In May, the House Energy and Commerce Committee voted 48-1 in favor of the Sunshine Protection Act. The U.S. Senate voted unanimously in March 2022 to make daylight saving time permanent but the House never took up the measure in the face of opposition. The proposal the House will consider next week would allow states to opt out.
Why not standard time?
It’s, like, THE STANDARD
Yeah, no clue why everyone’s going DST instead. I think having politicians make science decisions is a really dumb idea.
People get cranky when the time is moved forward in the spring. So they write to the politicians around that time. The politicians start talking about doing away with it then. There’s no thought towards “ok we’ll move the clacks back in the fall (nobody’s cranky about that one) and then not change it again.” It’s just “do away with changing the clocks immediately!”
It’s “standard”, yet only applies 4 months out of 12 a year.
Science?
DST has always been a political decision.
People like daylight time in the summers, because that gives them the opportunity to do things after work in sunlight. For places where they’re getting 16 hours of sunlight, they’d generally prefer sunrise at 5am and sunset at 9pm, rather than 4am to 8pm.
But daylight time is terrible in the winters. Sunlight from 8am to 4pm is probably better than 9am to 5pm.
That’s basically why we had daylight savings switching clocks to begin with. But the fundamental tradeoff in the higher latitudes was always summer versus winter.
Nope what is the difference at least I see sunlight. Go to work in the dark under both ways. One I at least get some sun at the end of the day.
Because I want it to be light out later in the day
You like not being able to be outside?
I’d rather have them move the clock an hour backwards in summer. Summer days are so hot nowadays that you can’t be outdoors until after the sun goes down. Summer nights are nice, summer evenings aren’t. With DST you have to go to bed by the time you can be outdoors so you effectively can’t be out during weekdays.
North/West vs South/East in each time zone
There are 4 time zones in the US
The more North/West you live in a time zone the more you hate DST. The more South/East you live the more you like DST.
If you live in blue you probably hate DST, yellow probably like DST
All stems from states like Michigan should be in CST not EST. If Michigan was in CST then permanent DST would make it EST and they would be in “standard” time still.
We should just reset our time zones to be straight lines while we’re at it
So half your house is in one time zone and the other half is in another?
Speaking as someone who used to live in a city that’s on that line: yes
Or you can break it down by city or county instead, some states already do it by county. If you know that Columbus is an hour later than Zanesville or that it’s an hour earlier than Springfield, will it be disruptive? Sure, but it’s the sort of thing people who live on time zone lines get used to. People in Indianapolis go to Chicagoland fairly often despite being in different time zones.
Really what drives me nuts is that it’s arbitrarily shifted. Kentucky and Indiana are split when they could just all be central without issue. But hey, at least we aren’t doing time zones as badly as Spain
Couldn’t this be fixed by just moving the blue sections to the adjacent time zone.
Yes it could be. But having half a city in one time zone and the other half in another causes logistical problems. Does the same thing with states. That’s why they are like that.
Best solution would be creating all new states designed around the time zones.
This would be the best way to split up the time zones with current states and counties
Because most of the year is already daylight savings time. We’re only in standard time for 4 months from November to March. It doesn’t sound like a big difference from being 50/50, but we’re in DST twice as long as we’re in standard time.
Because light in the evening is better than light at night.
The numbers on the clock have no effect on the amount of daylight.
No, but they have an effect on the amount of daylight you have on your free time, in the evening. Evening being defined by the numbers on the clock.
Great, so there’s no objection to permanent daylight savings.