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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
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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.