meanwhile...

[redbird]

A few days ago, the US Senate passed a bill for permanent daylight saving time by unanimous consent, surprising a lot of people. It transpires that the people surprised includes most of the senate.

This is a thing Marco Rubio and Ed Markey have been pushing for the last few years, getting nowhere beyond the occasional "here's something Sen. Markey did" news article. When Rubio asked for unanimous consent on Tuesday, he expected a specific senator, Roger Wicker, to object. He deliberately waited until Wicker was in Washington before asking for unanimous consent, but Wicker says he was saving his energy for more important issues.

As for why none of the other senators objected: apparently they didn't realize this was going to happen. Rubio's office says they sent the usual notices to other sentators, whose staffers may have decided this wasn't worth worrying their bosses about, since it wasn't going anywhere.

We get one delightful quote:

“It’s literally an issue my staff and I had never discussed and they made an assumption that I don’t really care about daylight saving time,” said Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE). “And I don’t know if I do! I’ve never taken five minutes to stop and think about it.”

Guy, if you don't know whether you care about something that's part of your life, because you've never taken five minutes to think about it, you don't care.

Comments

[otter]

Geez. And they're the ones "in charge". SMH. I won't miss setting clocks ahead and back, that's for sure.

[calimac]

Wow. Never previously, whenever the topic has come up, have I encountered somebody who cares so little about it as Sen. Coons.

(As I've written: I hate changing clocks. But I'd hate year-round DST more, and I'm not even the one who'd have to get up in the dark all winter.)

[redbird]

And he's from Delaware. If a senator from Hawai'i said he didn't have an opinion on the subject, that might mean "Hawai'i doesn't do DST because we're in the tropics, the people who live further north should work it out."

[alexseanchai]

I assume he isn't responsible for changing any clocks in his household

my moderately strong opinion on the matter is, changing clocks fucking sucks, and if we're to be sensible enough to stop doing it, we should stop doing it in a manner that minimizes the average distance between solar noon and clock noon

[calimac]

I agree - and further, minimizing the distance would also mean correcting a lot of silly time zone boundaries. Indiana and most of Michigan (outside the Detroit area, anyway) have no business being in the Eastern zone.

[redbird]

That assumes they don't make the changes based on other considerations. There was a proposal for year-round DST in Britain, because some people thought it would be convenient for business if London was in the same time zone as Paris and Hamburg.

I'm in one of the places that's half an hour ahead of solar time with daylight saving, or half an hour behind without it. Living here I'd rather have year-round daylight than year-round standard time; if I was still in New York I'd rather have standard time year-round. I suspect that if the state government was given the choice, they'd probably do whatever New York does, rather than try to find out what the people of Massachusetts think.

[mindstalk]

Boston could usefully be on Atlantic time, like Chile, but the local elites may want to be on NY time.

[lcohen]

well i never thought i'd agree with senator rubio about anything but i'd actually be in favor of permanent DST--unlike calimac above, i hate getting off work when it is still dark out more than i dislike getting up in the dark--but then i get up in the dark a lot of the time anyway. but having it be dark when i get off work--it feels like the day is over and i can't do anything else and really, there's a lot i should be doing.

[brooksmoses]

I think that "if you don't know whether you care about something that's part of your life, because you've never taken five minutes to think about it, you don't care" is fair for whether one personally cares about a thing -- but I would hope that what he means is that he doesn't know if he professionally cares. Which is to say, whether the constituents he represents care about it.

[coth]

My immediate thought is that, as usual, the rules are being made by the people who have no idea who is impacted or how. The people who are seriously inconvenienced or endangered by the mismatch of light levels in their local environment to the formal clock schedules of a global society probably don't include most senators.

[vass]

"by those who show up", as they say.

[readerjane]

I'm glad we're finally moving forward to a year-round stable clock. I wish it was toward year-round Standard Time (boo! for later sunrise in winter) but it will still be an improvement.