Comment Re:They should do the same in The Netherlands (Score 1) 211
Right. The statement "Keeping DST means that the sun rises an hour later in the Winter" is untrue. Even if the entire US congress agreed, it won't make the sun rise earlier or later.
To make it true you have to write out the implicit bit that you meant but didn't say:
Keeping DST means that the sun rises an hour later relative to locally defined civil time. We agree laws can't affect the sun, so what they change is locally defined civil time.
Logically, we can flip the relative relationship to say: "keeping DST means that locally defined civil time is an hour earlier (than it would have been without permanent DST) relative to when the sun rises." Since the sunrise is constant we can drop it from the statement entirely to get "keeping DST means that locally defined civil time is an hour earlier (than it would have been without permanent DST)."
The vast majority of people don't get up much earlier in the morning than they have to to be at work on time. For those people, the last statement is equivalent to mine. It not only "works logically," it is what is actually happening. Ignoring that implicit relative in your statement gives rise to all kinds of silliness like "Sunshine protection act" and even "daylight savings time." No sunshine is being protected, nor daylight saved.
As you point out, DST makes you wake up an hour earlier. The transition to doing that is what people dislike. They tend to like the transition to not doing it in the fall, although some people still complain because they have OCD and they haven't figured out how to set the VCR clock yet. The bit we don't like is getting up earlier, and the proposal is to do that all the time.
When you actually look at it logically you realize something else: pretty much everybody is free to observe permanent DST whenever they want. All they have to do is get up an hour earlier in the winter than they would otherwise, i.e. at the same time they would in the summer. No time changes. Hardly anyone actually does this. Your boss probably isn't going to be mad if you get to work early. They're certainly not going to be mad if you get up early and enjoy an extra hour in the winter to do whatever you want. Yet almost nobody does this. Almost everyone gets up as late as they can and still meet their social obligations. Especially in the winter.
I wonder why?