This seems like such a simple thing to me, and yet the US just can’t seem to get it done. What are the issues preventing this?
We tried it once, and quickly went back, is one.
Might be a case of greener grass. Virtually none of us has lived without it, apart from Arizona, so we just don’t know what we have.
Unless that was a well organized and faithful attempt to switch, that shouldn’t prohibit us from trying again.
They last tried DST “year-round” starting in January 1974 and people quickly hated it, with support dropping from 79% before it started to 42% three months in. Morning accidents increased and schoolchildren were injured or killed.
I don’t necessarily love the idea of the sun starting to rise as early as 4am in the summer, but I think if we’re going to stay with one we might as well stick to standard time year-round. We’d still have light past 8 PM where I live and it would mean activities better for the dark could start earlier. I see places wanting to take advantage of the warm weather for things like outdoor movies but they can’t start until after 9.
This is the most reasonable approach, and it meshes with medical studies about how DST affects our mental and physical health. We don’t need sunlight until 9 or 10 pm, and the sun is supposed to be approximately overhead at noon, not 1pm.
We took my in-laws back to my father-in-law’s hometown on the west coast of France last year and it was kind of wild to have it not be dark out until 10 pm. A lot of times we didn’t have dinner until 8:30 or 9 because it didn’t feel that late.
Morning accidents increased and schoolchildren were injured or killed.
With car culture as it is now, that’ll just be seen as business as usual.
I’m in AZ, I think y’all are so dumb for doing that(not that any of you have a choice). I don’t want to live anywhere that fakes the time. The days change throughout the year, they get shorter and longer , it’s natural, get over it.
We keep DST for more months than ST so I think more people like it more.
I kinda think it runs backwards, making the sun set even earlier in the clock day during winter. So much more dispiriting to come home in the dark than to go to work in the dark.
My argument for ending it is that you can’t make days longer or shorter by moving the clock around, but I think we should just keep adding weeks onto DST and taking them away from ST until eventually it’s just DST. But settling on either scheme would be ok, better than switching back and forth.
Congress would actually have to do their jobs and pass legislation without throwing 500 riders onto it.
They literally have it completely approved, it’s just that they’re waiting to use it as the base for whatever else they want to get passed.
In theory, individual states could choose to not do daylight savings time. Two states already don’t use it and there was a proposal for Florida to get rid of it and move to the Atlantic Time Zone.
I personally would rather have more daylight in the mornings than in the evenings during winter. Makes it way easier to wake up. Maybe lots of other people feel the same way.
That only works at a certain latitude. Further north it remains dark in the morning anyway
It still helps, it’s just not as big a difference as further south.
Where I live, in December it’s dark when I go to work and dark when I get out. That’s just how it is, so who cares?
Meanwhile in June I can’t get to sleep due to they sky still being bright and blocking melatonin production until about 11pm. If we got rid of DST it’d get dark at 10pm.
And I don’t care if sunrise would end up 4:30am. It’s easy to set up blackout curtains in the bedroom to stay asleep.
Yep. A lot easier to have blackout curtain in just your bedroom to stay asleep than it is to have them all over your house to build up melatonin in the evenings during summer
I’ve found people would either like change or not mind it.
But like you said, they can’t agree on which way so thus it is.
I honestly dgaf about any of it. I’m fine with the current system.
I read that some senator was working on a bill to permanently switch to half-DST, which is where we set our clocks to halfway between regular time and DST. I’ve been advocating for that forever so I hope it will at least get people thinking/talking about it. It should solve the argument between whether to permanently stay on one time or the other. Split the difference and just get it done already!
I didn’t care until I had to take care of my niece. During half of the school year it’s dark outside going to the bus. And why are we fighting what nature intended our body clocks to be? I have to get up for work at 4:30AM, it’s hard even with blackout curtains to get the room dark at 8-9PM.
So why not keep time as a constant and if individual places want to change times they can do that
Even just single states can have vastly different sunrise and sunset times and changing 300m people’s schedules so that a few people can have a few extra minutes of sun in the morning for part of the year seems absolutely ridiculous
A local school district could very easily do a 1 hour shift as the sunrise gets later so that it properly aligns with their local school pickup times
Exactly! Why does no one ever consider changing the time they do something instead of making the whole country adjust to time change? I know with schools, maybe their starting times are geared to when parents have to be a work or something, but surely they can figure out how to adjust their particular schedules around their particular needs and leave the rest of us alone.
I’ll give you the only argument I ever give for this.
Congress once voted to end it, the backlash from constituents was severe and they could not reimplement it fast enough.
But they changed it suddenly in January, instead of just not changing back in the fall. That was dumb.
They went about it in a stupid way and now we’re doomed for all time because it gets pointed to as proof we can never end DST 🥲
Congress once voted to end it, the backlash from
constituentsbusinesses was severe and they could not reimplement it fast enough.Ftfy. Fuck those greedy pricks
I think we should just use sidereal and let the hours of the day rotate smoothly over the year.
Just shift it 30 mins instead of an hour to appease everyone.
The shift kills people tho…
Literally, a shit ton of heart attacks happen because people’s schedule changes all of a sudden. No, those would likely happen in the following months anyways, but them all happening at the same time overloads our medical system even when staffing is adjusted for it.
Just change it once and leave it.
How big is the actual effect on most of the US anyway?
I mean, most of the US is located surprisingly far to the south (e.g. Washington lying on a same latitude as the southern tip of Italy, Los Angeles as Northern Africa), so I would assume it to be not that big a deal, as seasonal changes of daylight are limited?
Is it something we need to do? I’ve never felt like it’s a big deal. I like the sunrise/sunset times in the summer and it would effect my life if that changed. I don’t like them in the winter but there’s no great alternative.
Just hypothesizing here, but it wouldn’t surprise me if there was some union/club/cabal of industrial clock adjusters (you know, someone has to adjust the clocks of city halls etc) that spend a lot of money on ensuring that their members have a predictable income. I just made it up, and I have no reason for this claim beyond it being in line with how everything else works in the US. And Epstein was of course a high-ranking member of that too. And Bush somehow wasn’t.
Hey we only have about half the Clockwinder files, Bush could absolutely still show up
There kinda is. Stores get more customers when there’s daylight in the evenings, specifically when most people are off work. So they tend to like daylight savings time because it maximizes that time window. These stores tend to lobby against bills for removing DST to keep their sales and profits high
Someone like RFK would be given the job of co-ordinating it.
