Permanent Daylight Saving Time? Florida Says Yes, but It’s Not So Simple

Yes! Bravo to Florida.<p>I don&#x27;t care what timezone California wants to be in—PST or MST—as long as we stop the nonsense of changing between two timezones every year. This coming Sunday is another DST change, and with it will come countless small nuisances, immeasurable drowsiness and lost productivity, and a non-trivial number of injuries or worse.<p>Just pick a timezone and stick with it!

I wouldn&#x27;t mind everyone moving to UTC. Sure, only people in Greenwich would be able to eat lunch at 12 noon. But at least it would simplify my life as a programmer.

I am fully in favor of this. I enjoy having more sunlight after work when I can actually go out and enjoy it.

&gt; <i>In parts of Maine, for example, between Thanksgiving and Christmas, the sun sets before 4 p.m. — more than an hour earlier than it does in Detroit, at the other end of the Eastern time zone.</i><p>Why is the solution &quot;permanent daylight savings&quot;? Why is it not &quot;let&#x27;s split up the timezones better&quot;?

I hope my own state follows suit.<p>Before I became a parent, I found the shift to and from daylight savings time a mild annoyance.<p>By the time I had an infant and a toddler, I was roundly cursing whomever decided that arbitrarily slip-shifting our clocks twice a year was a good idea. Kids&#x27; sleep schedules don&#x27;t adjust instantaneously, and when they&#x27;re too young for explanations to mean much it means it&#x27;s a twice-a-year festival of not-enough-sleep.

I don’t get the downright hatred that some have for DST. If we were perpetually on winter time, then at my latitude during the summer the sun would rise at 5 in the morning which is too early for many people. If we were to be perpetually on summer time, then in winter the sun will not rise until after 8, with people starting to work before the sun came up.<p>Is there something wrong with wanting the sun to come up at a semi-standard time of 6–7? Is it just the system we have in place?

&gt; The problem? Florida doesn’t have the authority to adopt daylight saving time year-round.<p>&gt; The federal government controls the nation’s time zones, as well as the start and end dates of daylight saving time. States can choose to exempt themselves from daylight saving time — Arizona and Hawaii do — but nothing in federal law allows them to exempt themselves from standard time.

This is reason #532 or so why we need gigantic libraries to deal with dates and times. &quot;24 hours in a day&quot;, &quot;60 seconds in a minute&quot;, lol, no.

If I&#x27;m reading this correctly (&quot;Daylight saving time shall be the year-round standard time of the <i>entire state</i> and all of its political subdivisions&quot;), this is going to be terrible for people living in or near Pensacola. The far end of the panhandle is in Central time, so it&#x27;s going to be an hour (or two) ahead of everyone else around them in the winter.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.timetemperature.com&#x2F;tzus&#x2F;current_time_in_florida.shtml" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.timetemperature.com&#x2F;tzus&#x2F;current_time_in_florida...</a>

&quot;Even if the governor signs the bill, nothing will happen now. Congress, rived over tariffs and gun control and immigration, would have to act on clocks — or the Transportation Department would have to issue a new regulation, an option the Florida legislation does not mention.&quot;

One thing that DST discussions on HN always omit is that not everyone works as a software engineer with a reasonably flexible culture and a 10AM start culture. People who work at coffee shops, retail stores, foodservice prep, etc. often need to be working by 5 or 6AM, they’re just not as politically powerful as the wealthy who have schedule flexibility. They often have 2+ hour commutes on public transportation, and permanent DST means they’ll be working an extra hour in the dark (they already start work in darkness) and will be in bed when it’s still light out.

I&#x27;m torn on this. Yes, having a shift of a full hour in a week is obnoxious. However, the natural sun up and sun down time changes so dramatically in its own, that it is hard to really complain about it. If anything, I could see society moving to a time more based on when the sun comes up. Yes, there are difficulties scheduling something with someone across distance on the earth. But... I don&#x27;t see a practical solution to that.

Assuming the feds don&#x27;t change on their end, what&#x27;s stopping Florida from joining Atlantic Time (and declining D.S.T.)? I looked at 15 USC 261-264 which defines the time zones, but except for some exceptions about Idaho and Texas&#x2F;Oklahoma, I don&#x27;t see anything that specifies which zone each state needs to be in (or other geographical specifications)

commenters seem to be missing the sentence about &quot;Florida doesn’t have the authority to adopt daylight saving time year-round.&quot; this is just state politicians being state politicians. Nothing to see here. Lets just say Florida politicians probably have more important things to do and aren&#x27;t doing them, and leave it at that.

This is great in principle, but doing it state-by-state in drips is going to cause more problems than it solves, particularly if different states decide on DST vs Standard.<p>The federal government needs to abolish one or the other across the board.

My parents live in Orlando...this is going to really confuse me when I call them from New York, which used to be the same time zone.<p>Oh well, I think this is the right decision in the long run, I hope the rest of the states follow.

This makes Florida daylight savings time permanent. It does not end daylight savings time, it ends standard time.<p>Update: Which doesn&#x27;t actually happen unless Congress <i>also</i> &quot;amends 15 U.S.C. s. 260a to authorize states to observe daylight saving time year-round&quot; which is the wording used in the Florida bill that&#x27;s passed. Unclear if the governor signs it, this isn&#x27;t a law yet.

Tomorrow (March 9), the sun rises at 6:05 am in Pensacola. This bill would have it rise at 8:05 am. A couple of months ago it would have risen, in their new found EDT life, at 8:46am.<p>It&#x27;s weird, given that the panhandle is solidly republican, that the GOP dominated Florida legislature wants give those folks a ~9am sunrise. They are probably very lucky it&#x27;s not likely to happen.

- The winters on the central Florida coast are beautiful.<p>- I work 9 hours a day, at a job I loathe, in a building with no windows.<p>- Anyway, I&#x27;d like to enjoy some sunshine at the end of the day after work (that is, until I rage quit my job and become a full-time beach bum, in which case the extra sunlit hours in the evening will be a boon to my panhandling). So, in any case, I&#x27;m all for this.

We keep track of time so can coordinate our actions. We be better off using ONE timezone world wide.<p>But it&#x27;s going to get increasingly easier to deal with time zones. Computers and artificial intelligence will see to that. So I don&#x27;t see much impetus to get people to change this.

Iceland went to a permanent DST (GMT) back in the 60’s. But health officials are seriously advocating moving Iceland back closer to the solar noon (GMT-0100). Apparently consistently waking up way before sun rise may have negative consequences on the general public.

Since devices that automatically set their own time are so common now I’ve sometimes wondered why we don’t try moving the time forward&#x2F;back by some smaller increment each day instead of a full hour twice a year.

Eliminating changes for DST - good.<p>Introducing a fifth timezone in the lower 48 - bad. Are they trying to open a stock exchange in Miami to open an hour earlier than New York?<p>Just dump this abomination of DST and stay on Standard Time.

Nearly good job Florida. I hate DST for personal and professional reasons, but this is a very &quot;Florida&quot; reaction to dealing with this problem.

Does anyone why they voted to stay in permanent daylight-savings instead of permanent standard time?

What are they doing with the panhandle? It&#x27;s on Central Time, not Eastern.

this is going to be annoying to implement in software.

Here’s hoping Texas will follow.<p>Governor Abbott, are you listening?

&quot;Sunshine Protection Act&quot; oh ffs

EVERYONE USE UTC!

Big props to ending the madness of skipping 1h back and forth each year.<p>However, what&#x27;s wrong with tracking solar noon, so it&#x27;s near 1200 instead of being near 1300? (if you argue you want more time with daylight after work, why not just set your work hours as 8-16, or even 7-15, instead of manipulating all other people&#x27;s clocks).

As a web developer: screw you Florida!