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this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2026
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Very sad that this direction is the one they decided to go with, as opposed to permanent standard time.
Yeah fuck this I work early morning and I don’t need the sun in the mornings, especially when that trade off is it gets dark at 4:30 pm in the winter up where I am. Fuck that. I get off work and I get an hour or less of sunlight?! It’s so depressing. It’s not like the sun makes it any warmer when it’s -30 degrees and it’s too low to even hit me so no body heat or my car so no defrost… Give me my 9:30 sunset and wake up in the dark please and thank you
I... if the sun currently sets at 4:30 in the winter then permanent daylight time would only push that back to 5:30, hardly sounds like a significant difference to me.
When it’s the only time I have to spend with sunlight every second matters. I would just prefer it in the evening when I have more leisure time
How about compromise and move the clock forward half an hour
I say this too and people look at me crazy. Not being able to pick one or the other is crazy if you ask me.
Hard disagree. Standard time means it's dark by like 4:30 in the winter where I live. I'd much rather it get dark at 5:30.
This is it right here. To me, having to deal with more dark in the morning and getting a later sunset in the dark days of December is clearly the better option.
Honestly I don't care which way they set it, just so long as we can stop fucking with the clocks every 6 months. Schedules can move if needed, for those that need to.
Why are you italicizing standard like it’s any less made up than DST? Time is a human construct.
standard time more closely aligns noon with the sun reaching it's high point. That's generally regarded as healthier for our circadian rhythms, aligning with the sunlight.
Maybe for you. Solar-noon only aligns with human-noon at specific longitudes (and iirc only really on the equinox). The further out from the longitude (and the further out from the equinox), the more drift the there is between solar noon and human noon.
Grab a straight stick and a compass. We got a couple hours to test this the old fashioned way.
Try spending a winter in New England and only seeing the sun on your commute and on weekends. EST is a bigass timezone and New England is the furthest east.
I'd be happy if we were on permanent AST (GMT-4:00), but permanent EDT I guess is the same.
Huh? Solar noon is exactly the same for everyone on the same longitude. People at the equator have noon at the same time as someone in the north. The only difference is the zenith of the sun and how long the forenoon and afternoon are.
Unfortunately the timezones are pretty wide so only in the center of the zone would be the closest to the solar mean.
I think people fail to realize that Northern latitudes always have bigger changes in day/night time than southern latitudes. Changing the time zones doesn't change the fact that Northern latitudes will always have more daylight in summer and more darkness in winter than the Southern more equatorial latitudes.
Longitude != Latitude.
I get them confused sometimes but then I just think of Jimmy Buffet..."Changes in attitude...changes in latitude".
But yes. New England gets doubly-boned for being both on the far North and far East stretches of a very large time zone. Not as boned as, say, Halifax..or maybe Quebec or Montreal...but there's as many people in just Rhode Island as there are in Nova Scotia.
Think of it like a ladder, the long part of the ladder is the longitude and the ladder rungs are the latitude.
Seriously, summer days in Calgary were long as fuck compared to Texas compared to Panamá.
I spent 12 years living in actual England and Canada. And I've also spent plenty of time in Pamaná and Costa Rica. The real problem is the year-round work/school schedule. We should be changing that to match the sun instead of changing our definition of time of day.
I won't say the time zone system we have is perfect, far from it, but they way to fix the problems with it isn't to shunt every single time zone 15 degrees east.
The time zones themselves now aren’t even that aligned, the closest solar noon ever gets to actual noon in my time zone is 12:40. Also people are way too different from each other to say that everybody is better with solar noon being at noon. It’s pretty well documented that at least half of humans are night owls.
Well sure people are different. I'm definitely a night owl. But coming up with time divisions and time zones at all were ways to give a reasonable reference to the sun's position in both nearby and far away regions. It's of course never going to precise everywhere. But I don't really think a deliberate seasonal redefinition of the time to suit corporate whims is really the most logical solution, either. We could instead socially agree to have summer/winter business hours, for example. We already do that for days of the week. Just agree to adjust work from 9-5 to 8-4 instead of saying 9 is 8 for the next 7 months. You still get your after work sun while being more honest about where we are in the rotation and it will have the same physiological impact. We already have 38 time zones instead of 24. So we can make them more granular if we need to re-align closer to solar min/max within the population centers where it would matter most.
edit: probably relevant to add that I also think we should switch to a 13 month calendar of 28 day lunar months with a global holiday at the end, which goes for two days on leap years.
Didn't they do that a while ago, and no one wanted it? I read somewhere that they gave states blanket permission to switch to permanent standard time and they all wanted permanent daylight savings time instead.
In December of 1973 changing to permanent DST had a 79% approval rating nationwide. They passed it and Nixon signed the bill in January 1974. By February 1974 the approval rating was around 42% and the change repealed in October of 1974.
yes, in the mid 1970s. Went to year-round DST and moped on out after the first winter with it.
I also wouldn't mind allowing states to choose to be on permanent daylight time if they were so inclined, bu I want the default to be standard for a whole host of health reasons.
Now I'm curious about what multiple health reasons depend on sunrise being an hour earlier or later.
It has to do with lining up with circadian rhythms better, and getting the health benefits that come from better sleep.
Agree with this.
More sunlight in the morning makes it better for kids walking to school and not being run over due to our shit infrastructure.
You could work around that but let's be honest- schools and workplaces aren't going to adjust times ever to actually accommodate anything.
would you rather keep switching back and forth twice a year, or would you prefer one becomes permanent?
That's the nifty part: once it becomes the only one, "daylight saving time" BECOMES standard time.
Whether you choose that or the current "standard" time is almost completely arbitrary, and thus nothing to be sad about 🤷🏻
Just move to the other side of a time zone or just across the next ones boarder