17 ms·
I seriously considered taking time off a few years ago to lead a multi-state referendum to get the whole Pacific time zone to join Arizona in opting out of time
by bsimpson 8y ago
I seriously considered taking time off a few years ago to lead a multi-state referendum to get the whole Pacific time zone to join Arizona in opting out of time changes. While researching it, I learned that you can legally either switch to PDT in the summer or remain on PST year-round, but the federal government doesn't allow a state to permanently be in PDT.
So, if the western states opted out of daylight savings time changes, they'd be an hour behind Arizona year-round, which would mean earlier sunsets year-round too. I gave up when I realized the choices were either lobby the federal government to change the regulation or change the entire culture of the western US to start and end its business day earlier.
- JoblessWonder 8y agoCalifornia is actually voting on it this fall. Although like you mentioned it is dependent on the federal gov allowing it: https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_7,_Permanent_Daylight_Saving_Time_Measure_(2018) https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_7,_Permanent_...
- SCAQTony 8y agoPeople here in Southern California exercise and prefer extra sunshine. Farmers here are against the repeal as well. Even popular mechanic endorses DST as a good thing: https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/a18011/in-defense-of-daylight-saving-time/ https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/a18011/...
- btilly 8y agoDo you have a source for farmers liking it? Every reference that I have seen agrees with https://agamerica.com/myth-vs-fact-daylight-saving-time-farming/ https://agamerica.com/myth-vs-fact-daylight-saving-time-farm... that farmers don't like DST. In fact the original reason to introduce it was to save energy, and it doesn't do that either. I know that I will vote for the repeal.
- SCAQTony 8y agoI concede that I cannot fine a solid study regarding farmers opposing, only anecdotal. I am curios and if I may ask, do you engage in any outdoor activities? I do and the people I exercise with do too. But I did find that crime rates drop: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brookings-now/2015/10/29/fighting-crime-with-daylight-saving-time/ https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brookings-now/2015/10/29/figh... I will not be voting for the repeal.
- btilly 8y agoIf you read your article, being on DST permanently should be even better than the current switching. The California bill is for permanently being on DST. Which is equivalent to the present for most of the year, in my opinion is better in the winter, and avoids the disruption twice a year. And to answer your question, I do engage in outdoor activities. Mostly hiking and the beach. My preference for hiking is for later in the day because I want to sleep in, and wait for the heat to break.
- jrahmy 8y agoI think you might be confused. The repeal will switch us to DST year-round, which seems to be what you'd prefer.
- peterarmstrong 8y agoI grew up in Saskatchewan, which is the most farmer-focused province in Canada, and is probably more farmer-focused than almost all US states. Saskatchewan has never had DST.
- astrodust 8y ago"Farmers, contrary to the strange and completely false belief that DST was created for them, actually despise it: Their schedules are entirely run by sunlight rather than the clock..." Seriously, arguments for DST are absolutely ridiculous. In the summer when the days are longest it kicks in, which is pointless. In the winter when days are shorter it's not active. Throw DST into the trash where it belongs.
- jstanley 8y agoYou must agree that the timezone you choose has no effect whatsoever on the amount of sunshine there is in a day. If you want to be outside in the sunshine, you can go outside while it's sunny, whatever time of day that happens to be.
- rifung 8y agoYes but many if not most people work at certain hours and don't have the flexibility to change those hours. So people can't necessarily just go outside when it's sunny.
- phaedryx 8y agoCows can't tell time. Corn can't tell time. I grew up in a farming community. I never understand the "farmers" argument.
- snickerbockers 8y agoWhy is permanent DST being considered instead of an absolute abolition of DST?
- arijun 8y agoNo DST means that solar noon is always at 12:00. While useful for figuring out what time it is without a watch that's a less common occurrence nowadays. DST, on the other hand, pushes daytime later, so if you wake up at say 8 (after sunrise for most of the year) and go to sleep at midnight (after sunset), you see more daylight.
- Natanael_L 8y agoJust fix your schedule... Edit: downvoted for asking people to go up at another clock time in order to match the daylight, instead of going up at the same clock time and changing the clock to follow daylight. Really? What's so important about the number on the clock? Why not just be consistent with daylight, and let the clocks be normal?
- surye 8y ago> What's so important about the number on the clock? Because jobs, business hours, travel schedules?
- Natanael_L 8y agoYes, those places can fix their schedules to follow the daylight. Problem solved. Now you don't need to have permanent DST anymore. Why again does people want clock time not to match solar time? It's far more sane to change the numbers on the schedule than to change the clock.
- anyfoo 8y agoIf DST was abolished instead of made permanent, what is your plan to make everyone (including businesses, events, transport time tables...) move their hours by one hour earlier? Making DST permanent "just" requires a singular change of legislation, and basically never switching the clocks back to "normal" time. As has already been stated twice in a sibling discussion here, "changing an entire culture is hard", but I'm honestly interested in hearing your approach.
- sandworm101 8y agoYou think that's bad? Canada is forced to follow the US. Whenever the US moves the dates/times we just mirror them. We want to get rid of the entire thing, but a north/south split would be a huge disruption to air traffic, at least for the passengers. In the real north, the part with very short/long days/nights, an hour one way or the other really makes no difference.
- unreal37 8y ago"Forced" is a strong word. We do it because it makes things easier for business and commerce to follow the U.S.
- koheripbal 8y agoActually the impact on nations higher in latitude makes the time change more compelling. The biggest issue is traffic accidents as a result of commuting directly into the rising or setting sun. It's especially acute if there are children crossing streets to get to school at the same time. It doesn't take many dead kids to make headlines. If I remember correctly, Chile abolished DST, and then after they have a ton of traffic fatalities, they added it back two years later. It's not as clear cut as people make it out to be.
- krupan 8y agoI don't buy this. Sunset/sunrise times change year round. If you shift the time by one hour you are still going to have a few weeks where the sun is in your eyes in the morning or evening, it'll just shift when that happens by some number of days
- jstanley 8y agoI found that the change in timezone actually caused me to be commuting into the sun twice as often. I'd go through a period of commuting into the sun, and then the sun would start rising later, and then the timezone changed and I'd be commuting into the sun again.
- jrace 8y ago
- marcosdumay 8y agoCan't you change your time-zone while opting out of PDT?
- kibwen 8y ago"Abolishing" DST means that there's no longer any PDT, just PST, MST, CST, EST... But abolishing DST while desiring to move to "summer time" just means, in practice, shifting the state from PST to MST.
- jsjohnst 8y ago> shifting the state from PST to MST I’m not a lawyer, but from my reading of the respective regulations and the little case law that exists, I believe California has the legal authority to elect to move to Mountain time.
- Osiris 8y agoThis is what Arizona did. They just went to MST. If California likes PDT, then MST is the exact same thing.
- grogenaut 8y agoWouldn't it be PT then? Also why not just move to one zone west. POE Pacific ocean east time.
- khuey 8y agoThe states alone cannot, because the time zones are set by Federal regulation. See https://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/text-idx?SID=6a1a124065df269aff9faa2340478852&node=pt49.1.71&rgn=div5#se49.1.71_19 https://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/text-idx?SID=6a1a124065df269aff....
- astrodust 8y agoTell that to Indiana. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Indiana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Indiana
- xahrepap 8y ago> but the federal government doesn't allow a state to permanently be in PDT. I mean this sincerely: I don't understand how the federal government gets away with stuff like this. I don't see where DST is in the constitution. And according to the 10th Amendment[0], that means that decision belongs to the States or the People, right? So the federal government, I suppose, could make the law, but the states should have the ability to say no to anything the Feds say without an Amendment being passed. What am I missing here? 0: https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/tenth_amendment https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/tenth_amendment
- oh_sigh 8y agoProbably some interstate commerce clause justification.
- jon_richards 8y agoTime zones were invented in order to standardize railroad time schedules, so that's probably exactly what it is.
- irrational 8y ago200 years of arguing about state versus federal power/rights/law?
- ghaff 8y agoNor do I. But I also have trouble believing that, were California (or any other state) to change timezones, abolish DST, or whatever combination thereof, that the federal government would have any power whatsoever to do anything about it.
- oconnor663 8y agoIt's very possible that if a state decided to do this, and the feds tried to stop them, the state would win in court. But court is expensive, and it adds to a long list of "reasons why this might be more trouble than it's worth".
- jldugger 8y ago
- cameldrv 8y agoExactly. Changing an entire culture is hard, so you just change the clock. People naturally wake up at some delta from sunrise, so it's inconvenient that we have set times to do things that aren't set based on time since sunrise. Of course the sun rises at different times everywhere, so it wouldn't be very convenient to say that we were going to have a conference call at sunrise+3 hours, when that's not a consistent time for both of us. Instead we just approximate the correction with a one hour step function every year, and everyone is coordinated on it automatically. If a few programmers have to use more complicated date/time functions, it's a small price to pay for everyone to be able to keep their bodies on a more natural schedule.
- perl4ever 8y ago"a few programmers have to use more complicated date/time functions" This is a denial of the actual problem, which is that time zones get separated from times in practice. It's not a programming problem that can be solved by technicians. Blaming them is like blaming shortcomings of the taxation system on the IRS. As you wrote, "changing an entire culture is hard"
- wpietri 8y agoYeah. I suppose it depends a lot on latitude, but where I grew up, businesses and schools would need summer and winter hours so that activity reasonably matches daylight. Having everybody change at once seems much easier than letting everybody do their own thing. Especially given that computers are handling more and more of the clock-changing workload these days.
- spacehome 8y ago> the federal government doesn't allow a state to permanently be in PDT. I don't recall this part of the enumerated powers of the federal government from when I read the constitution. Has there been a recent amendment?
- dragonwriter 8y ago> I don't recall this part of the enumerated powers of the federal government from when I read the constitution. Has there been a recent amendment? No, it's in the bare unamended text: “The Congress shall have power [...] To coin money, regulate the value thereof, and of foreign coin, and fix the standard of weights and measures” (Art. I, Sec. 8; emphasis added)
- spacehome 8y agoWow. Thanks.
- j16sdiz 8y agoThe business will adapt if you fix the clock.
- escherplex 8y agoIf gung-ho on the subject then why not split the difference and lobby the UN or the powers that be to add half an hour to ST in all time zones and eliminate DST? The only ones who might complain are those in Winter who live north of 40N or south of 40S latitude.
- ummonk 8y agoIs there a federal mandate that forces us to be in pacific time instead of mountain time?
- skummetmaelk 8y agoCould you change to PST for one day in summer and keep PDT the rest of the year?
- dragonwriter 8y agoNo, when Daylight Savings transitions happen is federally regulated; you can opt out or opt in, but not customize.
- homero 8y agoHow does Arizona get away with it?
- metaphor 8y agoI'm on a team collaborating with branches in CA, IN, and NC. Given the majority of us (including the lead site) are on Eastern time, the CA team tends to dread milestone reviews since they have to be prepared and on the ball by 6am; the first few reviews started 5am PDT, but that quickly proved to be too painful for our CA brethren. If Pacific states decided to drop DST without (at least) Eastern states following suit, collaboration would become that much more difficult. I feel like Central and Mountain states have the geographic flexibility to decide either way without significant impact to interstate commerce on the whole. From the same lens, Pacific and Eastern states don't appear to have the same flexibility insofar as the potential for a 4-hour gap if Pacific states drop DST while Eastern states perpetuate the status quo. I'm just selfishly thinking in terms of synchronization, overlap, engagement opportunity, jet lag...as if 3-hour gaps weren't already a chore.
- matwood 8y agoI lived in Mountain time for a few years while still working east coast hours. It was awesome. Starting working around 6 meant I was done locally early. And done early was really done because the east coast was shutting down and going home. Much different than when you start around 5-6am and people give you funny looks when you leave around 2pm, or you get dragged into staying late through the day.
- metaphor 8y agoDefinitely more power to you. Every week, I try to trick my body into waking up at 6am (let alone being at the office at the same time), but my biological clock always finds a way to reject attempts at realignment in short order. On the flip side, being an early bird on an 8-hour schedule is a non-issue with my current employer. In fact, 5:45am-2:15pm was clockwork for a certain graybeard engineer; if you couldn't schedule and conclude your business with him within those hours, you were simply out of luck, and any manager with a clue of who really transforms shit into green leaves in our branch would be seriously hardpressed to upset this balance.
- matwood 8y ago
- philwelch 8y agoI would be in favor of abolishing the Pacific time zone and merging it with Mountain Time to create Western Standard Time. The mountain states can still do DST if they want, but the pacific states can just stay on WST all year round.