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California Voters Embrace Year-Round Daylight-Saving Time (sfchronicle.com)
Californians warmed to the idea of year-round daylight-saving time, approving an initiative that would urge state lawmakers to junk the annual springing forward and falling back. From a report: With 43 percent of precincts reporting Tuesday night, Proposition 7 was leading 61 percent to 39 percent. It's a long way from here to year-round daylight-saving time. First, the Legislature would have to approve it by a two-thirds vote. Then Congress would have to allow California to deviate from standard time when most of the rest of the nation shifts to it.
Let's get real, it's highly probable that both Oregon and Washington State will follow suit. Just easier.
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What they are saying is instead of going with the natural time (noon is midday, and midnight is... well, midnight), they want to keep the shifted time where we get up an hour earlier, so that we have more daylight later in the day after work.
It's interesting because two issues are being convoluted. One is having to change times twice a year, and the other is it getting dark earlier than people want. The former is a pain in the butt and disruptive, the latter is natural.
The "right" way to do it is do away with time changes and DST, and simply move schedules an hour earlier. School starts an hour earlier, work starts an hour earlier, etc. But apparently this is psychologically too difficult to embrace so instead we'll just pretend 8 PM is 9 PM, and call "6 AM" "7 AM", so we don't think we are waking up earlier and going to be earlier.
Better known as 318230.
It means that local "noon" will be roughly equivalent to one hour before the sun reaches maximum elevation around that longitude.
The basic idea is that people are firmly entrenched in the idea of what happens at what particular number is indicated on a clock, moreso than simply adapting to whatever actual time happens to be advantageous.
i.e. getting to work at "9AM" is an immutable, unchangeable state of the universe, while the actual position of the sun in the sky relative to your location on earth at 9AM is something that has to be legislated.
In the old days, people in high latitudes just had "summer hours" and "winter hours" where they'd open/close stores and show up to work based on whatever was advantageous for that time of year, and weren't wedded to the idea of having an unchangeable schedule on the clock. Businesses and families made or did not make changes as independent units, and the decisions were based on the nature of the activity.
Now the clock is somehow more important than actual, physical reality.
DST is just tricking people into changing their schedules while they somehow think their schedule has stayed the same because they do things at the same indicated time their clock has always told them to.
i.e. humans are incredibly stupid creatures sometimes.
There is. It's called Pacific Daylight Time, or Mountain Standard Time. Or UTC-07.
No, the headline is sort of wrong. The oficial summary includes "Permits the Legislature by two-thirds vote to make future changes to California’s daylight saving time period, including for its year-round application, if changes are consistent with federal law." So it could mean that the legislature could change DST to happen on different dates as well.
And I voted against it I think. Permanent DST is stupid, where as permanent abandonment of DST is smarter. I agree that the change in time twice a year is dumb, but permanently being off by an hour and effectively being in a different time zone altogether is dumber. I think it's confusing to people who just want to get rid of the twice a year time change but who don't realize that DST is not the "standard" time.
Overall this proposition will have zero effect because states can't change these rules unilaterally. However, currently states are allowed to choose to not have DST at all, which applies to most of Arizona, and California probably doesn't even need a proposition for that. Hopefully the legislators are smart enough not to push forward with this.
They'll try to call it PDT but then the computers will "fix" their clocks all the time.
In the end they're going to have to learn to call it UTC-7, and they'll beg and beg for websites to call it UTC-7 (California) so that they can, like, find it, brah.
So, it's Mountain Standard Time year round, same as Arizona which doesn't use DST.
It puts two issues together - the time change issue and the issue of DST or no DST. As well as allowing the legislature to change the time of DST start and end. That's the ultimate problem with California propositions - they're not written by a committee who has sat down and thought things through, they're often written by a disgruntled person with a gripe who's able to raise money to get it on the ballot. Many of these propositions when passed are quickly struck down by the courts because they violate the California constitution, or they conflict with other laws, etc. This one seriously feels like a bunch of drunks in a bar hashed things out on the back of a napkin.
The "right" way to do it is do away with time changes and DST, and simply move schedules an hour earlier. School starts an hour earlier, work starts an hour earlier, etc. But apparently this is psychologically too difficult to embrace
It's more about coordination than psychology. Maybe software developers are used to flexible hours but retail, healthcare, transportation and a lot of other sectors are tied to the clock. What happens if the school changes but work doesn't? What about contracts that specify working hours? Are stores willing to switch if customers split between early and late? What about rules for overtime pay that kick in at night? There's a million little things that make it easier for a majority to change the time zone rather than change everything else and then those who don't like it can try scheduling things an hour later if they can.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
where as permanent abandonment of DST is smarter
You say that until you wonder why the sun is rising at 4:40AM in the summer (in June in Los Angeles, it rises on June 23 at 5:40AM DST), and there's an hour less light in the evening.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
I like to have dinner around 6:30 PM. I could wait until each member of my family happened to be hungry and then feed them individually, but I don't. Because we all know dinner is coming at 6:30, everyone times their earlier meals they're ready to eat at 6:30. This is not natural behavior, but neither is it somehow underhanded. It's simply a logistical convenience made possible by the invention of the clock.
That's pretty much how all non-agrarian work is coordinated: we agree on when we'll show up for work and when we get home.
The purpose of daylight savings was to give people working industrial jobs more daylight leisure time in the summer. Remember, when it was first adopted electric lighting wasn't something those people would have. They could have got the same effect by telling everyone in your society to adjust their schedule twice a year, but the government doesn't regulate the start and end time of work shifts. It *does* regulate the time standard, making that the simplest mechanism for accomplishing this.
Daylight savings never made sense in near-tropical or near-arctic regions. Nor is the case for shifting back and forth between standard and daylight savings compelling in a world of ubiquitous electric lighting. You can either stick with standard time, and lose summer daylight leisure time, or stick with savings time year round, getting ready for work in the winter with the aid of light bulbs.
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"You say that until you wonder why the sun is rising at 4:40AM in the summer (in June in Los Angeles, it rises on June 23 at 5:40AM DST), and there's an hour less light in the evening."
So what? Don't like it? Just get up and hour earlier and go to work an hour earlier so you can leave earlier if you want more daylight after work. Don't force everyone else onto your schedule. Or better yet, get a night job and then you can have as much daylight as you want during your non-working hours.
Easy, I just start surfing an hour earlier. I mean, why is this so hard that we have to change clocks twice a year?
I don't expect to be able to legislate the analemma, but we can least stop with the fall ahead nonsense. It's a waste of time and energy and nobody likes it.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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Nobody's suggesting getting rid of the clock.
But even as it stands, some businesses are open from 6-2, some are 7-4, others from 8-5, some are 8-4, and some are 10-6 [...]. It seems that we get along just fine with these already-wide variations in operating hours, where the first-shift factory worker's day is half-gone before the shop that is open from 10-6 even opens the doors. This is normal and it works as well as it needs to. Further discussion of this aspect is a really stupid thing to be doing.
Plenty of us are fed up with the twice-yearly tomfoolery of changing the clocks, though.
Solar noon happens at the same time every single day of the year for a given meridian.
If we stop doing DST, then the days just get shorter as winter approaches: The sun comes up a bit later, and goes down a bit earlier. The opposite happens after winter is over and the days get longer. No big deal.
If you need daylight to perform your job, you're already adjusting your schedule based on the sun.
The rest of your questions can be answered with "Figure it out once, and then write it down. And then change it later if it seems like a good idea." Just like every fucking thing else in business.
Kid-proof tablet..
You're confusing the benefit of accurate timekeeping for the purposes of coordination with the dogmatization of the INDICATED time taking precedence.
i.e. is 6:30PM dinnertime because we agreed to have it at the time that will be indicated at 6:30PM today, or is it because dinnertime is somehow inherently 6:30PM?
The benefit of the accurate timekeeping is that you can all have dinner at the same time -- and that time will happen whether your clock says 6:30PM, 6:30AM, or is marked with random trapezoids ("dinner time is at rhombus-o-clock!"). What's important is that you are picking the appropriate time, ahead of time, and your clocks are in sync so people know when it is.
The alternative (that many people seem to practice now) is worshiping the symbols on the clock rather than the time they represent. I.e. people feeling they MUST have dinner at 6:30PM even though it's been 25 hours since 6:30PM yesterday due to the DST change. If the government declared that the clock moved ahead by 23 hours at 7PM, it would follow that you'd have dinner twice in an hour since 6:30PM the next day would occur an hour after 6:30PM today. .... and if the government replaced the numbers with aforementioned random shapes you'd NEVER EAT DINNER AGAIN because it would "never be 6:30PM ever again", only Rhombus-O-Clock. Guess you have to starve.
That's the silliness -- instead of using the numbers to keep track of time, you're DEFINING TIME TO BE THE NUMBERS. It would be like if the U.S. switched to the metric system and you suddenly felt thin because you now weigh only 113 kilograms instead of 250 pounds.
Or someone born in 1980 claiming to be only 9 years old because they were born on Feb 29th and they've only had 9 birthdays since. =P
Just get up and hour earlier and go to work an hour earlier
Unless you need to work with people who work 8AM-5PM, not 6AM-3PM.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
the purpose of Daylight savings was to give people more shopping hours. Retailers like it because folks shop less when the sun goes down. We've basically massively inconvenienced ourselves so that sales don't dip a bit in the winter.
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Actually, DST is now (as of 2007) from half-way into March until the end of October (7.5+ months), so PST is actually used for less than 4.5 months out of the year. I could see Trump and blocking this just to spite California. I hope not, as I think it makes good sense and I voted for Prop 7 as I hate the time change. I don't care of we go to UTC-7 all the time or UTC-8, I just hate the change.