In Tuesday's Vote, California Opts for Year-Round Daylight Saving
gizmodo.com
gizmodo.com
https://votersedge.org/en/ca/ballot/election/area/73/measure...
The way it is now
Federal law sets standard time zones for each area of the country. California and other western states are in the Pacific Standard time zone. Current law requires the time of each zone to move forward by one hour from early March to early November each year during a period called Daylight Saving Time. During this period, sunrises and sunsets happen one hour later. Federal law lets states choose to stay on standard time all year long, but prevents states from having year-round Daylight Saving Time.
What if it passes?
Prop 7 would allow state lawmakers to vote on changing Daylight Saving Time. Lawmakers would be able to choose year-round Daylight Saving Time, if allowed by federal law. Any change would require support from two thirds of California’s Legislature. Until then, Prop 7 would keep California’s current Daylight Saving Time schedule.
Budget effect
Prop 7 would have no immediate effects. Impacts on state and local government would likely be very small.
edit: I think it is more of a referendum that Californians want a single timezone rather than they specifically want PDT.
CA has only a single timezone, the Pacific Timezone.
Let's accept your premise that a vote for the referendum was in all cases a vote for the change. The referendum requires 2/3rds of the representatives of the people to vote to affect the change. It can certainly be argued that since this level of support was included in the referendum and the referendum itself failed to garner this level of support then the representatives should not vote for the change.
The referendum requires 2/3rds of the representatives of the people to vote to affect the change
2) it needed only a simple majority.
3) California DST implementation has been in violation of CA law for decades. CA law has been late April to late September since 1949.
4) to actually change DST still requires an additional 2/3rds majority vote in BOTH houses of the Legislature in the same session.
I personally find it annoying that sometimes we end having to vote directly on things that really fall under the job of our representatives.
Of course, federal action is still needed, too.
the law setting DST policy was from the voters
If the law was obeyed, DST would still start in April and end in September.
There's been some suggestions that it might be easier for a state to get moved to a different zone rather than getting a permanent daylight exception (I think the former may be doable by regulation, while the latter definitely takes Congress.)
https://www.transportation.gov/regulations/procedure-moving-...
Now, not respecting Daylight Savings Time is another matter entirely, and I believe that California could decide to be permanently in PST w/o the approval of the DOT. What they can't do is change the dates for DST or decide to always observe it (which would effectively end up creating a new time zone).
https://www.transportation.gov/regulations/daylight-saving-t...
it passed by less than the required % of votes in the legislature
Maybe school shouldn't start so early then? Starting at 8:30-9 would reduce a lot of that, though not all of it. Also, as a Canadian and Vancouverite... so what? Darkness is a fact of life, get over it.
[1]: https://sacramento.cbslocal.com/2018/11/06/proposition-7-pas...
I mean, it's their parents, not some random strangers.
If the expectation was that one parent cared for the children and the household, that would drastically shrink the supply of workers, and force wages up, recognizing the actual, formerly unpaid cost of maintaining a household and raising children.
I know a number of people who work with children in education and there is a very clear change happening in the last 20 years with how prepared children are when starting school. The average amount of actual parenting time many children are getting now has dropped dramatically and it is showing in behavior and basic education preparedness. Of course it is the right of either parent to work but society has now made both parents working a requirement in many places, not an option... and it seems the fallout is affecting the children.
If you're concerned about society then the focus needs to be on preparing the next generation better. Either you structure it so that single income families are an option, or you dump a lot more into the education system to make up for the lack of input kids are getting from their parents.
You can always unilaterally decide to do things on a different schedule; the problem is getting everyone else to do it too.
Package it with pay increases and/or shortening the day (also good for students) so that teachers still get off at the same time, and it'll go over fine.
Even aside from that, teachers aren't the majority of the electoral base for either local school boards or state lawmakers, so if it's important enough to non-teachers, it will get mandated whatever teachers prefer.
Like walking to school in the dark is worse than walking home from school in the dark?
The only advantage of the former is that it gives the sun a chance to warm up the air a bit more so it's not quite as cold in the morning.
There is no place in California where the amount of daylight is so short that kids would walk home in the dark as long as school starts around 8-9, regardless of whether they use PST or PDT during the winter.
The choices are, if school start times stay so that they are before parent work start times, between walking both to and from school in the light, and walking to school in the dark and from school in the light.
If it were a choice between walking to school in the dark or walking home from school in the dark, walking to school in the dark would be worse, because the school day is shorter than the adult work day. The kids going to school overlap with the morning commute traffic. The kids coming home beat the evening commute traffice.
Actually, yes.
Not just California, but starting an hour later also lets the temperature rise. That's not an undue consideration when you have snow and ice.
My neighbors kid has a middle schooler who starts at 7:30 and a 1st grader who starts at 9:30!
Personally, I went to a rural district with an 8:05 start time. The bus picked me up at 6:40AM, and I typically didn't see daylight outside of school in December.
They are in the wrong timezone, in my opinion. The sun sets super early in the day. If I was the dictator of the planet, I'd set japan's clocks forward by two hours year round. Then the sun would set at 18:40 instead of 16:40 today.
Getting off work and having some daylight is pretty important, IMHO. It is quite hard to do in Japan.
Japan is indeed ahead of solar time, as opposed to many other places on their longitude. (Though perhaps not by two hours).
Interestingly, many more places are behind their solar time then places that are ahead of it.
[1] http://blog.poormansmath.net/how-much-is-time-wrong-around-t...
Using the statement 'well maybe school shouldn't start so early then' as an argument in favour of making schools start earlier seems rather contradictory.
That said, even for K12 students, I’d say it’s a give and take. Waking up and going out in the dark each morning does sound bad for mood and potentially for circadian rhythms. But school gets out at 3PM, and on the shortest days of the year, the sun sets around 5PM. That leaves only 2 hours to potentially spend outdoors in the sun, at best; after-school activities can easily consume much or all of that time, not to mention homework. Or even if you spend all day indoors, the earlier the sun sets, the sooner your body starts producing more melatonin and making you feel tired; robust artificial lighting can help, but then it’s harder when you are ready to start winding down for the day. And then there’s seasonal affective disorder (Google it). In all these cases, going from 2 to 3 hours of sunlight after school would be a big help.
Even in the U.S....Washington, Montana, Michigan, Maine...this is fact of life stuff.
(But yes, it was the idea of losing time that convinced me this article is either a humor or misguided)
Even with day light saving, people don't work on the same schedule. Plenty of them need to get up before sun rise or work until late night no matter what the clock says.
By the way, I would also love to get rid of clock changes twice a year. I'm mainly playing devil's advocate here. The drawbacks of winter morning darkness are real, and will likely not be solved without DST. I just also think that they're not worth screwing with the clock.
If I lived in a more northerly latitude, maybe I'd change my tune. But as it is, I value daylight at 5pm way more than at 7am. The yearly "fall back" of DST is like an insult added to the injury of winter.
Reading the text of the revised law, it does seem to emphasize the possibility of going to year-round DST as opposed to year-round Standard Time (which is what I would prefer).
One thing I'm not clear about is how the state legislature didn't already have this authority. Prop 7 doesn't change the state constitution, just the state Government Code.
The relevant Government Code provision establishing DST was adopted by the voters (not the Legislature on its own) and, therefore, the legislature can't change it unilaterally, only by sending an amending statute to the voters.
it passed by less than the required % of votes in the legislature
Curious to see a Californian writing for (supposedly) tech-savvy publication echoing an old English superstition: https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/Give-...
I think the author is arguing against getting rid of DST? In which case, what he wrote above (which BTW is a link that goes to an article that backs up not a single thing he said) actually goes against his point. It says that if we stay on permanent DST, it's better for everyone.
Personally, I'd much prefer PST over PDT, which gives us sunlight later into the day.
Honestly, we should just abolish the Pacific time zone and then abolish DST on the West Coast. Rename Mountain Standard Time to Western Standard Time.
US law allows for states to opt in or out of DST. (Also, Indian reservations, because they're treated as quasi-sovereign nations in some ways.) A WST would probably entail WA, OR, and CA opting out with AZ while MT, ID, WY opt in.
So now we're dealing with a patchwork of 'zones of similar customary times' as areas with similar solar times move towards a similar clock so businesses can coordinate and trade easily with local businesses. It'll be a mess so states will probably organize together to make things simpler and have a similar set of hours across the state. These pseudo-timezones will be slightly better and states around a similar longitude will naturally order into a similar set of customary times because their local solar times are roughly the same. Now we've got pretty much the EXACT same situation as the current timezones including a generalized offset from UTC so we gain nothing.
What exactly do you suppose we gain from abolishing timezones?
I live in the southern hemisphere and 'work' online in the northern - I have to deal with the mess that is 4 different combinations of timezones every year, and calendaring systems that are unable to handle the idea of knowing WHERE a meeting is going to be held so they can get the time right
Really though people should change their work hours to match their timezones - I live a long way south, we have long twilight in the summers and tiny days in the winter, when it gets dark at 4:30 because we're squashed up against a timezone boundary - I have to get up in the dark anyway, why not move our winter work hours so we get a couple of hours daylight during the winter? it would help with the Vit D issues
Not really I know some of our offices are in India UTC +5:30 and some are in Texas UTC -6 which are +11:30 and -1 respectively. With the current setup most timezones follow state boundaries in the US so I know when it is there roughly by the location. In the 'no timezone' setup (which is really just timezones without the top down mapping) I have to hope they have business hours posted somewhere convenient to look up instead of just finding their rough location.
The rest of that sounds principally a failure of tools than anything else. Today you could just set all meeting times using UTC and let the users UI take care of the mapping to local time.
But again my biggest issue with the no timezones system is we'll just be getting rid of the defined boundaries in favor of undefined boundaries because each area WILL wind up on roughly the current timezones anyways because they roughly match to solar time as is.
> Really though people should change their work hours to match their timezones - I live a long way south, we have long twilight in the summers and tiny days in the winter, when it gets dark at 4:30 because we're squashed up against a timezone boundary - I have to get up in the dark anyway, why not move our winter work hours so we get a couple of hours daylight during the winter? it would help with the Vit D issues
This is more an argument for more flexible working hours than most anything else.
I think that my solution to timezones simply is "more flexible working hours"
I’d love that. There’s no reason why a city at the latitude of Boston should have to endure 4:30 sunsets.
The sun will rise and set at exactly the same times it always has. All you are doing is changing your clock and deciding when to do things based on what the clock says. Farmers don't care- they get up and work based on when it's sunny, not based on what the clock on the wall says.
If you want children to be in school during daylight hours, modify the school schedules. If you want to get that extra round of golf in, go to work early and then leave work early. But don't drag the rest of society along with you so that you can pretend you're not doing anything differently!
Ten years after DST dies, everyone will remember how silly it all was and how they were always opposed to the madness.
When you're actually living in nature, waking up with the sunrise, you will gradually wake up earlier or later as the seasons shift.
If our time changed gradually on a more natural pace it would be a whole lot less disruptive and people wouldn't be losing daylight from their lives. We have the technology today to make that happen. If everyone's clocks are computerized and sycnhronized, we wouldn't even notice as minutes are quietly added/removed by the system across many days.
It might achieve the goal of having a sunrise at the same wall clock time every day, but I don't really see a purpose for that. Sunsets will still vary.
If the clocks are automated, nobody really notices the gradual change.
My perception is the public's major complaint is the jarring disturbance to their lives an overnight +-1-hour change has.
I don't see it as being a significant implementation difference if that offset changes a smaller amount at midnight on a short sequence of days vs. a larger amount at midnight on just one of those days.
Either way you need to be leap-aware.
You could just add a transition countdown field "-" to the "S" and "D" timezones being transitioned to, dropping it once the transition is finished.
e.g. for Pacific time:
PST -> PD-12T -> PD-11T -> PD-10T ... PD-1T -> PDT and in reverse: PDT -> PS-12T -> PS-11T -> PS-10T ... PS-1T -> PST
If you already have the indirection of the table, it doesn't increase implementation complexity to put some more rows in it.
I don't see where you got 365 zones per time zone, unless you thought I was proposing we change the time a little bit every single day of the year. That's entirely unnecessary to eliminate the practical nuisance of the sudden 1-hour jump.
It's enough of a pain to change all the clocks twice a year, I'd hate to have to do it 8 times.
If DST is made permanent in California then Southern California will have the same nearly the same sunrise as Georgia when they change their clocks back. Clearly Georgia makes it through the fall and Winter A-OK every year.
Is the concern mostly squared around Central through Northern California?
https://web.archive.org/web/20170420043300/http://stopdst.co...
No novel facts, just a pretty list of statements against Daylight Saving Time.
Any decrease in daylight time dramatically increases rates of depression.
2) For those who have calls with people in Europe this would be a big plus since the EU looks likely to go to DST year round. If this happens and California keeps switching then UK/ROI/Portugal will be 9 hours off from CA half the year, and western Europe 10 hours off. It's hard enough to schedule calls with an 8 hour difference.
That passage marks the point where they admit it is satire. It's about half way through.
> Never mind the fact that permanent DST means they never get that hour back or that in the winter children would be headed to the bus in darkness every morning.
doesn't do a thing