You're not a software developer, are you ;)? I'm not working on any timezone-aware products right now but I feel for all my brothers and sisters in the trenches if this passes and has to be fixed everywhere!
> I'm not working on any timezone-aware products right now but I feel for all my brothers and sisters in the trenches if this passes and has to be fixed everywhere!
Things have improved though: back in the 2000s when the 'Bush DST' change occurred, all sorts of software had hard-coded assumptions.
This is because US developers, who wrote a good portion of OS and other software, had never experienced a tzdata update first hand. So that when (e.g.) PST8PDT had its rules changed, it turns a lot of stuff needed to be rebooted to pickup things up.
A bunch of code was put in to notice changes dynamically, so in 2026 things should hopefully be smoother if there are new rules.
Even worse than that, it will pass, people will realize it actually sucks, then they we will go back to the quick and nearly painless "rip off the bandaid" approach.
No it wont. There's already one state in the union that has dipsensed with the silly time changes, Arizona. I've lived there for ~7 years while an adult, or about 20% of my life, now live in a time change state again.
Having experienced both I would take the no time change every time. And I have yet to meet anyone who would (small sample size for sure, I'm sure someones done some polling).
Arizona is on permanent standard time, which many seem to prefer over DST or permanent DST. This new law is trying to force permanent DST, which the US actually already signed into law back in 1974 and then repealed it within a year because no one liked it. Also, while permanent standard or DST may work in southern states, it becomes more problematic in northern states, particularly close to the edges of time zones. You could see sunrise as late as 9:30 am in some of these cases with permanent DST.
Our representative Mike Simpson voted for it. He has done some good things compared with our other congressional delegates (Mike Crapo, Jim Risch and Russ Fulcher) who tend to make fly by night committee votes against whatever is popular with the general public, so I don't want to knock him. But he does represent district 2, which is 200 miles to the east and would have a sunrise closer to 9:00 am:
My feeling is that permanent DST is just not gonna fly here. So if it passes, our elected officials will take a lot of flack for it and have to run damage control.
Things have improved though: back in the 2000s when the 'Bush DST' change occurred, all sorts of software had hard-coded assumptions.
This is because US developers, who wrote a good portion of OS and other software, had never experienced a tzdata update first hand. So that when (e.g.) PST8PDT had its rules changed, it turns a lot of stuff needed to be rebooted to pickup things up.
A bunch of code was put in to notice changes dynamically, so in 2026 things should hopefully be smoother if there are new rules.