California may vote on permanent daylight time

The legislators have approved a bill to allow California voters to decide whether the state should move to permanent daylight time. The governor now has less than 12 days to veto. Even if voters say yes, federal approval will be required. http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/technology/20180622/year-round-daylight-sav... -- Steve Allen <sla@ucolick.org> WGS-84 (GPS) UCO/Lick Observatory--ISB 260 Natural Sciences II, Room 165 Lat +36.99855 1156 High Street Voice: +1 831 459 3046 Lng -122.06015 Santa Cruz, CA 95064 http://www.ucolick.org/~sla/ Hgt +250 m

"Steve" == Steve Allen <sla@ucolick.org> writes:
Steve> Even if voters say yes, federal approval will be required. Steve> http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/technology/20180622/year-round-daylight-sav... No. No. Just no. Don't ruin "sun is overhead at noon". Permanent non-DST, sure. Permanent-DST is confused people thinking DST is cool. -- Randal L. Schwartz - Stonehenge Consulting Services, Inc. - +1 503 777 0095 <merlyn@stonehenge.com> <URL:http://www.stonehenge.com/merlyn/> Perl/Unix/Dart consulting, Technical writing, Comedy, etc. etc. Still trying to think of something clever for the fourth line of this .sig

<<On Wed, 27 Jun 2018 11:41:27 -0700, merlyn@stonehenge.com (Randal L. Schwartz) said:
No. No. Just no. Don't ruin "sun is overhead at noon". Permanent non-DST, sure. Permanent-DST is confused people thinking DST is cool.
For most people, the sun *isn't* overhead at noon, and hasn't been since the introduction of standardized time zones. (Where I am right now, *with* DST, the sun is overhead at 12:11. In Eastport, Maine, on the eastern edge of the Eastern Time Zone, the sun is overhead at 11:53. In Traverse City, Michigan, close to the western edge of Eastern Time, the sun is overhead at 13:07. In San Francisco, it's at 12:40 -- which would be 11:40 without DST, recall -- and in Portland it's at 12:35. In Anchorage, 12:13.) DST, "permanent" or not, is people thinking that it's more difficult to change "business hours" than it is to change what the clocks say. "Permanent DST" is unimaginative people who can't fathom that there could be another time zone immediately to their east. -GAWollman

Garrett Wollman <wollman@csail.mit.edu> writes:
"Permanent DST" is unimaginative people who can't fathom that there could be another time zone immediately to their east.
Well, for California, I think it's just a matter of making the message comprehensible to the average person. "Stay permanently on the time zone that we're in for half the year anyway" is a lot easier to instantly grasp for folks who haven't spent lots of time thinking about time zones than "change California to the Mountain Standard time zone and do not use daylight saving time," and it means essentially the same thing apart from some tricky implementation details in computer representations that the average voter rightfully doesn't care about. -- Russ Allbery (eagle@eyrie.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

Randal L. Schwartz wrote:
Permanent-DST is confused people thinking DST is cool.
Money is driving this, not coolness. Owners of convenience stores, tourist attractions, and similar businesses profit more if we all get up earlier in the day, and they spend way more money to lobby the legislature about timekeeping than the rest of us do. The costs of getting up earlier (for example, it increases cancer rates) are not nearly as well known or measured and hardly anybody lobbies the legislature against daylight saving time. Speaking of cancer, remember that study I mentioned in November that reported that breast cancer rates in the US are 12% higher in the western parts of time zones, where people get up earlier in the solar day? In April, Harvard researchers published a similar study about liver cancer, and found an effect there too: they reported that moving west within a US time zone significantly increases the incidence of liver cancer. See: VoPham T, Weaver MD et al. Circadian misalignment and hepatocellular carcinoma incidence in the United States. Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev. 2018-04-10. https://dx.doi.org/10.1158/1055-9965.EPI-17-1052

http://capitolweekly.net/clock-ticking-daylight-savings/ So it seems like the vote is going forward and will happen in November? And if it get permanent DST, then I would assume it mean the entire California will be in same timezone as most of Arizona? I think that might lead to surrounding states like Nevada to consider adopting sane tz rule which could result in a unification of mountain and pacific time that might help people there a lot.

Phake Nick wrote:
So it seems like the vote is going forward and will happen in November? And if it get permanent DST, then I would assume it mean the entire California will be in same timezone as most of Arizona?
There will be a vote, but it won't do anything by itself. All it will do is allow the legislature to pass a law to not have DST, which alone would merely revert the state to PST all year. Quite possibly the legislature will also want to follow the lead of Florida and shift time zones; however, this is not a done deal, and the Florida move is still awaiting Congressional approval which may or may not happen. Joe Mathews of Zócalo Public Square suggested that if the measure passes, the legislature should split California into three time zones: one PST, one MST, and one PST/PDT (i.e., with DST). See: Mathews J. Three different time zones in California? It’s not as crazy as it sounds. Sacramento Bee. 2018-08-02. https://www.sacbee.com/opinion/op-ed/article215979935.html

On 2018-08-05 00:09, Phake Nick wrote:
http://capitolweekly.net/clock-ticking-daylight-savings/ So it seems like the vote is going forward and will happen in November? And if it get permanent DST, then I would assume it mean the entire California will be in same timezone as most of Arizona? I think that might lead to surrounding states like Nevada to consider adopting sane tz rule which could result in a unification of mountain and pacific time that might help people there a lot.
Given that Nevada and California have almost the same longitudinal extents with solar UT offsets about 8.00-7.35 and 8.15-7.35, zone UT-8 is a "natural" fit, unless residents feel they need later evening light and prefer later morning light. -- Take care. Thanks, Brian Inglis, Calgary, Alberta, Canada
participants (7)
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Brian Inglis
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Garrett Wollman
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merlyn@stonehenge.com
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Paul Eggert
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Phake Nick
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Russ Allbery
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Steve Allen