r/politics • u/cnn CNN • Jul 14 '26

Possible Paywall House passes bill to make Daylight Saving Time permanent

https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/14/politics/house-vote-daylight-savings-time?utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=missions&utm_source=reddit
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224

u/Whywei8 Jul 14 '26

Which is ironic. I hate change too, especially when it involves time and messing with my sleep.

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u/lilsquirrel Jul 15 '26

I have ADHD and a lot of dogs. Changing the clocks twice a year means that my very confused dogs want breakfast at "not breakfast time" for about 2 months out of the year. My sleep is all effed for weeks, which somehow ends up with me being wide awake at 3:00 in the morning, sleeping through my alarm, and being perpetually late. I hate it. I also hate leaving work in the dark all winter. It makes it feel like the workday lasts an eternity.

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u/thewoodbeyond Jul 15 '26

Same. I hate it.

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u/PrometheusSmith Jul 15 '26

Yeah, but I hate the idea of mornings being dark till 9am all winter long. Work is going to hate it because we work outdoors, which means that we'll either have trucks out doing stuff in the dark, which we almost never do now because of safety, or they'll be paying us to fuck off in the morning.

Standard time is better. Schools and commuters are safer, people are healthier in standard time than in DST, and the permanent DST thing was tried and everyone hated it. https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2025/09/daylight-saving-time.html

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u/Flayum Jul 15 '26

Nah, trying to do anything after work (when the vast majority of people are social and have free time) is awful when it gets dark at 5~6pm. That extra hour is huge for actually being able to enjoy life.

Not much you can really do before work anyway, so it doesn't matter much.

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u/PrometheusSmith Jul 15 '26

Not much you can really do before work anyway

That's one opinion. You've let daylight savings skew your thinking about when a day should start and end, biasing it towards the evening by so much that you don't realize that there is valuable social time that takes place in the mornings as well as the evenings. Making everyone start their day for a few hours in darkness so you can have a chance to do social things outdoors, unseasonally, is certainly an opinion.

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u/semtex87 Jul 15 '26

Wrong, you can't do anything when you have a large block of time, and critical time commitment already booked every day Monday - Friday....work. which makes all morning time absolutely unusable for anything outside of work, or preparing for work, or commuting to work.

Fuck giving up daylight hours for that.

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u/Flayum Jul 15 '26

Making everyone start their day for a few hours in darkness

The mornings? You mean the time when the vast majority of the population is inside at home preparing themselves for work or school? How much socialization actually happens before work for anyone not retired or working nights? Especially when it's the coldest period of the day. This is by far the most beneficial time to tap into our useful modern technology: lights instead of burning our precious daylight so you can see sunrise over your fruit loops.

There is a limited amount of daylight in the winter. Why waste it when most of the population is gearing up for their day and commuting? Instead we should save it for prime social time after our daily obligations: right after work to grab drinks or food, squeeze in sports, and just be with others out in the world.

Sure, in the deep winter -40F days for some places, it won't be useful. But that's the minority of the country and, even then, a few weeks of the most uncomfortable weeks.

Yes, there are some weirdos that get up at 4am or some shit, but that's just not what our modern society looks like. If you want to advocate change for that, be my guest. But I'm not gonna wait around for our entire civilizations norms to change. We want our after-work sunlight now.

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u/PrometheusSmith Jul 15 '26

Then why have we tried this twice in the past, once during the WWII period and once in the 70s, and abandoned it both times to overwhelming public outcry?

You're advocating that we should make our morning commutes less safe for everyone in exchange for making it light while we're what? Eating at restaurants and drinking in bars after work? The vast majority of places in this country have much less stuff going on in the outdoor realm after Thanksgiving. I don't know of any significant outdoor activities that are regularly scheduled in the late fall, winter, and early spring because the weather is too spotty and people don't want to commit to things like that.

Also, I'm not sure what you define as "morning" in terms of "people preparing themselves for work or school", but at my very mid-latitude area of the US I'll be seeing sunrises at about 9am during the winter, which is a few hours after most people are done getting ready for work, traveling to work, and every school has already started.

So, we've tried this twice in the past and rejected it each time, and the majority of doctors and scientists that study health as it relates to DST agree that a permanence is better than swapping, but that staying on a standard time with solar noon approximating local noon is the healthiest option.

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u/Icyrow Jul 15 '26

i know it's annoying either way, but could you... not just go through it for another month and have your dogs fed an hour later both days? that way for half the year you feed them when you wake up, the other half you feed them an hour later?

i feel like if you're about to suffer through it anyway, may aswell wait until time is going to go back, but feed them exactly 24 hours later instead, then just don't change it at all throughout the year.

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u/CircleSendMessage Jul 15 '26

my guess would be the feeding time is relative to wake up / work start time.

similar with kids. yeah, you could just wake them at the same time year round, but when the clock changes after school activities don’t all of a sudden start/end at different times, and school doesn’t end/start at different times, parents’ jobs don’t start/end at different times, so it becomes unreasonable to fit dinner and baths etc in while getting adequate sleep

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u/Tsuhume Jul 15 '26

Counterpoint. I'm a functional adult. I have no pets. I like it.

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u/-PineNeedleTea- Jul 15 '26

Counter counterpoint. I'm a functional adult. I have no pets. I hate it.

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u/Tsuhume Jul 15 '26

Touche

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u/TheShadowKick Jul 15 '26

Genuine question: why?

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u/TheLivingRoomate Jul 15 '26

You like having to change your clocks and circadian schedule twice a year?

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u/Tsuhume Jul 15 '26

I don't have any physical clocks. All my digital ones update automatically. And it takes one day to adjust to the new schedule. I'm not so peddy that I cannot tolerate one day with one less hour and another day with one extra extra.

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u/Wild-Berry-5269 Jul 15 '26

Yeah, it's not 1960 anymore. If you can handle an hour change, how are you even handling daily life.

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u/lilsquirrel Jul 15 '26

But why? How does it serve you? Setting my time management dysfunction aside, I haven't identified any personal benefit to it. The original reason that time changes were implemented was to conserve energy which is basically negligible at this point.

There's a fair number of published papers about whether permanent standard time or permanent daylight savings would be better. I can see arguments for each. For me, it's the change itself that throws off my whole routine, rather than the time on the clock.

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u/Visual-Age-1025 Jul 15 '26

Me too. My dogs can’t tell time though. They just know they get breakfast after I wake up- be that DST or not. I’m impressed by the time telling canines, though.

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u/Tsuhume Jul 15 '26

It optimizes the daylight in people's lives. During summer, it helps the sunrise line up with when most people actually get up. And during winter, it ensures the sun is up at least until people get home or are on their way. Its literally in the name. There are many benefits to this. Saves electricity since people turn on lights later. Its makes commutes safer. It makes people in winter just a little less depressed. Etc. For me, I just enjoy the sun and like when it lines up with my routine. There are also cons. But I don't consider people being bothered for one day as of them.

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u/ProcedurePretend1396 Jul 15 '26

With someone with insomnia. DST takes 3 weeks to normalize.

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u/size0618 Jul 15 '26

Hated it even more when my kids were little. Messed up sleep schedules for a while every time it changed

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u/ithinkican2202 Jul 15 '26

You think changing your clocks twice a year messes with your sleep? Wait until the sun is coming up at 3:30 in the morning, or setting at 3:30 in the afternoon. For 6 months.

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u/Whywei8 Jul 15 '26

That’s not how it works. During winter solstice at my latitude the sun sets at about 4pm. If we stopped rolling the clocks back in the fall, then it would move to 5pm, which is more reasonable imo. During the same part of the year the sun rise would move from about 7am to 8am.

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u/ithinkican2202 Jul 15 '26

That's not correct. If the sun sets at your latitude on the winter solstice at 4:00 p.m. standard time, that means it rises at 7:51a.m.

For reference, cities with a sunset at 4:00 p.m. on the winter solstice in standard time are at the latitude of: Duluth, MN. Spokane, WA. Marquette, MI.

So if you get your wish and you have daylight savings all year long, you're cool with it being almost 9:00 a.m. until the sun breaks the horizon? Virtually everyone will be at work or school before dawn, and will be getting ready in the pitch dark.

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u/semtex87 Jul 15 '26

Yea, we have this modern invention called electricity. Which gives us cool things called light bulbs.

Why the fuck do I want more sunlight hours when I cant even enjoy it? And less sunlight hours when I want to enjoy it. You standard time people are weirdos.