In a unanimous vote today, the US Senate approved a bill which would
1) Cancel DST permanently, and
2) Move every square inch of US territory 15 degrees to the east.
My opinion of this ought to be obvious from my rhetoric. Hopefully, it will
fail, because it's likely to be the end of rational time worldwide, and even
if you do log in UTC, it will still make your life difficult.
I'm poleaxed; I can't even decide which grounds to scream about this on...
Hopefully, the House or the White House will be more coherent in their
decision on this engineering construct.
I don’t follow why cancelling DST has the effect of moving the US fifteen degrees to the east. Also, your subject line reads “permanent DST”, but from your language the bill will be permanent standard time.
I haven’t read the bill, but I’m hoping you can explain your position more clearly.
Permanent DST has the same effect as cancelling DST and moving all the timezones up one hour. Since timezones are roughly sliced every 15 degrees of … longitude?, hefting the physical US 15 degrees eastward would have the same effect on timezones as just a legal glitch to change them.
The bill is "permanently move all US time zones one hour earlier (-8 thru -5 is
replaced permanently with -7 thru -4).
They are *calling it* "permanent DST", but that's not really what's happening,
in my engineering appraisal. Or my geopolitical one, but I don't lay claim
to professional opinions there.
-- jra
360 / 24 = 15. Because we'd standardize on DST instead of the old
railroad time zones. It's a variation on the old saw about Congress
repealing the inconvenient laws of physics.
If Canada doesn’t do the same thing at the same time, it’ll be a real hassle, dealing with a change from -8 to -7 crossing the border between BC and WA, for instance. It has to be done consistently throughout North America.
Ok, so the fifteen degrees is bogus, nothing moves, and all that is really happening is standard time is ending. The OP here wins an award for “obfuscating reality”.
No sweat. Fixing all the systems to comply with the new time rules is billable
The 15 degrees is kind of a joke. It means that "high noon", when the sun is at zenith, would occur roughly 15 degrees east of noon local clock time.
It's kind of like the meme showing a Native American saying, "Only a white man would cut a foot off of the top of a blanket, sew it on the bottom, and think he has a longer blanket."
I’m with the OP Jay that this will cause long term problems. The 15 degrees is not mentioned in the document just the change from “Standard Time” to “Daylight Time” permanently (they probably don’t even understand it is in 15 degree increments). This will cause problems in systems across many sectors. The entire world works on UTC + or - on a 15 degree scale. Except now the US which will be 15 degree scale -15 degrees. I doubt Canada, Central, or South Americas are going to follow this so the United States will always be 15 degrees off of what is considered “Standard Time” by the world.
The better solution would be to remove DST all together and tell everyone in the US to start work at 07:00 and get off work at 16:00 every day.
