In the past six years, 19 states have made efforts to move to year-round daylight saving time. So what’s in the way?

  • rustyriffs@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I would like to ask a question, and hopefully someone much smarter can explain why it is or isn't a possibility.

    Why is it that an automated DST couldn't be implemented? In my head I'm imagining a time keeping ability that automatically adjusts, every day, to capitalize on the amount of daylight that is in a day during any given time of year. The amount of adjustment would be so incremental as to not even be noticeable really, to one's everyday routines.

    If clocks auto-adjusted each day, by milliseconds or whatever micro-amounts necessary, I feel like that would be so much easier than an abrupt 1 hour difference which throws everyone off because of how jarring it is.

    I don't like DST, but I can't help but wonder. If we HAVE to have it, then why can't it be better. I feel like we have the technology to be able to figure out a superior way of doing this.

    • WetFerret@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I believe this is how Google handles leap years and leap seconds on all of their servers. They kind of smear the difference out over a period of time so the difference isn't noticeable. Great for day to day activities, but people doing scientific measurements or other precision date work would probably have to use their own solution.

      • rustyriffs@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Not to sound negative towards those groups who use precision date work, but I think they should probably be using their own solutions anyway, and are probably more than capable of figuring out good solutions on their own. In my opinion, that definitely isn't a reason why the rest of us shouldn't have an agreeable (automated) standardization.

        Are the potential difficulties that these specific groups could face so drastic/detrimental that it just wouldn't work for some reason or another?

      • rustyriffs@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        No, but you'd probably want to update them more frequently. Pretty much everything I use to tell time (phone, watch, computer) is automatic anyway.