US President endorses bill to lock the clocks in current Daylight Savings Time | Hacker News Reader

US President endorses bill to lock the clocks in current Daylight Savings Time

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45 pointsivewonyoung36 comments

For northern states it almost doesn't matter, the latitude completely dominates the length of the day.

However I am irked at 'noon' being so far from solar noon year round, that's about the only solid reason to go back to 'standard' time so that at least in the median of timezones that time is approximately the same.

Southern states? Just let people work 8-4 instead of 9-5. This problem is entirely manufactured by trying to change the ruler rather than the prescribed mark points on it.

I'm irked in general by the lack of attention given to solar time. If I ever get into Android hacking, it'll be so I can replace the system statusbar clock with a solar one.

I made a CLI utility that prints percent through the solar day/night that people might find useful: https://github.com/riley-martine/sundial

I'm somewhat puzzled why so much attention is given to solar time. Why is it so important to have 12:00 be noon and match the time of day the sun is at its peak?

I'd much rather use UTC everywhere and eliminate daylight saving time. Because I'm currently UTC-5, it means the average workday would be 13:00 to 22:00, and noon becomes 17:00, but that seems no less arbitrary than 08:00 to 17:00 and 12:00, respectively.

Local noon (when the sun crosses the local meridian) orients us in time and in space. In time, because it marks the day being half-over. In space, because you can use solar alignment to lay out buildings and other structures in a north-south direction, or simply to navigate your locale.

It signifies a good time to eat lunch and the proper direction to orient your belly for an afternoon nap in the sun. :)

One of my screens at work is a full-screen UTC clock with seconds. But I added the solar altitude (in degrees) to the bottom of the display, just so I could easily track how close I am to sunrise or sunset. Solar azimuth would be more clock-like and make it obvious when the sun was culminating, but there's lots you can do when you program your own dashboards.

I live in Montana and would very much prefer to keep DST permanent because it means that I come home from work with light. Currently in deep winter when we are on standard time I get up and it's dark and go home and it's dark.

Light at the end of the day is useful to me because I can go for a walk around dinner, I don't care so much about it being light in the mornings when I'm getting ready for my day.

So I think making DST permanent for northern states would be a good thing.

The counterargument is that morning needs light more than evening because morning schedules are more synchronized than evening schedules and morning road conditions tend to be worse than evening road conditions.

So in the morning you've got the highest concentration of cars plus you've got kids walking or biking to school.

The school day is shorter than the work day so coming home the kids don't overlap with the workers. There is more time variation in when people leave work when they arrive, and many will do errands between living and driving home, so the cars are less concentrated.

Morning also has a higher chance of having worse road conditions. In the evening there is a chance the sun has melted ice patches that formed overnight. There's a chance that the day's traffic has cleared some paths in snow.

Back when I worked an office IT job, one year I asked my boss if I could come in an hour earlier in the winter (and leave an hour earlier after work). I had evening chores to do with my animals on the farm, and I needed the daylight after work.

What no one knew was that I just kept my watch on Daylight Savings Time and lived happily ever after. It was glorious. I saw my coworkers struggle with "jetlag" when the switch to Standard Time occurred, and when it went forward again. But I never switched. I kept that up for three years, and I highly recommend it. (I also got a tonne of work done in the hour before everyone else arrived to work.)

They've flipped back and forth over the years, and the length has been tweaked as recently as 2007.

I think that what happens is everyone blames DST, but the real culprit is just that the days are shorter in the winter and there's not much we can do about it.

Changing the numbers so that 1pm, rather than 12pm, now means noon is pointless and arbitrary, but if it makes people happy, whatever. I’d prefer we just switch to year-round correct time, but either option is much better than switching twice a year, so if this passes, I’m okay with it.

The US tried this in the '70s and people ended up hating it.

I'm the odd person out, I actually don't mind it.

Yeah it's inconvenient for about a few days, but I prefer being awake during the sunlight of the winter.

Why not just wake up an hour earlier, then?

A lot of people don't have the freedom to live their lives by scheduling around when the sun is up. Very large swathes of the population are tied to jobs with strict hours that they are required to be physically present somewhere (or at least online) and don't have a lot of room to flex from that. That limits their ability to take advantage of the longer summertime days by just "get up earlier" or "just leave work early" or what-not.

Me, I would love to see DST made permanent for that exact reason: I want the most available daylight after I can leave my job, so I have light for mountain biking, fishing, etc. But that's just me.

Okay, but won’t whatever cultural forces caused your job to be 9-5 (or whatever) under standard time eventually cause it to drift to 10-6 under +1 offset time, and then you haven’t gained anything? At that point will we offset by another hour, and so on ad infinitum?

I sometimes feel like arguments advocating for permanent DST think there’s something magical about the numbers “9” and “5” that made the 9-5 workday the standard, (rather than “three hours before midday” and “five hours after midday”), so that if we just change what times 9 and 5 refer to, things will work out…

I'm curious what factors might cause the job start time to drift? Isn't this a coordination problem? You want all of you employees to start at the same time, so the assembly line can keep operating. All the kids start school at the same time, so they can all be instructed at the same time.

Sure, probably. But how does that help me today? Of course I'm not literally just talking about myself per-se, but I expect that line of thought is how most people would view this. Who wants to wait a couple of years[1] for schedule drift to allow them to live a normal life?

[1]: would it actually be that long? I have no idea, TBH. But from a risk aversion viewpoint, one would probably prefer to already known scenario that optimizes for available sunlight after work.

other commenters nailed it: my job doesn't change its hours

Why do you think your job has the hours it does?

Support is more half and half than you might think, even historically. https://news.gallup.com/poll/657584/half-daylight-saving-tim...

After having lived in a country for a while that doesn't change its clocks, coming back to a country that still does has emphasised how annoying and archaic changing the clocks is. It also doesn't help that countries don't even change clocks on the same date.

We need to just stop it. After the first year everyone will forget it was even a thing.

I’m in NZ and we changed went into winter time. My kids now wake up 6AM, 3 hours before school…

Even a broken clock is right twice a day

Well, that one actually makes sense

In the digital age, we should have 2D timezones where the time is slewed ever so slightly every night at 3 a.m., so that 6 a.m. is always dawn. That is the future.

In some ways, yes. "Changing clocks" is the easiest it's ever been. We should be looking into changing them more often, not less. Two levels of daylight savings might be better than 1.

But on the other hand I think having the same sunrise time every day is actually pretty bad from a coordination perspective. Instead of everybody having a fraction of their year have an unfavorable sunrise, you will lock people into having either a light or dark commute.

Everybody will want to start their jobs at the same time making congestion worse. "Support jobs" (e.g. opening the store before "regular" business hours) will be permanently in the dark for their commute.

I feel like I would like this until winter. Then I'll wish we changed it again, but then in by summer I will change my mind again.

I prefer longer daylight in the evenings. Dark mornings don't bother me.

So you like summer more than winter. (Longer evenings could be had if jobs let out earlier in the day, or even better, gave employees the option to shift their time.)

Yes, but even in winter when we move back to standard time it's dark at 4 in the afternoon. I'd rather stay with DST year round.

A lot of jobs already offer time shifting where it's feasible. In many jobs it's not.

This is literally the only topic where I've ever agreed with the oompa loompa.

Works for me.

Title is: Trump endorses Rick Scott’s bill to lock the clocks in current Daylight Savings Time

Lousy farmers... /s

I’m pretty sure the idea that DST is for farmers is just a legend. Farmers can wake up whenever they need to based on where the sun is; it shouldn’t matter to them at all what the civil time is.

Farmers don't work in perfect isolation and do have to interact with other economic sectors that keep to clock hours. However, I don't think the misalignment between civil time and solar time has ever been so severe (nor would it be under year-round DST) to pose a serious problem for them.

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