Well, making it permanent, but the idea is the same.
What was the rationale for making the permanent time Daylight Savings rather than Standard?
Look - you can’t go back to the standard once you make Daylight savings the standard because then new standard is now the old daylight savings.
Sunrise for me is currently 5:45 & sunset is 8:30, which is a helluvalot better than 4:45 & 7:30. I get the benefit of daylight hours during the day rather than when I’m sleeping.
Because that’s what we are in right now and Congress is voting on it right now.
It’s always been the debate. A majority of Americans have favored not changing clocks.
But, to date, we’ve been split on a preference between standard or summer hours. I have my preference, but I’d rather stick with either one than continue to switch twice a year
Cute, but standard time is based on noon being the point at which the sun is highest in the sky. (At least for a given location which is near the center of the time zone.)
Still, if I had to choose, I’d rather go with year-long DST. I value an hour of daylight much more in the evening instead of before work. And sunlight before 5am in the morning all summer does absolutely nothing for me. It instead makes it difficult for me to get a full night’s sleep, along with getting dark at 7pm instead of 8pm.
But yearlong DST would delay the time of sunrise until really late in the winter (sometimes after 8am). So kids would be getting on the school bus in the dark.
That’s why the current system we have right now is the best alternative, IMHO.
And public opinion polling just complicates matters, since a sizeable percentage of Americans think “Daylight Saving Time” means either “the time setting we observe from November to March” or “the process of changing the clocks twice a year.”
If we switched to a standard time year-round, we’d get used to it. I’d prefer to stay on daylight time, but just pick one and stick to it.
Kids around here get on the bus in the dark in the winter regardless. They manage.
Personally, I don’t care. It’s light when I’m up in the summer and dark in the winter. An hour difference would hardly be noticed
Also, polling rarely, if ever, includes “just pick one and stick with it if I can’t have my preference”
Everyone always mentions this. Are there actually places where this isn’t already the case?
I’m one of the weirdos who likes switching clocks. It works fine for me in the summer and in the winter and puts daylight where I want it for those seasons living more north here in Chicago.
But I get it. It seems to be a waste of time now, costs us money, and there are health effects with the time switch that I can’t continue living in my perfect dream scenario of moving time to where I want it.
For me, go with Standard. I want my noon to roughly coincide with solar noon. I want my shadow at noon to point north (or close enough.) And I don’t mind an hour of daylight being taken away here in the summer. Sunset it already at around 8:30, with dusk through till nine, and I’m fine with moving that ahead an hour. And winters are dark enough when I wake up (typically at 6:30 a.m.) Sunrise is around 7 a.m. in December. It would be 8 a.m. with DST. The idea of dropping off my kids at school during winter when it’s still fully dark annoys me.
… and 5.5 hours different from Greenwich Mean Time. The plus – by design or by coincidence – is that you can turn an analog watch upside down and see what time it is in the other country. It was apparently a great help back when India was a colony of Great Britain.
Honestly kids should be sleeping in a bit and attending school later. Pediatricians seem to think starting no earlier than 8:30 and preferably even later would be beneficial for most kids. Sleep deficit is apparently a real problem, especially with teenagers. It’s harder on parents, but both school days and in alignment with that summer vacations should be shorter.
Well, sort of. The minute hand would be in the right place, but the hour hand would be a half-hour off. Is five-and-a-half o’clock 5:00 or 6:00?
But you can’t change sleep deficit by changing what time students go to school. Move back the school day, and kids will stay up later.
The daylight saving change alone is a massive decades long debate in the US.
Changing ‘typical’ school hours is probably more beneficial but a much, much bigger debate I doubt can be settled without massive social upheaval
No, shorter school days and sleeping in later will help with sleep deficits. But sleeping in later also helps mitigate the “kids standing in the dark” scenarios raised by opponents of year long DST.
ETA: Personally I’d prefer ST, as I think do most medical researchers. However, either is preferable to switching back and forth.
Yeah, the school bus comes past my house at 7:15 am. That’s just stupid. I work 8-5, and I’m not ready to get out of the house at that hour.