Sleep experts say Senate is wrong: Standard time, not DST, should be permanent
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
Our current system comes from a world of mechanical clocks. It made sense to ditch the sundial for a pendulum-driven display that worked rain or shine, and a spring-wound gadget you could carry around. But now our phones and even watches have caught up in their ability to accurately model the natural world -- they have the location information they could use to calculate the sundial time. There are already apps that do this [3].
Since this local time is just that -- local -- it should be understood that it's only useful for local things. When to wake up and go to bed, when to meet others in person, etc. For any coordination across different places on Earth local time is clearly not suitable, and we already have a solution for that: just use UTC.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_time
[2] https://pbfcomics.com/comics/high-noon/
[3] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/solar-time/id1100646247Once we abolish the changing of the clocks we’ve gotten rid of a societal menace.
Then, any state can switch to whatever time zone they want. If the Pacific states want to move an hour, go for it! Just so long as none of us need to move our clocks twice a year.
It literally doesn’t matter if we decide on Standard or Daylight time. Daylight seems to be the preference of the East Coast. If some states on the western edge of their time zones don’t like it they can move 1 over on their own. We need to abolish the nationwide clock changes because they’re nonsense.
New England has a compact to move ahead one time zone and abolish the clock changes, moving from Eastern to Atlantic zone, if all the states agree. That’s basically identical to year round DST. But if the rest of the Northeast stayed on Eastern with clock changes, New England would have a different time zone for 4 months out of the year, which is kind of weird and awkward. It’d be easier if Boston and New York were either in the same time zone, or 1 hour apart, but being different sometimes sounds like a mess.
Maybe California wanted to avoid that.
Plus it’s all a moot point because you need blackout curtains for good sleep in the area anyway.
I know, you meant creating sun outside. But blackouts also only create darkness indoors.
Sound good?
In other words—leave the clocks alone! It's not the clock that's the issue here, but rather the learned inflexibility about arbitrary work and school hours.
Also, I've read that counting 12 hours from sunrise to sunset was in fact how several ancient peoples did it. They didn't even necessarily count hours at night, only watches.
If a state decides parents matter more, they can move to the time zone such that parents are happy in winter year round. No need to change the clocks!
I think I would prefer DST, I'm always awake at 8pm but almost never awake yet at 7am.