
In Tuesday's Vote, California Opts for Year-Round Daylight Saving - ourmandave
https://gizmodo.com/in-tuesdays-absolute-worst-vote-california-opts-for-yea-1830275687
======
rrauenza
This doesn't change anything right now -- it _allows_ the California
legislature to pick _either_ PST or PDT:

[https://votersedge.org/en/ca/ballot/election/area/73/measure...](https://votersedge.org/en/ca/ballot/election/area/73/measures/measure/3253?id=statewide-73-ca)

 _The way it is now

Federal law sets standard time zones for each area of the country. California
and other western states are in the Pacific Standard time zone. Current law
requires the time of each zone to move forward by one hour from early March to
early November each year during a period called Daylight Saving Time. During
this period, sunrises and sunsets happen one hour later. Federal law lets
states choose to stay on standard time all year long, but prevents states from
having year-round Daylight Saving Time.

What if it passes?

Prop 7 would allow state lawmakers to vote on changing Daylight Saving Time.
Lawmakers would be able to choose year-round Daylight Saving Time, if allowed
by federal law. Any change would require support from two thirds of
California’s Legislature. Until then, Prop 7 would keep California’s current
Daylight Saving Time schedule.

Budget effect

Prop 7 would have no immediate effects. Impacts on state and local government
would likely be very small._

edit: I think it is more of a referendum that Californians want a single
timezone rather than they specifically want PDT.

~~~
CalChris
It passed 60-40. The legislature would be foolish to ignore the electorate's
clear intent.

CA has only a single timezone, the Pacific Timezone.

~~~
tssva
I don't think the voters intent is clear. The question was whether the
legislature should be able to make the change not whether they should. If I
lived in California I would have voted to provide them the option but that
doesn't necessarily mean I think they should. I would expect further debate
around the subject at the time legislation is introduced.

Let's accept your premise that a vote for the referendum was in all cases a
vote for the change. The referendum requires 2/3rds of the representatives of
the people to vote to affect the change. It can certainly be argued that since
this level of support was included in the referendum and the referendum itself
failed to garner this level of support then the representatives should not
vote for the change.

~~~
JBlue42
Yes, this is kind of the issue with a lot of things (props/measures) we get on
the ballots. Some are worth a direct vote, others should be phrased in the way
you're describing as "this is an issue we'd like you to take up, research, and
debate".

I personally find it annoying that sometimes we end having to vote directly on
things that really fall under the job of our representatives.

~~~
mtgx
I think all democracies would benefit from referendums/petitions that simply
force the legislature to put the issue up for debate/vote.

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singingboyo
From [1], which is much better and more on-point, if still short: "Opponents
of the proposition argue [...] the sun wouldn’t rise until 8 a.m. during some
winter months, forcing children to walk to school or buses in darkness"

Maybe school shouldn't start so early then? Starting at 8:30-9 would reduce a
lot of that, though not all of it. Also, as a Canadian and Vancouverite... so
what? Darkness is a fact of life, get over it.

[1]:
[https://sacramento.cbslocal.com/2018/11/06/proposition-7-pas...](https://sacramento.cbslocal.com/2018/11/06/proposition-7-passes-
daylight-saving-time/)

~~~
jandrese
The local TV news used to run the same story every DST change.

Like walking to school in the dark is worse than walking home from school in
the dark?

The only advantage of the former is that it gives the sun a chance to warm up
the air a bit more so it's not quite as cold in the morning.

~~~
fatnoah
Not sure where you are, but where I'm from (Northeast US) the walk to and from
school were usually in daylight hours, unless one happened to be 1-2 hours
early or late.

~~~
Spooky23
It all depends. Usually schools stagger arrival times to maximize bus trips,
especially in urban areas where desegregation or integration with public
transit required suboptimal routing (from a distance POV).

My neighbors kid has a middle schooler who starts at 7:30 and a 1st grader who
starts at 9:30!

Personally, I went to a rural district with an 8:05 start time. The bus picked
me up at 6:40AM, and I typically didn't see daylight outside of school in
December.

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eridius
Maybe it's trying to be funny, but this article is the stupidest take on this
issue that I've seen.

~~~
mark-r
Yup. Ranting about losing one hour, once? It's either a flat attempt at humor
or the stupidest thing I've heard in a long time.

~~~
paulgb
It might be just an hour to you, but collectively the residents of California
stand to lose 4.5 millennia!

(But yes, it was the idea of losing time that convinced me this article is
either a humor or misguided)

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echevil
Grew up in a region without day light saving, I really don’t see the point of
changing clocks twice every year. I’d be very glad to see it getting abandoned

~~~
jcranmer
The real kicker is snow: in the winter months, if you get snow, you really
want as much sun in the morning as possible to aid snowmelt and other snow
clearing steps. In the summer months, moving extra sunlight to the afternoon
makes much more sense. DST is a compromise that gets you morning sun in winter
and afternoon sun in summer.

~~~
echevil
What’s wrong with just getting up earlier, on your own terms? Or just stay on
DST time zone forever?

~~~
function_seven
Most people don't determine their own schedules. They have to get to work, or
class by a specific time. Even independent contractors have to accommodate
their clients' schedules.

~~~
echevil
Companies can decide what schedule makes better sense then. Or if needed,
better rules can be established to solve those problems.

Even with day light saving, people don't work on the same schedule. Plenty of
them need to get up before sun rise or work until late night no matter what
the clock says.

~~~
function_seven
People don't work at the same time, but the time they work is determined by
other people's schedules. That's why janitors often work in the middle of the
night, and school starts before work, and the doughnut guy has to get to the
shop early in the morning.

By the way, I would also love to get rid of clock changes twice a year. I'm
mainly playing devil's advocate here. The drawbacks of winter morning darkness
are real, and will likely not be solved without DST. I just also think that
they're not worth screwing with the clock.

If I lived in a more northerly latitude, maybe I'd change my tune. But as it
is, I value daylight at 5pm way more than at 7am. The yearly "fall back" of
DST is like an insult added to the injury of winter.

~~~
ghaff
Living in a relatively northern latitude with fairly fixed hours far east in a
timezone, I used to really value DST (though would just as soon have been in
the next timezone east). Now, between lots of travel and flexible schedule, I
don't care that much though I still prefer whatever tilts toward more evening
light.

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_kst_
Proposition 7 doesn't immediately change anything. It authorizes the state
legislature to change the DST rules _if_ authorized by federal law.

Reading the text of the revised law, it does seem to emphasize the possibility
of going to year-round DST as opposed to year-round Standard Time (which is
what I would prefer).

One thing I'm not clear about is how the state legislature didn't already have
this authority. Prop 7 doesn't change the state constitution, just the state
Government Code.

[https://vig.cdn.sos.ca.gov/2018/general/pdf/topl.pdf#prop7](https://vig.cdn.sos.ca.gov/2018/general/pdf/topl.pdf#prop7)

~~~
dragonwriter
> One thing I'm not clear about is how the state legislature didn't already
> have this authority. Prop 7 doesn't change the state constitution, just the
> state Government Code.

The relevant Government Code provision establishing DST was adopted by the
voters (not the Legislature on its own) and, therefore, the legislature can't
change it unilaterally, only by sending an amending statute to the voters.

~~~
masonic

       it passed by less than the required % of votes in the legislature
    

... but existing law (1949 Prop 12) has been ignored for decades anyway.

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cafard
Will the lost hour disrupt the time-space continuum?

Curious to see a Californian writing for (supposedly) tech-savvy publication
echoing an old English superstition: [https://www.historic-
uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/Give-...](https://www.historic-
uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/Give-us-our-eleven-days/)

~~~
bootlooped
I think the first half of the article is written sarcasticly.

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User23
Already been tried in the '70s and it sucked:
[https://www.mercurynews.com/2016/10/30/the-year-daylight-
sav...](https://www.mercurynews.com/2016/10/30/the-year-daylight-saving-time-
went-too-far/)

------
jedberg
> general consensus is that Daylight Saving Time is better for farmers, and
> energy consumption, as well as being less disruptive to children who are
> particularly affected by the ping-ponging of the clock in the spring and
> fall.

I think the author is arguing _against_ getting rid of DST? In which case,
what he wrote above (which BTW is a link that goes to an article that backs up
not a single thing he said) actually goes against his point. It says that if
we stay on permanent DST, it's better for everyone.

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kenneth
The annoying thing about this proposition is that it proposes allowing the
legislature to attempt to move to permanent PDT… which requires changing our
timezone, something which requires an action from federal congress. If we had
simply chosen to go to permanent PST, we could stay in the summer time zone
and make the change without involving congress since it doesn't require
changing timezone.

Personally, I'd much prefer PST over PDT, which gives us sunlight later into
the day.

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taylodl
So when the US East Coast springs forward 1 hour California is then going to
be 4 hours behind? That's gonna make West Coast travel even worse.

~~~
philwelch
The opposite. California is going to UTC-7 year-round. The East Coast varies
between UTC-5 and UTC-4. California is effectively going to be in the exact
same time zone as Arizona, which is in Mountain Standard Time and does not
recognize DST.

Honestly, we should just abolish the Pacific time zone and then abolish DST on
the West Coast. Rename Mountain Standard Time to Western Standard Time.

~~~
Taniwha
the obvious follow on from that is to abolish timezones all together, all use
UTS, and simply change the times we go to work to match local conditions

~~~
rtkwe
No that's just awful, now instead of having a defined timezone boundary we
have a slow bleed between different areas and we have to look up to know what
a businesses hours are if we're not close enough to follow the same customary
time instead of just knowing what timezone they're in.

So now we're dealing with a patchwork of 'zones of similar customary times' as
areas with similar solar times move towards a similar clock so businesses can
coordinate and trade easily with local businesses. It'll be a mess so states
will probably organize together to make things simpler and have a similar set
of hours across the state. These pseudo-timezones will be slightly better and
states around a similar longitude will naturally order into a similar set of
customary times because their local solar times are roughly the same. Now
we've got pretty much the EXACT same situation as the current timezones
including a generalized offset from UTC so we gain nothing.

What exactly do you suppose we gain from abolishing timezones?

~~~
Taniwha
but isn't that what you have to do now, look up what timezone a business is
in. The only difference with this scheme is that you don't need to convert
between timezones to figure out when they're open in your timeezone

I live in the southern hemisphere and 'work' online in the northern - I have
to deal with the mess that is 4 different combinations of timezones every
year, and calendaring systems that are unable to handle the idea of knowing
WHERE a meeting is going to be held so they can get the time right

Really though people should change their work hours to match their timezones -
I live a long way south, we have long twilight in the summers and tiny days in
the winter, when it gets dark at 4:30 because we're squashed up against a
timezone boundary - I have to get up in the dark anyway, why not move our
winter work hours so we get a couple of hours daylight during the winter? it
would help with the Vit D issues

~~~
rtkwe
> but isn't that what you have to do now, look up what timezone a business is
> in.

Not really I know some of our offices are in India UTC +5:30 and some are in
Texas UTC -6 which are +11:30 and -1 respectively. With the current setup most
timezones follow state boundaries in the US so I know when it is there roughly
by the location. In the 'no timezone' setup (which is really just timezones
without the top down mapping) I have to hope they have business hours posted
somewhere convenient to look up instead of just finding their rough location.

The rest of that sounds principally a failure of tools than anything else.
Today you could just set all meeting times using UTC and let the users UI take
care of the mapping to local time.

But again my biggest issue with the no timezones system is we'll just be
getting rid of the defined boundaries in favor of undefined boundaries because
each area WILL wind up on roughly the current timezones anyways because they
roughly match to solar time as is.

> Really though people should change their work hours to match their timezones
> - I live a long way south, we have long twilight in the summers and tiny
> days in the winter, when it gets dark at 4:30 because we're squashed up
> against a timezone boundary - I have to get up in the dark anyway, why not
> move our winter work hours so we get a couple of hours daylight during the
> winter? it would help with the Vit D issues

This is more an argument for more flexible working hours than most anything
else.

~~~
Taniwha
Just setting up meeting times in UTC doesn't work right now if the nominal
location of the meeting switches to/from daylight time (the actual UTC time
changes)

I think that my solution to timezones simply is "more flexible working hours"

------
mabbo
All of this is patently silly.

The sun will rise and set at exactly the same times it always has. All you are
doing is changing your clock and deciding when to do things based on what the
clock says. Farmers don't care- they get up and work based on when it's sunny,
not based on what the clock on the wall says.

If you want children to be in school during daylight hours, modify the school
schedules. If you want to get that extra round of golf in, go to work early
and then leave work early. But don't drag the rest of society along with you
so that you can pretend you're not doing anything differently!

Ten years after DST dies, everyone will remember how silly it all was and how
they were always opposed to the madness.

~~~
LordDragonfang
Unfortunately 9-5 is deeply ingrained in our culture as the "standard working
hours", despite the 8-hour workday being a relic of the past.

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newnewpdro
The real problem with the time change is it happens over a single night.

When you're actually living in nature, waking up with the sunrise, you will
gradually wake up earlier or later as the seasons shift.

If our time changed gradually on a more natural pace it would be a whole lot
less disruptive and people wouldn't be losing daylight from their lives. We
have the technology today to make that happen. If everyone's clocks are
computerized and sycnhronized, we wouldn't even notice as minutes are quietly
added/removed by the system across many days.

~~~
recursive
Under this system, either some minutes will be longer than others, or we'll
have leap minutes every night. This sounds _more_ complicated, not less.

It might achieve the goal of having a sunrise at the same wall clock time
every day, but I don't really see a purpose for that. Sunsets will still vary.

~~~
newnewpdro
I made no claim of it being less complicated, and I am not aware of the
general public's primary issue with the time changing being one of complexity.

If the clocks are automated, nobody really notices the gradual change.

My perception is the public's major complaint is the jarring disturbance to
their lives an overnight +-1-hour change has.

~~~
recursive
As a person who works on software that cares about what time it is, and
already struggles with the existing DST rules, I think I would change careers
if this were adopted. Measuring the elapsed time between two instants would
become extremely difficult.

~~~
newnewpdro
We're already in a world where you really need to rely on external date+time
libraries to apply a locale-specific temporally-varying offset from UTC.

I don't see it as being a significant implementation difference if that offset
changes a smaller amount at midnight on a short sequence of days vs. a larger
amount at midnight on just one of those days.

Either way you need to be leap-aware.

~~~
recursive
The amount of information embedded in leap-awareness would be significantly
different. Right now DST is modelled as two different time zones that are
switched between. If you want to handle it the same way, I guess you'd need
365 (366?) "time zones" per time zone. I can't see how you can argue that's
not a significant implementation difference.

~~~
newnewpdro
Let's say we wanted to turn it into a gradient where we instead shifted five
minutes per night, so we need 12 days to transition an hour.

You could just add a transition countdown field "-" to the "S" and "D"
timezones being transitioned to, dropping it once the transition is finished.

e.g. for Pacific time:

PST -> PD-12T -> PD-11T -> PD-10T ... PD-1T -> PDT and in reverse: PDT ->
PS-12T -> PS-11T -> PS-10T ... PS-1T -> PST

If you already have the indirection of the table, it doesn't increase
implementation complexity to put some more rows in it.

I don't see where you got 365 zones per time zone, unless you thought I was
proposing we change the time a little bit every single day of the year. That's
entirely unnecessary to eliminate the practical nuisance of the sudden 1-hour
jump.

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Moto7451
I don't understand all the hubbub but I am for this. I bounce between the West
Coast and the East Coast on a regular basis.

If DST is made permanent in California then Southern California will have the
same nearly the same sunrise as Georgia when they change their clocks back.
Clearly Georgia makes it through the fall and Winter A-OK every year.

Is the concern mostly squared around Central through Northern California?

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mshenfield
Archive of stopdst.com:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20170420043300/http://stopdst.co...](https://web.archive.org/web/20170420043300/http://stopdst.com/)

No novel facts, just a pretty list of statements against Daylight Saving Time.

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gdubs
Anecdotally, my kids (all under 5), have already decided to ignore the time
change.

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Silvanm
Here's a tool I built to calculate how much sunlight you get thanks to DST.

[https://daylight-saving-time.muehlemann.com](https://daylight-saving-
time.muehlemann.com)

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dsl
It will be so nice to not have to change the time on all our servers twice a
year!

------
lettergram
I saw a good argument that adjusting the time to keep daylight as long as
possible during waking hours is an amazingly healthy thing.

Any decrease in daylight time dramatically increases rates of depression.

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CalRobert
1) Nothing is changing unless federal law changes. So basically, nothing is
changing

2) For those who have calls with people in Europe this would be a big plus
since the EU looks likely to go to DST year round. If this happens and
California keeps switching then UK/ROI/Portugal will be 9 hours off from CA
half the year, and western Europe 10 hours off. It's hard enough to schedule
calls with an 8 hour difference.

------
cwmma
Why would they switch to PDT year round as opposed to just switching to MST ?

~~~
vinay427
PDT and MST are the same time all year long, as far as I know, so there's no
effective difference. I suppose this means that other places in Pacific time
that have DST part of the year would be on the same labeled time zone as
California part of the year for cultural and historical reasons.

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arachnids
This is probably the most content-free article I have ever read.

~~~
baron816
Is it satire? Are they being facetious? I honestly can’t tell if they’re
serious. They don’t make an argument against permanent DST.

~~~
bootlooped
"This is clearly stupid, and something I’ve personally felt keenly since at
least 1994, when I wrote to my then Congressman Pete Geren and asked why he
supported Daylight Saving Time."

That passage marks the point where they admit it is satire. It's about half
way through.

~~~
rconti
I have no idea. It seems like the author wants permanent Standard time?

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rconti
_connects twitter account to make a comment_

 _doesn 't do a thing_

