a car, so I walk everywhere.
But how do you meet deadlines if you can't agree on what time it is?
Granted, some things are inherently more flexible than others. An Uber driver can choose what hours to work, but is at the beck and call of people who need rides. If you want to make good money, you realistically need to work during busy times. But a lot of knowledge work can realistically be done whenever works best for the employee, so long as they get it done in time for the due date. You do need to arrange for such expectations though.
Mental math of "train arrives at 3pm, takes me 30 minutes to walk there, fifteen minutes to pack. Gotta be sure to be out of my meeting by 2:15" but if you live 30 sunrise minutes west, you and your coworker would have different 2:15 times.
You are 45 sun minutes west, but you go out to a job site with coworkers which is another 15 sun minutes west. You think you're able to leave on time to get home for your daughter's birthday, but forgot your clock that is calibrated to your current gps location, is going to make you 15 minutes late when you get home.
Good luck.
Am I missing something? Sure, we could have all sorts of different schemes. Most of them are not going to match human intuitions.
My guess is that what is intuitive for time keeping has changed over time (no pun intended). Consider back when most people were living directly or nearly directly off the land in single families or small groups, working very hard to grow enough food or catch enough fish or game to keep alive.
I think that they would use three references for time: sunrise, noon, and sunset. Sunrise would be the main one, because that marks the time when the dangers of the night go away, and your domestic animals wake up, and you have light to start working your fields or hunting your game. I think noon would mostly simply be used for pacing--it marks when you have used up half of your daylight, and so is a good time to judge if you are working at a good pace or need to pick it up for the rest of the day.
For such a person, if they had a use for a clock at all, a sunrise synced clock would be intuitive because it would put the things they do at relatively fixed clock times each day. For example, if it takes you about four hours working the fields each morning to get hungry enough to need a lunch break, then on a sunrise clock that has you starting in the fields at 8 AM everyday, you are coming back to the house for lunch at 12 PM every day.
On a noon-based clock, you would be starting in the fields at a different time each day, and so if you came in after four hours you would be arriving back at the house expecting lunch at a different time each day.
For people at that "barely making it off the land" stage, pretty much everything they might need timekeeping for is tied to sunrise or sunset in a similar way so those are the intuitive references for time.
It's not until you get a large enough and diverse enough society that you have people doing significant things that are not directly tied to just staying alive off of the land, and doing things that involve synchronizing with people who are traveling a long way, that noon-based starts to make a lot of sense.
As settlements become bigger and bigger and more specialized, the dark becomes less dangerous, more work is done indoors by candle light or lantern light, and syncing to the sun becomes less and less important. More and more of our time is dictated by the clock and noon-based makes even more sense because it is clock friendly.
But now we've reached a point where we have enough leisure time that we actually do want some sun synchronization. We want to go to work earlier in the summer, when the sun rises earlier, so that we'll more time for play in the sunlight after work.
The most obvious way to do that would be to change work hours. Normal offices hours would change to 8 to 4 for the summer from the normal 9 to 5, and we would not fiddle with the clocks.
I suppose this was not done because it require too many people to act. Instead we diddle the clocks, so the clock says you are starting work at 9 in the summer, but it is astronomically an hour earlier than the time you started work the rest of the year.
What I'm suggesting in my earlier comment is that now that clocks are actually computers that can do quite sophisticated calculation, we could use a psuedo-sunrise based time has both the daylight maximizing property of daylight savings time and has the reproducibility and consistency of noon-based.
You can think of it as a kind of continuous or near-continuous daylight savings time, where instead of adjusting the clock with a big jump twice a year, it is adjusted either continuously or in a small step every day.
I certainly appreciate the desire to utilize sunlight. I've spent the plurality of my life north of 45°N, and boy is it getting dark now!
Edit to add: Just discovered that the same site has a piece on continuous time zones, which is pretty much what you're proposing: https://qntm.org/continuous
The noon-based timezones change on the east-to-west axis; and the difference between two locations is static; i.e., if my noon is one hour later than your noon, then it's always one hour later than your noon.
However, sunrise based timezones would depend also on the north-south axis, and shift during the year! If my sunrise is one hour later than your sunrise, then at a different month my sunrise might be at the same time as your sunrise, or two hours later than your sunrise (depending on our locations) - and cities moving between timezones every few months is a bit inconvenient.
Where'd you get this? Reference sunrise is 6 AM, halfway between midnight (the middle of the night) and noon (the middle of the day).
No need to suppose. That’s how many cultures have marked the day. That’s why Jewish sabbath is sunset to sunset.
However your plan does suffer one drawback—time zones would need to change with latitude too. And what about the polar regions?
They'd be completely indifferent, their current clocks would still work, they'd just be annoyed at the other time zones moving around on them.
You're right when you say that they get ~12 hours every single day, but their clocks would still have to account for the slight changes (by a few minutes) in time for the sunrise. Which means changing their clocks everyday/every few days, based on the sunrise. But for what? They anyway get ~12 hours sunlight, so it's not a worthy tradeoff for them, compared to someone in Massachusetts.
If only humans worked like batteries, soaking up the summer sun to use it in winters..
It does mean that we'd have a lot more time zones because time zones would change both along longitude and latitude. It'd also mean that the time delta between two time zones north and south of each other would have a delta that changes every day, and wouldn't be a multiple of a single hour.
To illustrate, think of two time zones, one on the equator, and another straight north enough that the day length changes by an hour between the solstices. On the equinox their clocks are identical and on each solstice they are 30 minutes apart in either direction. Halfway between an equinox and a solstice, they'd be 15 minutes apart. And so on.
If you try and adjust the rules so that each zone is always an integral multiple of an hour apart from any other zone, then you end up with clocks jumping forward & back an hour which is basically what we were trying to avoid in the first place!
So you'd always need a computer when trying to arrange a meeting across time zones. I imagine we'd get used to it, though.
Another question is: what time would you pick for sunrise on really northern latitudes below the Arctic circle? For example Anchorage AK has a shortest day and shortest night of 5.5 hours. 9AM might be a good choice for the winter solstice, but it'd really suck waking up in the dark on the summer solstice when there's 18.5 hours of daylight! So maybe they'd set their time zone to smoothly change from a sunrise of 6AM to a sunrise of 9AM and back with the rest of the variance in the sunset times.
North of the Arctic circle they're screwed no matter what they do, so I imagine they'd just join the time zone of their neighbors to the immediate south just for commercial convenience. :)
It gets complicated, but time zones are complicated no matter what you do, and one hour clock shifts really suck. And sticking with DST also sucks, see minikites' comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15564160). So this really does seem to be the best of bost worlds. I'd vote for it.
Perhaps in the past this would have been ok, but today it's IMO definitely not worth the additional complication that comes from changing day lengths.
edit: I didn't read parent comment properly. Updated my comment.
Sun rises at approx 6am and sets at 6pm every day on the equator. Go straight north to another point, and in the northern summer, it's sun rises before it does at the equator, and in northern winter it rises after the equator. So, with your system calling sunrise 8am, the edges of a timezone would drift with the seasons and would only be north-south meridiens twice a year at the equinoxes.
If you decided to define the timezones with fixed (non-drifting) boundaries, your system might require a 2-dimensional grid of small timezones with boundaries not just on the east and west but on the north and south, with behaviors relative to their neighbors that would make timing a phone call to another time zone pretty much require computer assistance.
Sunrise: January 29th
Having a day defined as a period of constant length of 24 hours is, I feel, a feature, not a bug. It allows for scheduling, for easily mapping between hours and days in your head. The system being anchored at the point more-less in the middle between sunrise and sunset is elegant, IMO, because - as you say - "the extra daylight is split evenly between morning and evening". This synchronizes the day period with our circadian rhythm (based on day/night cycle), which allows for easier dealing with other people.
Variable-length day sounds like an ongoing chaos full of manual corrections and constant recomputations. I feel it would be a step back for our civilization.
> I think that in the days before clocks, when the sundial was the most sophisticated timepiece, this could have worked quite well.
Actually it's quite hard to figure out when "sunrise" occurs: it's not an instantaneous event, plus it's hard to calculate as an abstract (when would the sun peek over the horizon on an ideal billiard-ball planet); in the real world there are atmospherics, mountains etc. Plus for all these reasons it's hard to measure when you're close.
On the other hand noon is easy with a sundial as that's when the shadow "disappears" (really: "is shortest" on most of the planet) except of course on rainy days. You can see the shadow shorten, see noon, and see it expand again. It's literally a 0 in the curve.
The use of a nighttime sextant (or astrolabe that was on HN recently) is a way of transforming that calculation (known fixed angle) to other stars or times.
So it was the clock that made the time of sunrise work: if you could synchronise your clock to noon on D0 you could then use the clock to index into your ephemeris to figure out times of other celestial events post D0-noon.
Also, pre-clock, hours were not fixed duration, they were 12 divisions of the day. Minutes and seconds were post-clock inventions.
http://www.pressherald.com/2017/04/27/maine-may-switch-to-at...
New Hampshire looks to be against it so far:
http://www.concordmonitor.com/time-zone-change-atlantic-9808...
I do wish we'd fallen back earlier, like we used to. I'd much rather have that extra hour of daylight in the morning when I could maybe use it, rather than on my commute home.
Anyhow, we'd have to throw the clock off a full two hours to get any benefit. It's just getting light at 0700 and already getting dark at 1600 - during the shortest days. Daybreak was at about 0700 today, maybe later. It is raining. I couldn't tell and I didn't look online,
There's also opposing needs: working folk like afternoon sun so they have daylight when they get off work, parents with school children like morning sun, so it is light when their children are waiting for the bus, and in the winter there's not enough daylight to satisfy both groups of people.
That's being nit-picky, though, as the practical outcome is that anything less than nine hours means you'll go to work in the dark and come home in the dark.
The point of fussing with time zones (or the start-time for school/work, if you're in some weird place where people are capable of that) is so that you can go from "no morning or afternoon sun" to "morning or afternoon sun". You could tweak your 8.5 hours of daylight so that the sun rises at 6am and most people go to work/school in the sunlight and the sun sets at 2:30, or you could tweak it so that the sun rises at 10am and most people get some evening sun until 6:30.
It's not great but it's an option, instead of demanding the sun rises at 8am and sets at 4pm so that noon is noon and no one gets to enjoy it.
Alaska?
The fight to keep DST is about merchants more than anything else. Shopping is increased during the week if it is still light after you get home. When you get home and it is already dark, you are more likely to just stay home. I personally don't think it has anything to do with employers wanting to deny employees daylight. They mostly want a known schedule for customers and co-workers. Make DST -2 hours or get rid of DST and I think employers wouldn't care at all either way.
I, of course, love it.
But, yeah, there are real mental health impacts from the loss of sunlight. It causes actual harm.
I’m not saying that she’s a bear though!...
[edit] my grammar
https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/new-york
And here's Boston:
Well that explains why I feel like winter nights are somehow worse and darker than summer ones. In summer, it's mostly not night at all: the twilight periods eat half the clock-nighttime. In winter, twilight gets cut in half and combines with the losses of daylight to extend nighttime.
Nowhere in Manhattan is that true (though perhaps I'll grant that a building might occlude the sun, but you're exaggerating). Conservatively, if we pick Albany, NY as the "northernmost extent of Manhattan", the earliest sunset is ~4:21pm.
It doesn't matter what number my clock says at noon/sunrise/sunset. If it is about working-hours coinciding with daylight, businesses can adjust their working hours as needed (and post them on their site without you having to convert to local time to know when you can call)
edit: the link below just changed my mind. dammit, I hate being wrong.
If we all used UTC around the world, I'd have to calculate the difference for all the times that I'm used to. In London the stores open at 9 in the morning, but if I travel East a bit into Europe they open at 12, and dinner is at 11.
It has nothing to do with jet lag. Currently you only have to do any time calculation is you're working across time zones, once you're there and dealing with things in that time zone there's no real difference from what you're used to.
Bare in mind that just because Uncle Steve is awake that it is not necessarily convenient for him. In the scenario he likes to stay in bed a bit later. This is no problem if you simply send him a message. No need for any lookups or actuarial tables or astronomical calculations whatsoever. If we want to voice chat we can do so after he has responded to the asynchronous chat message.
Bare in mind that the answer to "what time in it" post timezones would be "mid-morning", or "late evening" or "noon". ie. conveying the information you actually need.
However I also think that 'wall clocks' should be something more like the wizard time peaces in the various harry-potter movies.
They'd all have fuzzy times like "dawn, noon, dusk". What is now 6am would be "early morning", 3 hours later 'morning'. Evening would be 1800 and late evening 2100. The times closer to mid-day would be on a denser schedule (finer granularity).
Realistically, the eastern time zone should probably stop between OH/PA, west of West Virgina, east of TN, etc.
But of course we'd then need 5 time zones to cover the continential US to keep other time zones from becoming far too large.
To a lesser extent, south-western Vermont is economically linked to the Albany metro area, and would also likely vote against a shift.
Were you to poll on support for moving New England over to Atlantic time, I'd bet you'd wind up with a map closely matching that of local support for the Boston Red Sox vs New York Yankees: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/04/23/upshot/24-ups...
It's great.
Sooo...
The options are
A) Complain about 1-hour change and about how it was made for farmers 100 yrs ago
B) Complain how you miss DST because the summer hours were so wonderful and man can't we just stay in DST--you know, that fake time we just made up--all the time?
I opt for the first option--the constant whining from others one--because the alternative would be constant whining from me. :D
Three things, actually :-) c) consider spending your winter months in the Southern Hemisphere. Some animals migrate vast distances twice a year.
It's almost sad that Massachusetts switching wouldn't even make it into that document... (too normal)
>If we stayed on Standard Time throughout the year, sunrise here in the Chicago area would be between 4:15 and 4:30 am from the middle of May through the middle of July. And if you check the times for civil twilight, which is when it’s bright enough to see without artificial light, you’ll find that that starts half an hour earlier. This is insane and a complete waste of sunlight.
>If, by the way, you think the solution is to stay on DST throughout the year, I can only tell you that we tried that back in the 70s and it didn’t turn out well. Sunrise here in Chicago was after 8:00 am, which put school children out on the street at bus stops before dawn in the dead of winter.
- Boston: https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/boston
- Lenox, on the opposite side: https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/@4941853
Also the article says Massachusetts wouldn't do it without the rest of New England also joining:
> A majority of other states in New England would have to jump on the time-zone train, too.
Edit: Must have been downvoted by west coasters who don't know what new england is ...
Most people think that east coast cities are on a north-south axis, but as you go up I-95 (the major highway connecting these cities) you are actually traveling northeast. It was a head trip for me being from DC when I realized I could drive straight north for 5 hours and end up in Rochester, NY, or drive "north" on 95 for 5 hours and end up in New York City, but the distance between those two points was also itself a 5-6 hour drive.