When I lived up north by Canada, the logic was "you don't want kids having to walk to/from school when it's dark!!" Okay, so... wow, did you know they could change school hours.

The same argument works the other way. Keep noon as the point where the sun is highest. Then change the times of things for appropriate daylight. Daylight savings is just people agreeing to get up an hour earlier. Instead of "9 to 5", everyone agrees to work 8 to 4. Which coincidentally puts solar noon perfectly in the middle of the work day. Isn't that a surprise!

Also school: let's start activities at 6 AM in winter. And not finish until 10PM. No the bus only runs for school hours why do you ask?

School hours are engineered to make sure parents can drop their kids off at the state-funded daycare (which is what most parents consider school) and get to work on time...

And the reason the high-school kids get out first is so they can take care of younger siblings after school, which is a shitty way for teenagers to spend afternoons. (I was lucky, youngest of six.)

I don't know, we tried it in the 70s and people hated it enough to switch back pretty quickly. Under permanent DST, sunrise in January would not be until after 8 AM, while under permanent standard time sunrise in June would be shortly after 4 AM.

As I always say, "A broken clock is right twice a day."

I hope the Dems read all the small print, like, "Daylight Savings is now permanent...and brown people have no rights...."

change the school hours for the shifting daylight hours, you'd also have to change parents' work schedules.. or provide some child care benefits, maybe. and we know how that would go over with this congress and administration.

^^^^ Legitimately one of the funniest things I've read in a long time.

I didn't even say anything!

It passed in the Senate. It died in the house.

It’s actually been gaining steam over the past 5-ish years. If it dies in the end, it’s because people can’t agree which time should be permanent.

I assume you don't live somewhere where it gets dark at 3pm in winter. The morning will be dark regardless, let me have that little bit of sun coming home from work

Agreed. After living most of my life in the PNW, having summer twilight as late as 10 PM was terrible.

On your first question: the current law is that DST is optional, but if a state opts out, they have to be on standard time. The new bill allows them to stay on DST permanently and removes the ability for states to opt-out unless they are already on year-round standard time. So, if this passes, every state in the union will be on either standard time or DST, depending on their status before, with no option to either go back to standard time nor to go back to changing twice a year.

Why not just move school and work start times an hour or two later in the winter in Colorado then? Why hold the entire country hostage because of niche locations that already have the ability to make local decisions like this?

Because of existing time zones aren’t we already different from the rest of the world? You make other good points but the rest of the world comparison seems odd. If anything just picking one is more consistent and safer regardless. I mean if you wanna talk about weird, the entire mainland china is one time zone, China Standard Time.

Feel free. There's nothing stopping you.

The reason it's not feasible is because most human activity happens during the daylight hours. As such, having the unit of a "day" cover what's typically a day makes things easier.
For example, banks , businesses and schools need to have a unified schedule across a jurisdiction. If the jurisdiction specifies a utc offset that defines the official business day you just have a less coordinated timezone system.
You also make knowing roughly what part of the waking cycle other parts of the world are in much harder. Right now it's 0100 in utc-5. So it's 0800 in utc+2, and people are eating breakfast, at work, getting kids to school and so on. If I want to know that without timezones I need to know where they are on the planet and what the relevant legal jurisdiction has mandated as coordinated business time. That's effectively just a worse version of timezones.

The human conception of time is intrinsically linked to spatial location. Fighting that is just making it hard for no reason. What we need to do is stop fiddling with the time. No more (major) clock adjustments. Daylight savings only sucks because of the switch , so we should just pick one and stay.