Daylight Saving Time Year-Round, Abolish Standard Time in US | Hacker News Reader

Daylight Saving Time Year-Round, Abolish Standard Time in US

washingtonpost.com

I live in New Mexico near the Arizona border. We have DST; they don't. Arizonans tend to be smug about that; New Mexicans don't. The natural background smugness intensity (smugtensity) between the two states is about the same. So by gross state smug delta I'd say a single year-round timezone is popular here.

I just wish for a little more conformity so that I miss fewer November appointments in Arizona, and to wipe away those smug smiles when I tell them why. Although it's possible that expression is just due to me being an idiot who can't tell time.

For those not old enough to remember, the US had year-round DST from 1973-1975. (It was enacted as a limited-time trial measure and it wasn't renewed when it expired.)

Although I have no real problem with the current system, in my current situation I'm not very affected by whether there's DST or not, I'd be at least neutral about a single year-round time so long as it was current DST rather than standard time.

Why does it matter which way it goes? It's just a number on a clock, the important thing is that having that change twice a year is silly and annoying.

Personally, I would prefer that we switch to UTC time, which would make it simpler for scheduling meetings.

Your comment seems confused. The reference frame for counting time of day is arbitrary but the schedules of all businesses are fixed relative to this arbitrary reference frame as far as DST is concerned. So DST effectively shifts the hours of all businesses. Put another way, if you fix the operational hours, you are delaying sunrises and sunsets relative to business hours. Do you want more light before work or after work? That is the year-round DST question. It's not arbitrary. I want more light after work, all the time. I don't care about mornings. I have very little time to do things in the morning before work.

Suggesting UTC here doesn't make much sense. The time difference is so great that businesses would need to update to new UTC hours. But what hours exactly? More specifically, what hours relative to the position of the sun in the sky? That's the same question as this year-round DST vs non-DST question. A UTC switch doesn't address the topic.

Wouldn't declaring DST year-round just redefine "Standard Time"?

It's how people would think about it though and it has precedent and mechanisms to implement. (We've changed the dates for DST before, including making it year-round.) Shifting everyone one timezone to the east, by contrast, sounds a lot scarier and would probably be more disruptive.

Shh!

We need the thoughtless people to be on board to get this through!

As one of the people who would be getting phone calls about all the software that breaks when EST gets redefined to be four hours behind UTC rather than five, I'd really not want to go to there. Either of "EDT is now year-round" or "The east coast of the US is now on AST" would lead to a lot fewer problems, as changes of that nature have to be dealt with pretty regularly.

Why not just leave the time alone altogether. If companies want to start work earlier, let them change their schedule at their own discretion.

That's exactly what these proposals would do. No more twice-yearly time changes; if anyone wants to adjust schedules twice a year, based on daylight, they can adjust their operating hours.

I think we need more times zones in the US, which dont change, but the max difference would be -30/+30 minutes from sundial time.

I'd like to see the east coast move to Atlantic Standard Time permanently.

In the unlikely event some states shifted from Eastern to Atlantic, it would likely be just MA, NH, VT, ME, and maybe RI. New York would be unlikely to shift and if it were just most of New England, being in a different timezone from NYC would probably be a showstopper.

They can't even get rid of the fucking penny and I'm supposed to believe the federal government has the wherewithal to do something as sensible as abolish DST?

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