I’m with you on this. I’m a morning runner (I have to be because of my work schedule) and if this went into effect I’d have to bring a head lamp for most of the year because of this.
They want policies that have an immediate effect on them and don’t care about long term consequences. Also, they hate the opposite: policies that require patience and delayed gratification to see the benefits. Social Security reform, YIMBYism, supply side economic reforms, deficit reduction, are things voters either hate or are not enthused about but are seen as good policy. For those people won’t see any benefit short term or they may see short term pain at first and require time to see any positive effects from them. Foresight is not a strength of populist policy.
There's a part of me that really hopes they do this. I can't think of a more banal, ridiculous, and yet effective "touching the stove" lesson than this.
Agree by and large - however I don’t understand why we can’t change clocks on Saturday instead of Sunday to give everyone two days to adjust before the workweek or school week?
While I’m glad your mom wasn’t bothered by DST, I’d like to gently suggest it may have been quite a long time since she had young children, and she may not remember how annoying it was because long term memories do not form well when you’re not sleeping well. I currently have young children, and it is indeed annoying to have yet another obstacle to good sleep and yet another logistical concern to manage artificially imposed twice a year.
As for missed appointments, I and my colleagues routinely miss meetings around DST time because I work with people in Europe, whose DST is offset from ours by a week and our joint meetings thus shift an hour. Even with my calendar handling this automatically, it only does so if I’ve managed to get the event associated with the correct time zone, and it can cause otherwise non-conflicting standing meetings to conflict if some are scheduled locally. This is not catastrophic, but i can vouch for the idea that DST (at least one that’s not globally observed) can cause professionals to miss appointments.
Finally, I completely agree that year round DST is a bad idea that’s been tried before, but why do we do it at all? I guess the Marco Rubios of the world just like staying up too late *so dang much* that we all have to change the clocks twice a year every year? Regardless of whether you think it’s childish, people really do find changing clocks annoying, as evidenced by these perennial bills to make it end, and we would all sleep better and have easier lives if we just stopped.
The reason we have seasonal daylight saving time is because of the trade-offs. Afternoon sun is a good trade for morning sun that would happen while we’re sleeping, but not for morning sun while we’re awake. Making a good trade at all times of year requires changing the clock so solar noon is later when days are longer.
Sunrise in much of the US tomorrow will be around 6:30 and sunset around 9:00. I just don’t see what would be so terrible about sunrise at 5:30 and sunset at 8:00. What actual benefits are we gaining here?
Plenty. A lot of folks are out and about in the evenings, especially in the summer, and there's no real need for early morning daylight that most of us aren't using anyway. The very fact that permanent daylight time is more popular than permanent standard time (hence these perennial proposals) should tell you that your view is clearly out of sync with how most Americans use and feel about evening daylight.
Why do we want it to stay sunny for more of evening in the summer? A shared experience in much of the country is being at a restaurant or wedding or whatever and going inside for a while until the sun goes down and it becomes cool enough to enjoy the patio outside again.
Because we derive more pleasure from evening sunlight, which is why more folks clearly prefer daylight time in summer across America. The shared experiences you describe already happen and have been enjoyed all along under daylight time.
Similarly, shifting daylight later in winter would allow for more pleasant outdoor activity in winter, especially in parts of the country where our winters are mild.
I'm curious as to why this is such a sensitive issue with Americans in particular. Daylight Savings Time was introduced in Japan under US occupation, but it was dropped as soon as the occupation ended and to my knowledge it has not been a live issue since. Everybody there (including me for a time) seems to get along fine without it. A quick search makes it look like summer time is mostly limited to the US, Canada, and Europe. What explains the preference/demand for it in some places but not others?
In northern tier states people have to stay up almost to midnight to watch Fourth of July fireworks displays. I don't personally care because fireworks are boring, but it can be a pain for families with young kids.
Based on my own experience, it is true in Montana, where I lived for many years and still visit frequently in the midsummer. The sun may go down around 9, but twilight tends to linger a long time that time of year.
What is most confusing to me isn't stopping time changes. It's going with DST. My instinct is it would make far more sense to make standard time permanent? I don't get why DST is the preferred option
If that were at all popular, it could already happen without federal intervention. A handful of states do stay on standard time year round. Arizona (who is pretty far west in their time zone, and effectively jumps from Mountain Standard time to Pacific Daylight time in the summer). Hawaii (which is close enough to the equator to not have significant changes in sunrise and sunset throughout the year, and some counties in Indiana (who are also pretty west in their time zone).
There's nothing preventing other states from going to standard time other then the popularity of Daylight time.
I'm old and I remember how quickly your Congress reversed permanent DST. (I was a young adult.) I might point out that people often forget things they should remember, e.g. what it was like being a teenager.
I think you're "wrong" about seasonal daylight time but I'm enough of an adult to realize that a lot of people like it, in good faith, and that means it's not obvious what the "right" answer is. (Though to my OCD-ish eyes it seems like an odd name/thing confusion.)
Being a timezone nerd I'll point out that people and their governments love moving to the zone east of them, and thus to later sunrises and sunsets. E.g. most of western Europe is in the "wrong" zone (CET), and most of Indiana and Michigan moved to the Eastern Time Zone in stages in the 20th century.
I obviously agree with the one hour east time zone theory. I just think Josh is overstating the aversion to that theory in the winter time.
If standard time were popular, states would already do that (like Arizona and Hawaii). Federal law has always allowed the opt-out for standard time... it only requires if you use daylight time, you use it on the mandated days.
It's crazy how popular this idea has remained even though so many devices you used to have to adjust - a minor annoyance, but a shared one - now do it automatically.
Twenty years ago, I'd have to change the time on my computer, oven, microwave, watch, and car twice a year. Now, everything uses NTP to update except for the oven and microwave. Who gives a shit about spending 2 minutes resetting those times?
That's not quite true. Almost everything does. We still have a few clocks around the house, though the biggest head ache for me is I have to change the clock on 3 cars (some of which have multiple clocks, and some of which have weird sync issues when I change them).
There are just enough things that I forget about those other ones and then end up thinking I'm suddenly an hour late or an hour early.
I live in MA and just wrote to Markey to say I oppose this but also to say "head spinning ritual" is a bit much for a guy who's clearly old enough to remember when ALL clocks had to be adjusted manually.
In generaly I agree that becoming a nation of complainers has had very bad results. I find the best approach is to compare downsides of policies, to demonstrate there will always be something to complain about - it's just a matter of which you accept
The bill is so badly written that it would force Puerto Rico and other territories to use DST even though they have never had it and don’t want it. Why am I not surprised that its sponsor is from Florida?
This is also true with the wealth tax proposals. We know that a number of European countries have tried them in the past and ended up repealing them. That’s not necessarily dispositive, but at a minimum any advocates for a wealth tax should be forced to explain why those earlier efforts failed and how their proposal is different and will thus succeed.
I'm in the camp that hates the seasonal time changes. The whining you quote is in fact over the top, but I do find it very annoying, especially in the spring, and I don't benefit from it. When I lived in Japan without summer time, I did not miss it. Incidentally, I have several wall clocks around my house that need to be manually adjusted, because I don't want to have to go get my phone or go to the computer and look at it every time I want to know what time it is.
What exactly is so bad about year-round standard time? I think we should embrace the natural cycle of day and night instead of trying to use clock tricks for the sake of people who enjoy particular kinds of activities at particular times of day.
So I'm going to push back on a couple of things Josh says:
1) people in northern states will complain when they find they are commuting in the dark in the wintertime.
The issue with this argument is they already commute in the dark in the winder. I grew up in Washington and in the wintertime the sun would rise sometime on while I was on the bus. So I would get on the bus in the dark and arrive in at school when it was light. That won't (and didn't) change because year round daylight savings time.
Also, in the winter, people who work normal jobs also commute in the dark on their way home. (It used to trick me into working longer when we did the time shift and the trigger of the sun going down to leave was no longer accurate).
2) This time will be just like when we did it in the 1970's.
2a) it was imposed from above.
I was alive in the 1970's and remember the shift to full daylight time. It had almost no impact on me, but I remember that it was a) expected to be temporary, and b) it was imposed from on high. We were in the middle of an energy crisis and the government was imposing the equivalent of austerity measures. It also included the nation wide 55 speed limit. The negative reaction had as much do to with the dissatisfaction with the energy crisis than anything else.
2b) this time it's bottoms up.
Almost everyone I know, including many you lived in the 1970's, are in favor of no longer futzing with the clock. This grass roots call didn't exist in the 1970's. We already have extended daylight time to be more than 6 months. Europe has been thinking about going full time daylight time. Europe already lives with artificially stretched time zones to stay in sync with one another. Spain is west of the UK and runs on a time zone 1 hour east of the UK.
3) My biggest head ache with the time shift is 4 times a year I have to figure out what time zone any given meeting I have scheduled is one. Almost all of my work meetings are international, so if they are scheduled in the US, then the meeting time doesn't change, but if they are scheduled in Europe, they change for 2 weeks while we are on daylight time and Europe is on standard time.
I personally am in the 'I'd rather be on daylight than standard time year round, but I'm OK with the time shift' camp. I would despise going full time standard time. Most of the people around me want to dispense with the time shift.
Seems like this shouldn't be a big deal. People can just adjust their schedules to make their preferred sunshine tradeoffs regardless of what time the government says it is. Schools and workplaces can implement winter hours if their customers or employees complain about a lack of morning sunlight. Who put the government in charge of time anyway?
Because the government mandated time affects when certain things happen (when government offices open, etc.). Time zones are an artificial creation because once we started moving fast enough to regularly communicate over large distances, it was more convenient to set all our clocks to the same time over those large distances, than to set those clocks to correspond with 12:00 matching the solar new). Keeping business times in synch is generally useful to society. Not many employees have the ability to 'set their own hours' with their employers, so individuals setting their own schedule independent of this common coordination is not really realistic. If it were we wouldn't be having these discussions.
I don't object to the government setting the time (who else would?), but I agree in so far as it should be on people with specific lifestyle preferences to make choices suitable for themselves, instead of relying on the government trying to nudge society in their direction by messing with the clock. I don't want to be inconvenienced for a week or so twice a year and gain nothing from it, just to give people more outdoorsy than I extra time to do their thing after work without artificial lighting for part of the year.
It's just easier to change the clock than negotiate a shared agreement by large numbers of people to shift the day. Imagine a school decides to open an hour earlier for part of the year - well the parents might still have workplaces that haven't budged
I’m with you on this. I’m a morning runner (I have to be because of my work schedule) and if this went into effect I’d have to bring a head lamp for most of the year because of this.
They want policies that have an immediate effect on them and don’t care about long term consequences. Also, they hate the opposite: policies that require patience and delayed gratification to see the benefits. Social Security reform, YIMBYism, supply side economic reforms, deficit reduction, are things voters either hate or are not enthused about but are seen as good policy. For those people won’t see any benefit short term or they may see short term pain at first and require time to see any positive effects from them. Foresight is not a strength of populist policy.
There's a part of me that really hopes they do this. I can't think of a more banal, ridiculous, and yet effective "touching the stove" lesson than this.
Agree by and large - however I don’t understand why we can’t change clocks on Saturday instead of Sunday to give everyone two days to adjust before the workweek or school week?
I don't like changing the time at all, but if American public opinion is so pro-DST that it must happen, I would rather this. Why is it Sunday?
While I’m glad your mom wasn’t bothered by DST, I’d like to gently suggest it may have been quite a long time since she had young children, and she may not remember how annoying it was because long term memories do not form well when you’re not sleeping well. I currently have young children, and it is indeed annoying to have yet another obstacle to good sleep and yet another logistical concern to manage artificially imposed twice a year.
As for missed appointments, I and my colleagues routinely miss meetings around DST time because I work with people in Europe, whose DST is offset from ours by a week and our joint meetings thus shift an hour. Even with my calendar handling this automatically, it only does so if I’ve managed to get the event associated with the correct time zone, and it can cause otherwise non-conflicting standing meetings to conflict if some are scheduled locally. This is not catastrophic, but i can vouch for the idea that DST (at least one that’s not globally observed) can cause professionals to miss appointments.
Finally, I completely agree that year round DST is a bad idea that’s been tried before, but why do we do it at all? I guess the Marco Rubios of the world just like staying up too late *so dang much* that we all have to change the clocks twice a year every year? Regardless of whether you think it’s childish, people really do find changing clocks annoying, as evidenced by these perennial bills to make it end, and we would all sleep better and have easier lives if we just stopped.
The reason we have seasonal daylight saving time is because of the trade-offs. Afternoon sun is a good trade for morning sun that would happen while we’re sleeping, but not for morning sun while we’re awake. Making a good trade at all times of year requires changing the clock so solar noon is later when days are longer.
Sunrise in much of the US tomorrow will be around 6:30 and sunset around 9:00. I just don’t see what would be so terrible about sunrise at 5:30 and sunset at 8:00. What actual benefits are we gaining here?
Plenty. A lot of folks are out and about in the evenings, especially in the summer, and there's no real need for early morning daylight that most of us aren't using anyway. The very fact that permanent daylight time is more popular than permanent standard time (hence these perennial proposals) should tell you that your view is clearly out of sync with how most Americans use and feel about evening daylight.
Why do we want it to stay sunny for more of evening in the summer? A shared experience in much of the country is being at a restaurant or wedding or whatever and going inside for a while until the sun goes down and it becomes cool enough to enjoy the patio outside again.
Because we derive more pleasure from evening sunlight, which is why more folks clearly prefer daylight time in summer across America. The shared experiences you describe already happen and have been enjoyed all along under daylight time.
Similarly, shifting daylight later in winter would allow for more pleasant outdoor activity in winter, especially in parts of the country where our winters are mild.
I'm curious as to why this is such a sensitive issue with Americans in particular. Daylight Savings Time was introduced in Japan under US occupation, but it was dropped as soon as the occupation ended and to my knowledge it has not been a live issue since. Everybody there (including me for a time) seems to get along fine without it. A quick search makes it look like summer time is mostly limited to the US, Canada, and Europe. What explains the preference/demand for it in some places but not others?
Yes, people will do daylight things when there is daylight. This doesn't really answer my question.
In northern tier states people have to stay up almost to midnight to watch Fourth of July fireworks displays. I don't personally care because fireworks are boring, but it can be a pain for families with young kids.
Where would that be true? The latest sunset on July 4th in the Lower 48 is 9:04pm, which puts fireworks at 9:30pm
Based on my own experience, it is true in Montana, where I lived for many years and still visit frequently in the midsummer. The sun may go down around 9, but twilight tends to linger a long time that time of year.
What is most confusing to me isn't stopping time changes. It's going with DST. My instinct is it would make far more sense to make standard time permanent? I don't get why DST is the preferred option
If that were at all popular, it could already happen without federal intervention. A handful of states do stay on standard time year round. Arizona (who is pretty far west in their time zone, and effectively jumps from Mountain Standard time to Pacific Daylight time in the summer). Hawaii (which is close enough to the equator to not have significant changes in sunrise and sunset throughout the year, and some counties in Indiana (who are also pretty west in their time zone).
There's nothing preventing other states from going to standard time other then the popularity of Daylight time.
I'll gladly join any campaign aiming to chip away at the popularity of Daylight Savings Time.
I'm in the opposite camp. I'm equally happy with full time DST or the status quo. I would not at all want full time standard time.
Depends on whether you are an evening person and live in the eastern part of your time zone
I'm old and I remember how quickly your Congress reversed permanent DST. (I was a young adult.) I might point out that people often forget things they should remember, e.g. what it was like being a teenager.
I think you're "wrong" about seasonal daylight time but I'm enough of an adult to realize that a lot of people like it, in good faith, and that means it's not obvious what the "right" answer is. (Though to my OCD-ish eyes it seems like an odd name/thing confusion.)
Being a timezone nerd I'll point out that people and their governments love moving to the zone east of them, and thus to later sunrises and sunsets. E.g. most of western Europe is in the "wrong" zone (CET), and most of Indiana and Michigan moved to the Eastern Time Zone in stages in the 20th century.
I obviously agree with the one hour east time zone theory. I just think Josh is overstating the aversion to that theory in the winter time.
If standard time were popular, states would already do that (like Arizona and Hawaii). Federal law has always allowed the opt-out for standard time... it only requires if you use daylight time, you use it on the mandated days.
Permanent standard time -- i.e. abandoning the practice of annually messing with the clock -- remains an option.
It's crazy how popular this idea has remained even though so many devices you used to have to adjust - a minor annoyance, but a shared one - now do it automatically.
Twenty years ago, I'd have to change the time on my computer, oven, microwave, watch, and car twice a year. Now, everything uses NTP to update except for the oven and microwave. Who gives a shit about spending 2 minutes resetting those times?
Some of us still have actual analogue clocks!
That's not quite true. Almost everything does. We still have a few clocks around the house, though the biggest head ache for me is I have to change the clock on 3 cars (some of which have multiple clocks, and some of which have weird sync issues when I change them).
There are just enough things that I forget about those other ones and then end up thinking I'm suddenly an hour late or an hour early.
I live in MA and just wrote to Markey to say I oppose this but also to say "head spinning ritual" is a bit much for a guy who's clearly old enough to remember when ALL clocks had to be adjusted manually.
In generaly I agree that becoming a nation of complainers has had very bad results. I find the best approach is to compare downsides of policies, to demonstrate there will always be something to complain about - it's just a matter of which you accept
The bill is so badly written that it would force Puerto Rico and other territories to use DST even though they have never had it and don’t want it. Why am I not surprised that its sponsor is from Florida?
Josh, DST was first started in 1916. Daylight Time and Standard Time was a mistake of solar stupidity and needs to be rectified
This is also true with the wealth tax proposals. We know that a number of European countries have tried them in the past and ended up repealing them. That’s not necessarily dispositive, but at a minimum any advocates for a wealth tax should be forced to explain why those earlier efforts failed and how their proposal is different and will thus succeed.
I'm in the camp that hates the seasonal time changes. The whining you quote is in fact over the top, but I do find it very annoying, especially in the spring, and I don't benefit from it. When I lived in Japan without summer time, I did not miss it. Incidentally, I have several wall clocks around my house that need to be manually adjusted, because I don't want to have to go get my phone or go to the computer and look at it every time I want to know what time it is.
What exactly is so bad about year-round standard time? I think we should embrace the natural cycle of day and night instead of trying to use clock tricks for the sake of people who enjoy particular kinds of activities at particular times of day.
Why not simply split the difference and move the time a half hour year round. Lots of countries are on the half hour of GMT.
So I'm going to push back on a couple of things Josh says:
1) people in northern states will complain when they find they are commuting in the dark in the wintertime.
The issue with this argument is they already commute in the dark in the winder. I grew up in Washington and in the wintertime the sun would rise sometime on while I was on the bus. So I would get on the bus in the dark and arrive in at school when it was light. That won't (and didn't) change because year round daylight savings time.
Also, in the winter, people who work normal jobs also commute in the dark on their way home. (It used to trick me into working longer when we did the time shift and the trigger of the sun going down to leave was no longer accurate).
2) This time will be just like when we did it in the 1970's.
2a) it was imposed from above.
I was alive in the 1970's and remember the shift to full daylight time. It had almost no impact on me, but I remember that it was a) expected to be temporary, and b) it was imposed from on high. We were in the middle of an energy crisis and the government was imposing the equivalent of austerity measures. It also included the nation wide 55 speed limit. The negative reaction had as much do to with the dissatisfaction with the energy crisis than anything else.
2b) this time it's bottoms up.
Almost everyone I know, including many you lived in the 1970's, are in favor of no longer futzing with the clock. This grass roots call didn't exist in the 1970's. We already have extended daylight time to be more than 6 months. Europe has been thinking about going full time daylight time. Europe already lives with artificially stretched time zones to stay in sync with one another. Spain is west of the UK and runs on a time zone 1 hour east of the UK.
3) My biggest head ache with the time shift is 4 times a year I have to figure out what time zone any given meeting I have scheduled is one. Almost all of my work meetings are international, so if they are scheduled in the US, then the meeting time doesn't change, but if they are scheduled in Europe, they change for 2 weeks while we are on daylight time and Europe is on standard time.
I personally am in the 'I'd rather be on daylight than standard time year round, but I'm OK with the time shift' camp. I would despise going full time standard time. Most of the people around me want to dispense with the time shift.
Seems like this shouldn't be a big deal. People can just adjust their schedules to make their preferred sunshine tradeoffs regardless of what time the government says it is. Schools and workplaces can implement winter hours if their customers or employees complain about a lack of morning sunlight. Who put the government in charge of time anyway?
Because the government mandated time affects when certain things happen (when government offices open, etc.). Time zones are an artificial creation because once we started moving fast enough to regularly communicate over large distances, it was more convenient to set all our clocks to the same time over those large distances, than to set those clocks to correspond with 12:00 matching the solar new). Keeping business times in synch is generally useful to society. Not many employees have the ability to 'set their own hours' with their employers, so individuals setting their own schedule independent of this common coordination is not really realistic. If it were we wouldn't be having these discussions.
I don't object to the government setting the time (who else would?), but I agree in so far as it should be on people with specific lifestyle preferences to make choices suitable for themselves, instead of relying on the government trying to nudge society in their direction by messing with the clock. I don't want to be inconvenienced for a week or so twice a year and gain nothing from it, just to give people more outdoorsy than I extra time to do their thing after work without artificial lighting for part of the year.
It's just easier to change the clock than negotiate a shared agreement by large numbers of people to shift the day. Imagine a school decides to open an hour earlier for part of the year - well the parents might still have workplaces that haven't budged