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Permanent Daylight Saving Time? Florida Says Yes, but It’s Not So Simple
- taeric 9y agoI'm torn on this. Yes, having a shift of a full hour in a week is obnoxious. However, the natural sun up and sun down time changes so dramatically in its own, that it is hard to really complain about it. If anything, I could see society moving to a time more based on when the sun comes up. Yes, there are difficulties scheduling something with someone across distance on the earth. But... I don't see a practical solution to that.
- RhodesianHunter 9y agoWhy not just have the hour shift slowly a few seconds per day over the course of the year?
- cvaidya1986 9y agoKeep the time the same. Just change company work hours.
- Sargos 9y agoYou just gave systems programmers panic attack with those words.
- hypervis0r 9y agoCan confirm, just got a slight arrhythmia just by reading that
- chillingeffect 9y agothe interesting thing is daylight savings' shifts do cause heart attacks! https://duckduckgo.com/?q=heart+attacks+daylight+savings&t=ffsb&ia=news https://duckduckgo.com/?q=heart+attacks+daylight+savings&t=f...
- shaki-dora 9y agoYou're in luck! Variable-time seconds are among the best cures for heart arrhythmias.
- waqf 9y agoNot as big a problem as it sounds. "System time" used for scientific and engineering purposes should continue to use UTC and should ignore changes to civil time statutes. It becomes more complicated to translate between system time and civil time, but there are relatively few applications for which you really need to be able to do that conversion — and libraries that handle those cases are complicated already.
- bena 9y agoIt's a huge problem. Your "system time" proposal is already the way things are done. But people like to know when they did something based on their own clock. Already that one hour shift causes goddamn headaches in showing the proper time to the user for past events. Now instead of just figuring out if we're across one threshold or another and adjusting another hour, we have to figure out what time of what day it was and figure out what the offset was at that time? No. Just get rid of DST.
- squiggleblaz 9y agoNonsense. The headaches aren't caused by daylight savings. They're caused by incompetently programmed libraries and systems. If I travel to Indonesia for a week, I want my reminders that are set to occur at 4pm to occur at 4pm. But Google decides that they should happen at 4pm - time zone offset in my home location + time zone offset in my current location. It's insanity. Also, it's insanity that there aren't standard libraries to let me say "4pm". And that programmers think timestamps solve all problems. And that you can use a timestamp to represent a day. But these are all issues that need to be fixed even if we get rid of daylight savings. Deciding there are gradual drifts to standard time on a daily or weekly basis will cause some hassle. But it will not create a new class of problem that doesn't already exist and which doesn't already need to be fixed. And time is absolutely the kind of problem that needs to be solved with a few standard libraries, rather than every two bit programmer thinking "i can add two hours to this number, it's a piece of cake".
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- mkempe 9y agoWe now have the technology to accurately, and simply, keep solar time wherever we are, instead of using and manipulating archaic time zones. Edit: The original, 19th-century impetus for time zones (vs solar time) was to reliably print and manage train schedules across longer East-West railroads. With powerful computers and satellite positioning cheaply available to everybody, we could overcome this now-obsolete hack.
- gpvos 9y agoYes, let's just go back to solar time per city.
- matte_black 9y agoUTC everywhere, done.
- birdmanjeremy 9y agoThis is such a terrible idea.
- space_fountain 9y agoWhy? Vary opening hours now the time. Makes sense to me.
- bunderbunder 9y agoYou'd end up with the official calendar day either flipping in the middle of the day, or at a different time in every locale.
- birdmanjeremy 9y agoThis is a really good, simple, reason I had not even thought of. Thanks!
- squiggleblaz 9y agoAn alternative is just to count seconds. Be as precise as you need (m? k? M?). A little like unix timestamps, except without the rule that says "there's 86400 of them in a day no matter how many seconds there were in that day". And then let "Sunday", "Monday" etc become simply approximate terms. And I never have any idea what day of the month it is so I don't care. (Birthdays and public holidays are set based some recurring feature of the count.) A refinement of this uses a time period that is approximately 100,000th of a day so then people can easily notice the day. In practice we might use hectokiloperiods instead of periods. Someone will invite a less woeful name. Nothing about telling time will be particular familiar. Doesn't mean it won't work. But I suspect it'll be awful. I'm fine with daylight savings and all the rest of it. Except days of months. Can't we just say "Monday, third week of June"? or "Wednesday, 39th week"?
- bahmboo 9y agoThe dramatic shift is in northern locales but not so much in southern ones
- cheald 9y agoArizona doesn't observe DST and hasn't since 1968. It works great, and the rest of the country should follow suit, IMO. We're no longer a nation of farmers whose work depends on daylight.
- bena 9y agoIt was never about the farmers. It was always about saving fuel during wartime. Farmers dislike DST.
- dvtv75 9y agoIf I ever get a time machine and meet George Hudson, I will punch him squarely in the face. He wanted some time after work to look at insects, and because of that we have DST. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Hudson_(entomologist) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Hudson_(entomologist)
- squiggleblaz 9y agoThat's unreasonable. Lots of people advocate for bad ideas. But George Hudson was never in any politically powerful position. It took others to introduce daylight savings. Notwithstanding, I am pleased we have daylight savings. It makes me happy and seems like an appropriate and proportionate response to the variation in length of the day.
- blang 9y agoFrom what I understand farmers hate DST more than anyone. They tend to wake up at dawn and shifting the time an hour gives them an hour less time until the rest of the area wakes.
- gowld 9y agoWhy do farmers care when other people wake up?
- deleted 9y ago
- peteey 9y agoFlorida is trying to act early. Ending daylight saving time is becoming popular throughout the US. Florida's tourism market would reap more gains if we fixed the clocks with an extra hour of sunlight in the evenings.
- Sargos 9y agoI am fully in favor of this. I enjoy having more sunlight after work when I can actually go out and enjoy it.
- Breefield 9y agoThis.
- politician 9y agoIt does seem like a theft from the working population to replace daylight with fluorescents.
- nerpderp83 9y agoTake away water and replace it with diet soda. Sounds like a prison, we should charge for this.
- benrbray 9y agoYes! I've always thought that we have it backwards. Why do we give ourselves more daylight in the summer when the days are naturally longer? If anything we should move them forward in the winter when we actually need it. That or eliminate it altogether, keeping "daylight-time" the default.
- svantana 9y agoThe amount of daylight is not changed by setting clocks. The point is to shift daylight hours away from "sleeping time", but still not having to get up when it's dark. The ideal daylight savings would be to synchronize clocks with sunrise, so that sunrise always occurs when it's time to get up (7 AM or whatever). Here in Sweden, where the length of the day varies from 6 to 18 hours, DST is really useful.
- kgwgk 9y agoOf course the other option is to get up with the sunrise. Nobody forces you to sleep until 7AM or whatever.
- bhauer 9y agoYes! Bravo to Florida. I don't care what timezone California wants to be in—PST or MST—as long as we stop the nonsense of changing between two timezones every year. This coming Sunday is another DST change, and with it will come countless small nuisances, immeasurable drowsiness and lost productivity, and a non-trivial number of injuries or worse. Just pick a timezone and stick with it!
- birdmanjeremy 9y agoPDT FOREVER!
- trimbo 9y agoAs an early riser, PST forever! I vote we do a half hour compromise.
- Xeoncross 9y ago> I vote we do a half hour compromise. Please no, just stop
- tlrobinson 9y agoFun fact, Nepal's timezone is UTC+5:45.
- fold 9y agoI wouldn't mind everyone moving to UTC. Sure, only people in Greenwich would be able to eat lunch at 12 noon. But at least it would simplify my life as a programmer.
- irrational 9y agoYou might want to move to China. Even though the country "should" have 5+ timezones, it only has 1 (Beijing Standard Time).
- rwmj 9y agoOr any country, since timezones only have a 1 hour granularity. If you're in Edinburgh (same longitude as Plymouth) this is quite noticable. Be interesting to see the consequences of hyper-local timezones where the sun is always over your head at 12 noon. With modern computing it should be possible to have your watch adjust as you drive east-west ...
- fergbrain 9y agoTime zones can have any granularity desired. Most are 1 hour, several are 30 minutes (including in India and Australia), and a few are 45 minutes (in New Zealand, for example). There’s no rule though about granularity though.
- mkempe 9y agoBig props to ending the madness of skipping 1h back and forth each year. However, what's wrong with tracking solar noon, so it's near 1200 instead of being near 1300? (if you argue you want more time with daylight after work, why not just set your work hours as 8-16, or even 7-15, instead of manipulating all other people's clocks).
- benrbray 9y agoMost people don't choose their working hours.
- TomatoTomato 9y agoGovernments don't mandate working hours either.
- mkempe 9y agoDo you think they could and/or should do so? what's stopping them from making that kind of choice where the hours of daylight after work are vitally important to them?
- squiggleblaz 9y agoWell anyone for whom daylight hours after work is vitally important is either dead or they have made that kind of choice. As for the rest of us, for whom sunlight after work is a nice-to-have, Generally speaking, we are employees of companies who set their work hours based on who-knows-what and not based on my desire for entertainment. If I like watching daytime tv, they don't say "and you can have a two hour lunch break". The people who set clock time are subject to my vote. The pepole who set working hours are not. It would definitely better if employees had more power than they do now but I think the solution of daylight savings is adequate and I wouldn't want to waste my bargaining power on something when we already have a solution that works well.
- hosh 9y agoI remember asking my ninth grade high school teacher that. I had just read a book, one of Rick Cook's wizardry books. A programmer fell into an alternate, fantasy magic-capable world, and time was tracked by the actual position of the sun. I thought it was a great idea and asked my teacher about it. My science teacher immediately came back with objections that I didn't understand until a few years later. If you were investigating science, lots of things would be problematic. Since then, I noticed some interesting things. Lots of pre-modern practices and rituals tracked solar noon. Allowing it to flex meant that there were greater alignment with the solstices and equinoxes. In a magic-capable fantasy world, tracking solar noon is sensible. I also remember reading things like, how standardized time was a modern invention that created a particular view of the world. And then an article about that debate between Borges and Einstein. We remember Einstein, but not Borges. Borges, in his time, was the pre-eminant philosopher on time. He was influential enough that Einstein did not receive the Nobel Prize for his work on relatively.
- tombert 9y agoMy parents live in Orlando...this is going to really confuse me when I call them from New York, which used to be the same time zone. Oh well, I think this is the right decision in the long run, I hope the rest of the states follow.
- inetknght 9y ago> In parts of Maine, for example, between Thanksgiving and Christmas, the sun sets before 4 p.m. — more than an hour earlier than it does in Detroit, at the other end of the Eastern time zone. Why is the solution "permanent daylight savings"? Why is it not "let's split up the timezones better"?
- CydeWeys 9y agoThis problem is inherent to having timezones that are an hour long. You're stuck with it unless you are willing to add a bunch more timezones, e.g. have 7 going across the country in 30 minute increments. I think that might be worse than aberrant sunrise/sunset times at the edges of the existing hourlong timezones.
- ianai 9y agoWhich is where having one central clock would make sense. But it would have to be something based on like a standard physical quantity instead of morning/noon. I’m thinking like rotational speed of the planet.
- CydeWeys 9y agoThe problem with only having one central clock is that you no longer have relative time. Right now, I can say something like "I woke up at 11am", and you understand what that means, regardless of which timezone I'm in or you're in. It means I woke up late. But now imagine I said "I woke up at 16:00 Z." That's meaningless without the context of what timezone I'm in. That could be early, it could be late, it could be waking up from a nap in the late afternoon. If you force people onto centralized time, then they'll still start using arbitrary (and worse) measures of relative time, like they'll say stuff like "I woke up two hours after sunrise".
- ianai 9y agoFor shift workers, 11 am can be usual or downright way too early. Everything is relative. A central time would force people to clarify just like they really need to anyway.
- nick238 9y agoThis is reason #532 or so why we need gigantic libraries to deal with dates and times. "24 hours in a day", "60 seconds in a minute", lol, no.
- velobro 9y agoMicrosoft Outlook for Mac has yet another DST related bug. This time, all calendar events will start an hour late on the week of the 11th if you a) have the week to start on Sunday and b) use the 7 day a week calendar It's been fun having to communicate this with all my clients. https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/office/en-US/a43a6c67-7d02-4a62-95e5-5ff931f8f7ac/march-11-calendar-bug-outlook-mac?forum=outlook https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/office/en-US/a43...
- nknealk 9y agoI made an account to tell you this was driving me mad and after much google, I landed on your comment. Switching the start of week to Monday fixed the problem and I'm eternally grateful.
- AceJohnny2 9y agoYeah, I was just thinking of the next commit to tzdata would say... Edit: links: https://www.iana.org/time-zones https://www.iana.org/time-zones Repo: https://github.com/eggert/tz/commits/master https://github.com/eggert/tz/commits/master
- theandrewbailey 9y agoIf I'm reading this correctly ("Daylight saving time shall be the year-round standard time of the entire state and all of its political subdivisions"), this is going to be terrible for people living in or near Pensacola. The far end of the panhandle is in Central time, so it's going to be an hour (or two) ahead of everyone else around them in the winter. https://www.timetemperature.com/tzus/current_time_in_florida.shtml https://www.timetemperature.com/tzus/current_time_in_florida...
- Eric_WVGG 9y agoarguably, it's terrible for states surrounding the panhandle who are two hours behind Pensacola
- hamandcheese 9y agoThe phrasing of the bill makes me think it would apply to the the Panhandle as well. I’m not sure if that means bringing the entire state into one time zone or if that means that the Panhandle would just always observe CDT.
- mortdeus 9y agothis is going to be annoying to implement in software.
- notjustanymike 9y agoAs a web developer: screw you Florida!
- BigChiefSmokem 9y agoHello, welcome to the HN footer area. I do have to ask though what is it that brings you to this opinion, as before moving to California to pursue my big data dreams I too was a Florida web developer, in a former life.
- mindways 9y agoI hope my own state follows suit. Before I became a parent, I found the shift to and from daylight savings time a mild annoyance. By the time I had an infant and a toddler, I was roundly cursing whomever decided that arbitrarily slip-shifting our clocks twice a year was a good idea. Kids' sleep schedules don't adjust instantaneously, and when they're too young for explanations to mean much it means it's a twice-a-year festival of not-enough-sleep.
- simonbarker87 9y agoIt wasn’t arbitrary - the guy who first proposed it was a big lover of the outdoors and thought it was mad that people in the UK missed out on all the summer sun from about 3am onwards, he proposed taking an hour from the morning sun and putting it at the end of the day so that people could enjoy some of that sun at the end of their working day (since this was in the early 1900s many men worked 12 hours in a mine shaft or in a factory so would have made a big impact) - in the end, what swung it was energy savings for running lamps during the world war 1 coal shortages. He never got to see it implemented, Germany trialled it first but since we were at war he didn’t know about that at the time.
- zanny 9y agoChanging the clocks doesn't have a good explanation at any age. You don't "gain" more hours of daylight, you don't warp reality doing it. You just want to keep getting up as "insert arbitrary time you get up" year round so rather than adjust your alarm clock when the sun starts rising earlier or later in the day you... change your alarm clock anyway? Except instead of setting the alarm back an hour you set the clock back an hour.
- jdmichal 9y agoI just took a cruise. We had a single day where our clocks were an hour behind. Also, we were on the late (2000) dinner. You can imagine the fun of sitting down at dinner with our 2-year-old when his internal clock was at 2100.
- swyx 9y agocommenters seem to be missing the sentence about "Florida doesn’t have the authority to adopt daylight saving time year-round." this is just state politicians being state politicians. Nothing to see here. Lets just say Florida politicians probably have more important things to do and aren't doing them, and leave it at that.
- dragonwriter 9y agoThe law is (as is not entirely uncommon in State laws) explicitly conditioned on a change in federal law allowing permanent DST. Of course, since States do have the authority permanently opt-out of DST and which base zone states used is a matter of federal-state consultation, the usual method suggested for a state to go on "permanent DST" is to opt out of DST, but move one zone East (so for Florida, instead of Central/Eastern, use Eastern/Atlantic.)
- FireBeyond 9y agoWitness the Indiana Pi Bill (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Pi_Bill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Pi_Bill), (attempting to )establish mathematical truth by legislation, which implies various incorrect values of pi, such as "3.2".
- wellactually 9y ago> The problem? Florida doesn’t have the authority to adopt daylight saving time year-round. > The federal government controls the nation’s time zones, as well as the start and end dates of daylight saving time. States can choose to exempt themselves from daylight saving time — Arizona and Hawaii do — but nothing in federal law allows them to exempt themselves from standard time.
- hughes 9y agoCould we end up with two time zones applied to the same region depending on the jurisdictional context?
- what10th 9y agowe're all familiar with the article in the constitution that gives the federal government the power to decide for states how to set their clocks, i assume. i guess you can always count on the times to advocate for centralized power
- CydeWeys 9y agoThe Constitution grants the federal government the power to pass laws, and "setting your own time" isn't explicitly enumerated as a right that is reserved to the states.
- krapp 9y agoAny rights not granted to the Federal government by the Constitution are reserved by the states and the people by default.
- CydeWeys 9y agoThe commerce clause seems limitless in what it will allow.
- KMag 9y agoRights not explicitly reserved for the federal government or individuals are reserved for the states.
- champagnepapi 9y agoEVERYONE USE UTC!
- jakelarkin 9y ago"Sunshine Protection Act" oh ffs
- pkaye 9y ago"Even if the governor signs the bill, nothing will happen now. Congress, rived over tariffs and gun control and immigration, would have to act on clocks — or the Transportation Department would have to issue a new regulation, an option the Florida legislation does not mention."
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- ufo 9y agoDoes anyone why they voted to stay in permanent daylight-savings instead of permanent standard time?
- cmurf 9y agoThis makes Florida daylight savings time permanent. It does not end daylight savings time, it ends standard time. Update: Which doesn't actually happen unless Congress also "amends 15 U.S.C. s. 260a to authorize states to observe daylight saving time year-round" which is the wording used in the Florida bill that's passed. Unclear if the governor signs it, this isn't a law yet.
- ethhics 9y agoI don’t get the downright hatred that some have for DST. If we were perpetually on winter time, then at my latitude during the summer the sun would rise at 5 in the morning which is too early for many people. If we were to be perpetually on summer time, then in winter the sun will not rise until after 8, with people starting to work before the sun came up. Is there something wrong with wanting the sun to come up at a semi-standard time of 6–7? Is it just the system we have in place?
- zanny 9y agoThe sun will rise at "5 in the morning" no matter what time your clock says it is. You could always, instead of changing time itself, just set your alarm an hour earlier or later. If your clocks go back an hour but you keep your alarm the same you are still getting up an hour earlier. You just made things way more complicated than they needed to be in the process.
- squiggleblaz 9y agoBut that isn't true if my company tells me "you have to work between this hour and that hour". I can change my alarms till the cows come home but it means nothing. Moreover, the majority can have an effect on what government we have, but we can't have an effect on what business decisions are. Because business leaders are a small subset of the community. If they naturally have an interest in not setting separate working hours summer and winter and employees naturally do have an interest in setting separate working hours summer and winter, the only plausible mechanism available to the employees (who need to work if they want to feed their family and can't afford to gratuitously quit in the hope of finding a job that doesn't exist) is to change the clocks. You're not obliged to follow us. If you don't like daylight savings, you can set your own alarms in the summer and winter differently. It will be no harder for you to do that than it will be for me to do that. If it was as trivial as you make it out to be, you wouldn't even utter a breath in complaint because it would be so easy for you to do it that you just wouldn't notice. But social realities mean that changing the clocks is the best route available to us, and so that's what our societies have settled on.
- jlmcgraw 9y agoSince devices that automatically set their own time are so common now I’ve sometimes wondered why we don’t try moving the time forward/back by some smaller increment each day instead of a full hour twice a year.
- peeters 9y agoAssuming the feds don't change on their end, what's stopping Florida from joining Atlantic Time (and declining D.S.T.)? I looked at 15 USC 261-264 which defines the time zones, but except for some exceptions about Idaho and Texas/Oklahoma, I don't see anything that specifies which zone each state needs to be in (or other geographical specifications)
- paulie_a 9y agoNearly good job Florida. I hate DST for personal and professional reasons, but this is a very "Florida" reaction to dealing with this problem.
- stretchwithme 9y agoWe keep track of time so can coordinate our actions. We be better off using ONE timezone world wide. But it's going to get increasingly easier to deal with time zones. Computers and artificial intelligence will see to that. So I don't see much impetus to get people to change this.
- runarberg 9y agoIceland went to a permanent DST (GMT) back in the 60’s. But health officials are seriously advocating moving Iceland back closer to the solar noon (GMT-0100). Apparently consistently waking up way before sun rise may have negative consequences on the general public.
- AnimalMuppet 9y agoProbably not that relevant to Florida, though, because Florida is at much lower latitude...
- AnimalMuppet 9y agoWhat are they doing with the panhandle? It's on Central Time, not Eastern.
- jcadam 9y ago- The winters on the central Florida coast are beautiful. - I work 9 hours a day, at a job I loathe, in a building with no windows. - Anyway, I'd like to enjoy some sunshine at the end of the day after work (that is, until I rage quit my job and become a full-time beach bum, in which case the extra sunlit hours in the evening will be a boon to my panhandling). So, in any case, I'm all for this.
- marshray 9y agoEliminating changes for DST - good. Introducing a fifth timezone in the lower 48 - bad. Are they trying to open a stock exchange in Miami to open an hour earlier than New York? Just dump this abomination of DST and stay on Standard Time.
- cmcguinness 9y agoTomorrow (March 9), the sun rises at 6:05 am in Pensacola. This bill would have it rise at 8:05 am. A couple of months ago it would have risen, in their new found EDT life, at 8:46am. It's weird, given that the panhandle is solidly republican, that the GOP dominated Florida legislature wants give those folks a ~9am sunrise. They are probably very lucky it's not likely to happen.
- lamontcg 9y agoThis is great in principle, but doing it state-by-state in drips is going to cause more problems than it solves, particularly if different states decide on DST vs Standard. The federal government needs to abolish one or the other across the board.
- MR4D 9y agoHere’s hoping Texas will follow. Governor Abbott, are you listening?
- ggg9990 9y agoOne thing that DST discussions on HN always omit is that not everyone works as a software engineer with a reasonably flexible culture and a 10AM start culture. People who work at coffee shops, retail stores, foodservice prep, etc. often need to be working by 5 or 6AM, they’re just not as politically powerful as the wealthy who have schedule flexibility. They often have 2+ hour commutes on public transportation, and permanent DST means they’ll be working an extra hour in the dark (they already start work in darkness) and will be in bed when it’s still light out.