Sometimes I get the impression that the spirit of states rights in the US has died.
It's actually an enumerated power under Article I, Section 8, Clause 5:
> [The Congress shall have Power...] To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures; ...
https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S8-C5-1/...
I would be less surprised if it were the commerce power used to uphold time zone coordination - for the promotion and regularity of interstate commerce etc etc. Tenuous, but consistent with a lot of the other nonsense that's been hung from the commerce power over the years.
Then there's the actual enforcement angle - time zones are just a social convention whereby people in a given area pretend that the time is slightly different than it 'really' is (local solar time). There's no reason local / state government and businesses can't post / operate on different hours, and leave federal bodies to operate on whatever 'federal time' they want. This already happens in parts of the world where the official time is locally inappropriate, such as Eucla in Australia or Xinjiang in China.
Obviously the optimal solution here is to coordinate a time change at all levels of government, but failing that there are other options.
But I don't see a problem relating time zones to measurement. Part of the authority to standardize measurement is the ability to dictate the manner and means of determining a quantitative value. Under the Weights and Measures clause I think Congress can regulate things like scales, including their precision and accuracy, at least in so far as they claim to provide a measurement of a Federally standardized unit. You might intuitively think the only reasonable end to such power is using it to improve and mandate ever greater precision and accuracy. But sometimes too much precision and accuracy is a bad thing--it can create transactional friction. Case in point, when 12PM noon varied between every town it become increasingly problematic as the speed of long-distance transportation improved, i.e. the rail roads. So the solution was to mandate worse accuracy.
Relatedly, there's a whole separate question of what time means. Most HN readers understand time in the scientific sense, and think of time in the sense of the SI second. But civil time used for general daily life has a slightly more nuanced meaning. That said, UTC/TAI time is very much like time zones in the sense of fudging accuracy. Modern clocks and gravimeter, even the kind regular people can buy for a few hundred or thousand dollars, are precise enough to be able to distinguish local time dilation. So the time passing in your living room is actually different from UTC/TAI. But think of how complex and, for the most part, useless it would be to try to "solve" that discrepancy by trying to integrate that reality in the general definition of civil time.
Also, AFAIU the authority to standardize measurement, and time specifically, operates more as a prohibition on states imposing their own mandates. See, generally, the Legal Tender Cases for the push and pull between various powers allocated between the federal government and the states.
The special auth. from the Fed's is needed to switch to "permanent summer time" (and, possibly advocating for year round "summer time" gives the state politicians cover to do nothing, because "their hands are tied...").
"Morons" was an overly dramatic way of putting it but it is very clearly the technically deficient choice as will be apparent to anyone who bothers to consult the history books. The US already attempted permanent DST in 1974 but quickly repealed it. Russia similarly tried it out from 2011 to 2014 before switching to permanent standard time instead. The UK also tried it at one point before abandoning it. Mexico might have tried it for the longest, from 1996 until 2022 when they too switched to permanent standard time. (Actually I'm unclear why Mexico gave it up. They're far enough south that the difference between the two shouldn't be particularly impactful.)
The correct answer here is obvious. (This being HN I guess personal political rants aren't really the thing to do so I should at least link to some actual literature on the topic. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/physiology/articles/10....)
It is the majority opinion of people that study chronobiology (circadian rhythms) and sleep researchers, as issued via their professional societies:
* https://srbr.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/SRBR-Statement-o...
* http://www.chronobiocanada.com/official-statements
* https://sleepresearchsociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/...
* https://jcsm.aasm.org/doi/10.5664/jcsm.8780
* https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2019.0094...
* https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35382618/
* https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/07487304198541...
* https://www.ama-assn.org/public-health/prevention-wellness/s...
* https://esrs.eu/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/To_the_EU_Commiss...
From a public health perspective, all-year DST is not good, and all-year Standard Time is what should be done.
But it makes them anti-science.
It still requires federal approval, but from Sec Transit instead of Congress
It was bullshit from day one. The origin of the state's rights argument was slave state's attempting to force free states to round up fugitive slave and return them to the slave states.