It was moved somewhat recently to first Sunday in November to accommodate Halloween trick or treaters.
I recently heard an argument from amature astronomers for permanant standard time, and that is that, in the summer, on DST, it doesn’t get to dark enough until nearly 11pm, giving them less time before they would like to go to bed.
And now they’ll have to for longer swaths of the year.
Actually, a lot of them do.
It’s common around here for businesses to have winter and summer hours. It’s also common for businesses that have different amounts of work at different times of year – seed companies, for instance – to have longer hours of operation when they’re busy and shorter hours when they’re less busy.
Changing the clocks is trivial, even if you’ve got a lot of clocks that don’t change themselves. It’s not about changing the clocks; clocks are in no way disturbed by being changed. It’s about changing sleep/wake cycles, both in humans and in all the associated non-human species who live with us.
There are some humans who don’t notice such changes much. There are a lot of humans who are seriously affected.
Restaurants in my tourist town on the beach also have different summer hours.
I suppose I am an anomaly in that the clock change itself doesn’t rattle me for more than a day or two. And heck, this last Sunday I was traveling from an non-DST jurisdiction to one that uses one time zone off, so I had to do no adapting (though the three housebound clocks needed changing).
Frankly part of the issue in the USA is (a) as mentioned, the arbitrary rule that the workday/schoolday for everyone, everywhere, has to happen exactly at these X:00-Y:00 clock hours regardless of conditions on the ground, because someone in New York or Boston or Chicago c. 1900 said so and (b) that the existing time zones in the Continental US, designed for the convenience of railroad and telegraph communications between the business hubs of the late 1800s, today in in many places wind up with too much of the population centers too offset from the actual longitude-from-GMT reference mark.
Ideally the best solution would be to reevaluate and redraw the CONUS time zone boundaries to get something that works out least badly for a maximum amount of people and places across the seasons, and then fix them there with year-round Standard Time.
I see from the recently passed bill that it rather takes the clumsy but easier route of just redesignating all the existing “Standard” time zones by a +1 hour datum (e.g. EST becomes defined as GMT -4 as opposed to GMT -5 ). But, it wisely allows that those locations that already exclude DST under current law (that would be Arizona, plus the various jurisdictions in the tropics – Hawaii, PR, USVI, Guam, American Samoa, the Marianas – where it’s kind of pointless) would get to choose which “new” zone to adhere to i.e. whether or not to make that one final change. In the case of PR/VI for instance they’re by longitude close to the west edge of the UTC-minus-4 reference (what the US calls “Atlantic Time”) and do not switch, but during DST the East Coast does sync up with them, so to those islands it would be most efficient if this law passes to just stand pat at minus 4, NOT move forward to minus 3, and nothing changes in their lives next November.
lol
I bet there were also complaints that the observatory dome was not heated so they were chilly, and that they did not have a good espresso machine.
[there is a reason why the official astronomical day used to begin at noon…]
To an astronomer, DST stands for “Darkness Squandering Time.” I’ve heard drive-in theaters hate it too, for exactly the same reason.
I’d say we can just make it so the administrators at the funding outfit, are expected to hold their business meetings at 9pm…
A cautionary tale?:
Absolutely.
They should have put us on permanent standard time.
In the long run, it doesn’t matter whether we are on permanent daylight savings time, or permanent standard time. Schools and businesses will adjust opening times as desired. But in the short run, getting past the first batch of dark winter mornings is required to make it stick. By unanimous consent — no historically astute senators.
Here is my obligatory comment about Hawaii never having to change its time. The only way DST affects us is having to remember how many hours ahead you guys are.
YMMV, but that sounds just as annoying as (if not more than) a small adjustment to the local time. I suppose it depends on how much one deals with institutions in other time zones.
If it’s such a small adjustment, then why do auto accident rates go up for a week or so after it’s done?
I assume it is somewhere in the thread already, but just put the whole country on UTC.
I schedule a meeting for 13:30, everyone knows what time it is going to happen. My hours in the office are 12:00 - 21:00, everyone knows when I can be reached.
I do like this Idea. Businesses could just decide their own starting times. And businesses like the Stock Exchange would have consistent hours across the country, heck the world for that matter. No need for anyone to try and compute times.
I do see issues for national businesses with local times. IE if Cracker Barrel wants to open at 8 AM then you have 4 different start times (based on the current time zones) for the continental US. But with Google and Bing and Duck Duck go like they are, if I do a search, and I usually do now for Businesses, then the local published hours should come up and I don’t have to worry about it.
This is ridiculous. That means that the date would change in California at, if I calculated correctly, what is currently 5pm.
Is there a similar drop after we fall back? Just curious – it wouldn’t affect any sort of opinion I have on the issue, I’m just curious if the extra sleep helps on the flip side or not and it’s a wash in the end. (I suspect they wouldn’t cancel each other out, but may be close.) ETA: Actually, wait, it says virtually no change in November. So extra sleep doesn’t help, but an hour less of sleep seems to contribute to about 28 extra fatal accidents a year. But that’s just one aspect of time change. You have to look at long-term effects as well. Will keeping us on DST year round increase accident rates in the morning (especially in Northern cities) because of increased darkness during normal commuting hours? There’s a number of factors to consider when moving around the clock, not just how many accidents there are in the week after a time change (though that is an important data point.)
My initial take is “So?”. But I can see where that is a paradigm shift, so you could use one of the existing US time zones (the AT&T network time was the Central time zone), but UTC has the advantage of being non-US centric for international businesses.
People plan things by date. That is so ingrained that it would be effectively impossible to change.