Several people keep making a variant of this argument, and I keep saying “that has really high coordination costs”, and I think maybe we’re talking past each other on it. As a thought experiment, how about the people who don’t want to switch their clocks just don’t, and go ask all the institutions that they interact with on a schedule (but don’t want to have change by an hour) institute seasonal schedule changes to accommodate them? Seems like a lot of work, right?
I don’t think I’m making that argument. I’m arguing that there is a fundamental discordance between modern clock-based schedules that are constant year round and a sun incidence that is not, and that the least inconvenient solution overall is coordinating that adjustment.
I feel like there’s a substantive difference between “no one has tried to show that changing the clocks is better” and “The majority should never be inconvenienced to accommodate another group”. The latter is a fairly tough philosophy to build a functional society around.
Also, I disagree that it is a minority group being accommodated. I believe that there is broad dislike of getting up way before the sun goes up, and the reason people are generally less aware of that is that we’ve been largely protected against having to do it by a generally good but imperfect policy: clock changes.
Reading some other news stories I’m beginning to think that the answer to the question asked in the post title is “No,” nowhere close to a fait accompli.
It seems to have been a quirk that it passed with unanimous Senate approval. Many staffers apparently didn’t bother to tell their Senators about the vote thinking that there was no chance it would pass without objection, so it just happened that the people who would have objected didn’t find out about it.
The house, while indicating some lukewarm approval of the idea, aren’t in any hurry to pick it up and do something with it.
I do. I hate the idea of having the sun not rise till 8:35 during the first week of January, but I equally dislike the idea of having the sun rise at 4:25 during the first week of July. So I am willing to switch twice a year.
Now if the government really wanted to do something for us, they would switch our thermometers twice a year. Instead of January average high of -15 and low of -25, make it -5 and -15 and instead of July average high of 35 and low of 25, make it 25 and 15. Just imagine how much we would save on winter heating and summer air conditioning!
Since there would also be people who did switch their clocks, institutions would be unable to accommodate both sets.
If the sun rises too early for you in July, can’t you just pull your blinds?
I’m entirely willing to have the switch be to year-round standard time, if most people would rather have that light in the morning than in the evening. I just don’t want to be yanked around twice a year; and I have fewer problems with it than most people, because to some extent I can set my own schedules.
We don’t have blinds in our bedroom. But even so, I don’t mind the early sunrise. In June we wake up in light and go to bed before it gets dark. I’ve also spent some summers in Alaska, so it doesn’t seem that strange to me.
In the winter, I go to work in the dark and come home in the dark. That would be true if you adjusted the clocks, or didn’t. So it really doesn’t make any difference to me whether it’s standard time or daylight time, and therefore I’d really prefer they pick one and stick to it.
Right. The idea that we can just leave the clocks the same and have the people who need to have a schedule that matches the sun change theirs is just as dysfunctional. For better or for worse, we all have to stay on the same schedule for almost everything because the coordination costs of doing anything else are just too high.
Yup. I’m okay with the argument that people who are hurt by changing time outnumber those who benefit from keeping wake-up time closer to dawn. But (as someone who does like to keep dawn closer to the same time) i get pissed off by those who say, “just adjust your schedule”. That’s really not feasible for most people.
I suggested that it might be better if the nation were a single time zone, and each city or major region were forced to come up with local standards that reflected latitude as well as longitude. But I’ve never suggested each person should somehow try to get everyone else to adjust to their schedule.
You don’t think suggesting that every single person live in the same “single time zone” and every locality being “forced” to adopt its own time zone would massively inconvenience some people? What, everyone would just be fine with this arrangement?
I don’t think there’s any answer that doesn’t inconvenience people. Unless you live in the tropics, the seasonal daylight cycle doesn’t play well with fixed clocks. But I don’t actually think it’s a major inconvenience to learn that “stores typically open at 11am”, if 11am is a normal morning time that works to start stuff in an area. If we all had “Washington, DC” time on our clocks, Californians won’t be eating lunch around noon, because that’s obviously crazy.
More importantly, i think it’s possible for a region to have regional norms. That’s exactly what happened before the railroads forced us to set up time zones. I think it’s impossible for an individual to negotiate with everyone else they encounter to make things work for that individual.
Anyway, “all one time zone” isn’t my first choice. My first choice is what we have, changing the clocks to keep them more in synch with dawn. I think that was a brilliant idea, and one that benefits me, and people like me who have a strong, sun-linked circadian rhythm. One big time zone is something I threw out as better than “we all move to current DST year round”, because that leads to a lot of very late dawns but ALSO retains the assumption that “stores open at 8”. I think one big time zone would remove that assumption.
We do this all the time with everything else. You are rather selfishly, to my mind, trying to invent some system (or to keep the one we invented a few generations back) to force the sun to shine at the times you happen to find most personally convenient for you.
I personally don’t like when it drizzles. Should we invent some system to cancel every appointment automatically when it drizzles so I don’t have to suffer the inconvenience of stepping outdoors into the rain again?
If the majority benefit from canceling all appointments when it drizzles, then yes, we should do that. They don’t, which is why we don’t. We do have systems to cancel appointments for snow storms and hurricanes.
As i said above:
If i get forced to stop changing the clocks, I’ll cope. I think I’m in the minority in appreciating that. But do i “selfishly” advocate systems that benefit me? Sure. Don’t you do the same? Isn’t the idea of democracy that we’ll all be better off on average if we all do that?
The human race seemed to deal with the complete absence of Daylight Saving Time until it was enacted.
It was a terrible idea, people rationalized it with all sorts of nonsense about the farmers’ schedules, and saving energy and about a dozen other weak rationales that have since been utterly debunked and abandoned by DST-defenders who have adopted even less reasonable arguments for keeping it.
Daylight gets less abundant in the winter. That is literally the way the world works. Deal with it. Don’t impose absurd ways of pretending that it doesn’t onto everyone else.
I you might argue more constructively if you understood the point of the other side. It’s not to “pretend we have more daylight than we do”, it’s to adjust our schedules to use the existing amounts of daylight more effectively.
That’s why Hawaii has never changed the clocks for daylight savings time. It’s close enough to the equator that the length of days doesn’t vary very much. It doesn’t make much sense in Alaska, either, since the day varies SO much that no minor adjustment is going to help.
Yeah, it looks like there was a pretty big breakdown in communication and understanding here. When a unanimous consent motion to move a bill is made on the floor, it’s generally left to the relevant committee’s Chair or Ranking Member to object if any member of their party has indicated their objection. It sounds like Senators (or their staff) assumed that Maria Cantwell or Roger Wicker would object, but neither did.
Now that the issue is on everyone’s radar, I think it’s unlikely that this will pass the House. It’s always easier to kill bills than move them.