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Comment by shadowofneptune | Hacker News Reader

This is excellent. With the rise of air conditioning, daylight savings has considerably less electricity savings than it used to. It will also make timekeeping more consistent. I have lived in Arizona for the past few years and it is pleasant to know that you will always be at UTC-7:00.

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True, but this keeps daylight savings permanent not standard time.

It will change how the morning feels in winter, but I'm OK with settling on savings time. The bill allows states like Arizona or Hawaii to stay on savings time if they'd prefer it.

I don't care what we choose, personally, as long as we choose. This madness has to end. I'm not going to bicker about which one is kept.

If your state doesn't like that, they can switch time zones.

It actually sets "standard time" to what is currently daylight saving time, and deletes DST.

RIP code parsing human-readable datetime strings to determine timezone

> It actually sets "standard time" to what is currently daylight saving time, and deletes DST.

As the current maintainer of the timezone database observed:

    A *lot* of computer software assumes that timezone abbreviations like 
    "PST" have their longstanding meanings. This software was obviously 
    misguided, but it's out there and changing it will be quite a hassle. I 
    don't envy people who will have the responsibility for cleaning up the 
    resulting mess where "PST" has one meaning for older timestamps and a 
    different meaning for newer ones and existing standards like Internet 
    RFC 5322 continue to say things like "PST is semantically equivalent to 
    -0800".

* https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2022-March/031239.html

Similarly, people thought the world would burn in flames due to Y2K, when dates were going to overflow their bits, kill everyone, and lose banking information. As things happened, the date passed with nary a blip for me or anyone I knew. I suspect this will be similar.

Y2K required hundreds of billions of dollars worth of effort to keep it from being a disaster, and it still actually resulted in some significant issues:

"In Sheffield, United Kingdom, a Y2K bug caused miscalculation of the mothers' age and sent incorrect risk assessments for Down syndrome to 154 pregnant women. As a direct result two abortions were carried out, and four babies with Down syndrome were also born to mothers who had been told they were in the low-risk group."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2000_problem

Nobody notices when things go right. :)

I find it hard to imagine that systems which store "PST" and rely on a hard-coded assumption that it is -0800 would be robust to normal changes in time zone rules, which already happen regularly. Like surely those systems would have already broken in 2007 when the rules of America/Los_Angeles changed such that the date of the yearly transition between PST and PDT changed.

Wow. Lawmakers continue to amaze me with their stupidity.

Arizona only goes by Mountain Standard time (UTC -7:00). If Daylight savings time becomes permanent will Arizona always be an hour off from the rest of Mountain time zone?

Yes, but at least it is consistent.

I live right by the border, on the Utah side, and driving through Arizona and Nevada is always so confusing!

We were on vacation, driving on 89 from Page to Kanab, which crosses AZ/UT state line. Several times our phones switched to different TZs. It was annoying

I spent a week camping near the California/Arizona border and my phone was absolutely flummoxed by the time zones. It was constantly jumping back and forth an hour.

The weirdest part is that I wasn't even _that_ close to the border, it was 30-40 miles away. I know there is some room for error with phone location tracking but I've never had a maps app consistenly confuse my location with a spot 40 miles away.

I have Family that lives in Lake Havasu right by the border. When driving there my phone will often get confused and switch between the 2 time zones.

I wonder if it has to do with which towers it is connecting to rather than where it thinks you are. I know time sync is important so perhaps your phone just shows you the timezone of the nearest tower and that almost always works well enough?

Arizona is rough because even though the state is officially MST, some (not all) of the Native American tribes do DST. In some areas it's kind of mess if you let your phone choose its timezone based off of the strongest cell tower.

Arizona the state is in MST, there's Navajo reservations in MDT, and there's even a Hopi reservation that's totally encircled by a Navajo reservation that doesn't do DST.

You are mostly correct but slightly imprecise. There is only one Navajo reservation, the Navajo Nation. It is indeed on Mountain time, not Arizona time, meaning it (unlike anywhere else in Arizona) switches to MDT in the summer.

It makes some sense because the Navajo Nation, though mostly located in Arizona, also has a large portion in New Mexico and a smaller one in Utah, both of which observe Mountain time. I don’t know the exact history, but I assume that when Arizona stopped observing DST, the Navajo Nation chose to keep Mountain time to avoid having two different time zones within their border.

The Hopi Reservation, while indeed an enclave within the Navajo Nation, is a completely separate political entity and so under no compulsion to follow any Navajo decisions. Also, they’re entirely within Arizona, so sticking to Arizona time is logical.

Another thing — I can’t recall having ever heard an Arizonan refer to our time zone as MST. That would be technically accurate, but would be confusing because it would naturally imply that we sometimes switch to MDT. We just call it Arizona time, and think of the Mountain and Pacific zones as a separate thing that we’re aligned with for part of the year.

Arizona would likely just move to Pacific time in that case

My impression (not backed by data, but I did grow up in Arizona) is that it has much closer economic, social, and cultural ties to California than it does to the Mountain states, so it would make sense to stay at -7.

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