Florida lawmakers just approved to keep Daylight Saving Time all year long

[Bunbain]

@werdnagreb

The world would be much better off it was on a single timezone.

I couldn’t agree more and am delighted there are others ready for this idea.

@PurpleStater

Most people can’t easily calculate the time difference between New York City and Los Angeles now, but to expect them to live in a “single time zone” world and remember what the business hours time differential is between cities around the world?

Ok, so most people can’t compute time differences, how are time zones helping any? If there are time restrictions on calling a business, aren’t they already posting their hours? I know I’ve had to call during “8am-6pm PST” (from east coast). It could have easily been “13:00-23:00” no math necessary.

It would take a little bit of cultural understanding of course. “In Japan people wake up around 21:00, that’s just how it is over there.”

Yes it would be a little odd to have lunch the day after breakfast. My S/O works overnights at the hospital though and they seem to do fine with it. And just think, we could celebrate New Year’s as a planet.

[anon30760835]

@andrewlwood

doesn’t it make more sense to make the decision as a nation rather than a state though?

If we did that we’d be 50 nations, fast.

[kermujin]

Yeah, there was definitely that, but that don’t get much easier at 5am - northern summer mornings are challenging either way!

[gatto]

@anon61833566

Florida chose to both end daylight savings time AND enact smarter gun laws?

smarter gun laws for some people. keep in mind they basically just agreed to give public money to buy guns. helping to complete the circle of nra corruption.

i know it’s a different topic but you can pretty much guarantee which parts of the law will be rolled back in florida courts and which parts will stay.

more sunshine for the sunshine state, tho? sounds good to me.

[GilbertWham]

Getting all of America to agree to do the same thing? Even something as simple as, ‘Yes. It is now, in fact, lunchtime’?

[andrewlwood]

@Bunbain

Ok, so most people can’t compute time differences, how are time zones helping any? If there are time restrictions on calling a business, aren’t they already posting their hours? I know I’ve had to call during “8am-6pm PST” (from east coast). It could have easily been “13:00-23:00” no math necessary.

I actually find this pretty easy, except for the one to two weeks of the year when the US has changed their clocks and we in Europe haven’t. I know that NYC is UK -5, except for two weeks of the year, when it bloody well isn’t, during which time I am exactly one hour late or early for all my videoconferences.

It wouldn’t be that hard to standardise EU and US (nothwithstanding, if I may say, your current president, who clearly won’t do anything that makes it look like he’s giving any credence whatsoever to ‘rest of world’).
I just feel that your lives are likely to become a whole bunch more complicated if some states are changing at different times/not at all. But I’m on the outside looking in and I’m happy to be wrong.

[tlwest]

@smulder

What YOU’RE doing is going to work earlier in the morning and leaving work earlier in the afternoon. People can do that without fucking with the clocks, or making them permanently wrong.

Actually, I think that’s pretty much the crux for us DST supporters right there.

My suspicion is that for the strong majority of us, it’s much easier to have legislators mess with the clocks than be able to get human culture (which, for most of us, dictates the hours which we have to work) to change.

My basic rule is when culture meets facts (or laws or common sense or logic or even survival itself), bet on culture.

[Bunbain]

@andrewlwood

I just feel that your lives are likely to become a whole bunch more complicated if some states are changing at different times/not at all.

Florida alone I don’t think will cause too much trouble on account of it being a peninsula. If enough other states can follow their lead I hope it has a domino effect!

[werdnagreb]

I’m 80% joking. It would make my life (and my software teams’ lives) easier, but just about no one else’s.

@PurpleStater

Software issues could mostly be eliminated now, if operations were simply scheduled by GST instead of local time.

Exactly. We no longer work with dates internally. We convert everything to a Unix timestamp, and calculate offsets from there. The only issue is when our data providers send us context-less dates and times with no locale information attached. THAT really bothers me.

[Ian_MCC]

If you’re going to pick one, seems to me it makes much more sense to go with the scenario that aligns daylight more with the time that most people are awake and doing things - which is to say, give some more light to the evenings. Outside of DST (or even during it, really, for people in the Northern U.S), most of us are up and about for several hours of darkness in the evenings (which is when people commute home, do errands, enjoy leisure time, and essentially live most of their non-work “life”), but usually only see a little bit of darkness first thing in the morning, if at all. Seems like it would be better for our biology, productivity, safety, and pleasure if that imbalance were evened out a little, year round.

[wazroth]

Last time they tried to go to DST full time (in the early 70s during the energy crisis) they bailed on the project because kids going to school in the dark kept getting hit and killed by cars.

edit: From the NPR story:

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

RICHARD NIXON: Tomorrow morning, or earlier if you want to break up the party, you should set your clocks ahead one hour, as most of the mainland United States goes on daylight saving time until October 1975.

WAMSLEY: It did not go well. A number of children were fatally struck by cars in the first few weeks of the experiment, as they headed to school in the darkness. And in October 1974, the measure was repealed.