Permanent Daylight Saving Time? Florida Says Yes, but It’s Not So Simple

As an early riser, PST forever!

I vote we do a half hour compromise.

This. As a parent, I would love to have daylight after work so that I can enjoy some time with my kid outdoors. It is depressing to pick up your child when it is already dark outside.

Even way up north, I'd rather have summer time all year. Having it get dark around 3:30 in the afternoon in the middle of winter is a drag.

That said, I've found there's a lot of resistance to the idea among parents. On standard time, it's light out when kids are on their way to school. On daylight time, it would be dark then.

If you are sufficiently far north / south, you adapt your culture to not treat 4pm like people who have 18 hours of sunshine every day year round treat 4pm. You don't change the clock and act like thats changing the flow of time.

It helps that you almost certainly already don't treat 4pm like that anyway since you are wearing 4 layers of clothing while those 18 hour sunshiners are going shirtless.

"DST can make sense if you're sufficiently far north/south,"

As a person living on the 61st parallel - it does not. Winters are dark anyway you put it, and summers have so much light you can't be awake through it all. The situation gets only more extreme the norther you get.

except this law would make DST the official time of Florida, not standard time (though only if Congress changes a law that allows states to do so). Other states like Arizona have exempted themselves from DST, which the federal government allows them to do.

Sufficiently far up (and down I guess) it makes little sense at all, or does so for very small part of the year. There's nothing to be saved in the abundance of light all day in the summer, and nothing to be done for the darkness of winter.

Hi I live in the relative north and DST is actually worse here. And go much further north than me and it doesn't really matter either way. I would kill to have it gone.

The range of latitudes for which DST makes sense is roughly 30°-50°: those latitudes where summer solstice is 14-16 hours of daylight. Further north, there's going to be afternoon sun anyways, further south, there's too little difference between summer and winter for there to be any sense switching twice a year.

It's not that it messes up anyone's life terribly. It's a minor inconvenience, but it slightly inconveniences hundreds of millions of people, and that adds up. If everyone is slightly drowsy, and 0.1% of people have slightly slower reflexes and get in a car accident, that is not to say that those people 'need to reconsider their priorities'. That means that the policy hurts that many people, and the society needs to evaluate whether the benefits outweigh that hurt.

Don’t know why you are getting downvoted for this. Two of my favourite days of the year are when we change the clocks, there is suddenly a shift in what the world looks like at certain times of day and throw things into a different perspective. Permenant DST makes the most sense out of the two options but I like the shift enough that I’d prefer the model we have - I think people’s negativity towards it is due to a dislike of change and a lack of understanding on its origins, it’s sad that the chap who first proposed it didn’t get to see it implemented.

You just get so, so much roadkill on time change day.

It is very frustrating to small children who don't understand what is happening, and thus it is also very frustrating to their parents.

Daylight savings time was not put in place to make noon the middle of the day. It was put in place specifically to move noon earlier in the (physical) day.

Splitting the time zones would be the worst of all options. It would no longer allow time zones to align on the hour (because most states and nations are unlikely to align on a new set of time zones) and would do nothing to make noon align with the actual middle of the day.

Or any country, since timezones only have a 1 hour granularity. If you're in Edinburgh (same longitude as Plymouth) this is quite noticable. Be interesting to see the consequences of hyper-local timezones where the sun is always over your head at 12 noon. With modern computing it should be possible to have your watch adjust as you drive east-west ...

How does this affect people living on Western borders in China ? Do they have really long days ?

As far as I remember it's not even an appropriate TZ for Beijing. More like central China time.

Alaska is close enough, it's wide enough to cover 4 timezones

http://www.alaska.org/how-big-is-alaska

Granted most people live in the space of 1 or 2.

People say this all the time. But if you look at a population density map of China, you realize that the vast majority of people live within the natural GMT+8 range, and the western region is very sparsely populated.

What? No really, time with numbers seems to work just fine.

how does that make anything easier or better? Every locality will still have a "morning" designation, so when you schedule a meeting with your coworker across the country, you still need to look up his "morning" time so you don't schedule it before he gets to work.

We could call them lauds, prime, terce, sext, none, vespers and compline.

Fun fact: noon comes from “nona hora” (ninth hour), which actually was mid-afternoon.

The Japanese came up with such a 'temporal hour system'. An ingenious clock to display time that changes with the seasons is this Myriad Year Clock built in 1851

https://youtu.be/1moRfIXCfak?t=886

Seems like a long winded way of saying "We use time to figure out where the sun is".

Obviously, there are many other non-sun-oriented uses of time, most of which are immensely complicated by timezones.

Except if we did abolish time zones rather than asking Google "what time is it in Melbourne" you ask it "is it the waking hours in Melbourne".

In either case you don't know what time to call Melbourne. You either need to know a complicated and inconsistent system of time zones, or you just ask the same question in terms of when the sun rises and sets. You don't get out of asking a question, you don't lose any information (there is a 1 to 1 equivalence between what time it is somewhere and when its noon there, you could ask either question and have the exact same thought process comparing a time to "safe" hours to call someone).

That article argues that the current system is some miraculous saver of sanity by solving all the problems associated with telling if someone is "awake" or not in a certain time zone. Except I have two cousins, both living in the same time zone, one of which wakes up at 6am and the other wakes up at 4pm.

Also, from personal experience calling people both without and with substantial time zone difference, you never know when its a good time to call someone else. They might have had a long day and took a nap. They might not be home when you think they would be. They might be engaged in an activity they don't want to be distracted from. For practical uses of synchronous communication you need to have agreements on when to call in the first place.

If I'm calling someone I know, its because I know from experience when they are available, relative to my time. It does not matter if they are in Munich or Tokyo or down the street, I need to know in advance their availability for that call regardless of silly contrivances like the culturally normative sleep cycles of the region I'm calling into.

Because at the end of the day, there are still tens of thousands of people in Melbourne working the night shift.

Great read, clocks are probably all going digital so no need to manually adjust hours twice a year

Nice essay. Some good points about the past still having time zones so programming might not get any simpler. I think appropriately adjusted "Do Not Disturb" settings on his uncle's phone could have save him a lot of the trouble.

This isn't actually discussing abolition of time zones---it's discussing going from ~24 time zones to having only 1 time zone. It essentially maximizes the errors inherent in having a finite number of time zones for an infinite number of locations on the planet.

Which is why we need not one time zone, but infinite time zones. Let time zones be continuous rather than discrete.

Now when somebody says "It's noon" we know the sun is exactly over their head. Not slightly off because they live to the eastern or western extreme of their time zone, but exactly.

Okay, so to the problem of "is it okay to call Uncle Steve in Melbourne?"

My increasingly-intelligent digital assistant (also known as a smart phone) knows who Uncle Steve is, and where he lives (thanks to his address and phone number, entered into my contact list). Based on his location and the (UTC) clock in the phone, the device calculates Steve's continuous local time. Now with greater precision than under the traditional discrete timezone system, I can determine where Steve is at regular to typical waking/sleeping hours.

Whereas lumping the world into a single timezone maximizes the divergence between the clock's reading and the sun's position, moving to infinite time zones minimizes the divergence to zero.

However, in this fully relative world it's more difficult to speak about specific moments of time. The State of the Union Address would be advertised as happening 7pm 77°00′32.63606″W

What does that mean in my own local time zone?

Well, once again technology will save us from this difficulty by automatically translating times on television announcements / Twitter posts / in telephone conversations from someone else's local time to ours.

---

It's fun to imagine a world with infinite time zones, but I think the "abolition" article and this exploration illustrate together that the time zone system we have is a reasonable, human-friendly compromise between extremes.

We can just start using kilosecond, megasecond, gigasecond. Like in Vernor Vinge's novel Deepness in the Sky ;-)

Seeing as almost no comms are direct, they are all intermediated by code, let the receiver decide. I for one would decide to never get contacted. :)

> trying to answer "is this a reasonable time to contact someone?" across great distances

This is a problem right now. My brother lives in Japan but I have no idea if 4pm my time is a reasonable time for him or not without going online and looking it up.

Going to UTC would make scheduling meetings really easy because you'd just say "Meeting at 13:00" and for some people that's the afternoon and others it's the morning and some it's the middle of the night, but there's no timezone math to be done.

I'm doing interviews right now and I have always put "I'm available 10am to 4pm (Mountain)" or I get an interview for "3:30pm EST" (which I then have to think about is 1:30pm my time).

If there were no timezones we wouldn't have to do all that.

Time zones don't fix the issue of knowing a good time for something. You have to look up your different offsets and then math it out, which is exactly what you'd do even if the time zones didn't exist.

The question you ask now is "what time is it in X place?" if you want to know if its reasonable to call someone.

But that is insufficient knowledge. You also need to know their work schedule, when they prefer to sleep, if they are busy that day. You call people regularly who are preoccupied or who just aren't in the mood.

I have two cousins who share a time zone apart from mine, but one works the night shift. So one sleeps 10-18 and works 22-06 their time and the other sleeps 23-07 and works 09-17. If you call one in their in between hours one is just waking up while the other is tired, in the same time zone.

You cannot even just assume "people everywhere wake up at 7 and go to bed at 11 within their timezones" because timezones are not consistent between countries, within countries, or across continents. Different cultures have different daily routines and schedules.

This is why people have just gradually, especially in newer generations, gravitated towards asynchronous communication as a default.

On the flipside, if you wanted to ask the question "we are on the same universal time, is it safe to call X?" you are asking a better question anyway since you need to know the regular available schedules of people where that person lives, just not on your presumed "normal" timetable.

Travel alarm clocks are a great topic, because they already require manual intervention for all the aforementioned time zone inconsistencies. To build a working "automatic" travel clock you need a full computer with GPS to do precise location to map you to the TZ database and then to also look up sunrise and sunset because those aren't consistent even with timezones.

An "everywhere is UTC" clock requires just as much hardware, but only one question - when is sunrise here? Because you just set your wakeup time near that if you are diurnal. Which not even everyone is. Especially in the hacking space where there are plenty of night owls.

This thread is making it very apparent to me that programmers live in a bubble.

Most people on earth don't have to contact someone outside of their timezone even once a week. Some people on earth don't contact anyone outside of their timezone even once a year. Why the heck would anyone suggest make a massively disruptive change to their lives in exchange for making life slightly easier for programmers? That's completely ass backwards. Increasing complexity for programmers in exchange for making user's lives easier is a tradeoff that any good, experienced programmer should always make 100% of the time.

If anything I'd agree with a suggestion made later in the thread : We should move towards infinite time zones, where noon and midnight are always when you expect they are, and smartphones magically tell you exactly where the sun is at the location of the person you are attempting to communicate with.

This is the exact problem it would solve, once "everyone" had actually switched.

Change "midnight" to "mid-night" and things work well enough.

"It's 5 O'Clock Somewhere" loses all meaning, along with anything else referencing the 9-5 workday.

I live in NZ, I work in California, I get up at 5am in (my) winter, 6am for a few weeks in spring/autumn, 7am in summer - I have breakfast (lunch at) 7/8/9am, I quit at 1/2/3

In case you haven't figured it out DST transitions go the other way in the southern hemisphere - UTC would make so much sense (and for me being at roughly UTC+12 wouldn't be such a big deal)

having said that I'm a big fan of just being on permanent DST, more daylight evening time for people

We already have separate planet times, for what it's worth [1].

I can't find it now, but I remember listening to an interview with a scientist involved with one of the Mars rovers who converted his whole family to Martian time for a few weeks or months after his rover landed, since those were the hours he was keeping for work.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timekeeping_on_Mars

Take away water and replace it with diet soda. Sounds like a prison, we should charge for this.

The amount of daylight is not changed by setting clocks. The point is to shift daylight hours away from "sleeping time", but still not having to get up when it's dark. The ideal daylight savings would be to synchronize clocks with sunrise, so that sunrise always occurs when it's time to get up (7 AM or whatever). Here in Sweden, where the length of the day varies from 6 to 18 hours, DST is really useful.

> Why do we give ourselves more daylight in the summer when the days are naturally longer? If

Because:

(1) Businesses want to keep consistent hours, (2) lots of work is more efficient with natural light (and people are better at getting up for work when it isn't significantly pre-dawn that they have to do that), (3) people seem more prone to do non-work activity out of the home after work and when there is sunlight; so, to preserve natural light for work when it is scarce and maximize what is available after work when it is plentiful, we turn the clocks back when the days are longer.

Well, there is. It has nothing to do with DST though.

There is more time in the summer because of the angle of the Earth to the Sun. Can see the effects even more when at high angles like closer to the North Pole. And to boot, Daylight savings makes it even more pronounced.

Hoping other states follow.

Not everyone has that luxury.

> Just go into work an hour early, and leave an hour early.

Boss, clients, etc won't allow me to.

> If it is a matter of coordination, have an official government statement that summer business hours adjust during x - z months.

That's exactly^H^H^H^H effectively what DST is.

> If it is a matter of coordination, have an official government statement that summer business hours adjust during x - z months.

Its a whole lot easier (especially now that clocks can largely set themselves, but even before that) to change the clocks by an hour twice a year rather than every schedule (at least, all business hours and all schedules for everything else that is driven by common business hours, like transit schedules) with similar frequency.

I'm not a big DST fan, but DST is a better solution than your proposed alternative.

This solution makes a lot more sense than time zones.

Which is where having one central clock would make sense. But it would have to be something based on like a standard physical quantity instead of morning/noon. I’m thinking like rotational speed of the planet.

There are regions that have timezones offset by 30 minutes, e.g., Australian Central Standard Time, UTC+09:30. In this case it's not for fitting in extra timezones though, since the neighbouring zones are UTC+8:00 and UTC+10:00.

Because daylight has positive effects on most people's wellbeing?

I live in a place where winters are long, days are short and skies are either gray or dark.

Having the opportunity to see the sun even for a couple of minutes when coming out from work is a great feeling that has a big impact on people's mood and mental health especially at the tail end of winter. Electric lights don't have that effect.

I also spend more of my non-working time outside and I'd love to be able to go out for a run without a headlamp earlier in the year.

Hopefully they are expensive, full-spectrum bulbs that allow producing Vitamin D, or else everybody is gobbling a handful of supplements every day. SAD is a real thing.

Just shift the school schedule.

Determine the optimal time for Wednesday, round to the nearest 10 minutes, and apply that to the entire week.

Considering the student with the longest commute, they should leave their house an hour after there is enough sunlight to make things clearly visible to a typical child in a typical bedroom.

The school can't possibly match up with every different work schedule. Matching up with none of them is fair. It's not the school's problem anyway.

You only have the cultural expectation of "always get up at 7am" because of the insane timezone system. If sunrise changes throughout the year, changing the time you wakeup is the natural answer. Having an obtuse and indecipherable timekeeping system instead is insane.

The answer is to get up at 5 in the Summer and 7 in the Winter, or even better to get up at 10 in the Summer and 12 in Winter since you would put everyone on UTC.

If everyone was on the same time table society would quickly adopt a strategy where business hours shift seasonally. In Summer your hours might be 12-22, in Spring and Fall have them be 13-23, and in Winter have them be 14-00. They already do that, except the government changes everyones clocks at once rather than just changing business hours every season. Its less overhead to change business hours than every clock, especially when you factor international scheduling around DST changes and timezone changes.

Would it really be a danger for kids walking to school?

If dawn didn't happen until after 0800, I could understand the concern. But the time between dawn and sunrise is much safer than the time right after sunrise. When the sun is low in the sky it blinds drivers.

But that isn't true if my company tells me "you have to work between this hour and that hour". I can change my alarms till the cows come home but it means nothing. Moreover, the majority can have an effect on what government we have, but we can't have an effect on what business decisions are. Because business leaders are a small subset of the community. If they naturally have an interest in not setting separate working hours summer and winter and employees naturally do have an interest in setting separate working hours summer and winter, the only plausible mechanism available to the employees (who need to work if they want to feed their family and can't afford to gratuitously quit in the hope of finding a job that doesn't exist) is to change the clocks.

You're not obliged to follow us. If you don't like daylight savings, you can set your own alarms in the summer and winter differently. It will be no harder for you to do that than it will be for me to do that. If it was as trivial as you make it out to be, you wouldn't even utter a breath in complaint because it would be so easy for you to do it that you just wouldn't notice. But social realities mean that changing the clocks is the best route available to us, and so that's what our societies have settled on.

The Constitution grants the federal government the power to pass laws, and "setting your own time" isn't explicitly enumerated as a right that is reserved to the states.

The Commerce Clause: >Article I, Section 8, Clause 3: [The Congress shall have power] To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;

Here's an example. Suppose I'm driving down the highways, and I arrive at some town and I decide to stop for lunch. I see a parking space, but it says I can't park there at certain times. But every city in the country sets its own clocks. How do I figure out what time it is? That's a pain, right?

You're talking about the Commerce Clause?

I don’t see any advocacy here.

I made an account to tell you this was driving me mad and after much google, I landed on your comment. Switching the start of week to Monday fixed the problem and I'm eternally grateful.

You just gave systems programmers panic attack with those words.

We now have the technology to accurately, and simply, keep solar time wherever we are, instead of using and manipulating archaic time zones.

Edit: The original, 19th-century impetus for time zones (vs solar time) was to reliably print and manage train schedules across longer East-West railroads. With powerful computers and satellite positioning cheaply available to everybody, we could overcome this now-obsolete hack.

Yes, let's just go back to solar time per city.

This is such a terrible idea.

Only if they get rid of leap seconds as well.

That doesn't actually help... My problem is that I walk the kids to school every day. A few weeks ago, it was solidly dark when we did this walk. Now it is broad daylight. Will remain that way for the rest of the year. Even with the change in time coming up.

I confess in the grand scheme, this is not a major concern of mine. It isn't as easy as just moving to UTC, though. When families move, you typically try and keep the same "clock" bedtimes, as an easy example. (Even though, they actually care about sun height for bedtime/waketime.)

TAI everywhere, if you don't want to deal with fiddling adjustments.

Until you get far enough south.

Or if you go far enough north, Alaska, the shift is pointless because of the midnight sun/all day dark depending on the season.

It was never about the farmers.

It was always about saving fuel during wartime. Farmers dislike DST.

From what I understand farmers hate DST more than anyone. They tend to wake up at dawn and shifting the time an hour gives them an hour less time until the rest of the area wakes.

I realized this after I commented; I really should learn to read, might make this software job easier :)

Governments don't mandate working hours either.

Do you think they could and/or should do so? what's stopping them from making that kind of choice where the hours of daylight after work are vitally important to them?

What would be examples of such contracts, where you need solar noon to be at 1300 instead of 1200?