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Goronmon

Maine is tentatively on-board:

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...

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Yeah, it really screws with us up here. Once you get up above the meridian, days get pretty short in the winter. Moving those hours around helps exactly none. No farmer has their life improved. It's not saving energy. It's just a dumb setting on the clock.

It's super depressing in December and January when you get up to go to work in the dark, and by the time you get out at 5, it is pitch dark again.

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.

Yeah, you know where I live, as I recall? You should come visit. ;-)

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,

I agree, I used to start for work at 6:30 AM and by 4, it'd be pitch dark again. Super Depressing.

Time zones aren't for farmers; they're for employees who have employers who won't (or can't) let their employees set hours that give them free time in the daylight.

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.

It's dark when we go out. It is dark when we come home. We get down to about 8 hours of daylight, I'm pretty sure. 8:15, I think? I could Google that. I'm at about the 47th.

8:25 is the shortest day in Seattle (a tad north of the 47th), which is further north than anywhere else that isn't in WA (except for that little piece of MN).

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.

Practically you must do at least one.

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.

> which is further north than anywhere else that isn't in WA (except for that little piece of MN).

Alaska?

The north pole? (I know, context matters)

The implication earlier in the thread was the continental U. S. But if you want to go the out-of-context route, you should have chosen “terrestrial north pole”.

Exactly, not for farmers. Farmers do work whenever they need, and use whatever light there is, when it is.

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.

It would probably take quite some time to prove, but I suspect depression, alcoholism, etc would improve a bit with more “access” to daylight. No one enjoys seeing the sun set by 5, but it probably has a more profound impact on a further subset.

We have SAD here, quite a bit of it. The missus suffers from it a bit, so I plant her under special lights and feed her tasty food until spring. I'm pretty sure she is part bear. She hibernates for the winter.

I, of course, love it.

But, yeah, there are real mental health impacts from the loss of sunlight. It causes actual harm.

LED bulbs have been a godsend for me. About 12W of LED light roughly replaces a 100W incandescent bulb. This means that given a light socket rated for a 300W maximum, I can plug in a tree of Y-splitters and 25 LED 100W equivalent bulbs. The amount of light is glorious :-)

I get her specialty spectrum lamps. She knits and crafts and lives under them until spring when, I kid you not, she goes out and forages in the woods. (Fiddleheads.) She isn't really a bear.

...Does she like salmon? Does she start to eat lots of berries in fall?

I’m not saying that she’s a bear though!...

Yeah, but the fix for that is not working nearly as many hours in the winter—which isn’t gonna happen.

The meridian? I assume you must mean some line of latitude, and after some searching, it looks like the 45th runs through Maine so it's my best guess.. I don't really remember there being a colloquial name for the 45th parallel though I remember seeing the sign every family roadtrip through OR to CA.

New Hampshire is usually against anything liberal Massachusetts proposes. They have a massive inferiority complex up their despite basically being dependent on Massachusetts for work.

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