Back on the legislative matter – as I mentioned elsewhere, what should be really considered is a redrawing of the time zone boundaries. We no longer have to accommodate that the railroad’s home office is in the East Coast so therefore Indiana/Michigan/Ohio should be on Boston time – and for that matter, save for Pacific, the way they are drawn the reference longitude for each time zone is towards the east edge of the zone, rather than down the middle of it.
You have seen the maps, the “winter sunrise too late” band cuts across the NW end of each time zone in a diagonal – so, adjust that: move those states/counties over to the earlier-hour zone, and rename the zones. But of course, that would require someone at the responsible committee actualy sitting down and designing (or requesting the CRS and Naval Observatory to sit down and design) those new boundaries which would result in any number of congressmen arguing that their hometown needs to be as close to DC time as humanly possible and we’re back to where we started with the railroads.
Which brings up a part of the issue you can’t really legislate: what private businesses do about their business hours. Back in the early 20th Century someone figured the best times for office work in the East Coast were 9-to-5 EST, and it then became a matter of everyone becoming expected to have office hours 9-to-5 local regardless of conditions. Someone elsewhere mentioned that if most businesses changed their times to be an hour after latest sunrise, eventually people would start to complain “but I still want 5 hours of sunlight after quitting time!”
(One could imagine a rational world in which schools and businesses change their hours so you clock in at 8 or 9 between May Day and Halloween and then change that to 9 or 10 for “winter” – but part of the matter is that (a) we expect to have everyone be at work more or less at the same time as us (and the Transit Authority counts on that to schedule the buses) and (b) we have made non-agricultural work independent of non-extreme conditions – we have air conditioning, artificial lights, and now online connectivity that creates the expectation that I will answer a business e-mail 24/7 anywhere on the planet.)
It doesn’t sound dysfunctional to me. It’s a body that accepts that some things need to get passed that don’t really raise a concern, so there’s a process for that to happen. It didn’t work properly this time, but that should just mean that each Senator gives their staff a lecture about reading the notices more carefully.
I think it means that in the past, this process has worked. I have no complaints about the existence of the process. But it’s dicey that this time someone did propose a controversial topic under the “unanimous consent” rules. That feels like a bad precedent.
This is the kind of thing, though, that can only work once. Every Senate office will now be scrutinizing every unanimous consent motion and objecting if there’s even the possibility that it could be remotely controversial.
The danger isn’t that UC motions will be used to pass other controversial bills, it’s that UC motions (which are used a lot in the Senate to expedite routine business) will be constantly blocked bringing the chamber to a halt.
It was just a weird brain fart. I don’t think anyone was trying to be sneaky. Since we have the House and POTUS as a backstop, literally no harm was done and there was the benefit of bringing the whole thing to … light … so that we could have a fruitful discussion.
Just about everything that goes through the Senate is proposed first to pass under unanimous consent, even if the proposer knows that it won’t clear cloture or even pass a regular majority vote of the full Senate. It’s really a standard part of regular order.
There are some parliamentary bodies that have a “consent agenda” which is passed automatically at the close of business. Any member of the body who wishes may object to the placing of any item on the consent agenda, after which the item goes onto the regular agenda for the meeting. This has a similar name to the motion to pass under unanimous consent, but it’s really not the same kind of thing.
Occasionally a committee chair will place something controversial on the consent agenda to try to sneak it through without discussion or debate, hoping the opposition on the committee will be asleep at the switch. For the unanimous consent motion in the Senate, though, that’s just part of the process.
Yes, what’s dysfunctional isn’t that unanimous consent is possible, but that many essential government functions grind to a halt without it because there is only limited majority rule in its absence.
So here’s the problem with this (at least the wat I see it), Why DST? Why not normal time? Leave it as EST, not EDT for example (I’m on the east coast).
We just skipped ahead an hour, this is DST, this is NOT the actual time or normal time. Let’s go back the hour and leave it the heck alone!!!
I’d probably prefer standard time, but I don’t think it is normal time any more. What we do for 2/3 of the year is more normal than what we do for 1/3 of the year. And as for the actual time, that’s whatever we say it is. It’s all contrived.
I don’t know about that, especially since it came up at the moment (i.e. when everybody has just experienced the “fall back” loss of an hour of sleep) that highlights the disadvantages of changing the clocks twice a year.
I still think that the efficient unit of geographical time determination is larger than that. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we tend to end up with mostly whole states and countries getting thunked into time zone barriers rather than individual cities or counties. Lots of people interact with multiple municipalities. I know plenty of people who live in one city but work in another. The chaos of the three weeks a year where the two don’t change their seasonal schedules at the same time would be far far worse than the coordinated changes we currently have.
Practically, there would be two stable equilibria to such a system. One where effectively everyone changes their schedules at the same time, which is just the thing we have today, or one where almost nobody changes a seasonal schedule, which is what you get without the clock switch. Every other state is way more costly than one of those, so you should just advocate for which of those you prefer.
That’s because time standardization initially happened so that rail schedules could be synchronized, and that was typically done at the state/national level. There are now other ways to do that.
I would bet almost none of these people work in a place where solar time would be dramatically different between those two municipalities. But some of them might have to cross a time zone boundary, and I bet it doesn’t melt their brains when they do so.
If we want to have some sort of longitudinal regime where it’s decreed that office hours are set in a solar-aligned way, fine. We could say that government offices open at 13:00 in the Eastern Time Zone, and private businesses can follow that (or not).
But there’s no good reason to insist that start of business must be associated with the number 9, or Christmas in December, or that the official time should be 13:00 in Eastern and 14:00 in Central, or that it should shift twice a year. All that is outdated silliness from a bygone era.
Right, but it’s not the clock changing that is the problem, it’s that different institutions might change their clocks at different times. If you cross a time zone boundary, you just have to remember that everything is always offset by 1 hour (or if it’s a boundary with Arizona, that half the year it’s offset by 1 hour). If municipalities or individual businesses are determining things then there are going to be weird shoulder seasons where some institutions in some cities change to their winter hours at different times and everything is a major pain. Your employer changes their winter hours one week, your kids school changes their winter hours next week, the municipal bus system changes their winter hours the following week… and so on. A huge mess!
A system with no winter hours at all (outside of specific outdoor things like ski resorts that have to stop the lifts before it gets dark) is stable and functional. A system where essentially everything switches in a synchronized manner is stable and functional. Everything in between is terrible.
This is what I’m not getting: the ski resorts’ problem is not the clock, it’s the fact that there are fewer hours of daylight in the winter. So they announce “AS OF MARCH 43RD, OUR HOURS OF OPERATION WILL CHANGE FROM 61-69 O’CLOCK TO 59-67 O’CLOCK FOR THE NEXT THREE MONTHS. THANK YOU.” Problem solved.
Right, and what I’m saying is that it’s one thing if ski resorts and a few other institutions figure out their own seasonal hours, but we can’t do it on a society-wide basis without it being organized and universal.
And, again, I believe that most people want their schedules to have broad societal seasonal adjustment, and that the annoyance of changing the clocks is salient because it’s the current system, but once we get rid of it, people will realize that they largely prefer the way things are now, with society-wide schedule shifts to better align the beginning of our days to sunrise, than they do getting up an hour earlier relative to sunrise for ~4 months a year. I claim that this already happened once 50 years ago, but as discussed upthread, the data from that experiment are awkwardly inconclusive.