Now if only all people, managers, businesses, unions, realized they could set what time they worked to whatever the hell they wanted within reason, moved to somewhere closer to the equator, got up earlier to use the morning instead of the night, did stuff at night…
Either way, we need to do away with the switching lol.
Eh…I think we need to do away with the concept of money, and work, and managers owning the majority of our time.
You think a cat gives a fuck what time Starbucks closes??? Hell no! They just sleep on your bed, or on the floor, or on a table, or on the stairs, or anywhere they want, anytime they want. And they make SURE you are always looking at their butthole.
You think you can just go into starbucks, and present your butthole, to all who look at you, while also sleeping on their counter? I mean, you’re TOTALLY in the way, and making everyones lives more inconvienent…but fuck 'em, ya know?
You can’t do ANY of that! Because for some reason, we’ve all decided that little green paper controls our lives.
Or in the case of Canada, multicolored monopoly money.
With permanent DST the latest sunrise in Detroit would be 0900. That’s fucking absurd. All across the US kids would be waiting for the school bus in the dark, walking to those bus stops in the dark. My personal beef with it is that I, and many of the people that make the world go 'round, start at 0600. We need to see ASAP for safety, if nothing else.
Fuck DST. If people really want it to stay light until 2100 in the summer then so be it but don’t make a lot of the working class labor half their day in the dark.
I say keep the time at either at ST or DST and let the different institutions/businesses decide their hours of operation. I’ll bet you after a year or two, 99% will settle on something and keep it throughout the year.
Maybe instead of focusing on 6 am we just accept that noon makes sense as when the sun is highest in the sky (or close as we can get with timezones) and that the time the sun comes up will change throughout the year.
My personal complaint is that I would have an extra hour of work in the dark, and DST does that to me anyway. My schedule is earlier than office workers and I like it.
Even my days off are early and it’s great. I know the country is going to go permanent DST eventually and I’ll adapt, but it’s still stupid IMO.
With permanent DST the latest sunrise in Detroit would be 0900.
The entire nation doesn’t need to be following year round the schedule that Detroit school kids need from November to January.
The better solution for this little problem is to go ahead and shift the entire country to permanent DST, and move Detroit from the Eastern time zone to the Central time zone. Latest sunrise in Detroit is now 8AM. Your complaint is resolved, without either of us being forced to switch our clocks twice a year.
No. Fuck them. If I’m get a Spring Forward I’m owed a goddamned Fall Back. I spend half a year with an hour’s deficit so people going home to watch Netflix after work can pretend they give a damn about an extra hour of sunlight.
Give me Standard Time or pay to move my ass to the East a couple hundred miles to fix it.
Holding that opinion, I am reasonably sure you do not live on the eastern edge of your time zone. Being that militant about it, I reasonably believe you live all the way on the western edge.
That being the case, there’s an easier solution. Just redraw the timezone boundaries so your state is just west of the boundary instead of just east, which leaves you on “standard time” in your current timezone, which is “daylight time” to your west.
If Detroit kept DST permanent, the sun would basically set after 6pm every day.
However. Like you said, no one wants to wait until the 9am for the sun to rise.
Abolishing DST could be beneficial for Detroit. Not as many days where the sun sets after 6. But more days where it rises before 7.
The current system is bad for Detroit. It should either abolish it or keep it permanent.
Detroit night owls would want to keep it, early birds would want to abolish it.
Detroit is like El Paso TX. Where the current system is clearly bad.
Maine is the opposite. The current system is “best” and the birds and owls fight.
I live in Charlotte NC. I’ve always been for DST. Permanent DST means basically 365 days where the sun sets after 6pm. While getting basically the same number of days where the sun rises before 7am. I’m not an early riser, so as long as it’s up by 8/9am most of the time it’s fine with me.
Arizona has it right. What I want in Charlotte shouldn’t matter to what you want in Detroit.
You hate DST, I like it. You should be able to get rid of it, I should be able to keep it.
Different places are affected by it much more or less. People are owls or birds. You can’t make everybody happy with one option.
Maine is so far away from everything else it could be in it’s own time zone. That’s why it is a strange case.
Never really thought about Detroit being almost directly north of Charlotte.
Red lines are current time zones. Red circle is El Paso. Blue lines are if you equally cut US into 4 time zones.
Detroit is to the right of the red line. It has 3 boxes to reach the beginning of the time zone which is just to the right of Maine. (Sorry didn’t draw it)
El Paso being in the circle makes it 3 boxes to reach the beginning of time zone just like Detroit and why it is in the similar situation with DST.
The right two time zones are large time zones. The left two are only 2 boxes wide.
Maine should be in a separate time zone than Detroit
Detroit should probably move to CST. Then, argue about daylight savings time in the summer to be EST (Not EDT)
It’s clearly a complex issue. I didn’t realize that Eastern and Central were so much bigger than Mountain and Pacific, honestly. Central is crazy across the southern US.
Normally I don’t mind the change so much but it’s kicking my ass this fall for some reason. I don’t actually live in Detroit, I just know it’s one of the more extreme examples like El Paso (but they just want to stick with the rest of TX anyway). I live in CO and wake up early; Looking at Fig1 it’s obvious that I would like it abolished but most here would like it permanent. lol, poor Utah.
I dunno, the majority of people seem to want permanent, I know CO has a law saying as soon as Congress allows it we’re going to stay on DST. So it’s coming, but I don’t have to like it.
I just realized that El Paso is actually in MST. They must have hated it so bad not to stick with the rest of Texas. But whoever lives in the farthest point west but still in CST is being screwed. Same with EST.
Funny the section of Texas that is in MST is three tiny blocks, basically the same width as all of Michigan. Texas is big lol.
Michigan should probably move to CST
When I think of Colorado I think of it being way north. You could live in Colorado and be as north as someone living in Raleigh NC almost. That’s wild.
Yeah Colorado seems to appear to be all up to preference on the choices. It’s at the start of a time zone. People on the east lean towards permanent MDT, People on the west lean towards permanent MST.
Im guessing that you live towards the west side. Yet if most people around you seem to want it, then maybe you live on east side lol
(Or we’ll try permanent DST and experience all of the negative effects and then either go back to cycling or realize we should’ve done permanent standard.)
Basically the local Uyghur population in Xinjiang code switch and maintain an unofficial local time which aligns more closely with the movement of the sun.
You are right, but do you really want to deal with the confusion of having to wake up at some random number like 4pm UTC? And then if you finally get used to that you travel abroad and now you have to wake up at 1am? Timezones are a mess but if done correctly, they make sense because the numbers won’t be arbitrary.
I don’t see how dealing with that is any worse than dealing with time zones.
Downside of UTC everywhere: you might have to set your alarm for a different time when you travel.
Upsides: Never need to account for timezones in communication. Never need to change a clock, ever.
They make sense because the numbers won’t be arbitrary.
But they are. There’s no changing that. They’re arbitrary now. They’d be arbitrary if we had UTC everywhere. We’re not out here using sundials to set our clocks, 12:00 is not solar noon more often than it is.
I’m with you. Another perk is a sense of where you are on the planet. If I get up with the sunrise at 22:00 somewhere, then travel somewhere the sun rises around 18:00, it’s obvious the sun is hitting this part of the planet sooner.
If UTC were widely adopted, it’d be interesting to see what employers near time zones would do. EG start work at 19:00 or 20:00? 19:30? Flex-time with mandatory core hours from 22:00 to 02:00? Maybe I’m over optimistic, but it seems like it would encourage more flexible work hours.
It definitely would not be, regardless of whatever “done correctly” means. Solar noon at exactly 12:00 is only going to happen on a single line of longitude. If you have a timezone centered on that line and exactly 15° (one hour) wide then solar noon will be up to 30 minutes away from 12:00 depending on your east/west position in that timezone.
It was exactly this realization that the numbers were arbitrary and 12:00 didn’t need to be solar noon that led to the creation of timezones in the first place, so that it’s not 4:14 in Norwich while it’s 3:52 in Birmingham and just travelling from city to city doesn’t mean you’re changing your watch constantly and it becomes actually possible to write a sensible rail schedule.
Timezones are already a step toward an arbitrary standard time for the purposes of making communication easier and not needing to change your watch just because you moved around. UTC everywhere would just be another larger step in that already established direction.
The negative effects are either due to the act of changing the clocks forward implemented in such a way as to deprive everyone everywhere an hour of sleep, or something something natural light in the morning. Which is not a benefit of “standard” or “daylight savings” time, it’s a complete and utter failure of “work starts at 6AM and ends at 10PM.”
The solution: Lynch all the rich people. If there’s no one to be forced to build wealth for, we won’t have to work such long hours and we can get up and have free time in daylight.
Drop “daylight savings time” and “standard time” monikers. Use UTC offsets, and tell us what state you are in.
New York and Michigan are currently in the same time zone. When we go to permanent time, they should not be.
Michigan in UTC-4 (EDT) winter would have a sunrise after 9AM. That’s fucking absurd; they should not be on UTC-4 during winter. They should be permanently on UTC-5.
New York in UTC-5 (EST) would have a summer sunrise before 4AM. That’s fucking absurd. They should not be on UTC-5 in the summer. They should be permanently on UTC-4.
Maine’s earliest sunset on UTC-5 will be at 3:45PM. That is criminally insane. They should permanently be on UTC-4, or maybe even UTC-3.
Permanent daylight time gives us all of the downsides and exactly one benefit. I’m sorry you live that far North/South but that’s just how the seasons and tilt of the earth work. We shouldn’t be doing split time at all and we shouldn’t endeavor to be an hour off the rest of the world just so commuters can drive home with the sun in their eyes.
There is no formal requirement for your state to stay within its current timezone.
If we go to permanent DST, you can petition for your state to switch to the next timezone to the west, which would give you the same time as permanent standard time in your current timezone. Detroit, for example, is on the western edge of ET. Sunrise in winter for them would be as late as 9AM, which is ridiculous. But, if Michigan shifts to CT instead of ET, sunrise goes to 8AM, and everyone is happy.
Move yourself from EDT to CDT, which is the same as EST. Or move from CDT to MDT/CST. Or MDT to PDT/MST. Or PDT to AKDT/PST.
If you don’t want to drive home with your the sun in your eyes, take a job to the east of your home.
Or we could just stop trying to fuck with it and leave it on standard time. Timezones are an international standard. You could easily just adjust your business hours. Instead we’re out here bending everything, even literal time around the capitalist demand for productivity. Just stop fucking with it.
UTC offsets are an international standard. The specific UTC offset to adopt in any particular geographic area is by no means an international standard. That decision is made at a relatively low level of government.
Or we could just stop trying to fuck with it and leave it on standard time.
Clearly, you and I don’t want to be in the same time zone. Let’s dump the “Standard Time” and “DST” names. They are really just confusing the issue.
Eastern Standard Time is currently UTC-5. What state are you in, and what UTC offset do you want to permanently use?
I am in easterm Ohio, and I want to be permanently on UTC-4.
I think Maine and much of New England would choose to be on permanent UTC-3, so sunset is never before 4PM.
I think Michigan would probably choose permanent UTC-5, so sunrise is never after 8AM.
You’re using a tilted and flattened map. Look at the US on Google Earth. It’s not level with latitude lines, and the northern states are expanded on any flat representation.
This is most noticeable at the equator, where there is no large variation. (There’s about 8 minutes difference due to secondary things, not axial tilt.)
And? We’re not abolishing timezones any time soon. So there’s always going to be that issue of the easternmost and westernmost towns in a time zone. That’s not a reason for anything.
Time zones change the sunset time east and west as well.
Abolishing time zones has nothing to do with “fixing” daylight savings.
Even if we all switched to UTC and got rid of time zones . Everyone would have to decide when to go to bed, when to wake up, and when to work to fit it around the sun.
5:13pm CST is 11:13pm UTC
If Sioux Falls wanted to stay “standard time” for the sun. They would have to start work at 3pm UTC and get off work at 11pm UTC. (9am to 5pm)
Yet they could decide that they wanted to get “daylight savings time” for the sun, they would start work at 2pm UTC and get off at 10pm UTC. They would get one extra hour of sun after work instead of before.
The length of your day is not defined by your time zone. It is defined by your latitude, how far north of the equator you are. X degrees north gets Y hours of sunlight at N time of year.
It’s that simple. So instead of creating a fucking nightmare for commerce and programming, we should be working the hours that make sense. Being on the western edge of a time zone means your work hours should be different than on the Eastern edge.
If you shift the zone, you’re not going to get more sunlight, you’re going to get a later time to go home from your boss. The problem isn’t the time zone. It’s capitalism demanding you work the entire day away even though productivity has increased massively and we work far more than our ancestors from supposedly dreary times.
That’s why shifting the time zone is, at most, going to get you the sun in your eyes as you drive home. It’s not going to give you any more hours of sunlight. Those don’t magically appear. And it wastes energy as people try to heat the coldest part of the day instead of staying under their blankets. Savings Time literally is the worst option except in the one regard of trying to preserve afternoon light for people rich enough to enjoy it.
Permanent daylight time gives us all of the downsides and exactly one benefit. I’m sorry you live that far North/South, but that’s just how the seasons and tilt of the earth work. We shouldn’t be doing split time at all, and we shouldn’t endeavor to be an hour off the rest of the world just so commuters can drive home with the sun in their eyes.
I said “Its not just north and south,” implying that time zones pay a large part in how one experiences the sun.
Daylight savings time’s intention is not to “get more or save sunlight”. The intention is to shift the time to better use the sunlight.
Depending on where you live, you’re going to be either for or against DST more or less.
Example, if you live in El Paso TX, then staying on DST is amazing. They get 365 days where the sunsets after 6 pm while having basically the same number of days where the sun rises before 7 am . However, if you live in Auburn AL, then you probably hate permanent DST because the sun would hardly ever rise before 7 am. Auburn benefits from the current system or they get less affected by getting rid of DST.
The length of your day is not defined by your time zone. It is defined by your latitude, how far north of the equator you are. X degrees north gets Y hours of sunlight at N time of year.
Yes that is correct.
Look at Sioux Falls and Rapid City. Their daylight length is less
Sioux Falls
7:08am sunrise to 5:12pm sunset CST
Rapid City
6:36am sunrise to 4:37pm sunset MST (7:36am CST to 5:37pm CST)
Sioux Falls
10 hr 4 mins of sunlight
Rapid City
10 hr 1 mins of sunlight
Because of the latitude difference, they have a ~3 minute difference in the amount of sun tomorrow. Because latitude affects how fast the sun sets and rises, the total sunlight will be slightly different.
Let’s say you wake up at 6am.
Rapid City
Light
Sioux Falls
Dark
Now if you got off work at 5pm
Rapid City
Dark
Sioux Falls
Light
Now, would you prefer to live in Rapid City or Sioux Falls? It depends on your sleep and work schedule, probably.
What if we moved Rapid City to CST? (Basically DST, +1 hour)
Wake up 6
Dark
Get off work at 5
Light
Some people in Rapid City might enjoy that.
So instead of creating a fucking nightmare for commerce and programming, we should be working the hours that make sense.
Being on the western edge of a time zone means your work hours should be different than on the Eastern edge
These two sentences conflict so hard
Let’s look at Alabama and Georgia since the time zone splits them.
So what you’re saying is someone that lives in Alabama near the Georgia line should have a different time to go to work than some living in Alabama on the other side of the state?
Is your solution just having more time zones? Because that is more complicated and has nothing to do with daylight savings time.
The problem isn’t the time zone. It’s capitalism demanding you work the entire day away even though productivity has increased massively and we work far more than our ancestors from supposedly dreary times.
This is random.
You just want people to pick whenever they feel like working? In Sioux Falls the sun sets at 5:12pm CST tomorrow. I want 4 hours of full sunlight after work. So I should be able to work from 5:12 am to 1:12pm?
I think your point was “8 hour work day is bullshit”. And I’m not against that but that’s a whole other discussion.
Even if we all didn’t work, we would still fight over keeping our current system, staying on DST, or staying on standard time. Some will want more light in morning. Some would want it in the evening.
That’s why shifting the time zone is, at most, going to get you the sun in your eyes as you drive home.
This only happens if you have to drive west during that exact time.
What’s funny is the idea of DST tries to correct stuff like this
Say everyone from Westburg has to commute to Eastville to work (or to play because they don’t have to work and be enslaved to capitalism). Everyone is going to hate driving home afterwards if they all have to do it at the exact time the sun will shine directly into their eyes.
One solution is work begins and ends earlier or later. (Or you park your jetski early or later.)
Or you could shift the time + or - 1 hour like DST does.
Also, once again, it’s not about magically getting more sunlight. It’s about shifting the sunlight you get to better suit your desires.
And it wastes energy as people try to heat the coldest part of the day instead of staying under their blankets
Wow.
Anyways, I’m sorry you are unfortunate enough to get out of work at the time the sunset would be a problem and have to drive straight towards it.
Some people would prefer to double down on DST. Instead of falling back in the fall, you spring forward again. Then in the spring you fall back. Make DST standard. Maybe this is something you’d be interested in if you hated sun in the morning and wanted at least an hour of it after work.
There is nothing “standard” for the sun to set in Sioux Falls at 5:12pm CST. It could easily set at 6:12pm if the whole system wasn’t based off of Greenwich England. You could have had SFMT (Sioux Falls Mean Time) and then base all other time zones off of it. Sun would set at 6:12pm SFST. You could do daylight savings and turn it into the sun setting at 7:12pm SFDST. You could do daylight wasting time and make the sun set at 5:12pm SFDWT.
… do you believe the person made the image for this comment? What evidence is shown in the image for you to believe that the tilt and shape of the earth wasn’t taken into consideration for the graphic, besides it being shown as a 2d image?
You’re just like almost there, that graph isn’t about lengths of days. It’s an arbitrary representation of what someone would consider a “normal” time for the sun to set and rise. The gradient in colors is because of the shape of the earth, the blocky lines are probably the cut off counties/states that follow different timezones (would need to verify source for that though). I’ve gotta split but hopefully someone can explain it better in the mean time if you have more questions.
The gradients change based on time zones. You’ll see how they line up.
Walking over a time zone line changes time one hour, but the sunset time doesn’t magically change an hour.
Like say you are standing between Georgia and Alabama. If you walk into Georgia the sun will set at around 5:30pm EST. If you walk into Alabama the sun will set at around 4:30pm CST.
The sun is setting one hour earlier in Alabama but you are basically watching the exact same sunset.
As you go further west into Alabama the time zone change “makes more sense” because the time zone being exactly between Alabama and Georgia doesn’t make sense other than them being separate states.
Geez. that timezone separation is more fucked than I realized lol. I’ve lived in different time zones but always near the center of it and I didn’t know there was such awful cut offs that zigzag through states like that. Sucks that user stayed hostile though, not sure if they just want to argue about everything timezone related or just too embarrassed to gracefully exit.
Where I live, even our winter time isn’t close to be aligned with sun time (GMT+1 though we’re basically on the Greenwich meridian). Summer time is off by two hours.
Problem is, our school/work/activity schedules have been made to adapt to that, so having days centered around actual sun midday would sound like crazy talk to people. It’s just because of how we already compensated for it.
So many people don’t understand that the same outcome of an ‘extra hour’ after work could be had by shorter work hours or not having the majority of the typical office workday after noon.
9-5 was a 3|5 split. 8-5 is a 4|5 split. Treating 5 pm as the only rime to end the office workday is the fucking problem, not the sun. Changing clocks twice a year is a problem.
one day we will just stick with daylight time. its kind of a slap in the face to lose your only hour of sunlight after work!
Ah yes, that darn hour of sunlight you lose.
Cries in 3hrs of sunlight
I honestly think the 24 hour daylight weeks would be worse.
You get used to it. Blinds are you friend, but driving is the worst. The sun is always in your eyes.
Start working hours earlier.
Wow, great suggestion. I assume you’ll be contacting the people at my company in charge of defining when I must be at work?
Now if only all people, managers, businesses, unions, realized they could set what time they worked to whatever the hell they wanted within reason, moved to somewhere closer to the equator, got up earlier to use the morning instead of the night, did stuff at night…
Either way, we need to do away with the switching lol.
Eh…I think we need to do away with the concept of money, and work, and managers owning the majority of our time.
You think a cat gives a fuck what time Starbucks closes??? Hell no! They just sleep on your bed, or on the floor, or on a table, or on the stairs, or anywhere they want, anytime they want. And they make SURE you are always looking at their butthole.
You think you can just go into starbucks, and present your butthole, to all who look at you, while also sleeping on their counter? I mean, you’re TOTALLY in the way, and making everyones lives more inconvienent…but fuck 'em, ya know?
You can’t do ANY of that! Because for some reason, we’ve all decided that little green paper controls our lives.
Or in the case of Canada, multicolored monopoly money.
I mean, anybody can do pretty much anything they want at least once.
Hey, Black Ass!
I say this every year: FUUUUUUUUCK THAT.
With permanent DST the latest sunrise in Detroit would be 0900. That’s fucking absurd. All across the US kids would be waiting for the school bus in the dark, walking to those bus stops in the dark. My personal beef with it is that I, and many of the people that make the world go 'round, start at 0600. We need to see ASAP for safety, if nothing else.
The US tried it in the early '70s, didn’t even finish the two year trial period:
https://www.npr.org/2022/03/19/1087280464/the-u-s-tried-permanent-daylight-saving-time-in-the-1970s-then-quickly-rejected-
Fuck DST. If people really want it to stay light until 2100 in the summer then so be it but don’t make a lot of the working class labor half their day in the dark.
So what you are saying is that kids can walk to school in the dark at 7am anyway?
Not in Colorado. Detroit has to deal with their own shit, I guess.
Kids all across the US are waiting at the bus in the dark anyway.
Not everyone gets to get on a bus after sunrise.
I say keep the time at either at ST or DST and let the different institutions/businesses decide their hours of operation. I’ll bet you after a year or two, 99% will settle on something and keep it throughout the year.
In the north? Here in the middle of the country it’s reasonable.
Maybe instead of focusing on 6 am we just accept that noon makes sense as when the sun is highest in the sky (or close as we can get with timezones) and that the time the sun comes up will change throughout the year.
There’s a lot of commerce that would actually be disrupted by doing that. Software developers would certainly riot.
My personal complaint is that I would have an extra hour of work in the dark, and DST does that to me anyway. My schedule is earlier than office workers and I like it.
Even my days off are early and it’s great. I know the country is going to go permanent DST eventually and I’ll adapt, but it’s still stupid IMO.
Found the ancient Mesopotamian…
The entire nation doesn’t need to be following year round the schedule that Detroit school kids need from November to January.
The better solution for this little problem is to go ahead and shift the entire country to permanent DST, and move Detroit from the Eastern time zone to the Central time zone. Latest sunrise in Detroit is now 8AM. Your complaint is resolved, without either of us being forced to switch our clocks twice a year.
You can’t make the days longer and I still think the sun in the afternoon/evening is more useful.
It’s true moving the clocks around doesn’t do anything. But I know my kids wanted more hours of daylight after school not before school.
Though I also think school ought to start closer to 9:00.
Do you like the time change, or do you want to stick to standard time?
My preference is to stick to standard. If people insist on DST I acquiesce.
I know I could just go live in Arizona, but then I’d have to live in Arizona.
No. Fuck them. If I’m get a Spring Forward I’m owed a goddamned Fall Back. I spend half a year with an hour’s deficit so people going home to watch Netflix after work can pretend they give a damn about an extra hour of sunlight.
Give me Standard Time or pay to move my ass to the East a couple hundred miles to fix it.
Holding that opinion, I am reasonably sure you do not live on the eastern edge of your time zone. Being that militant about it, I reasonably believe you live all the way on the western edge.
That being the case, there’s an easier solution. Just redraw the timezone boundaries so your state is just west of the boundary instead of just east, which leaves you on “standard time” in your current timezone, which is “daylight time” to your west.
Flagstaff is nice. Williams and Winslow are nice if you’re fully remote. Anything South of Camp Verde or Prescott is just ridiculous though.
Detroit is an interesting one.
If Detroit kept DST permanent, the sun would basically set after 6pm every day.
However. Like you said, no one wants to wait until the 9am for the sun to rise.
Abolishing DST could be beneficial for Detroit. Not as many days where the sun sets after 6. But more days where it rises before 7.
The current system is bad for Detroit. It should either abolish it or keep it permanent.
Detroit night owls would want to keep it, early birds would want to abolish it.
Detroit is like El Paso TX. Where the current system is clearly bad.
Maine is the opposite. The current system is “best” and the birds and owls fight.
I live in Charlotte NC. I’ve always been for DST. Permanent DST means basically 365 days where the sun sets after 6pm. While getting basically the same number of days where the sun rises before 7am. I’m not an early riser, so as long as it’s up by 8/9am most of the time it’s fine with me.
Arizona has it right. What I want in Charlotte shouldn’t matter to what you want in Detroit.
You hate DST, I like it. You should be able to get rid of it, I should be able to keep it.
Different places are affected by it much more or less. People are owls or birds. You can’t make everybody happy with one option.
Maine is so far away from everything else it could be in it’s own time zone. That’s why it is a strange case.
Never really thought about Detroit being almost directly north of Charlotte.
Red lines are current time zones. Red circle is El Paso. Blue lines are if you equally cut US into 4 time zones.
Detroit is to the right of the red line. It has 3 boxes to reach the beginning of the time zone which is just to the right of Maine. (Sorry didn’t draw it)
El Paso being in the circle makes it 3 boxes to reach the beginning of time zone just like Detroit and why it is in the similar situation with DST.
The right two time zones are large time zones. The left two are only 2 boxes wide.
Maine should be in a separate time zone than Detroit
Detroit should probably move to CST. Then, argue about daylight savings time in the summer to be EST (Not EDT)
Sounds like something you’d like, maybe?
It’s clearly a complex issue. I didn’t realize that Eastern and Central were so much bigger than Mountain and Pacific, honestly. Central is crazy across the southern US.
Normally I don’t mind the change so much but it’s kicking my ass this fall for some reason. I don’t actually live in Detroit, I just know it’s one of the more extreme examples like El Paso (but they just want to stick with the rest of TX anyway). I live in CO and wake up early; Looking at Fig1 it’s obvious that I would like it abolished but most here would like it permanent. lol, poor Utah.
I dunno, the majority of people seem to want permanent, I know CO has a law saying as soon as Congress allows it we’re going to stay on DST. So it’s coming, but I don’t have to like it.
Fuck DST.
I just realized that El Paso is actually in MST. They must have hated it so bad not to stick with the rest of Texas. But whoever lives in the farthest point west but still in CST is being screwed. Same with EST.
Funny the section of Texas that is in MST is three tiny blocks, basically the same width as all of Michigan. Texas is big lol.
Michigan should probably move to CST
When I think of Colorado I think of it being way north. You could live in Colorado and be as north as someone living in Raleigh NC almost. That’s wild.
Yeah Colorado seems to appear to be all up to preference on the choices. It’s at the start of a time zone. People on the east lean towards permanent MDT, People on the west lean towards permanent MST.
Im guessing that you live towards the west side. Yet if most people around you seem to want it, then maybe you live on east side lol
One day we will just stick with standard time.
(Or we’ll try permanent DST and experience all of the negative effects and then either go back to cycling or realize we should’ve done permanent standard.)
Or we’ll realize that the specific numbers are arbitrary and use UTC everywhere.
China does a variant of this where the whole country is on Beijing time. 99% Invisible did an episode that covered it here: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/matters-of-time/
Basically the local Uyghur population in Xinjiang code switch and maintain an unofficial local time which aligns more closely with the movement of the sun.
You are right, but do you really want to deal with the confusion of having to wake up at some random number like 4pm UTC? And then if you finally get used to that you travel abroad and now you have to wake up at 1am? Timezones are a mess but if done correctly, they make sense because the numbers won’t be arbitrary.
I don’t see how dealing with that is any worse than dealing with time zones.
Downside of UTC everywhere: you might have to set your alarm for a different time when you travel.
Upsides: Never need to account for timezones in communication. Never need to change a clock, ever.
But they are. There’s no changing that. They’re arbitrary now. They’d be arbitrary if we had UTC everywhere. We’re not out here using sundials to set our clocks, 12:00 is not solar noon more often than it is.
I’m with you. Another perk is a sense of where you are on the planet. If I get up with the sunrise at 22:00 somewhere, then travel somewhere the sun rises around 18:00, it’s obvious the sun is hitting this part of the planet sooner.
If UTC were widely adopted, it’d be interesting to see what employers near time zones would do. EG start work at 19:00 or 20:00? 19:30? Flex-time with mandatory core hours from 22:00 to 02:00? Maybe I’m over optimistic, but it seems like it would encourage more flexible work hours.
if timezones were done correctly it would be and the numbers wouldn’t be that arbitrary
It definitely would not be, regardless of whatever “done correctly” means. Solar noon at exactly 12:00 is only going to happen on a single line of longitude. If you have a timezone centered on that line and exactly 15° (one hour) wide then solar noon will be up to 30 minutes away from 12:00 depending on your east/west position in that timezone.
It was exactly this realization that the numbers were arbitrary and 12:00 didn’t need to be solar noon that led to the creation of timezones in the first place, so that it’s not 4:14 in Norwich while it’s 3:52 in Birmingham and just travelling from city to city doesn’t mean you’re changing your watch constantly and it becomes actually possible to write a sensible rail schedule.
Timezones are already a step toward an arbitrary standard time for the purposes of making communication easier and not needing to change your watch just because you moved around. UTC everywhere would just be another larger step in that already established direction.
It’s almost 22 UTC
Which is 5pm EST
8am EST is when most work starts
That’s 15 hours from now
So work would start at 13 UTC
Yes, these are arbitrary numbers. Doesn’t matter if we go to work at 8am EST or 13 UTC.
However, this has nothing to do with daylight savings time or with what daylight savings time is trying to accomplish.
The negative effects are either due to the act of changing the clocks forward implemented in such a way as to deprive everyone everywhere an hour of sleep, or something something natural light in the morning. Which is not a benefit of “standard” or “daylight savings” time, it’s a complete and utter failure of “work starts at 6AM and ends at 10PM.”
The solution: Lynch all the rich people. If there’s no one to be forced to build wealth for, we won’t have to work such long hours and we can get up and have free time in daylight.
It is amazing how many problems would be resolved with liberal use of (figurative) guillotines.
This article is stupid. In the winter it’s dark when I get up for work and it’s dark when I done witn work.
If we adopt permanent DST, the simple answer is just shift your daily schedule accordingly.
Drop “daylight savings time” and “standard time” monikers. Use UTC offsets, and tell us what state you are in.
New York and Michigan are currently in the same time zone. When we go to permanent time, they should not be.
Michigan in UTC-4 (EDT) winter would have a sunrise after 9AM. That’s fucking absurd; they should not be on UTC-4 during winter. They should be permanently on UTC-5.
New York in UTC-5 (EST) would have a summer sunrise before 4AM. That’s fucking absurd. They should not be on UTC-5 in the summer. They should be permanently on UTC-4.
Maine’s earliest sunset on UTC-5 will be at 3:45PM. That is criminally insane. They should permanently be on UTC-4, or maybe even UTC-3.
Permanent daylight time gives us all of the downsides and exactly one benefit. I’m sorry you live that far North/South but that’s just how the seasons and tilt of the earth work. We shouldn’t be doing split time at all and we shouldn’t endeavor to be an hour off the rest of the world just so commuters can drive home with the sun in their eyes.
There is no formal requirement for your state to stay within its current timezone.
If we go to permanent DST, you can petition for your state to switch to the next timezone to the west, which would give you the same time as permanent standard time in your current timezone. Detroit, for example, is on the western edge of ET. Sunrise in winter for them would be as late as 9AM, which is ridiculous. But, if Michigan shifts to CT instead of ET, sunrise goes to 8AM, and everyone is happy.
Move yourself from EDT to CDT, which is the same as EST. Or move from CDT to MDT/CST. Or MDT to PDT/MST. Or PDT to AKDT/PST.
If you don’t want to drive home with your the sun in your eyes, take a job to the east of your home.
Or we could just stop trying to fuck with it and leave it on standard time. Timezones are an international standard. You could easily just adjust your business hours. Instead we’re out here bending everything, even literal time around the capitalist demand for productivity. Just stop fucking with it.
UTC offsets are an international standard. The specific UTC offset to adopt in any particular geographic area is by no means an international standard. That decision is made at a relatively low level of government.
Clearly, you and I don’t want to be in the same time zone. Let’s dump the “Standard Time” and “DST” names. They are really just confusing the issue.
Eastern Standard Time is currently UTC-5. What state are you in, and what UTC offset do you want to permanently use?
I am in easterm Ohio, and I want to be permanently on UTC-4.
I think Maine and much of New England would choose to be on permanent UTC-3, so sunset is never before 4PM.
I think Michigan would probably choose permanent UTC-5, so sunrise is never after 8AM.
It’s not just north or south
You’re using a tilted and flattened map. Look at the US on Google Earth. It’s not level with latitude lines, and the northern states are expanded on any flat representation.
This is most noticeable at the equator, where there is no large variation. (There’s about 8 minutes difference due to secondary things, not axial tilt.)
Sioux Falls SD is 43.5460°N
Rapid City SD is 44.0805°N
Sioux Falls Sunset is at 5:13pm CST
Rapid City Sunset is at 4:38pm MST
If both cities were in CST, Rapid City sun would set at 5:38pm CST
Due to the latitude difference, the sunsets should be 25 minutes apart
However, they are 35 minutes apart due to the time zone difference
If you said “Sioux Falls is farther south than Rapid City” and tried to base sunset time on just that, you’d be wrong.
And? We’re not abolishing timezones any time soon. So there’s always going to be that issue of the easternmost and westernmost towns in a time zone. That’s not a reason for anything.
Like I said, “It’s not just north or south.”
Time zones change the sunset time east and west as well.
Abolishing time zones has nothing to do with “fixing” daylight savings.
Even if we all switched to UTC and got rid of time zones . Everyone would have to decide when to go to bed, when to wake up, and when to work to fit it around the sun.
5:13pm CST is 11:13pm UTC
If Sioux Falls wanted to stay “standard time” for the sun. They would have to start work at 3pm UTC and get off work at 11pm UTC. (9am to 5pm)
Yet they could decide that they wanted to get “daylight savings time” for the sun, they would start work at 2pm UTC and get off at 10pm UTC. They would get one extra hour of sun after work instead of before.
Okay we’re not talking about the same thing here.
The length of your day is not defined by your time zone. It is defined by your latitude, how far north of the equator you are. X degrees north gets Y hours of sunlight at N time of year.
It’s that simple. So instead of creating a fucking nightmare for commerce and programming, we should be working the hours that make sense. Being on the western edge of a time zone means your work hours should be different than on the Eastern edge.
If you shift the zone, you’re not going to get more sunlight, you’re going to get a later time to go home from your boss. The problem isn’t the time zone. It’s capitalism demanding you work the entire day away even though productivity has increased massively and we work far more than our ancestors from supposedly dreary times.
That’s why shifting the time zone is, at most, going to get you the sun in your eyes as you drive home. It’s not going to give you any more hours of sunlight. Those don’t magically appear. And it wastes energy as people try to heat the coldest part of the day instead of staying under their blankets. Savings Time literally is the worst option except in the one regard of trying to preserve afternoon light for people rich enough to enjoy it.
I said “Its not just north and south,” implying that time zones pay a large part in how one experiences the sun.
Daylight savings time’s intention is not to “get more or save sunlight”. The intention is to shift the time to better use the sunlight.
Depending on where you live, you’re going to be either for or against DST more or less.
Example, if you live in El Paso TX, then staying on DST is amazing. They get 365 days where the sunsets after 6 pm while having basically the same number of days where the sun rises before 7 am . However, if you live in Auburn AL, then you probably hate permanent DST because the sun would hardly ever rise before 7 am. Auburn benefits from the current system or they get less affected by getting rid of DST.
Yes that is correct.
Look at Sioux Falls and Rapid City. Their daylight length is less
Sioux Falls
7:08am sunrise to 5:12pm sunset CST
Rapid City
6:36am sunrise to 4:37pm sunset MST (7:36am CST to 5:37pm CST)
Sioux Falls
10 hr 4 mins of sunlight
Rapid City
10 hr 1 mins of sunlight
Because of the latitude difference, they have a ~3 minute difference in the amount of sun tomorrow. Because latitude affects how fast the sun sets and rises, the total sunlight will be slightly different.
Let’s say you wake up at 6am.
Rapid City
Light
Sioux Falls
Dark
Now if you got off work at 5pm
Rapid City
Dark
Sioux Falls
Light
Now, would you prefer to live in Rapid City or Sioux Falls? It depends on your sleep and work schedule, probably.
What if we moved Rapid City to CST? (Basically DST, +1 hour)
Wake up 6
Dark
Get off work at 5
Light
Some people in Rapid City might enjoy that.
These two sentences conflict so hard
Let’s look at Alabama and Georgia since the time zone splits them.
So what you’re saying is someone that lives in Alabama near the Georgia line should have a different time to go to work than some living in Alabama on the other side of the state?
Is your solution just having more time zones? Because that is more complicated and has nothing to do with daylight savings time.
This is random.
You just want people to pick whenever they feel like working? In Sioux Falls the sun sets at 5:12pm CST tomorrow. I want 4 hours of full sunlight after work. So I should be able to work from 5:12 am to 1:12pm?
I think your point was “8 hour work day is bullshit”. And I’m not against that but that’s a whole other discussion.
Even if we all didn’t work, we would still fight over keeping our current system, staying on DST, or staying on standard time. Some will want more light in morning. Some would want it in the evening.
This only happens if you have to drive west during that exact time.
What’s funny is the idea of DST tries to correct stuff like this
Say everyone from Westburg has to commute to Eastville to work (or to play because they don’t have to work and be enslaved to capitalism). Everyone is going to hate driving home afterwards if they all have to do it at the exact time the sun will shine directly into their eyes.
One solution is work begins and ends earlier or later. (Or you park your jetski early or later.)
Or you could shift the time + or - 1 hour like DST does.
Also, once again, it’s not about magically getting more sunlight. It’s about shifting the sunlight you get to better suit your desires.
Wow.
Anyways, I’m sorry you are unfortunate enough to get out of work at the time the sunset would be a problem and have to drive straight towards it.
Some people would prefer to double down on DST. Instead of falling back in the fall, you spring forward again. Then in the spring you fall back. Make DST standard. Maybe this is something you’d be interested in if you hated sun in the morning and wanted at least an hour of it after work.
There is nothing “standard” for the sun to set in Sioux Falls at 5:12pm CST. It could easily set at 6:12pm if the whole system wasn’t based off of Greenwich England. You could have had SFMT (Sioux Falls Mean Time) and then base all other time zones off of it. Sun would set at 6:12pm SFST. You could do daylight savings and turn it into the sun setting at 7:12pm SFDST. You could do daylight wasting time and make the sun set at 5:12pm SFDWT.
It’s all arbitrary
… do you believe the person made the image for this comment? What evidence is shown in the image for you to believe that the tilt and shape of the earth wasn’t taken into consideration for the graphic, besides it being shown as a 2d image?
Because the reasons for the varying lengths of day are well known It’s more an exercise in figuring out why the map has such slanting in it.
You’re just like almost there, that graph isn’t about lengths of days. It’s an arbitrary representation of what someone would consider a “normal” time for the sun to set and rise. The gradient in colors is because of the shape of the earth, the blocky lines are probably the cut off counties/states that follow different timezones (would need to verify source for that though). I’ve gotta split but hopefully someone can explain it better in the mean time if you have more questions.
Thank you. You did a great job explaining it.
The gradients change based on time zones. You’ll see how they line up.
Walking over a time zone line changes time one hour, but the sunset time doesn’t magically change an hour.
Like say you are standing between Georgia and Alabama. If you walk into Georgia the sun will set at around 5:30pm EST. If you walk into Alabama the sun will set at around 4:30pm CST.
The sun is setting one hour earlier in Alabama but you are basically watching the exact same sunset.
As you go further west into Alabama the time zone change “makes more sense” because the time zone being exactly between Alabama and Georgia doesn’t make sense other than them being separate states.
Geez. that timezone separation is more fucked than I realized lol. I’ve lived in different time zones but always near the center of it and I didn’t know there was such awful cut offs that zigzag through states like that. Sucks that user stayed hostile though, not sure if they just want to argue about everything timezone related or just too embarrassed to gracefully exit.
Where I live, even our winter time isn’t close to be aligned with sun time (GMT+1 though we’re basically on the Greenwich meridian). Summer time is off by two hours.
Problem is, our school/work/activity schedules have been made to adapt to that, so having days centered around actual sun midday would sound like crazy talk to people. It’s just because of how we already compensated for it.
So many people don’t understand that the same outcome of an ‘extra hour’ after work could be had by shorter work hours or not having the majority of the typical office workday after noon.
9-5 was a 3|5 split. 8-5 is a 4|5 split. Treating 5 pm as the only rime to end the office workday is the fucking problem, not the sun. Changing clocks twice a year is a problem.