It’s really not that silly, imagine if everyone changed times on their own schedule. It’s a problem of collective action.
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reads thread Apparently not… 
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My point exactly!
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Does your boss let you leave at 3:00 PM so you can get home before dark?
It’s half right, that’s as good as it gets around here.
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They would, but why would I?
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How about instead of changing clocks by an hour we just compress and expand the hours based on the location of the sun? Sunrise = 6am. Sunset = 6 pm. This is the 21st Century, we have the technology! Heck, we’ve had the technology since at least 1500BC.
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Cool story. Not how I’ve observed it to work in the real world.
Clock sync is of course a legitimate point and besides, I’m not the one advocating based on “but DST doesn’t make sense!” (presumably with respect to local noon) as though that mattered, my post was a reductio ad absurdem response to a post I mentally put in that category.
(Although not for nothin’, these days most everyone carries in their pocket a device with the capabilities to maintain local solar time anywhere and at all times.)
Edited to add: oh I thought of another benefit of this, if it passes. I won’t get that eyelid twitch every time someone uses “standard time” to mean “time”, as in “EST” to mean “Eastern Time”. (Obviously this is only annoying during the part of the year daylight time is observed.) Perils of having once worked in a job where it was actually important to get the time really, really, right. (We usually used UTC for that reason of course.)
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Three-fourths of the Earth’s population gets by just fine without changing the clocks twice a year. People can figure out how to deal with it.
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Look. Part of the problem here is that the Eastern time zone is just too fucking big. Portland, Maine is on the same time as Indianapolis, Indiana, where the sunset is over an hour later. If you are stuck on the eastern side of a time zone it’s bad enough, but when your time zone is oversized it’s terrible. Lack of daylight in the winter is one of the worst aspects of living in New England, and sunset before you get out of work is frigging inhumane. I don’t really care about DST, except it’s nice to have light to 9:30 in the summer, but if we ever go to full time standard time, New England needs to move to Atlantic time.
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waaait… school already starts at like six am. Any earlier and most of the kids and staff will be dysfunctional from sleep deprivation or stuck permanently taking provigil. Graveyard shift can be a killer. Can’t really see it working.
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How about we take this opportunity to just let each state pick its TZ and end any kind of seasonal switching? If some states don’t want a solar aligned day, then good on them. But telling every state they must not use a solar aligned day is stupid.
Edited: Okay, how about we stop using TZs entirely? Let’s just use UTC! I credit @jgs!
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Why do you think I would say that? Pick a time that works resonably well with your local time. If that time needs to change throughout the year, then do that if it’s what makes sense for your area.
A brief “thoughts and prayers” and especially thank yous(!) to the maintainer of the all critical timezone data file for the majority of computer systems: tzdata.
One wonders how many cheap-ish (hardware) clocks will have to be thrown out for having the shift sort’ve hardwired into them…?
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I’ll take that. With standard time in the winter, it’s dark when I go into the office and also when I come out. With permanent DST, it would at least still be light when I leave to go home. Dark mornings don’t bother me, but dark afternoons get me down.
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I’m not familiar with many cheap clocks that have a hardwired date for the DST adjustment–that doesn’t mean that there aren’t any, just that I’m unfamilar with them. Most GPS or atomic clocks (WWVB receivers) use the signal from the source. Cell phones are the same.
Now I’m curious if there is such a specimen. The worst case thing you’d need to do with them is what all of use already have to do with ‘dumb’ clocks now–change the time on them by an hour twice a year. I think we don’t need to throw them out.
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