Where I live, kids walk to school in the dark (and rain) for several months regardless. For 1/3 of the year I go to work in the dark and come home in the dark. For another 1/3 of the year, the sun is up before me and sets after I go to bed. For a few months, the sun and my schedule match up. Honestly that seems more rare than the others.
Seems like you guys are bickering endlessly over a zero-sum game, when we should be figuring out how to tidally lock the Earth with the USA pointed at the Sun.
That is ridiculously complicated and unnecessary, not to mention would play havoc with the politics of who gets to be in the light side and dark side. What is a workable solution is just to reduce the 23.4 degree rotational axis of the Earth to near normal to the plane of the ecliptic.
Stranger
I don’t like this plan. It’s still no net gain for the USA vs the commies and Australians on the other side, and you get much more attractive lighting with the Sun low in the sky.
It seems to me that what we really want is for the surface of the Earth to spin more rapidly during USA night, and more slowly during USA day. We could achieve in a straightfoward manner by hollowing out the interior of the Earth and inserting a dense neutronium counterweight elastically connected to the surface that swings around inside with diurnal periodicity to conserve angular momentum while the surface speeds up and slows down.
Yeah, we already had the “compromise” decision, ages ago. Standard time is the compromise.
xkcd already presented the appropriate compromise solution a few days ago.
Thanks for the heads up; I’ll be investing in Dramamine futures and seismic anchor manufacturers.
Stranger
There’s always a critic, but my solution could have saved Galileo from the Inquisition.
Quite right. Hence my comment you quoted about how you experience it depends on which corner you’re in. The experience of the east edge or west edge are quite different, and along the e.g. east edge, the experience of the northern or southern corner is quite different too.
The four corners of any time zone represent its most extreme values of either inconvenience or convenience as the case might be. But generally the max convenience is roughly in the center east / west and about 1/4rd of the way up from the bottom north / south. The farther you are in that time zone from that happiest spot the less happy / more inconvenienced you’re likely to be about ST, DST, or even both.
True. You’ve got people in one who are coming and going home in the dark no matter what you do, and people in the other who are coming and going home in the light no matter what you do (at least, in either case, aside from shifting the clocks a lot further than anybody’s talking about), and people part way along for whom shifting the clocks an hour can make one or the other light but not both. And undoubtedly some people in the middle for whom shifting them an hour at the right time can make them both light. I wonder whether that’s where much of the encouragement to keep changing the times is coming from?
I agree with you. I’d prefer light at both ends but if I have to choose I prefer it was light in the evening rather than the morning.
Sure, waking in the dark is not great and a bit harder to get out of bed but, personally, that is when my brain is not fully engaged and I am doing normal morning things like brushing my teeth, using the toilet, showering and dressing and then fixing a light breakfast. I do not need nor barely notice daylight for any of that. By the time I am ready for work it is light out.
I’d much prefer my daylight at the end of the day when I actually want to be out and about to do things (dinner, shopping, whatever).
Just my $0.02
IMO the demand for ST comes from the regions for whom DST in winter means sunup finally happens only after the kids are already at school. And the demand for DST comes from the regions where ST in the summer would result result in sunrise 2 hours before anyone wanted to get up to start their school & workdays per the fixed clock.
So in both cases, the demand for semi-annual clock changing come from the north end of each time zone. But the east side of that north wants DST year round but definitely needs DST in summer while the west side of north wants ST year round but definitely needs ST in winter.
The fact that historically the US population was concentrated up north and the outsized political power of small densely populated US states has a lot to do with the enduring time changing we do.
Most adults and most retailers agree with you. I sure do.
Most parents hate that idea. Kids standing outside in the snow awaiting the bus in the frigid conditions an hour pre-dawn and needing to be awakened 2+ hours pre-dawn is just a non-starter for parents.
(Really asking)
Why not make schools adjust rather than the whole country?
Instead of school from (say) 8a-3:30p make it 9a-4:30p.
Or, they can adjust times with the seasons to be in the most daylight (but that seems unnecessarily complex). At some point, far enough north or south, and the kids will be in darkness at some point which makes the argument a little silly.
IANA parent. And also not a far northerner.
But AIUI / ISTM the issue is that parent(s) must get kids awake, dressed, fed, then also get themselves awake, dressed, and fed. Then either the parent(s) drive the kids to school then drive themselves to work, or else the parents assist the kids to whatever degree with walking, bussing, or biking to school then drive to work themselves. Recalling 5yos need lots a help with every aspect of getting ready and getting there whereas teens can be more self-tending, but also suffer from a bad case of adolescent night owl syndrome. And any given family may have kids or any / every age needing to be delivered somehow to 3 schools.
The total time that all that crap takes means waking up long before whenever the parent must arrive at their work station. If we arrange things so sunrise happens early enough that first wakeup isn’t “in the middle of the night”, the parent will arrive at work long after daytime has begun and therefore long after the employer would prefer work to have already begun.
It’s an intractable problem every day of the year. But it’s worse when sunrise occurs too late versus the clock times.
Thought experiment: imagine an alternate timeline where DST has never been invented, and we observe standard time year-round. Would anyone in that timeline be complaining about how early the sun sets in the winter?
Here is where I point out that my home state of Indiana does not have just one time zone. The northwestern counties next to the Illinois state line follow Chicago time, that is, Central time. The counties to the east are in the Eastern time zone.
I believe downstate there is a similar situation near Illinois/St. Louis.
So here in Indiana over the course of a year we have FOUR time zones to deal with: Standard Central, Daylight Savings Central, Standard Eastern, and Daylight Savings Eastern. Because… reasons?
Go far enough north, sure, someone will complain about that.
Go far enough north and someone will be complaining that the sun doesn’t rise at all for a couple months of the year.
I can’t speak to the other three timezones but the one in NW Indiana makes sense since it is economically linked to Chicago and it makes sense for them to be on the same page (timewise) as Chicago.
Maybe something similar happens for Louisville and Cincinnati? (No idea…just thinking out loud)
Pretty sure that’s the reason for the counties opting out of the all-Indiana zone otherwise. Yes, NW Indiana is really suburbs of Chicago and economically much more closely tied to that city in Illinois than to the rest of Indiana.