We Gotta Talk About this Daylight Savings Time News

Not sports, but everybody is talking about this right now:

Holy shit. The Senate just unanimously passed a bill making daylight savings time permanent.

If this clears the House, no more changing the clocks twice a year. https://t.co/d85L72mzf8

— Andrew Desiderio (@AndrewDesiderio) March 15, 2022

If the House passes this, it wouldn’t go into effect until 2023. Gotta let airlines and other companies get straightened out first.

But the clock forward/clock back discussion is always interesting because everybody has a different routine. The most common complaint is that people want more light later in the day. You don’t want to be getting home from work at 5:25 p.m. in January and it’s completely dark out. Give us that extra time instead.

Conversely, do we want it to be dark at 8 a.m.? And what if you’re waking up at 6 a.m. already, so the sun isn’t up, regardless of a potential switch? That’s why it’s weird. If you work 2:30 p.m. to 11:30 p.m., aka the shitty shift we worked in television news, then you’re already going to work when it’s light and coming home when it’s dark anyway. We work so many different shifts and schedules in this country that there’s never gonna be a unanimous consensus here, but it seemed like momentum was slowly building to just keep DST permanent and stop fucking around with the clocks.

The most common dissenting complaint here seems to be winter morning darkness, i.e. are our kids gonna be sitting at the bus stop in cold blackness? People smarter than me note that the current latest sunrise of the year IN MOST CITIES is around 7:20 a.m., so if this passes, the very latest winter darkness you would get would be ~8:20 a.m. It varies based on where you live, so yes, you’d get some dark mornings, and maybe safety has to be taken into consideration, but we’d be doing away with depressing black darkness before the average 9 to 5 work day + commute ends.

I’m on team “picking up your kid in the dark sucks.” Give us the extra hour of sunlight up until 6:30 or so. It’ll do wonders for our collective mental health. Serenity now!

The US Senate voted unanimously on Tuesday to make Daylight Saving Time permanent.

Blogger and cartographer Andy Woodruff visualized what life might look like if we abolished DST, or kept it going all year, in a series of maps. pic.twitter.com/R14Sro1HCt

— Vox (@voxdotcom) March 15, 2022

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