What does the free project care about "the market?" What you mean is that the commercial project isn't forced to contribute back to the free one. I also don't like that idea, but claiming that forcing someone to do something they don't want to is "more free" is weird.

It has always seemed a particularly strange argument that a restriction makes something more free. More ethical, maybe. A reasonable limitation in order to maintain some other goal, okay. It's not free if you can do this, no.

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?

I don't think the logic really works there

Just to clarify, you think that DST makes the sun rise later rather than than making people get up earlier?

Otherwise being near the timezone border would be an issue

It is. All the incresed heart attacks, strokes, car accidents and whatnot you hear about associated with the time change are also associated with living on the eastern side of a timezone, except every day, not just the one special day a year.

US states can all switch to permanent standard time whenever they want. Some already have. There's a federal law that specifically prohibits switching to permanent DST because the whole country did it in the 70s and hated it so much they not only switched back but made it illegal for everyone.

But everyone (now) thinks they want permanent DST because long summer evenings are nice and they can't remember how much getting up an hour earlier in the winter sucks.

No, it was popular prior to clocks. You got up at sunrise because, as a diurnal animal, that's what your biology likes to do. Some people, many farmers for example, still do this.

"When the sun comes up" is hard to define exactly. The sun isn't a point so you have to decide whether it's the top, bottom, middle, whatever. There's lots of refraction too, so you see the sun come up before it actually does. So when we invented clocks we started using noon as a standard rather than sunrise. It's relatively easy to precisely determine the time of local noon, when the sun reaches its highest point.

The two are different, and that's the source of the problem. Noon stays the same year round, sunrise varies. DST is an attempt to use noon-based time but shift it to be a bit closer to sunrise-based time.

We hear about how the US is pretty authoritarian, but they actually send inspectors to your house to check your clocks? Do you go to jail if you don't change them, or is it just a fine? Is it the FBI that does the raids or is that one of the Secret Service jobs?

Yeah, you could shift them forward in March and back in October or November.

Keeping DST means that the sun rises an hour later in the Winter.

No, it means people have to wake up to go to work and school an hour earlier in the winter.

If you ask people if they'd like to have year-round DST a lot of them will say yes. If you ask them if they'd like to have to wake up an hour earlier in the winter than they do now, a lot of them will say no.

The Americans didn't even make it all the way through the first fall.

https://www.nytimes.com/1974/1...

Oh wait, sorry, that's the story about ending permanent DST because it was a terrible idea.

I keep all my clocks on UTC now. I can't be bothered to change them twice a year.

Yeah mate that's frankly nuts.

Firstly, you have to go to effort to stop you phones and laptops changing their times automatically. Secondly, your clocks are now mismatched from literally everyone around you half the time. 95% of the point of clocks is to synchronise things with other people. That's why we got the concept of centralized time in the first place.

Scotland only has six hours of daylight in the winter - so you're either going to work in the dark or coming home in the dark.

Or both! I'm further south (London) and in the depths of winter I was going to school before sunrise and would often/usually arrive home after sunset. And work is usually longer hours than school.

That actually seems worse than the alternative. If everyone's going to be shuffling times around, just sort it out centrally rather than having a month of incredibly vexing minor synchronisation errors.

Or, you know pick hours for when it makes most sense when there's least sun (winter) and just leave it there?