152
How the sunrise and sunset times would be affected by abolishing daylight saving time in the USA. Would you prefer to keep it or drop it?
(files.catbox.moe)
this post was submitted on 14 Dec 2024
152 points (93.7% liked)
AskUSA
170 readers
334 users here now
About
Community for asking and answering any question related to the life, the people or anything related to the USA. Please keep in mind:
- !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world - politics in our daily lives is inescapable, but please post overtly political things there rather than here
- !flippanarchy@lemmy.dbzer0.com - similarly things with the goal of overt agitation have their place, which is there rather than here
Rules
- Be nice or gtfo
- Discussions of overt political or agitation nature belong elsewhere
- Follow the rules of discuss.online
Sister communities
Related communities
- !asklemmy@lemmy.world
- !asklemmy@sh.itjust.works
- !nostupidquestions@lemmy.world
- !showerthoughts@lemmy.world
founded 1 week ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
That's cool on paper but not in practice. If noon is at 12 then the solar day has to be symmetrical around that. But we don't really spend our day symmetrically around noon. Like 6 pm is early enough that this can still do some major activities. But 6am is so early no one thinks "oh I'll just get that major activity done before 6am"
Another example is 10 hours after noon is getting late and a good time to end the day. 10 hours before noon is 2am. If you're awake at 2am it's not because you're walking up.
You understand that these are all conventions and the associations between what constitutes "late" and "early" are entirely arbitrary, right? Literally any system of naming time could work in practice. If we wanted, we could set the entire world at UTC0 and just get used to the fact that it's noon at 6:00 in some places.
The disadvantage of daylight savings time is not actually that the sun doesn't line up to our expectation of the day, it's that it causes confusion.
I think daylight savings time comes from a human need to have our day match the natural cycles of the sun (because we don't want to fight our cicardian rhythm) and to have consistent schedules and routines through the year.
I hate it though, I agree it's pretty arbitrary and we can do better.