Permanent Daylight Saving Time? Florida Says Yes, but It’s Not So Simple

Re:Permanent Daylight Saving Time? Florida Says Yes, but It’... by snarf21 on Thursday March 08, 2018 @05:07PM (#16548147)

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.

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Re:Permanent Daylight Saving Time? Florida Says Yes, but It’... by dpark on Thursday March 08, 2018 @07:52PM (#16549048)

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.

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Re:Permanent Daylight Saving Time? Florida Says Yes, but It’... by orev on Thursday March 08, 2018 @11:09PM (#16549739)

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.

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Re:Permanent Daylight Saving Time? Florida Says Yes, but It’... by dpark on Thursday March 08, 2018 @11:18PM (#16549762)

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.

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