I agree we should just pick one and move on. The one thing that gets forgotten is that noon was picked based on highest sun point (for some latitude) which is fine until we start to have a generally accepted day as 8-5. Noon is no longer in the middle of that day. It probably makes the most sense to just split the difference between EST and EDT and call it ENT (normalized) and never change again. This doesn't swing winter or summer days anymore than needs be but still gets rid of having to ever change again. The retailers get the biggest benefit of all the time DXT.

Daylight savings time was not put in place to make noon the middle of the day. It was put in place specifically to move noon earlier in the (physical) day.

Splitting the time zones would be the worst of all options. It would no longer allow time zones to align on the hour (because most states and nations are unlikely to align on a new set of time zones) and would do nothing to make noon align with the actual middle of the day.

You’ve completely misread. No one thinks DST was made to align noon with the sun. I mean, it’s so obvious that’s not the case (noon is aligned with the sun in Standard Time), I can’t believe you would think it was said that way, especially on this site.

The alternative way to read it seems to be “here’s an irrelevant bit of data about the concept of noon, followed by an irrelevant proposal to shift time zones by a half an hour for essentially no reason”. I’m not sure that’s better.

Also, noon is not really aligned with the sun in standard time. In some rough sense, sure. But solar noon on one side of a time zone is an hour before/after solar noon on the other side. The nature of time zones scoped to hour blocks guarantees that clock noon will not correspond to solar noon in most of the zone. This is especially true for larger zones like China’s official zone.

> especially on this site

Because everyone on this site is a super genius and never miscommunicates.

DST can make sense if you're sufficiently far north/south, but definitely doesn't if you're closer to the equator. And for Florida DST probably never made sense.

Even way up north, I'd rather have summer time all year. Having it get dark around 3:30 in the afternoon in the middle of winter is a drag.

That said, I've found there's a lot of resistance to the idea among parents. On standard time, it's light out when kids are on their way to school. On daylight time, it would be dark then.

If you're at a latitude that only gets 8-9 hours of daylight in the winter, there just isn't much daylight to go around. If you're adding it to the evening, you're taking it from the morning.

While I agree that the sun setting at 3:30 is a drag, I'm not sure pushing that to 4:30 really helps much.

During the summer, when you push sunset from 8pm to 9pm, that's at least an hour most people get to use (they are still awake and not working), and you're taking away an hour from 4am to 5am which most people don't (almost everyone is asleep).

During the winter, you're taking away an hour of daylight from, say, 7-8am, which most people can use (it will either be during their commute or before their commute, which they can enjoy themselves) to add an hour from, say, 3:30-4:30, which for many people is still going to be in the middle of their workdays.

Florida's case isn't quite so bad as that. In Tampa, FL, they are in fact taking away people's 7-8am sunshine in the winter, but they're at least adding sunshine from 6-7pm which will be fairly useful sunlight.

I'm just not sure it's useful for anyone much north of Florida to follow suit - you're trading valuable pre-work daylight for during-work daylight.

For the New England states, they're far enough East that it makes sense for them to join the AST time-zone and do away with DST.

Birds start chirping here at 3:30am... that ain't right.

They're not just East, they're North. If you throw Burlington, VT into the AST, you've then got 8:30 sunrises in the winter.

I think you could make an argument for "double daylight savings time", so that you're 3 months of UTC-5 in the winter and 3 months of UTC-3 in the summer, with UTC-4 in between (which I guess would be AST with "daylight savings time" in the summer and "daylight payback time" in the winter), but when you've got 16 hours of daylight in the summer you've got to put them somewhere. Do you really want to have the sun set at midnight so that it's easier to sleep in in the mornings?

As a kid, I didn't care whether it was light out on the way to school. School time wasn't my time anyway, might as well be dark.

On the other hand, having an hour of sunlight after the school is over has been a drag, as you said, especially when it was eaten up by the commute.

The schools should just be starting at a later time. There is already ample evidence that school start times are too early for students.

If you are sufficiently far north / south, you adapt your culture to not treat 4pm like people who have 18 hours of sunshine every day year round treat 4pm. You don't change the clock and act like thats changing the flow of time.

It helps that you almost certainly already don't treat 4pm like that anyway since you are wearing 4 layers of clothing while those 18 hour sunshiners are going shirtless.

Nobody has 18 hours of sunshine year round. If you have the same number of hours of sunshine year round, you have 12 hours.

Every location on earth has the same number of daylight hours when averaged over an entire year (12 hours). More Northerly/Southerly location just have larger variation over the year, and have less average light intensity normal to the earth's surface due to the relative angle of incoming sunlight.

The range of latitudes for which DST makes sense is roughly 30°-50°: those latitudes where summer solstice is 14-16 hours of daylight. Further north, there's going to be afternoon sun anyways, further south, there's too little difference between summer and winter for there to be any sense switching twice a year.

"DST can make sense if you're sufficiently far north/south,"

As a person living on the 61st parallel - it does not. Winters are dark anyway you put it, and summers have so much light you can't be awake through it all. The situation gets only more extreme the norther you get.

Hi I live in the relative north and DST is actually worse here. And go much further north than me and it doesn't really matter either way. I would kill to have it gone.

except this law would make DST the official time of Florida, not standard time (though only if Congress changes a law that allows states to do so). Other states like Arizona have exempted themselves from DST, which the federal government allows them to do.

It would put Florida onto Atlantic Standard Time. The simple description of how to get there is to shift to DST one summer and never shift back.

The same thing has been proposed in New England, if enough states agree to do it simultaneously.

Sufficiently far up (and down I guess) it makes little sense at all, or does so for very small part of the year. There's nothing to be saved in the abundance of light all day in the summer, and nothing to be done for the darkness of winter.

Since I work remote for a company in Arizona I actually get an hour back on Sunday, I lost an hour when it went back my first meeting at 745am now it's going to be a more reasonable 845am.

PDT FOREVER!

This. As a parent, I would love to have daylight after work so that I can enjoy some time with my kid outdoors. It is depressing to pick up your child when it is already dark outside.

And I can get behind that, which is why I say we can be either PST or MST, I don't really care which. (MST being functionally equivalent to PDT.)

Frankly, I just want us to choose something and lock it in. PST, MST, UTC, or whatever. Just don't make me change my timezone ever again.

UTC is a terrible choice, I don't even know what time I would wake up in UTC. My family in NC would never know what time to call. I'd be OK with PST or MST/PDT. I'd prefer more light in the evenings though, I work an early schedule and don't actually care if it's light when I go to the office.

> I don't even know what time I would wake up in UTC.

You’d probably wake up about the same UTC time that you currently wake up, whatever that is. Do you imagine that if your state switched to UTC everyone would just begin a free for all and show up to school and work just whenever? Of course not.

> My family in NC would never know what time to call.

Probably the exact same time they call now. I can’t imagine why they wouldn’t be able to figure it out.

It would be complicated to answer questions such as "what time does school starts in your county"?

Today if you are American and I am French, if I say "we start at 8:30 and finish at 16:30" you would understand immediately. In UTC you would need to convert.

Of course UTC helps when we need to agree on the time to have a call.

I guess the advantage vs drawback depends on the kind of messages people usually convey

> It would be complicated to answer questions such as "what time does school starts in your county"?

That question is difficult to answer now. I live in Seattle and our schools aren’t consistent even within the city. The variance in start time among public schools is >1 hour.

I don’t actually want UTC. But I’d take it over the current crap.

Well yes, I mean every timing relative to the day/night cycle will be difficult. "What time do your kids go to bed?" , "what time are the main news?", etc. Saying 13:00 will not help me.

OTOH everything which is international will be easier.

This is a trade-off.

Now - I am also against DST, but would realistically keep immutable timezones.

I feel compelled to post https://qntm.org/abolish .

EDIT: Ah, of course someone already posted it in this thread.

I feel compelled to point out that I specifically said I do not want UTC. :) I simply hate the daylight savings time switch so much that I’d choose standardization on UTC over it. I’d much, much prefer constant standard or daylight time (with time zones) over UTC though.

Not so fast. Having grown up in a permanent DST on the 63th parallel, I can say that waking up and walking to school in constant darkness is also quite depressing. So much so that health officials in Iceland are now debating towards moving Iceland back closer to the solar noon (GMT-0100 from GMT) citing public health reasons.

Conversely as a parent I prefer daylight early in the morning so that I can enjoy it alone without the hindrance and distraction of my kid.

Which illustrates the difficulty of finding a compromise even for a simple example as that.

As an early riser, PST forever!

I vote we do a half hour compromise.

> I vote we do a half hour compromise.

Please no, just stop

Fun fact, Nepal's timezone is UTC+5:45.

Many historic timezones have 15 minute offsets. In the era before American railroads synchronized timezones to the hours, Louisville, KY, as one example close to home, was often UTC-5:45. (It's GE's fault that Louisville and consequently most of the US I-65 corridor wound up EST rather than CST.) I don't expect to win arguments that the city should return to UTC-5:45, but I make them anyway to amuse myself.

And that's the important thing. :-)

Afghanistan is +4:30 , which is different from both Iran and Pakistan

Afghanistan also borders China, and the time jumps three and a half hours at the border.

Most places in Xinjiang have an unofficial local time that they use in addition to official Chinese standard time. See:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_Time

One can imagine in Kashgar the ridiculousness of Beijing time is even more noticeable than in Urumuqi.

Doesn't really affect things though since there is no road through the Wakhan corridor to reach China, and no road over the mountain pass. If you want to drive it is a very long way via the karakoram highway via Gilgit in Pakistan. Travel from AF to CN is generally done by flying to Dubai, Delhi or Islamabad first.

India, UTC+05:30, all through the year. Despite having widely different climate zones in various regions of the country, there is no "Daylight Saving Time".

I would accept your compromise in the winter, but I'm keeping my 8:30 sunset in the summer.

Your resolve is weak!

Is it really that big of a deal? It has never bothered me. If waking up a hour early totally messes up your life it might be time to reconsider your priorities.

It's not that it messes up anyone's life terribly. It's a minor inconvenience, but it slightly inconveniences hundreds of millions of people, and that adds up. If everyone is slightly drowsy, and 0.1% of people have slightly slower reflexes and get in a car accident, that is not to say that those people 'need to reconsider their priorities'. That means that the policy hurts that many people, and the society needs to evaluate whether the benefits outweigh that hurt.

Don’t know why you are getting downvoted for this. Two of my favourite days of the year are when we change the clocks, there is suddenly a shift in what the world looks like at certain times of day and throw things into a different perspective. Permenant DST makes the most sense out of the two options but I like the shift enough that I’d prefer the model we have - I think people’s negativity towards it is due to a dislike of change and a lack of understanding on its origins, it’s sad that the chap who first proposed it didn’t get to see it implemented.

It is very frustrating to small children who don't understand what is happening, and thus it is also very frustrating to their parents.

You just get so, so much roadkill on time change day.