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Comment by kibwen | Hacker News Reader

This is a bit needlessly cynical, because individual states already have the power to choose whether or not to observe daylight savings time. Arizona and Hawaii already don't, and there are bills in the Florida and Massachusetts legislatures to do the same.

The only federal regulation that applies here is that states wouldn't have the option to choose between summer or winter time as their permanent time, as the EU states can. IOW, US states are allowed to disregard the observance of DST, but they can't change their time zone without federal congressional approval.

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Florida's bill passed, but it's conditional to Congress or the DoT's authorization

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/08/us/daylight-saving-time-f...

Note that in this case it's conditional on Congress because Florida wants to move to permanent summer time, which, if we imagine that as of tomorrow DST were abolished everywhere else, would effectively put them in Nova Scotia's time zone ("Atlantic Time").

(I'm personally sympathetic; I live in the northeast US and I'd much rather go to work in the dark than leave work in the dark. Summer time or bust!)

In Maine we passed a bill to move to Atlantic time as well, but it's conditional on Massachusetts and New Hampshire moving to the same time zone: https://www.pressherald.com/2017/04/27/maine-may-switch-to-a...

(I would love this)

Arizona and Hawaii already don't

And Indiana. Except for the part that's part of the Chicago market.

And about a quarter of Arizona actually does change time. The Navajo Nation goes with New Mexico/Denver time.

Indiana started observing DST across the whole state in 2006.

Ah. Thanks for that. I haven't been up there in a while. Apparently longer than I thought!

I commented on this shift here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18009875

And the Hopi Nation that is an enclave in the Navajo Nation follows Arizona. That got really confusing when we drove the 264 during our holiday in our way from Grand Canyon to Canyon de Chelly.

> IOW, US states are allowed to disregard the observance of DST, but they can't change their time zone without federal congressional approval.

Interestingly, that seems to be the exact opposite of EU where countries can choose their own timezones but (currently) have to observe DST.

I lived in Indiana when they decided to adopt DST. The reasoning was that interacting with other time zones which had DST while they didn’t was expensive. It’s bad to not use DST until none (or few) do.

Such a chilling network effect might exist if all the states were equal in population, economic activity, and interstate traffic, but that's not the case here. If California wanted to abolish DST, it certainly has the clout to pull it off--and it may very well force NV to as well in the process (and perhaps even OR and WA). Same for Texas, which could force the hands of OK/LA/NM. The Northeast would be harder; you'd basically need all of New England sans CT to agree to make the switch at once, and then NY+CT+NJ+DE(+PA?) to do so at the same. The problem is far from intractable, though.

You are greatly overestimating the cost of dealing with states that do or do not observe DST. We don’t here in AZ and it barely matters. The worst is that everyone else expects us to move around our daily stand up times twice a year so they don’t have to.

AZ is much larger than Indiana. A large fraction of Indiana is suburbs of cities in other states (Louisville, Chicago, and arguably Cincinnati).

Here in Indiana there was an attempt to go off DST for a long while but it became more of a problem because it was inconsistent with all of the other places nearby and for people going through.

Indeed, small states wedged between big states are going to have the hardest time of it; the best way for Indiana to jettison DST is to convince Illinois and Ohio to. If there's ever going to a movement to abolish DST across all the states, it's probably got to start at the big edges of the country (California, Texas, Florida) and roll its way inward.

Pretty sure you can include Maine in that group of states as well...

Same with leap days and leap seconds, why not just count forward at a consistent rate?

The earth doesn't rotate at a consistent rate, so leap seconds (as determined by astronomical measurements) are necessary to keep civil time in sync with sunrise and sunset.

Have you LOOKED at how much civil time moves around? Heck, the discrepancy changes as you physically move around.

In a few thousand years they can change timezones ONCE to deal with leap seconds adding up. It won't even count as noise next to how much happens for random political reasons.

Right? It would make way more sense to have a "leap period" once every century that calculated for all the leap days, minutes, seconds, OR people 200 years from now, might not care when my sunrise and sunset were.

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