Will the US make daylight savings time permanent in 2023?

closes Dec 1

14%

chance

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-senate-approves-bill-that-would-make-daylight-savings-time-permanent-2023-2022-03-15/ It sounds like the soonest this will happen is 2023, so March 2023 would be the last time Americans change their clocks. I'll resolve this to YES when that becomes certain. On the off chance that March 2022 was the last time change, that would also be a YES.

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Anton

bought Ṁ17 of YES

Daniel Reeves

Kronopath

bought Ṁ10 of NO

Related question on California specifically (which still resolves “Yes” if it happens at the national level): https://manifold.markets/Kronopath/will-california-abolish-daylight-sa

Sjlver

bought Ṁ50 of NO

Is love to see this pass, but... Doesn't this require updating most operating systems in the world? Including your little router at home for which the admin password has long been lost? I'd expect more than a few months notice for such an important decision.

Andrew Hartman

is predicting YES at 30%

@Sjlver Not really, no. There's basically a master list of all the complicated time zone shenanigans, of which DST is a subset, to which all (competently written) programs refer. Phasing DST out would just prompt a change to the list, and in theory most of the world's code needn't change.

Sjlver

is predicting NO at 30%

@AndrewHartman agree, but isn't that list part of the OS? Or C runtime if you prefer... Anyway close enough to the OS that it's hard to upgrade. And you would still need to upgrade that on every device where you need local times. Think surveillance cameras, ATMs, door lock systems integrated into buildings, weather stations, ... It's probably a smaller issue than Y2K, but I would still think along those lines.

Andrew Hartman

is predicting YES at 30%

@Sjlver It's a resource file, not code - they learned a (small) lesson from the Y2K days. The majority of programs which rely on it would propagate changes to it automatically, as well.

Adam

bought Ṁ20 of NO

god I hope not. Maybe I should be buying YES as a hedge, tbh.

upzone socal

bought Ṁ50 of NO

I'm not holding hopes for it happening

Bolton Bailey

bought Ṁ30 of YES

https://newrepublic.com/article/165961/unlikely-success-permanent-daylight-saving-time-senate gives 60-40 odds

Eli Lifland

bought Ṁ20 of NO

Seems <50% as I share the prior others have of things not happening, though I'm a bit confused how it passed the Senate unanimously according to the article?

Martin Randall

bought Ṁ100 of NO

Congress can barely agree to keep the government running.

Scott Owens

bought Ṁ25 of NO

It's too my knowledge that it's up to the states to determine DST or not. I can't see this being popular in all states especially ones further North

Stephen

bought Ṁ10 of NO

Do I want this to happen? Yeah, I think so. But, as said above, change is hard. "The battles are so bitter because the stakes are so low", etc. etc. But clearly I'm not very convinced of that logic just yet.

Clive Freeman

bought Ṁ50 of NO

Getting concensus for any change is ridiculously hard at the moment, regardless of the logic of any underlying arguments.

Conflux

bought Ṁ10 of NO

mild hedge + change is hard

Daniel Reeves

bought Ṁ1 of NO

My personal commentary is that this would suck for commuting to school in the morning in the winter. Our kids bike to school and there were a few weeks around winter solstice where it seemed too dark for that to be safe. With permanent DST it means school starting before dawn in the winter. (Also, just philosophically, how absurd is it to permanently change the clocks rather than change standard business hours? Like my whole pro-DST argument -- https://doc.beeminder.com/madhack#36 -- is that changing standard business hours earlier and later again every year is untenable. But if the public consensus is "business hours should just always start earlier so we have more daylight after work" then it's almost tragically hilarious that the best way to achieve that is to permanently redefine time itself rather than tamper with the apparently greater sanctity that is "Nine To Five". Maybe it's the Dolly Parton movie by that name that really locked us in there.)