I don’t actually. Have not looked into this at all, but I do hear a lot of complaints about what a gigantic, useless pain in the ass it is to be switching back and forth every six months. Purely anecdotal.
That said, I think if we followed your suggestions, we’d find ourselves in a situation where the majority will be unhappy with any outcome: roughly 1/3 of the population would prefer to keep switching, another 1/3 would like to stay on constant DST, and the final 1/3 would prefer to stay on constant non-DST.
It isn’t “every 6 months.” We are on Standard Time for 4 months and a week. Makes sense that if you are going to stay on one time, do the time you spend most of your time in. Did that make sense?
Yes, except don’t let counties decide time. Let them choose their business hours, and we use a time standard that is universal and immutable. No more time zones, leap days, leap seconds. Someday in Chicago, Christmas might arrive in July and planting season might start in November. This is fine; local customs will have caught up well before that time.
There is no time standard that will please everyone in every longitude and latitude. Things get weird when you live in high latitudes that don’t have DST.
The problem I have with landing on permanent DST vs permanent Standard Time is philosophical. My belief is that, for thousands of years humans considered “noon” as the point at which the sun was highest in the sky. That worked just fine until it didn’t (for example, when trains started crashing into each other becuase “noon” meant one thing to the people over here, and another to the people over there). So we created time zones. OK, they’re arbitrary, they’re based on government fiat and not real life, and they affect the people at the edges of the zone more than they do other people in the zone, but them’s the breaks. Some compromises are necessary in order to, you know, keep trains from crashing into each other. And to prevent 350 million Americans from having 350 million different notions of “noon.” I’m still on board.
However, to say that we’re going to make “noon” an hour earlier than it actually is, and stay there permanently, just seems wrong. The earth will continue to rotate, just as it has been doing for billions of years, regardless of what meaning we arbitrarily assign to the stages of its rotation.
I wrote “as I see it,” obviously implying that others see it as disputable.
But I wrote it that way to underscore my point which is that I don’t wish to argue about whether it is true. In my own experience, I have found that most folks derive far less pleasure from switching the clocks twice per year than they would from not switching them.
Some of course don’t care either way, and some don’t mind because they think it’s fun, or because they like to define themselves as “traditionalists” or because they think they’re getting some benefit from clock-switching that they’re not actually getting–I grant you these.
But with many such mindless traditions (that either make no sense in the first place, or which follow principles that no longer apply) I find that if we can overcome the resistance to changing them, the vast majority of people will adjust and say, after a few months or years, “Hey, ya know what? I hated this change, but it’s really no biggie. Glad we switched.”
What? I’m in Chicago, and I find I prefer my daylights hours where they are with the change in clocks each time, than freezing the clock to either CST or CDT. I don’t “think” I’m getting some sort of benefit I’m “not actually getting.” I am very much getting a benefit: I like my sun at the end of the day in warm weather months, and I like moving that sunlight to the beginning of the day in winter. This is not a benefit I’m imagining.
Do you have a cite that for the vast majority of the population the changeover causes them only three hours of mild confusion?
I know it’s like that for some people. I know it’s worse than that for some people. I know it’s much worse than that for some people. I have no idea what the percentages are.
Now that would be a real mess. I’m pretty sure that we could get a strong consensus that almost nobody wants to do it that way.
Things get weird when you live in high latitudes whether or not you’ve got DST.
Though, I suppose, things get weird when you’ve got humans.
Had to drive to work in the dark today - hated it.
I get why people want daylight in the evenings to do things. If only someone could invent electric lights so we wouldn’t have to rely on daylight at night.
That kind of depends on what you’re doing , doesn’t it? I’m not going to illuminate my yard enough to do yardwork after sunset, nor would I wake up at 4:30 am (the time the sun will rise in late May/early June) to do it before work.
I drive to work in darkness for at least three or four months per year. I drive home in darkness those same months. I literally only saw my house in the daylight on weekends (before COVID WFH)
Messing around with the time by an hour doesn’t even see to make much of a difference except right around the dates of the change over. My wife commented that it was dark this morning when she woke up. I told her to wait a month and it would be back to normal.
My argument for year-round Standard Time is (in addition to not wanting sunrise to be mid-morning) is mathematical. We’ve agreed that the Prime Meridian runs through Greenwich, UK. A circle has 360 degrees, and a day has 24 hours. 360º ÷ 24 hours = 15º per hour. The West Coast of the United States is approximately 120º west longitude. (Seattle is about 122º W, and Los Angeles is about 118º W.) 120º ÷ 15º = 8. So the West Coast of the United States should be eight hours earlier than Greenwich, UK. Not seven hours; eight hours.
EDT and EST aren’t apples-to-apples, though. We gotta convert one to the other to make sure we’re looking at things consistently.
If we convert, 7:12 EDT is the same as 6:12 EST, right? And 7:19 EST is the same as 8:19 EDT, right?
So if we switch to EDT for all year round, on January 7, there will be kids waiting for the bus when the sun won’t rise until 8:19. Plenty of kids are out at the bus stop by 7:20 or even earlier in the morning, and this DST all year round change will put a lot of them waiting for the bus when it’s fully dark outside.
Which is why I think it’s an awful idea. If a kid is waiting for the bus right around sunrise, the sky will be getting light. Having kids waiting for the bus while it’s an hour before sunrise seems like a recipe for disaster.
As a teacher, I also think it’s a bad idea. It’s going to be hellish trying to get kids focused on school before the sun has risen.
As I may have demonstrated above, EVERYONE is going to some fatal (personal) flaw in most DST/non-DST systems. The majority of the population is going to be unhappy, as they are right now, with ANY system we go with.
Can we accept this as a given?
Because if this is in dispute (and I don’t think it is) then we have no chance of getting a discussion going.
Which we seem to have, no chance of a discussion here that doesn’t end with everyone talking at cross-purposes
My understanding is that the greatest beneficiaries of daylight in the evenings are retail merchants. That’s right, we aren’t using the extra daylight to do yard work or exercise - but rather to go shopping. So my guess is merchant lobbying groups are ‘prodding’ politicians for this change. And given the strongest proponent of this change is from Florida, where tourism is also an issue, I think it’s pretty self explanatory.
To me the solution is blindingly simple - turn off the clock changes once we get back to Standard Time, then let each state query their citizens if they want to change time zones and petition the Commerce Department (or whichever department handles that) as necessary. If Florida wants to move to the Atlantic Time Zone, let them. All within reason of course, you can’t have states ‘leapfrogging’ each other time zone-wise