19 States approved permanent daylight saving time | Hacker News Reader

19 States approved permanent daylight saving time

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27 pointsgeox45 comments

Anybody know what those of us in the remaining states can do to help push this forward? I've never contacted my local representatives before, but this is the kind of no-brainer change that I would love for us to finally enact.

Until this goes away or a federal bill passes, nothing will change: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Time_Act.

This only allows states to choose to switch or to remain in "standard time", there's not an option to remain in "savings time".

> no-brainer change

In a way? [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47264013

Metric system when?

100 seconds per minute, 100 minutes per hour, 100 hours per day, 100 days per year. That's the dream. (I know that's not what you meant)

I prefer decaminutes

Furlongs per fortnight.

This was a real unit of time on VAX/VMS systems.

We just need to change Earth's rotational speed and orbital period so that the number of days in a year is congruent 0 (mod 10). If we had 1000 day years, then maybe we could have 10 months of 10 weeks of 10 days. Or with 100 day years, we could skip months and just have 10 weeks of 10 days.

Somewhere between Mercury's and Venus's orbits, we could have a year with 100 days of our current length. It would be nice for our existing circadian rhythms but a bit on the hot side...

A bit further than Mar's orbit, we could have a year with 1000 days of our current length, but pretty chilly.

Maybe we could take Mars's orbit, since we think it had liquid water and we've go a greenhouse going anyway... That is about 690 of our current day lengths. But maybe we could spin Earth up to have 1000 rotations per orbit, and each day would be about 16.5 of our current hours.

Given the utter climate chaos we'd get from this, it might be more realistic to move everybody underground and then we can just program the lights to give us whatever decimal time units we want... ;-)

We tried that in 1998! See Swatch Internet Time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time

I loved the idea. However, the main issue was that it completely ignored the date.

While it worked fine in Western Europe - as i.Beats were based on the “Biel Mean Time” = GMT+1, people in the US would e.g. wake up at @584 on March 7 and eat dinner @125 on March 8.

Most devices don't even require manually setting the clock anymore. What exactly is so difficult about the time changing by an hour?

I’m curious about your school or job/work schedules. Or how consequential it is, when personal scheduling isn’t kept.

If a personal or family routine is not robust enough to handle an hour of variation I wouldn't expect the dst changeovers to register in the top 25 most disruptive yearly events.

Your understanding is backwards.

Most devices do still in fact require setting the clock. In my home right now, I have a computer, a phone, my microwave, my stove, and my car which all have clocks. Only the first two of those have the ability to sync time from an external source.

We see increased deaths with the time changes. Car accidents. Heart attacks. There is a real cost.

You can just set your clocks to whatever you want. Stop trying to force people to do it with the government.

Ok but for most people work hours are dictated by a shared clock (and many daily activities as well) so... It becomes a coordination problem if we don't all agree on what time it is in each locale.

I appreciate the coordination problem here, but I do think that states are making it harder than it needs to be. The federal government doesn't need to be involved. Each state can decide on their own how to coordinate this, it does not need to be the entire nation (and indeed it already isn't, as the examples of AZ and HI show).

Considering that one of the biggest problems in our country today is trying to run more and more at the federal level instead of at the state level, it's really silly to add to that pile.

The federal government constrains what states are allowed to do, so it has to be decided at the federal government. AZ and HI got legal exceptions long ago.

As I understand it, any state is welcome to keep standard time all year, as AZ and HI do, without dispensation from the federal government.

Changing time zones or keeping permanent daylight time requires a dispensation. It is my firm belief that state legislatures have voted to keep permanent daylight time as a way to not actually change anything while telling constituents that they're doing stuff.

No, the law is that states can decide to not implement DST at all, but they can’t decide to have it permanently.

At one point a couple New England states were looking at this, but for that reason it would have been implemented by moving to a different time zone: year round AST rather than year round EDT. (Which are both UTC-4.) That said, I think states need federal permission to move time zones, too.

Uniform time act of 1966 prevents this being set at the state level outside of remaining forever in standard time.

Let the market decide. If it's worth it to some people, then they'll pay for the privilege of doing so.

Right now, the revealed preference is that there is zero demand for it.

Markets don't solve coordination problems

What are you talking about? Markets solve the distribution and valuation coordination problem by price signaling. That's the whole shtick.

Markets are a heuristic for solving some computationally hard problems. Heuristics get stuck in local optima. Overcoming local optima is presumably what GP meant by coordination problem.

What does that mean? People pay for it to be light out at 6 PM, or we bid on what time sunset is? What does this problem look like on a market?

And by what metric is there zero demand to solve the time-change problem?

> Ok but for most people work hours are dictated by a shared clock (and many daily activities as well) so...

Obviously request a reasonable accommodation and sue if you don’t get it.

Changes to official time zones should be a non-issue to you then

If you look at a schedule of sunrise and sunset, there is no reasonable hour for school kids to walk in the daylight year-round. So your choice is to either let them walk in the dark in winter; not let them walk at all; change school hours seasonally; or change all hours seasonally.

It’s not clear that daylight savings is the least reasonable solution. And there is no fundamental reason to me that the time has to be the same in two different states. Wanting to live with the hobgoblin of consistency does not make your plan correct.

I don't understand what you're trying to say.

The northernmost tip of the continental US gets about 8 hours of daylight during winter solstice. School is normally about 6.5 hours, so it's possible to give kids at least 45 minutes of daylight on either end of school any day of the year. Obviously not possible in Alaska, but possible in the other 49.

If you insist on your time zones being an hour wide, that makes it 15/75 and 75/15 on the edges. 15 minutes isn't a lot of time to walk to/from school, but that's only the week of winter solstice which is often during Christmas break anyways. Every week away from solstice adds about 15 minutes.

Okay, you do understand what I’m trying to say, so what am I supposed to respond? Tell me what your calculations for the school day year-round would best be in Washington State, and Maine.

The existing standard times already work? For Seattle on PST that puts sunrise at 7:54AM and sunset at 4:20PM in Seattle during winter solstice. Which gives almost an hour of sunlight on either side for a standard school day of 9-3:30.

For Bangor on it's 7:06AM and 4:03PM. It'd work better for an 8:30-3:00 school schedule. But for a 9-3:30 they'd unsurprisingly be better off on Atlantic Standard Time.

Now convince the parents that the kids should go to school at 9 and convince the companies that parents should start work at 10. I’m not really the one you need to bat around.

School start time is already 8:50AM in Seattle, no convincing needed.

They start earlier in Bangor, but the sun rises earlier in Bangor, so again everything already lines up quite well.

My kid’s elementary school in Seattle starts at 7:50 AM

Yeah, you can't have kids walking in daylight during the winter solstice unless all schools start at the same time. You can pick a time zone to match the school start time, or you can pick a school start time to match the time zone. But any school more that 30 minutes different has kids walking in the dark during the winter solstice.

As a 90s kid, reading this caused me to wonder "How many kids actually walk to school anymore? I've almost never seen it in the US." Seems like it might be around 10%:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221133551...

Regardless of where you stand on this issue, I hope we can all at least agree that implementing half daylight savings time (ie a 30 minute adjustment) is just stupid.

This idea was apparently introduced in a bill last month: https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/7378...

Not really. The equilibrium of removing daylight savings will result in schedules somewhere between DST and Standard Time. This just gets you there faster.

The trade off of having 30-minute time zone offsets probably isn't worth it, but this solution isn't immediately "stupid."

Actually the only intelligent solution is to abandon discrete time changes to & make this a continuous adjustment. We need to adjust the clock continually, ongoingly, to appropriately track the light of the day.

/sssssss

Disregard clocks, touch grass, abandon technology, worship sun.

Also, my retirement plan.

While we're at it, everyone deserves 12h of daylight, so clocks should use exact position to automatically and continuously adjust so that 6:00 is always sunrise, 12:00 is always "high noon", and 18:00 is always sunset. :-)

Some will argue that the minutes should correspond to sun angles over the (eastern) horizon, so you know what kind of hat to wear for a given appointment time. In the tropics, you can have this 6:00..12:00..18:00 daytime a couple times per year. Elsewhere and elsewhen, your clock should asymptotically approach a morning time corresponding to the sun's zenith, then jump to the corresponding afternoon time as the sun starts descending again.

However, after a gathering of stakeholders, it will be determined that everyone can pretend to be at the right tropical latitude to have the sun pass overhead. We will simply add "grocer's quotes" around each clock display or written timestamp, indicating that it is aligned to a hypothetical high noon. Largely thanks to these grocery clerks, we'll never have to design clocks with correct asymptotic behavior for midnight sun and polar night observers.

Of course, the ISO timestamp format will also need to be updated, replacing the timezone suffix with a longitudinal coordinate. Many variants will be defined for using decimal degrees, degrees/minutes/seconds, or floating-point radians for this value. But most programmers will only bother to handle decimal degrees, and many will be lazy and use lookup tables. Clever hackers will decide to save space by discretizing with a formula like floor(longitude / nbins). After careful study, they will settle on the constant nbins=24.

Finally, Newfoundland was right all along. First as per usual

India also has half hour offset. & no DST

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