Comment by fc417fc802
6 hours ago
Notably Washington state legislated the same change to DST years ago (instead of standard time, the morons!) but the federal government never approved the switch. AFAIK it's still pending. I remain unclear what authority the federal government has over such a matter and why Washington (or any other) state has opted to respect it. What are they going to do if a state just ignores them and switches their clocks?
Sometimes I get the impression that the spirit of states rights in the US has died.
> I remain unclear what authority the federal government has over such a matter
It's actually an enumerated power under Article I, Section 8, Clause 5:
> [The Congress shall have Power...] To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures; ...
https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S8-C5-1/...
I'm surprised that would be interpreted to include time zones. Units of time, arguably (measures), but time zones? Time zones are not a measure of anything. Time zones do not follow on from definitions of units of time, any more than road speed limits follow on from the definition of a mile.
I would be less surprised if it were the commerce power used to uphold time zone coordination - for the promotion and regularity of interstate commerce etc etc. Tenuous, but consistent with a lot of the other nonsense that's been hung from the commerce power over the years.
Then there's the actual enforcement angle - time zones are just a social convention whereby people in a given area pretend that the time is slightly different than it 'really' is (local solar time). There's no reason local / state government and businesses can't post / operate on different hours, and leave federal bodies to operate on whatever 'federal time' they want. This already happens in parts of the world where the official time is locally inappropriate, such as Eucla in Australia or Xinjiang in China.
Obviously the optimal solution here is to coordinate a time change at all levels of government, but failing that there are other options.
If US states want to get rid of time switches they are free to go to year-round Standard Time (like Arizona).
Just switch to the +1 standard time. WA can switch to MST, which is equivalent to PDT.
It still requires federal approval, but from Sec Transit instead of Congress
You're saying the federal government granted blanket authorization to switch to the one? So the only reason states wait on authorization is merely obtusely insisting on the wrong choice? (In addition to being impotent.) The more I learn about this issue the more things I find to be angry about.
Permanent DST being the "wrong" choice is your opinion, and a minority one. Certainly doesn't make those who disagree "morons".
2 replies →
Yes. States are allowed to ignore "summer time" and remain on "standard time" all year round. Arizona is the usual example cited, they do not change the clocks, and remain on standard time year round.
The special auth. from the Fed's is needed to switch to "permanent summer time" (and, possibly advocating for year round "summer time" gives the state politicians cover to do nothing, because "their hands are tied...").
I read elsewhere this may be partial reason why BC forged ahead. As Canada/US relationship is on the rocks and BC stopped waiting for the US to change.
Nailed it. It's been ~5 years, and the odds of coordinating with the US grow smaller by the month.
It is crazy, because there is actually a law that allows us to switch to year round PST if we want (but no one wants that), while we need congressional approval to switch to PDT year round (which is what everyone wants) and the house voted for it, but the senate simply didn't make it a priority.
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Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
We've already had to ask you this recently so it would be good to fix. I don't want to ban you - your good comments are fine. But bad comments do more damage than good comments add goodness... a sad fact of life.
It was only ever a thing to promote civil war grievances.
> Sometimes I get the impression that the spirit of states rights in the US has died.
It was bullshit from day one. The origin of the state's rights argument was slave state's attempting to force free states to round up fugitive slave and return them to the slave states.