Bill to make Daylight Savings permanent | Hacker News Reader

Bill to make Daylight Savings permanent

congress.gov

56 pointspolm2327 comments

What does "make daylight savings time permanent" even mean? To stick with daylight savings time all year long and don't adjust for winter and summer?

If so sounds good to me.

It does mean we stop adjusting the clocks twice a year. The question is, do we stick with standard time or daylight savings time.

A lot of the changeovers in NA seem to be leaning towards keeping DST year round. As a Canadian, the idea is certainly appealing. Currently it gets dark about 45 mins before work ends. Having a bit of sunlight when you leave is nice.

But as pointed out below, sticking with DST is probably worse for highschoolers.

As a upper midwesterner, I wholeheartedly agree. It's just annoying that the moment I get home from work, it's so dark out I can't jog without a reflective vest or headlamp. The morning is fine because it's no different than when you have to wake up early for work.

What I think it /should/ mean is that 13:00 becomes the center of daylight. Who knows what's in that bill through ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

I wish we could stick with Noon as the middle of the day and adjust normal work, school, etc schedule around that. But I'd take "permanent daylight saving".

I believe that's already an option, but few/none have chosen it. Currently, the two legal options federally are no DST or DST half the year. There are a couple states that have passed laws for permanent DST but are waiting on a federal law before it can be enacted.

Recent discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25646867

And I believe it was also buried by dang, on the logic that bills rarely go anywhere and are thus usually not worthy of a thread.

Nit: it's daylight saving [singular].

Ha! Not according to the title of the bill!

"H.R.69 - To make daylight savings time permanent, and for other purposes.”

In terms of engineering, permanent DST is pretty stupid. Instead we should use standard time but move one timezone over.

With DST all year long your timezone becomes UTC+N+1, this is needlessly verbose/overcomplicated.

I thought research showed it didn't save money

I mean if research also shows that switching times twice a year doesn't save money either, then it probably makes sense to transition for quality of life purposes.

I thought research showed it saves lives, since accidents (car and work-related) are higher after daylight switches.

If we're going to adjust time, I want one timezone nation wide. Heck, I want that worldwide but let's start with the US first.

worldwide? but what about the sun

I assume OP means something like "use UTC everywhere". You can still have mid-day, afternoon, morning etc. they just don't rotate around 12PM (unless you're close to the prime meridian).

Why does the sun need to have anything to do with numerical time?

Swatch tried to do that by creating Swatch Internet Time, which was a time zone less decimal time system. As you can guess, this didn’t end well or take over the world.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time

Time zones exist so that (approximately) the sun is overhead at noon. If you ask anyone what time zone the world should operate on, they’ll agree, provided that they use your time zone. Otherwise you could make everyone use GMT/UTC instead, and I can’t see America doing that when most of the country can’t count beyond 12 on a clock.

There are some counties which use a single time zone by dictat, like China, but all that happens is people adjust their working days such that the sun is up at lunchtime, so you don’t gain any advantages by having everyone on the same time zone because now you need to know what individual areas working hours are so you can communicate.

These days more problems are caused by leap seconds, which is the difference between GMT and UTC, and I expect we will get rid of those soon as well.

What proposals are there for eliminating leap seconds? I don't see how you can get around them without either redefining the second, or putting off a bigger adjustment later.

The problem is that leap seconds might have made sense when time keeping was accurate at the millisecond level but now that time can be measured at the nanoseconds level (at the speed of Computing, essentially) such changes are to big and cause problems, especially if they are negative. Instead, applying by smearing the time over a period (see Google’s approach) is a less dangerous way of handling the situation, but now you’ve got computers that might not agree on time exactly.

As a result it is easier to abolish leap seconds and just live with the fact that in 30,000 years time that noon might not be directly overhead.

This is often posted as a response: https://qntm.org/abolish

I'd actually be curious to hear what a nation wide timezone would solve?

#RepealStandardTime

The best thing to do would be to keep DST but move “spring forward” to occur at 11am on Monday so that we get to keep the hour of sleep on Sunday and lunchtime comes sooner.

Couldn't we just insert/remove an extra five minutes the first Saturday of every month? We'd get the same effect, but without the jump.

Many clocks and watches are still manually set.

No I don’t want any minutes taken away from my saturdays. Have my hour before lunch instead

Would still give a problem on the following days. It takes several days to change the circadian rhythm.

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