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Massachusetts is considering leaving the Eastern Time Zone

169 points by tony101 9y ago

sinodin 9y ago
Thanks u
poulsbohemian 9y ago
Personally, it would be brilliant if we'd just go to permanent daylight savings time nationwide. The transition is hard on the kids and living in the northern part of the country, the extra daylight is appreciated.
- austincheney 9y ago
  Better would be to go to a single Zulu timezone nationwide. You just go into work an hour later in the central area compared to the east coast.
  - idbehold 9y ago
    https://qntm.org/abolish https://qntm.org/abolish
    - kemiller 9y ago
      You are doing important work here.
    - Nullabillity 9y ago
      If I'm thinking about calling someone I'll check their IM status, not look at the clock. If I'm going to a store I don't visit often I'll have to look up their opening hours on a map anyway. Whether that says it's 08-20 or 16-04 couldn't matter less. And that's before getting into the even more ridiculous stuff: > First of all, we need to straighten out some terminology. The terms "a.m." and "p.m." (ante meridiem and post meridiem) are strongly deprecated now, because they refer to the position of the Sun, not of the clock. So use 24-hour time? Somehow the rest of the world manages just fine. > So, you have to say "solar noon" to refer to the instant when the Sun is at its zenith, and "twelve hundred hours" to refer to the instant when the clock reads 12:00. Similarly "solar midnight" and "zero hundred hours". And you have to use the twenty-four hour clock, it's the only way to be unambiguous. 12:00 is just an arbitrary time anyway, and even now it might not have much to do with noon anyway, depending on where you live. Hell, look have a look at the arctic circle, where noon (or day/night) doesn't have much of a meaning anyway. > Even in the best case scenario, it is impossible to retroactively scrap time zones. The past will always exist, and the people who lived there will never adopt your new standard. Nor can all of past history be renumbered. The history of timekeeping will remain exactly as complicated as it always has been, and the zoneinfo database can never be abandoned. Do you also refuse to use epoch timestamps, because they can't represent dates before 1970? Sure, you'd need to handle zones for historical data, but that'd get progressively less relevant the further away from cutoff you get.
    - EvanAnderson 9y ago
      That's wonderful. Thank you for sharing that.
    - tempestn 9y ago
      Your conclusion is a thing of beauty: > If it's any consolation, all of this is extremely unlikely to happen, since it relies on an international agreement between every single nation in the world. Or on China attacking and conquering the entire world and installing China Standard Time as part of a totalitarian regime, which is slightly less unlikely but still very unlikely.
    - Asooka 9y ago
      This has nothing to do with DST.
    - tzs 9y ago
      That's greatly exaggerating the difficulty of deciding if it is OK to call your Uncle who is about 165° east of you in a single time zone system compared to the current multiple time zone system. In fact, the procedure is the same in both systems: 1. Look at your clock. 2. Add 11 hours to clock time. 3. Ask yourself if it would be daytime at your location when your clock says that time. 4. If yes, call your Uncle. • Under the current multiple time zone system that works because clock time is close to local time. Step #2 computes the clock time at your Uncle's location, which gets you close to the local time at his location. Daylight hours are approximately the same in his local time as in your local time, aside from the seasonal variation which you can ignore if you allow yourself a reasonable margin of error (e.g., aim for calling him a couple hours or so after sunrise rather than shooting for the crack of dawn), so you can use your local time as a proxy for his [1]. • Under a single worldwide time zone system it works because your local time is about 11 hours behind his local time. The time you get in step #3 is what the time will be on your clock (and on his clock, and on everyone else's clock) when your local time is the same as his local time is right now. So if that clock time will be a good time for you to receive a call, now is a good time to try your Uncle. Of course, you probably wouldn't actually have to do any of that. Just as in his first example with the current time zone system where he Googles "time in melbourne" rather than looking at his clock and adding 11 hours, in the single worldwide time zone you would Google "local time in melbourne". In such a world, where local time can be quite a ways off from clock time, Google would surely recognize such queries and do the right thing. Heck, it might even assume you mean local time if you just did "time in melbourne" because in the single time zone there would be no need to Google for the clock time for a particular area. I'd expect "time in melbourne" to probably give something like "The local time in Melbourne is X at world time Y". That covers everything. [1] If you really are aiming for crack of dawn calling, then you will have to take into account the seasonable variation in sunrise relative to local noon, but you have to do that in both the multiple time zone system and the single worldwide time zone system.
  - mejin 9y ago
    I like it that no matter where I live I can wake up at 6, stores open by 9, and lunch is at 12. Imagine every time traveling having to ask the locals what time things happen. Also, I don't think any politician will allow their state to be the state that doesn't have the same time as other countries in the same longitude
    - starlig-ht 9y ago
      Arizona doesn't do daylight savings, while the Navajo Nation (surrounded by AZ) does, and so does Utah to the North.
      - SAI_Peregrinus 9y ago
        And the Hopi Nation (surrounded by the Navajo Nation) does not.
        colejohnson66 9y ago
        And then the Navajo Nation portion inside the Hopi Nation does
      - protomyth 9y ago
        > Navajo Nation (surrounded by AZ) Actually, it occupies area in 3 states. The Hopi Reservation is surrounded by the Navajo Nation.
    - mattferderer 9y ago
      Most places I've visited vary from business to business. With all due respect, I don't know of anywhere that fits your 9 & 12 mold. When I travel I always need to look up the hours of businesses. Many also pick a day or two during the week to close or prepare. Many also operate dramatically different depending on the day you go.
      - brewdad 9y ago
        Ok but they do operate at a reasonable approximation. Sure a shop may open at 0800 in one town and not until 1000 in another but are there really places on earth where the shops tend to open at 0100 and close by 0900? Certainly there can't be many.
  - kemiller 9y ago
    Good God, no. The time isn’t just an arbitrary number to help coordinate meetings, it communicates what time of the day/night cycle you’re experiencing, to a reasonable approximation. Having separate time zones may be annoying, but it forces you to think about others’ experience. If I say I was up last night til 4 in the morning, that tells you something.
    - racer-v 9y ago
      Agree. Noon should be the moment when the sun is at its highest altitude in the sky, or a close approximation thereof.
      - mcny 9y ago
        > Agree. Noon should be the moment when the sun is at its highest altitude in the sky, or a close approximataion thereof. I too want the same time worldwide but I guess the best we can do is UTC. I mean we could do it but I fear we'd just be sweeping the ugliness under the rug. I don't want this kind mess https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_China > Currently, timezone usage within Xinjiang is roughly split along the ethnic divide, with most ethnic Han following Beijing time and most ethnic Uyghurs following Ürümqi Time.
        incompatible 9y ago
        We already have UTC when you want the same time worldwide. Using UTC in everyday life would be somewhat confusing when travelling. I guess it would take quite a while to get used to things happening at a different time on the clock.
      - rocqua 9y ago
        I think the sunrise is a better fixture socially, and maybe the sunset is a better fixture biologically. Noon is just an easy to measure compromise for the above two. Social life and timing mostly revolves around how early you get up. "Its late" kind of means "I am behind schedule to get enough sleep before waking up". Biologically, we are programmed around sunlight. Whilst our mornings aren't really controlled by the biological clock (that is what the alarm is for), the evening really are. Besides, the for many people, the evening is what separates 'civil life' from 'private life'.
  - thephyber 9y ago
    This is similar to China, which has 5 timezones wide and they have one standard national timezone. The US is far wider when you consider Alaska, Hawaii and the island territories in the Caribbean and the Pacific. It spans from UTC+10 (Guam) to UTC-10 (Hawaii / Aleutians).
  - InclinedPlane 9y ago
    Why? You would still need to create a system to keep track of local time of day. Hey, guess what, we already have such a system, people already use it and are familiar with it, let's keep using it.
    - austincheney 9y ago
      No, you don't need that. Many people think you need it, but only because they have never experienced the alternative. Once you try it you won't want to go back.
  - trumpownsyou420 9y ago
    you should probably keep your opinion to yourself.
  - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
    Erm, this is china. In Urumqi, the official time is still the same as Beijing but stores open and close much later. However, they still have an unofficial separate time that locals use to coordinate the meaning of noon, morning, and night.
- waqf 9y ago
  I think we should shift time zones a little every day, so that (in some designated location, say New York or DC) the sun rises at exactly 6am every morning. This eliminates the sudden transition to daylight savings which is the source of most complaints, and it would be trivial to implement with modern electronics.
  - connicpu 9y ago
    "trivial"
  - grzm 9y ago
    I firmly believe we'd see a lot of problems. Pick nearly any datetime library and see how easy it would be to calculate things like durations between two arbitrary timestamps. Even with those that do handle daylight saving or time zones properly, many applications that do use these libraries don't use these features. Or how often projects update their timezone databases. Handled in an incremental way would be a world of pain, precisely because of our reliance on modern electronics and software, or more precisely, because we rely on time so heavily to coordinate events, and rely on syncing these operations with human activities. I think I may have just literally shuddered. By the way, what you describe is how things worked prior to standardization of time which was driven in part by the expansion of the railroad. There's a brief history on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_zone#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_zone#History
  - macNchz 9y ago
    Regardless of the (extreme) technical challenges to implement something like this...a 6am sunrise in NYC would make for sunset at 3:15pm in December. A little early for my taste!
- mattferderer 9y ago
  As a parent of young children, we dread changing the clocks & curse the evil people who came up with this terrible idea. If Dante's Inferno were to be written today, their would be a 10th Circle for those who came up with daylight savings time. It would involve the sound of screaming children, important appointments & clocks that change at random.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - wavefunction 9y ago
    The people who came up with it were people living in more agrarian times, when your kids wouldn't be screaming, they'd be up watering the chickens and helping you out around the farm before day-break no matter what the hour of the day.
- toss1 9y ago
  NO! Agree that the transition is hard, but Standard time is much better. Wakening before the sun is not only biologically counterproductive, but the late morning dark would further hinder ability to exercise in the morning for months out of the year. Just Kill DST, stay on standard time and be done with it
  - ebiester 9y ago
    Whether standard or DST makes more sense really depends on geography.
    - Asooka 9y ago
      That's why we have timezones?
      - 24gttghh 9y ago
        I think they mean Latitude.
      - snarf21 9y ago
        I think they mean Maine vs Florida not east/west. You may need the daylight "later" in Maine than Florida.
- zeveb 9y ago
  Why permanent daylight savings time? Why not just permanent real time? Clock noon should be roughly the same as solar noon, all year round. 'Daylight savings' is an impossibility.
  - chimeracoder 9y ago
    > Why permanent daylight savings time? Why not just permanent real time? Clock noon should be roughly the same as solar noon, all year round. 'Daylight savings' is an impossibility. Because if my commute involves driving fifty miles east in the morning and fifty miles west in the evening, I don't want to have to adjust my clock by about 5 minutes twice a day. (At the equator, this would be 3 minutes - the further you go from the equator, the greater the difference that fifty miles would represent).
    - zeveb 9y ago
      > Because if my commute involves driving fifty miles east in the morning and fifty miles west in the evening, I don't want to have to adjust my clock by about 5 minutes twice a day. You seem to think that I'm arguing against time zones. I'm not (here, anyway): I'm arguing that the time within a time zone be that of noon at its midpoint, so that no point within the timezone is more than 30 minutes from true noon (yes, some timezone are larger than an hour …), as opposed to those who want permanent DST, or even double DST, where clock noon might be hours from true noon.
      - koenigdavidmj 9y ago
        And life gets interesting if your time zone crosses through anywhere populated. (That's why northwest Indiana is on central time: it basically exists as a bedroom community for Chicago, so it's most sensical to be on Chicago time.)
  - Spooky23 9y ago
    The valid argument is usually about safety. Many people, especially children are travelling to go to work or school and sunrise at 7:20, feels a little unsafe for many people. That extra hour in the morning helps.
- c517402 9y ago
  Arizona doesn't participate in daylight savings time. And, we really don't need to be saving any daylight in Arizona.
  - osteele 9y ago
    Most of Arizona doesn’t participate in DST [1]. [1] “Daylight Savings Time explained”, CGP Gray. https://youtu.be/84aWtseb2-4 https://youtu.be/84aWtseb2-4. Skip to the 5 minute mark for Arizona.
    - selectodude 9y ago
      Is Navajo Nation technically in Arizona, though?
      - AlotOfReading 9y ago
        For some purposes yes, for others no. The state has jurisdiction in matters not involving the tribe that take place there and the residents can vote / participate in civil government as Arizonians. However, the nation does have sovereignty in tribal affairs on the reservation and a few outside it.
- shmerl 9y ago
  Yeah, this whole DST shift is pointless. Just keep it constant but standard, not DST. Also, I'd prefer a switch to 24 hour time notation. AM/PM is cumbersome.
  - mintplant 9y ago
    I switched my own "native" time format to 24 hours years ago, in my head and on all my personal devices. Now I'm able to convert between the two formats effortlessly, and doing mental math on times is easier when I don't have to mix in a bunch of modulo-12 operations. (I live in the US.)
    - shmerl 9y ago
      Same thing here. I use 24 hour system anywhere I can. Converting it isn't an effort for me. But I wish everyone around would use it.
      - Koshkin 9y ago
        Well, in English, you can't say "16 o'clock", can you? You can only say "sixteen hundred hours" (which sounds terrible, if you ask me).
        shmerl 9y ago
        Yeah, sixteen hundred hours sounds awful. Sixteen o-five sounds OK to me though.
        thaumasiotes 9y ago
        > Well, in English, you can't say "16 o'clock", can you? You can only say "sixteen hundred hours" What's stopping you?
        mitchty 9y ago
        Nothing, get enough people saying it and it will become the thing. I'd vote for sixteen hour or something similar.
- tzs 9y ago
  If kids are a concern, what about the problem of DST in winter in northern areas meaning kids go to school in the dark? For example I see kids walking to school at around 7:15 AM (6th-8th grade and high school) and around 8:30 AM (K-5th grade). This is at latitude ~47.7° N (same latitude as the city that is part of your name, in fact). Here is what various DST options would do in terms of kids going to school before sunrise: Elementary: Middle/High: No DST: never Nov 20th - Feb 10th Current DST: never Oct 10th - Mar 16th Permanent DST: Nov 23 - Feb 2nd Oct 10th - Mar 16th
  - racer-v 9y ago
    This is just a problem of schools starting too early. You can't fix stupid. Although isn't the idea of "permanent DST" an oxymoron?
    - tzs 9y ago
      I agree that middle/high school is arguably starting too early (especially since research has shown, I believe, that teens really should be sleeping later). In the case of elementary school, though, you are dealing with kids young enough that they probably cannot reliably be counted on the get ready and leave for school on their own, and so you need to fit school times in with their parent's work schedule.
      - racer-v 9y ago
        As long as we're trying to fix all the world's problems, I'd submit that the ideal domestic partnership has one parent able to focus full-time on childcare and home life. It doesn't have to be the same parent all the time, but I find the expectation of dual incomes to be one of the great rip-offs of modern life.
        positivecomment 9y ago
        Somewhere along the way to 10s, we lost the work flexibility. "I took care of my kids for 5 years" gets your CV discarded in an instant. So both parents, not always because they need the money, but very frequently because they're afraid to lose their career, choose to keep working.
- DerekL 9y ago
  What is the point of making it permanent? If you want to increase the daylight after the workday, then just make working times one hour earlier, instead of changing the clock.
- Asooka 9y ago
  As a former schoolchild, please no, PLEASE NO. Waking up early is already hard, having to wake up an hour earlier than I would otherwise have to for the entire year would be hell. Just use normal non-DST time. Please.
  - Asooka 9y ago
    Can the people downvoting please explain?
- mnw21cam 9y ago
  That'd be "Daylight saving time", not "Daylight savings time". Not sure why so many people get this wrong.
  - luckroy 9y ago
    I'm with you, but we're fighting the losing fight. As an aside, what a brilliant marketing name. Daylight is in peril and we all adjust our clocks to save it from the treacherous grasp of morning. We're heroes!
Animats 9y ago
Unless all the states east of New York switch, this is a non-starter.
- bryanlarsen 9y ago
  FTA: The report said Massachusetts should not act alone, or else it could disrupt "commerce, trade, interstate transportation and broadcasting" across the region. A majority of other states in New England would have to jump on the time-zone train, too.
- wickberg 9y ago
  It's even more subtle than that - about half of Connecticut is heavily involved with business in NYC, and would probably be quite unwilling to jump an hour over. To a lesser extent, south-western Vermont is economically linked to the Albany metro area, and would also likely vote against a shift. Were you to poll on support for moving New England over to Atlantic time, I'd bet you'd wind up with a map closely matching that of local support for the Boston Red Sox vs New York Yankees: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/04/23/upshot/24-upshot-baseball.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/04/23/upshot/24-ups...
skykooler 9y ago
The sun sets around 4 in the winter even in Philadelphia. This would imply that basically all of New England should move to Atlantic Time.
- phyzome 9y ago
  But only if you think there should be no particular correspondence between solar time and clock time. (I'm not going to have that argument at this moment, though.) Eastern Standard Time in Massachusetts is a good match: - Boston: https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/boston https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/boston - Lenox, on the opposite side: https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/@4941853 https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/@4941853
- asveikau 9y ago
  Philadelphia is not in New England. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_England https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_England Also the article says Massachusetts wouldn't do it without the rest of New England also joining: > A majority of other states in New England would have to jump on the time-zone train, too. Edit: Must have been downvoted by west coasters who don't know what new england is ...
  - kw71 9y ago
    If New England is North or East of Philadelphia, then shouldn't the situation for New England be worse, iow, sunset earlier?
    - asveikau 9y ago
      It's both north and east. And I think that was the point of the article, that New England has it particularly bad for this. Most people think that east coast cities are on a north-south axis, but as you go up I-95 (the major highway connecting these cities) you are actually traveling northeast. It was a head trip for me being from DC when I realized I could drive straight north for 5 hours and end up in Rochester, NY, or drive "north" on 95 for 5 hours and end up in New York City, but the distance between those two points was also itself a 5-6 hour drive.
starlig-ht 9y ago
I would rather see the planet stop using time-zones altogether. Let's all go UTC, adjust our clocks and schedules once and be done with it. It doesn't matter what number my clock says at noon/sunrise/sunset. If it is about working-hours coinciding with daylight, businesses can adjust their working hours as needed (and post them on their site without you having to convert to local time to know when you can call) edit: the link below just changed my mind. dammit, I hate being wrong.
- nkrisc 9y ago
  And then whenever you travel you'll have to recalibrate your time-related intuition about everything. No thanks.
  - mjevans 9y ago
    They call this jet lag, and everyone has to do it already.
    - beal 9y ago
      Not the same thing.
    - nkrisc 9y ago
      No, that's not the case. When I'm in New York, most stores open at 9 in the morning. When I'm in London, most stores open at 9 in the morning. If we all used UTC around the world, I'd have to calculate the difference for all the times that I'm used to. In London the stores open at 9 in the morning, but if I travel East a bit into Europe they open at 12, and dinner is at 11. It has nothing to do with jet lag. Currently you only have to do any time calculation is you're working across time zones, once you're there and dealing with things in that time zone there's no real difference from what you're used to.
- idbehold 9y ago
  https://qntm.org/abolish https://qntm.org/abolish
Goronmon 9y ago
Maine is tentatively on-board: http://www.pressherald.com/2017/04/27/maine-may-switch-to-atlantic-time-zone-if-new-hampshire-and-massachusetts-do/ http://www.pressherald.com/2017/04/27/maine-may-switch-to-at... New Hampshire looks to be against it so far: http://www.concordmonitor.com/time-zone-change-atlantic-9808198 http://www.concordmonitor.com/time-zone-change-atlantic-9808...
- KGIII 9y ago
  Yeah, it really screws with us up here. Once you get up above the meridian, days get pretty short in the winter. Moving those hours around helps exactly none. No farmer has their life improved. It's not saving energy. It's just a dumb setting on the clock.
  - megaman22 9y ago
    It's super depressing in December and January when you get up to go to work in the dark, and by the time you get out at 5, it is pitch dark again. I do wish we'd fallen back earlier, like we used to. I'd much rather have that extra hour of daylight in the morning when I could maybe use it, rather than on my commute home.
    - KGIII 9y ago
      Yeah, you know where I live, as I recall? You should come visit. ;-) Anyhow, we'd have to throw the clock off a full two hours to get any benefit. It's just getting light at 0700 and already getting dark at 1600 - during the shortest days. Daybreak was at about 0700 today, maybe later. It is raining. I couldn't tell and I didn't look online,
    - walterkobayashi 9y ago
      I agree, I used to start for work at 6:30 AM and by 4, it'd be pitch dark again. Super Depressing.
  - saalweachter 9y ago
    Time zones aren't for farmers; they're for employees who have employers who won't (or can't) let their employees set hours that give them free time in the daylight. There's also opposing needs: working folk like afternoon sun so they have daylight when they get off work, parents with school children like morning sun, so it is light when their children are waiting for the bus, and in the winter there's not enough daylight to satisfy both groups of people.
chrisabrams 9y ago
I really hope NY get on board as well. Being in Manhattan during the winter, the sun is gone many days by 4pm, sometimes earlier depending which part of the city you are in (which skyscraper is blocking the last bit of sunlight). As a native Texan it's tough to adjust to :O [edit] my grammar
- grzm 9y ago
  Thinking a little bit more about this, I'm wondering how much this would really help. Yes, there would be more daylight in the evening, but given the latitude, how much longer in the morning would it be dark? I found this handy tool to get a feel for it: https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/new-york https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/new-york And here's Boston: https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/boston https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/boston
  - eli_gottlieb 9y ago
    >https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/boston https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/boston Well that explains why I feel like winter nights are somehow worse and darker than summer ones. In summer, it's mostly not night at all: the twilight periods eat half the clock-nighttime. In winter, twilight gets cut in half and combines with the losses of daylight to extend nighttime.
- deathanatos 9y ago
  > the sun is gone many days by 4pm Nowhere in Manhattan is that true (though perhaps I'll grant that a building might occlude the sun, but you're exaggerating). Conservatively, if we pick Albany, NY as the "northernmost extent of Manhattan", the earliest sunset is ~4:21pm.
erickhill 9y ago
A bit off topic, but I was equally intrigued by the fact that the article was on aol.com. Made me do a brief double-take.
_raoulcousins 9y ago
Over here in Seattle sunset is at 4:19 in winter. Maybe we need to switch to some other time zone.
- Skunkleton 9y ago
  Maybe you could put the whole city on a barge and migrate south for the winter?
- mikestew 9y ago
  What difference would that make? You still have to deal with almost sixteen hours of darkness in December. Shifting clocks around isn't going to change that physical reality.
  - Skunkleton 9y ago
    I would like my sunset to be around 8:30 pm every day. That way I always have daylight after work. That's just my preference, I know it wouldn't work for everyone.
- mkempe 9y ago
  Two things to say: a) come spend winter in Sweden... in Lapland the sun does not set at all in June and there is darkness around the clock in January; Stockholm is not that far up North, so we get a few hours of daylight in mid-December; and b) if lack of daylight in the winter is such an issue, maybe move to Southern California, or somewhere even closer to the equator. Three things, actually :-) c) consider spending your winter months in the Southern Hemisphere. Some animals migrate vast distances twice a year.
  - rconti 9y ago
    I was actually surprised during a visit to Stockholm (granted, in May) that it was not light that much later than my native Seattle in the summer. I guess there's probably a reason major cities in Scandinavia are not all that far north in their respective countries :) I've been above the arctic circle in the summer, but thankfully never in the winter.
GnarfGnarf 9y ago
Gee, should Nova Scotia move into another time zone?
pmurT 9y ago
I wish we'd get rid of timezones all together - is there really much point aside from tradition?
- dredmorbius 9y ago
  Yes, there is, and it ties into a whole mess of interrelated standardisation, information, and control capabilities. Beninger's book is a fascinating exploratiion of this. http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674169869 http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674169869
flatfilefan 9y ago
This Russian Collusion hysteria is going too far. Yes, Russia has experimented with daylight savings under Medvedev, but Massachusetts shouldn’t overreact and leave the Eastern Time Zone altogether!
tzs 9y ago
One of the main purported benefits of DST is that it in effect moves some of the extra sunlight from the longer days of summer from the morning to the evening, where most of us are in a better position to use it. That's because without DST as the day lengthens the extra daylight is split evenly between morning and evening. But WHY does it split evenly? It's because we historically use noon as our reference. We think of noon on day N+1 as being exactly one day after noon on day N. Noon is a sensible reference, fairly easy to determine with ancient technology. Suppose that instead we had historically used sunrise as our reference. By definition, then, sunrise would be 8 AM every day. As the days lengthened in the summer, all of the extra daylight would then have shown up in the evening automatically. It's interesting to ponder whether or not such a reference could have worked. I think that in the days before clocks, when the sundial was the most sophisticated timepiece, this could have worked quite well. It would also fit in well with work schedules, meaning people who needed to wait for light to work would be going to work at about the same time every day. It would also fit in with animal sleep schedules. With clocks, though, a noon reference is easier. A sunrise reference requires a much more sophisticated clock, or it requires frequent manual adjustment. Nowadays, though, clocks easily have the sophistication to handle that. We probably could actually reasonably handle using sunrise as our reference, and have our clocks adjust daily to keep that so. It would mean that a given clock time on day N+1 is no longer exactly 24 hours later than that same clock time on day N, but I don't think that would matter for ordinary life. I'd be willing to put up with that if it means I get the benefits of DST (more evening light in summer) without the two big discontinuities a year. Edit: to be clear, I am assuming that if we did a sunrise-based system instead of a noon-based system we would still do time zones. 8 AM would be simultaneous everywhere in the zone. [1] In this comment "day" refers to sunrise to sunset.
- Retric 9y ago
  Calibrating a sundial to noon is a one time effort. Calibrating a sun dial to dawn requires an update every single day. Further, dawn depends on local geographic conditions making it an ambiguous term.
  - tzs 9y ago
    I'd expect that a sunrise-based system would use the calculated time that sunrise would occur for an observer at the middle of the time zone on perfectly spherical planet. Well, if we did one today, anyway. If it had done it in ancient times it would probably be based on sunrise in the capital city as observed each day by some designated religious office such as a high priest at the main temple of the dominant religion.
minikites 9y ago
This is an unpopular opinion but I'm a big fan of DST for most of the reasons enumerated in this article: http://www.leancrew.com/all-this/2013/03/why-i-like-dst/ http://www.leancrew.com/all-this/2013/03/why-i-like-dst/ >If we stayed on Standard Time throughout the year, sunrise here in the Chicago area would be between 4:15 and 4:30 am from the middle of May through the middle of July. And if you check the times for civil twilight, which is when it’s bright enough to see without artificial light, you’ll find that that starts half an hour earlier. This is insane and a complete waste of sunlight. >If, by the way, you think the solution is to stay on DST throughout the year, I can only tell you that we tried that back in the 70s and it didn’t turn out well. Sunrise here in Chicago was after 8:00 am, which put school children out on the street at bus stops before dawn in the dead of winter.
rconti 9y ago
The major problem here is that far too much effort was put into accommodating everyone by including them in the eastern time zone. Last time I looked, I think something like 48% of the US population lives in it, and it's just unnecessarily large. Obviously there are benefits, but it creates a ton of perverse consequences too. Realistically, the eastern time zone should probably stop between OH/PA, west of West Virgina, east of TN, etc. But of course we'd then need 5 time zones to cover the continential US to keep other time zones from becoming far too large.
- graywh 9y ago
  4 time zones is enough to cover the 48 states unless you want half-hour zones or radically different sunrise times on one coast or the other. Just need to reduce the sizes of Eastern and Central to better match the longitude lines.
_cerv 9y ago
I get the strange feeling that I might be the only happy person who loves early sunsets.
minademian 9y ago
Mexit!
werty1 9y ago
Seriously only clicked because aol.com. That's a thing I've not seen in close to 20 years.
manoj_venkat92 9y ago
Laughter from India. We don't have this DST stuff but I have to deal with this at work as the clients are American. Damn, this is some serious mess.
floitsch 9y ago
Just wrote a post a week ago on the subject of date/time issues programmers have to be aware of: https://medium.com/@florian_32814/date-time-526a4f86badb https://medium.com/@florian_32814/date-time-526a4f86badb It's almost sad that Massachusetts switching wouldn't even make it into that document... (too normal)
inanutshellus 9y ago
Everyone whines about DST, but I love the DST "timezone" in summer. I leave work in the sun. It feels like I still have time to play and have fun after work. It's great.
- ranit 9y ago
  People don't whine about DST, people hate the one hour change every year.
  - dboreham 9y ago
    Especially people who debug calendar software. Just sayin..
  - inanutshellus 9y ago
    I mean... you can't have DST if you don't change. DST is the fake time. If you get rid of it, you're in normal time. Sooo... The options are A) Complain about 1-hour change and about how it was made for farmers 100 yrs ago B) Complain how you miss DST because the summer hours were so wonderful and man can't we just stay in DST--you know, that fake time we just made up--all the time? I opt for the first option--the constant whining from others one--because the alternative would be constant whining from me. :D

169 points by tony101 9y ago

Thanks u

Personally, it would be brilliant if we'd just go to permanent daylight savings time nationwide. The transition is hard on the kids and living in the northern part of the country, the extra daylight is appreciated.

austincheney 9y ago
Better would be to go to a single Zulu timezone nationwide. You just go into work an hour later in the central area compared to the east coast.
- idbehold 9y ago
  https://qntm.org/abolish https://qntm.org/abolish
  - kemiller 9y ago
    You are doing important work here.
  - Nullabillity 9y ago
    If I'm thinking about calling someone I'll check their IM status, not look at the clock. If I'm going to a store I don't visit often I'll have to look up their opening hours on a map anyway. Whether that says it's 08-20 or 16-04 couldn't matter less. And that's before getting into the even more ridiculous stuff: > First of all, we need to straighten out some terminology. The terms "a.m." and "p.m." (ante meridiem and post meridiem) are strongly deprecated now, because they refer to the position of the Sun, not of the clock. So use 24-hour time? Somehow the rest of the world manages just fine. > So, you have to say "solar noon" to refer to the instant when the Sun is at its zenith, and "twelve hundred hours" to refer to the instant when the clock reads 12:00. Similarly "solar midnight" and "zero hundred hours". And you have to use the twenty-four hour clock, it's the only way to be unambiguous. 12:00 is just an arbitrary time anyway, and even now it might not have much to do with noon anyway, depending on where you live. Hell, look have a look at the arctic circle, where noon (or day/night) doesn't have much of a meaning anyway. > Even in the best case scenario, it is impossible to retroactively scrap time zones. The past will always exist, and the people who lived there will never adopt your new standard. Nor can all of past history be renumbered. The history of timekeeping will remain exactly as complicated as it always has been, and the zoneinfo database can never be abandoned. Do you also refuse to use epoch timestamps, because they can't represent dates before 1970? Sure, you'd need to handle zones for historical data, but that'd get progressively less relevant the further away from cutoff you get.
  - EvanAnderson 9y ago
    That's wonderful. Thank you for sharing that.
  - tempestn 9y ago
    Your conclusion is a thing of beauty: > If it's any consolation, all of this is extremely unlikely to happen, since it relies on an international agreement between every single nation in the world. Or on China attacking and conquering the entire world and installing China Standard Time as part of a totalitarian regime, which is slightly less unlikely but still very unlikely.
  - Asooka 9y ago
    This has nothing to do with DST.
  - tzs 9y ago
    That's greatly exaggerating the difficulty of deciding if it is OK to call your Uncle who is about 165° east of you in a single time zone system compared to the current multiple time zone system. In fact, the procedure is the same in both systems: 1. Look at your clock. 2. Add 11 hours to clock time. 3. Ask yourself if it would be daytime at your location when your clock says that time. 4. If yes, call your Uncle. • Under the current multiple time zone system that works because clock time is close to local time. Step #2 computes the clock time at your Uncle's location, which gets you close to the local time at his location. Daylight hours are approximately the same in his local time as in your local time, aside from the seasonal variation which you can ignore if you allow yourself a reasonable margin of error (e.g., aim for calling him a couple hours or so after sunrise rather than shooting for the crack of dawn), so you can use your local time as a proxy for his [1]. • Under a single worldwide time zone system it works because your local time is about 11 hours behind his local time. The time you get in step #3 is what the time will be on your clock (and on his clock, and on everyone else's clock) when your local time is the same as his local time is right now. So if that clock time will be a good time for you to receive a call, now is a good time to try your Uncle. Of course, you probably wouldn't actually have to do any of that. Just as in his first example with the current time zone system where he Googles "time in melbourne" rather than looking at his clock and adding 11 hours, in the single worldwide time zone you would Google "local time in melbourne". In such a world, where local time can be quite a ways off from clock time, Google would surely recognize such queries and do the right thing. Heck, it might even assume you mean local time if you just did "time in melbourne" because in the single time zone there would be no need to Google for the clock time for a particular area. I'd expect "time in melbourne" to probably give something like "The local time in Melbourne is X at world time Y". That covers everything. [1] If you really are aiming for crack of dawn calling, then you will have to take into account the seasonable variation in sunrise relative to local noon, but you have to do that in both the multiple time zone system and the single worldwide time zone system.
- mejin 9y ago
  I like it that no matter where I live I can wake up at 6, stores open by 9, and lunch is at 12. Imagine every time traveling having to ask the locals what time things happen. Also, I don't think any politician will allow their state to be the state that doesn't have the same time as other countries in the same longitude
  - starlig-ht 9y ago
    Arizona doesn't do daylight savings, while the Navajo Nation (surrounded by AZ) does, and so does Utah to the North.
    - SAI_Peregrinus 9y ago
      And the Hopi Nation (surrounded by the Navajo Nation) does not.
      - colejohnson66 9y ago
        And then the Navajo Nation portion inside the Hopi Nation does
    - protomyth 9y ago
      > Navajo Nation (surrounded by AZ) Actually, it occupies area in 3 states. The Hopi Reservation is surrounded by the Navajo Nation.
  - mattferderer 9y ago
    Most places I've visited vary from business to business. With all due respect, I don't know of anywhere that fits your 9 & 12 mold. When I travel I always need to look up the hours of businesses. Many also pick a day or two during the week to close or prepare. Many also operate dramatically different depending on the day you go.
    - brewdad 9y ago
      Ok but they do operate at a reasonable approximation. Sure a shop may open at 0800 in one town and not until 1000 in another but are there really places on earth where the shops tend to open at 0100 and close by 0900? Certainly there can't be many.
- kemiller 9y ago
  Good God, no. The time isn’t just an arbitrary number to help coordinate meetings, it communicates what time of the day/night cycle you’re experiencing, to a reasonable approximation. Having separate time zones may be annoying, but it forces you to think about others’ experience. If I say I was up last night til 4 in the morning, that tells you something.
  - racer-v 9y ago
    Agree. Noon should be the moment when the sun is at its highest altitude in the sky, or a close approximation thereof.
    - mcny 9y ago
      > Agree. Noon should be the moment when the sun is at its highest altitude in the sky, or a close approximataion thereof. I too want the same time worldwide but I guess the best we can do is UTC. I mean we could do it but I fear we'd just be sweeping the ugliness under the rug. I don't want this kind mess https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_China > Currently, timezone usage within Xinjiang is roughly split along the ethnic divide, with most ethnic Han following Beijing time and most ethnic Uyghurs following Ürümqi Time.
      - incompatible 9y ago
        We already have UTC when you want the same time worldwide. Using UTC in everyday life would be somewhat confusing when travelling. I guess it would take quite a while to get used to things happening at a different time on the clock.
    - rocqua 9y ago
      I think the sunrise is a better fixture socially, and maybe the sunset is a better fixture biologically. Noon is just an easy to measure compromise for the above two. Social life and timing mostly revolves around how early you get up. "Its late" kind of means "I am behind schedule to get enough sleep before waking up". Biologically, we are programmed around sunlight. Whilst our mornings aren't really controlled by the biological clock (that is what the alarm is for), the evening really are. Besides, the for many people, the evening is what separates 'civil life' from 'private life'.
- thephyber 9y ago
  This is similar to China, which has 5 timezones wide and they have one standard national timezone. The US is far wider when you consider Alaska, Hawaii and the island territories in the Caribbean and the Pacific. It spans from UTC+10 (Guam) to UTC-10 (Hawaii / Aleutians).
- InclinedPlane 9y ago
  Why? You would still need to create a system to keep track of local time of day. Hey, guess what, we already have such a system, people already use it and are familiar with it, let's keep using it.
  - austincheney 9y ago
    No, you don't need that. Many people think you need it, but only because they have never experienced the alternative. Once you try it you won't want to go back.
- trumpownsyou420 9y ago
  you should probably keep your opinion to yourself.
- seanmcdirmid 9y ago
  Erm, this is china. In Urumqi, the official time is still the same as Beijing but stores open and close much later. However, they still have an unofficial separate time that locals use to coordinate the meaning of noon, morning, and night.
waqf 9y ago
I think we should shift time zones a little every day, so that (in some designated location, say New York or DC) the sun rises at exactly 6am every morning. This eliminates the sudden transition to daylight savings which is the source of most complaints, and it would be trivial to implement with modern electronics.
- connicpu 9y ago
  "trivial"
- grzm 9y ago
  I firmly believe we'd see a lot of problems. Pick nearly any datetime library and see how easy it would be to calculate things like durations between two arbitrary timestamps. Even with those that do handle daylight saving or time zones properly, many applications that do use these libraries don't use these features. Or how often projects update their timezone databases. Handled in an incremental way would be a world of pain, precisely because of our reliance on modern electronics and software, or more precisely, because we rely on time so heavily to coordinate events, and rely on syncing these operations with human activities. I think I may have just literally shuddered. By the way, what you describe is how things worked prior to standardization of time which was driven in part by the expansion of the railroad. There's a brief history on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_zone#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_zone#History
- macNchz 9y ago
  Regardless of the (extreme) technical challenges to implement something like this...a 6am sunrise in NYC would make for sunset at 3:15pm in December. A little early for my taste!
mattferderer 9y ago
As a parent of young children, we dread changing the clocks & curse the evil people who came up with this terrible idea. If Dante's Inferno were to be written today, their would be a 10th Circle for those who came up with daylight savings time. It would involve the sound of screaming children, important appointments & clocks that change at random.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- wavefunction 9y ago
  The people who came up with it were people living in more agrarian times, when your kids wouldn't be screaming, they'd be up watering the chickens and helping you out around the farm before day-break no matter what the hour of the day.
toss1 9y ago
NO! Agree that the transition is hard, but Standard time is much better. Wakening before the sun is not only biologically counterproductive, but the late morning dark would further hinder ability to exercise in the morning for months out of the year. Just Kill DST, stay on standard time and be done with it
- ebiester 9y ago
  Whether standard or DST makes more sense really depends on geography.
  - Asooka 9y ago
    That's why we have timezones?
    - 24gttghh 9y ago
      I think they mean Latitude.
    - snarf21 9y ago
      I think they mean Maine vs Florida not east/west. You may need the daylight "later" in Maine than Florida.
zeveb 9y ago
Why permanent daylight savings time? Why not just permanent real time? Clock noon should be roughly the same as solar noon, all year round. 'Daylight savings' is an impossibility.
- chimeracoder 9y ago
  > Why permanent daylight savings time? Why not just permanent real time? Clock noon should be roughly the same as solar noon, all year round. 'Daylight savings' is an impossibility. Because if my commute involves driving fifty miles east in the morning and fifty miles west in the evening, I don't want to have to adjust my clock by about 5 minutes twice a day. (At the equator, this would be 3 minutes - the further you go from the equator, the greater the difference that fifty miles would represent).
  - zeveb 9y ago
    > Because if my commute involves driving fifty miles east in the morning and fifty miles west in the evening, I don't want to have to adjust my clock by about 5 minutes twice a day. You seem to think that I'm arguing against time zones. I'm not (here, anyway): I'm arguing that the time within a time zone be that of noon at its midpoint, so that no point within the timezone is more than 30 minutes from true noon (yes, some timezone are larger than an hour …), as opposed to those who want permanent DST, or even double DST, where clock noon might be hours from true noon.
    - koenigdavidmj 9y ago
      And life gets interesting if your time zone crosses through anywhere populated. (That's why northwest Indiana is on central time: it basically exists as a bedroom community for Chicago, so it's most sensical to be on Chicago time.)
- Spooky23 9y ago
  The valid argument is usually about safety. Many people, especially children are travelling to go to work or school and sunrise at 7:20, feels a little unsafe for many people. That extra hour in the morning helps.
c517402 9y ago
Arizona doesn't participate in daylight savings time. And, we really don't need to be saving any daylight in Arizona.
- osteele 9y ago
  Most of Arizona doesn’t participate in DST [1]. [1] “Daylight Savings Time explained”, CGP Gray. https://youtu.be/84aWtseb2-4 https://youtu.be/84aWtseb2-4. Skip to the 5 minute mark for Arizona.
  - selectodude 9y ago
    Is Navajo Nation technically in Arizona, though?
    - AlotOfReading 9y ago
      For some purposes yes, for others no. The state has jurisdiction in matters not involving the tribe that take place there and the residents can vote / participate in civil government as Arizonians. However, the nation does have sovereignty in tribal affairs on the reservation and a few outside it.
shmerl 9y ago
Yeah, this whole DST shift is pointless. Just keep it constant but standard, not DST. Also, I'd prefer a switch to 24 hour time notation. AM/PM is cumbersome.
- mintplant 9y ago
  I switched my own "native" time format to 24 hours years ago, in my head and on all my personal devices. Now I'm able to convert between the two formats effortlessly, and doing mental math on times is easier when I don't have to mix in a bunch of modulo-12 operations. (I live in the US.)
  - shmerl 9y ago
    Same thing here. I use 24 hour system anywhere I can. Converting it isn't an effort for me. But I wish everyone around would use it.
    - Koshkin 9y ago
      Well, in English, you can't say "16 o'clock", can you? You can only say "sixteen hundred hours" (which sounds terrible, if you ask me).
      - shmerl 9y ago
        Yeah, sixteen hundred hours sounds awful. Sixteen o-five sounds OK to me though.
      - thaumasiotes 9y ago
        > Well, in English, you can't say "16 o'clock", can you? You can only say "sixteen hundred hours" What's stopping you?
        mitchty 9y ago
        Nothing, get enough people saying it and it will become the thing. I'd vote for sixteen hour or something similar.
tzs 9y ago
If kids are a concern, what about the problem of DST in winter in northern areas meaning kids go to school in the dark? For example I see kids walking to school at around 7:15 AM (6th-8th grade and high school) and around 8:30 AM (K-5th grade). This is at latitude ~47.7° N (same latitude as the city that is part of your name, in fact). Here is what various DST options would do in terms of kids going to school before sunrise: Elementary: Middle/High: No DST: never Nov 20th - Feb 10th Current DST: never Oct 10th - Mar 16th Permanent DST: Nov 23 - Feb 2nd Oct 10th - Mar 16th
- racer-v 9y ago
  This is just a problem of schools starting too early. You can't fix stupid. Although isn't the idea of "permanent DST" an oxymoron?
  - tzs 9y ago
    I agree that middle/high school is arguably starting too early (especially since research has shown, I believe, that teens really should be sleeping later). In the case of elementary school, though, you are dealing with kids young enough that they probably cannot reliably be counted on the get ready and leave for school on their own, and so you need to fit school times in with their parent's work schedule.
    - racer-v 9y ago
      As long as we're trying to fix all the world's problems, I'd submit that the ideal domestic partnership has one parent able to focus full-time on childcare and home life. It doesn't have to be the same parent all the time, but I find the expectation of dual incomes to be one of the great rip-offs of modern life.
      - positivecomment 9y ago
        Somewhere along the way to 10s, we lost the work flexibility. "I took care of my kids for 5 years" gets your CV discarded in an instant. So both parents, not always because they need the money, but very frequently because they're afraid to lose their career, choose to keep working.
DerekL 9y ago
What is the point of making it permanent? If you want to increase the daylight after the workday, then just make working times one hour earlier, instead of changing the clock.
Asooka 9y ago
As a former schoolchild, please no, PLEASE NO. Waking up early is already hard, having to wake up an hour earlier than I would otherwise have to for the entire year would be hell. Just use normal non-DST time. Please.
- Asooka 9y ago
  Can the people downvoting please explain?
mnw21cam 9y ago
That'd be "Daylight saving time", not "Daylight savings time". Not sure why so many people get this wrong.
- luckroy 9y ago
  I'm with you, but we're fighting the losing fight. As an aside, what a brilliant marketing name. Daylight is in peril and we all adjust our clocks to save it from the treacherous grasp of morning. We're heroes!

Animats 9y ago

Unless all the states east of New York switch, this is a non-starter.

bryanlarsen 9y ago
FTA: The report said Massachusetts should not act alone, or else it could disrupt "commerce, trade, interstate transportation and broadcasting" across the region. A majority of other states in New England would have to jump on the time-zone train, too.
wickberg 9y ago
It's even more subtle than that - about half of Connecticut is heavily involved with business in NYC, and would probably be quite unwilling to jump an hour over. To a lesser extent, south-western Vermont is economically linked to the Albany metro area, and would also likely vote against a shift. Were you to poll on support for moving New England over to Atlantic time, I'd bet you'd wind up with a map closely matching that of local support for the Boston Red Sox vs New York Yankees: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/04/23/upshot/24-upshot-baseball.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/04/23/upshot/24-ups...

skykooler 9y ago

The sun sets around 4 in the winter even in Philadelphia. This would imply that basically all of New England should move to Atlantic Time.

phyzome 9y ago
But only if you think there should be no particular correspondence between solar time and clock time. (I'm not going to have that argument at this moment, though.) Eastern Standard Time in Massachusetts is a good match: - Boston: https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/boston https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/boston - Lenox, on the opposite side: https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/@4941853 https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/@4941853
asveikau 9y ago
Philadelphia is not in New England. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_England https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_England Also the article says Massachusetts wouldn't do it without the rest of New England also joining: > A majority of other states in New England would have to jump on the time-zone train, too. Edit: Must have been downvoted by west coasters who don't know what new england is ...
- kw71 9y ago
  If New England is North or East of Philadelphia, then shouldn't the situation for New England be worse, iow, sunset earlier?
  - asveikau 9y ago
    It's both north and east. And I think that was the point of the article, that New England has it particularly bad for this. Most people think that east coast cities are on a north-south axis, but as you go up I-95 (the major highway connecting these cities) you are actually traveling northeast. It was a head trip for me being from DC when I realized I could drive straight north for 5 hours and end up in Rochester, NY, or drive "north" on 95 for 5 hours and end up in New York City, but the distance between those two points was also itself a 5-6 hour drive.

starlig-ht 9y ago

I would rather see the planet stop using time-zones altogether. Let's all go UTC, adjust our clocks and schedules once and be done with it. It doesn't matter what number my clock says at noon/sunrise/sunset. If it is about working-hours coinciding with daylight, businesses can adjust their working hours as needed (and post them on their site without you having to convert to local time to know when you can call) edit: the link below just changed my mind. dammit, I hate being wrong.

nkrisc 9y ago
And then whenever you travel you'll have to recalibrate your time-related intuition about everything. No thanks.
- mjevans 9y ago
  They call this jet lag, and everyone has to do it already.
  - beal 9y ago
    Not the same thing.
  - nkrisc 9y ago
    No, that's not the case. When I'm in New York, most stores open at 9 in the morning. When I'm in London, most stores open at 9 in the morning. If we all used UTC around the world, I'd have to calculate the difference for all the times that I'm used to. In London the stores open at 9 in the morning, but if I travel East a bit into Europe they open at 12, and dinner is at 11. It has nothing to do with jet lag. Currently you only have to do any time calculation is you're working across time zones, once you're there and dealing with things in that time zone there's no real difference from what you're used to.
idbehold 9y ago
https://qntm.org/abolish https://qntm.org/abolish

Goronmon 9y ago

Maine is tentatively on-board: http://www.pressherald.com/2017/04/27/maine-may-switch-to-atlantic-time-zone-if-new-hampshire-and-massachusetts-do/ http://www.pressherald.com/2017/04/27/maine-may-switch-to-at... New Hampshire looks to be against it so far: http://www.concordmonitor.com/time-zone-change-atlantic-9808198 http://www.concordmonitor.com/time-zone-change-atlantic-9808...

KGIII 9y ago
Yeah, it really screws with us up here. Once you get up above the meridian, days get pretty short in the winter. Moving those hours around helps exactly none. No farmer has their life improved. It's not saving energy. It's just a dumb setting on the clock.
- megaman22 9y ago
  It's super depressing in December and January when you get up to go to work in the dark, and by the time you get out at 5, it is pitch dark again. I do wish we'd fallen back earlier, like we used to. I'd much rather have that extra hour of daylight in the morning when I could maybe use it, rather than on my commute home.
  - KGIII 9y ago
    Yeah, you know where I live, as I recall? You should come visit. ;-) Anyhow, we'd have to throw the clock off a full two hours to get any benefit. It's just getting light at 0700 and already getting dark at 1600 - during the shortest days. Daybreak was at about 0700 today, maybe later. It is raining. I couldn't tell and I didn't look online,
  - walterkobayashi 9y ago
    I agree, I used to start for work at 6:30 AM and by 4, it'd be pitch dark again. Super Depressing.
- saalweachter 9y ago
  Time zones aren't for farmers; they're for employees who have employers who won't (or can't) let their employees set hours that give them free time in the daylight. There's also opposing needs: working folk like afternoon sun so they have daylight when they get off work, parents with school children like morning sun, so it is light when their children are waiting for the bus, and in the winter there's not enough daylight to satisfy both groups of people.

chrisabrams 9y ago

I really hope NY get on board as well. Being in Manhattan during the winter, the sun is gone many days by 4pm, sometimes earlier depending which part of the city you are in (which skyscraper is blocking the last bit of sunlight). As a native Texan it's tough to adjust to :O [edit] my grammar

grzm 9y ago
Thinking a little bit more about this, I'm wondering how much this would really help. Yes, there would be more daylight in the evening, but given the latitude, how much longer in the morning would it be dark? I found this handy tool to get a feel for it: https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/new-york https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/new-york And here's Boston: https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/boston https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/boston
- eli_gottlieb 9y ago
  >https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/boston https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/boston Well that explains why I feel like winter nights are somehow worse and darker than summer ones. In summer, it's mostly not night at all: the twilight periods eat half the clock-nighttime. In winter, twilight gets cut in half and combines with the losses of daylight to extend nighttime.
deathanatos 9y ago
> the sun is gone many days by 4pm Nowhere in Manhattan is that true (though perhaps I'll grant that a building might occlude the sun, but you're exaggerating). Conservatively, if we pick Albany, NY as the "northernmost extent of Manhattan", the earliest sunset is ~4:21pm.

erickhill 9y ago

A bit off topic, but I was equally intrigued by the fact that the article was on aol.com. Made me do a brief double-take.

_raoulcousins 9y ago

Over here in Seattle sunset is at 4:19 in winter. Maybe we need to switch to some other time zone.

Skunkleton 9y ago
Maybe you could put the whole city on a barge and migrate south for the winter?
mikestew 9y ago
What difference would that make? You still have to deal with almost sixteen hours of darkness in December. Shifting clocks around isn't going to change that physical reality.
- Skunkleton 9y ago
  I would like my sunset to be around 8:30 pm every day. That way I always have daylight after work. That's just my preference, I know it wouldn't work for everyone.
mkempe 9y ago
Two things to say: a) come spend winter in Sweden... in Lapland the sun does not set at all in June and there is darkness around the clock in January; Stockholm is not that far up North, so we get a few hours of daylight in mid-December; and b) if lack of daylight in the winter is such an issue, maybe move to Southern California, or somewhere even closer to the equator. Three things, actually :-) c) consider spending your winter months in the Southern Hemisphere. Some animals migrate vast distances twice a year.
- rconti 9y ago
  I was actually surprised during a visit to Stockholm (granted, in May) that it was not light that much later than my native Seattle in the summer. I guess there's probably a reason major cities in Scandinavia are not all that far north in their respective countries :) I've been above the arctic circle in the summer, but thankfully never in the winter.

GnarfGnarf 9y ago

Gee, should Nova Scotia move into another time zone?

pmurT 9y ago

I wish we'd get rid of timezones all together - is there really much point aside from tradition?

dredmorbius 9y ago
Yes, there is, and it ties into a whole mess of interrelated standardisation, information, and control capabilities. Beninger's book is a fascinating exploratiion of this. http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674169869 http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674169869

flatfilefan 9y ago

This Russian Collusion hysteria is going too far. Yes, Russia has experimented with daylight savings under Medvedev, but Massachusetts shouldn’t overreact and leave the Eastern Time Zone altogether!

tzs 9y ago

One of the main purported benefits of DST is that it in effect moves some of the extra sunlight from the longer days of summer from the morning to the evening, where most of us are in a better position to use it. That's because without DST as the day lengthens the extra daylight is split evenly between morning and evening. But WHY does it split evenly? It's because we historically use noon as our reference. We think of noon on day N+1 as being exactly one day after noon on day N. Noon is a sensible reference, fairly easy to determine with ancient technology. Suppose that instead we had historically used sunrise as our reference. By definition, then, sunrise would be 8 AM every day. As the days lengthened in the summer, all of the extra daylight would then have shown up in the evening automatically. It's interesting to ponder whether or not such a reference could have worked. I think that in the days before clocks, when the sundial was the most sophisticated timepiece, this could have worked quite well. It would also fit in well with work schedules, meaning people who needed to wait for light to work would be going to work at about the same time every day. It would also fit in with animal sleep schedules. With clocks, though, a noon reference is easier. A sunrise reference requires a much more sophisticated clock, or it requires frequent manual adjustment. Nowadays, though, clocks easily have the sophistication to handle that. We probably could actually reasonably handle using sunrise as our reference, and have our clocks adjust daily to keep that so. It would mean that a given clock time on day N+1 is no longer exactly 24 hours later than that same clock time on day N, but I don't think that would matter for ordinary life. I'd be willing to put up with that if it means I get the benefits of DST (more evening light in summer) without the two big discontinuities a year. Edit: to be clear, I am assuming that if we did a sunrise-based system instead of a noon-based system we would still do time zones. 8 AM would be simultaneous everywhere in the zone. [1] In this comment "day" refers to sunrise to sunset.

Retric 9y ago
Calibrating a sundial to noon is a one time effort. Calibrating a sun dial to dawn requires an update every single day. Further, dawn depends on local geographic conditions making it an ambiguous term.
- tzs 9y ago
  I'd expect that a sunrise-based system would use the calculated time that sunrise would occur for an observer at the middle of the time zone on perfectly spherical planet. Well, if we did one today, anyway. If it had done it in ancient times it would probably be based on sunrise in the capital city as observed each day by some designated religious office such as a high priest at the main temple of the dominant religion.

minikites 9y ago

This is an unpopular opinion but I'm a big fan of DST for most of the reasons enumerated in this article: http://www.leancrew.com/all-this/2013/03/why-i-like-dst/ http://www.leancrew.com/all-this/2013/03/why-i-like-dst/ >If we stayed on Standard Time throughout the year, sunrise here in the Chicago area would be between 4:15 and 4:30 am from the middle of May through the middle of July. And if you check the times for civil twilight, which is when it’s bright enough to see without artificial light, you’ll find that that starts half an hour earlier. This is insane and a complete waste of sunlight. >If, by the way, you think the solution is to stay on DST throughout the year, I can only tell you that we tried that back in the 70s and it didn’t turn out well. Sunrise here in Chicago was after 8:00 am, which put school children out on the street at bus stops before dawn in the dead of winter.

rconti 9y ago

The major problem here is that far too much effort was put into accommodating everyone by including them in the eastern time zone. Last time I looked, I think something like 48% of the US population lives in it, and it's just unnecessarily large. Obviously there are benefits, but it creates a ton of perverse consequences too. Realistically, the eastern time zone should probably stop between OH/PA, west of West Virgina, east of TN, etc. But of course we'd then need 5 time zones to cover the continential US to keep other time zones from becoming far too large.

graywh 9y ago
4 time zones is enough to cover the 48 states unless you want half-hour zones or radically different sunrise times on one coast or the other. Just need to reduce the sizes of Eastern and Central to better match the longitude lines.

_cerv 9y ago

I get the strange feeling that I might be the only happy person who loves early sunsets.

minademian 9y ago

Mexit!

werty1 9y ago

Seriously only clicked because aol.com. That's a thing I've not seen in close to 20 years.

manoj_venkat92 9y ago

Laughter from India. We don't have this DST stuff but I have to deal with this at work as the clients are American. Damn, this is some serious mess.

floitsch 9y ago

Just wrote a post a week ago on the subject of date/time issues programmers have to be aware of: https://medium.com/@florian_32814/date-time-526a4f86badb https://medium.com/@florian_32814/date-time-526a4f86badb It's almost sad that Massachusetts switching wouldn't even make it into that document... (too normal)

inanutshellus 9y ago

Everyone whines about DST, but I love the DST "timezone" in summer. I leave work in the sun. It feels like I still have time to play and have fun after work. It's great.

ranit 9y ago
People don't whine about DST, people hate the one hour change every year.
- dboreham 9y ago
  Especially people who debug calendar software. Just sayin..
- inanutshellus 9y ago
  I mean... you can't have DST if you don't change. DST is the fake time. If you get rid of it, you're in normal time. Sooo... The options are A) Complain about 1-hour change and about how it was made for farmers 100 yrs ago B) Complain how you miss DST because the summer hours were so wonderful and man can't we just stay in DST--you know, that fake time we just made up--all the time? I opt for the first option--the constant whining from others one--because the alternative would be constant whining from me. :D