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Comment by FreeFull | Hacker News Reader

DST can make sense if you're sufficiently far north/south, but definitely doesn't if you're closer to the equator. And for Florida DST probably never made sense.

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Even way up north, I'd rather have summer time all year. Having it get dark around 3:30 in the afternoon in the middle of winter is a drag.

That said, I've found there's a lot of resistance to the idea among parents. On standard time, it's light out when kids are on their way to school. On daylight time, it would be dark then.

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 awake and not working), and you're taking away an hour from 4am to 5am which most people don't (almost everyone is asleep).

During the winter, you're taking away an hour of daylight from, say, 7-8am, which most people can use (it will either be during their commute or before their commute, which they can enjoy themselves) to add an hour from, say, 3:30-4:30, which for many people is still going to be in the middle of their workdays.

Florida's case isn't quite so bad as that. In Tampa, FL, they are in fact taking away people's 7-8am sunshine in the winter, but they're at least adding sunshine from 6-7pm which will be fairly useful sunlight.

I'm just not sure it's useful for anyone much north of Florida to follow suit - you're trading valuable pre-work daylight for during-work daylight.

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?

As a kid, I didn't care whether it was light out on the way to school. School time wasn't my time anyway, might as well be dark.

On the other hand, having an hour of sunlight after the school is over has been a drag, as you said, especially when it was eaten up by the commute.

The schools should just be starting at a later time. There is already ample evidence that school start times are too early for students.

If you are sufficiently far north / south, you adapt your culture to not treat 4pm like people who have 18 hours of sunshine every day year round treat 4pm. You don't change the clock and act like thats changing the flow of time.

It helps that you almost certainly already don't treat 4pm like that anyway since you are wearing 4 layers of clothing while those 18 hour sunshiners are going shirtless.

Nobody has 18 hours of sunshine year round. If you have the same number of hours of sunshine year round, you have 12 hours.

Every location on earth has the same number of daylight hours when averaged over an entire year (12 hours). More Northerly/Southerly location just have larger variation over the year, and have less average light intensity normal to the earth's surface due to the relative angle of incoming sunlight.

The range of latitudes for which DST makes sense is roughly 30°-50°: those latitudes where summer solstice is 14-16 hours of daylight. Further north, there's going to be afternoon sun anyways, further south, there's too little difference between summer and winter for there to be any sense switching twice a year.

"DST can make sense if you're sufficiently far north/south,"

As a person living on the 61st parallel - it does not. Winters are dark anyway you put it, and summers have so much light you can't be awake through it all. The situation gets only more extreme the norther you get.

Hi I live in the relative north and DST is actually worse here. And go much further north than me and it doesn't really matter either way. I would kill to have it gone.

except this law would make DST the official time of Florida, not standard time (though only if Congress changes a law that allows states to do so). Other states like Arizona have exempted themselves from DST, which the federal government allows them to do.

It would put Florida onto Atlantic Standard Time. The simple description of how to get there is to shift to DST one summer and never shift back.

The same thing has been proposed in New England, if enough states agree to do it simultaneously.

Sufficiently far up (and down I guess) it makes little sense at all, or does so for very small part of the year. There's nothing to be saved in the abundance of light all day in the summer, and nothing to be done for the darkness of winter.

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