In May, the House Energy and Commerce Committee voted 48-1 in favor of the Sunshine Protection Act. The U.S. Senate voted unanimously in March 2022 to make daylight saving time permanent but the House never took up the measure in the face of opposition. The proposal the House will consider next week would allow states to opt out.
This would be about the only good thing Republicans have done ever if they pass this. Hope they don’t let states opt out. When I lived up north by Canada, the logic was “you don’t want kids having to walk to/from school when it’s dark!!” Okay, so… wow, did you know they could change school hours.
School hours are engineered to make sure parents can drop their kids off at the state-funded daycare (which is what most parents consider school) and get to work on time…
And the reason the high-school kids get out first is so they can take care of younger siblings after school, which is a shitty way for teenagers to spend afternoons. (I was lucky, youngest of six.)
When I lived up north by Canada, the logic was “you don’t want kids having to walk to/from school when it’s dark!!” Okay, so… wow, did you know they could change school hours.
The same argument works the other way. Keep noon as the point where the sun is highest. Then change the times of things for appropriate daylight. Daylight savings is just people agreeing to get up an hour earlier. Instead of “9 to 5”, everyone agrees to work 8 to 4. Which coincidentally puts solar noon perfectly in the middle of the work day. Isn’t that a surprise!
People have a weird fixation on the inherent meaning of certain times of day. Like 9:00 a.m. is ontologically when work begins. It’s strange.
Landscapers and construction want to start as early in the day as possible, but are restricted by noise ordinances designed to protect the sleep of everyone else. They have to wait until after sunrise, and work in the heat of the day in the summer. Daylight Savings Time pushes the summer heat back an hour, letting them work longer and safer.
On standard time, summer sunrises can occur as early as 3:30AM on the eastern edge of some time zones. Forcing landscapers and construction to wait four hours after sunrise until a noise ordinance expires is absurd. Standard time is terrible in the summer.
DST does push the morning back, with morning twilight as late as 9am at high latitudes on the western edge of a time zone. But the solution to that is to redraw the time zone boundaries, not force the entire country to continue doing something as stupid as the time change. These places can adopt DST of the next zone to the west, which is standard time for their current zone.
DST in winter takes an hour of morning daylight from the boss, and gives it back to us as an hour of daylight after work, where we can put it to use. Kids can enjoy year-round outdoor extracurriculars, instead of being limited from November to March due to entirely arbitrary clock settings.
