Maine to us: It's time, guys

By adamg on Sun, 04/30/2017 - 3:25pm

The Portland Press-Herald reports the Maine House of Representatives has approved a bill to permanently set the Pine Tree State's clocks ahead an hour - but only if New Hampshire and Massachusetts do the same thing.

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Politics

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Atlantic Time

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Comments

Now if the Maine Legislature can get Governor LePage

By bulgingbuick on Sun, 04/30/2017 - 3:28pm.

to turn his clock ahead to this century they'll be making progress.

Hell Ya!

By Time Bandit on Sun, 04/30/2017 - 3:38pm.

Let's get New York on board too!

Somehow I feel like MA is

By anon on Sun, 04/30/2017 - 4:56pm.

Somehow I feel like MA is more likely to pass this if NY doesn't, out of sheer cussedness.

Either way I'm on board. 4PM sunsets are the worst.

Plus, the ~WHAT ABOUT THE CHILDREN~ hand-wringers would do well to remember that children actually improve a full letter grade if school just starts an hour later. It's not complicated. Inconvenient to parents with 8-5 schedules, yes, but let's not pretend it's about what's really best for the kids in that case.

Not sure about that.

By Wiffleball on Sun, 04/30/2017 - 5:09pm.

New England is a logical place to make the divide.

NY goes pretty far west, and if you included that, it would make sense to include PA, MD, NJ, DE, VA, NC, SC, leaving ET pretty slim.

bingo.

By Anonymous on Sun, 04/30/2017 - 6:28pm.

It makes sense for Boston and NYC to be in the same time zone for business travel. We share a border with NY

When does it matter that MA and Maine are in the same time zone?

Maine still thinks of itself

By JM on Mon, 05/01/2017 - 12:50am.

Maine still thinks of itself as the part of Massachusetts it once was and looks to us for leadership.

Shared border?

By Sock_Puppet on Mon, 05/01/2017 - 6:12am.

The divisions between time zones currently go right through the middle of several states. That nice straight line from Vermont down to Connecticut would be the neatest division in the country.

How about this?

By Bill O. on Sun, 04/30/2017 - 4:18pm.

You change your governor and we'll change ours. Then we talk about clocks, deal?

Theres very little upside to

By anon on Sun, 04/30/2017 - 4:58pm.

Theres very little upside to this as compared to the downsides

There is very little downside

By anon on Mon, 05/01/2017 - 8:45am.

There is very little downside to this compared to the upside.

You just need to get out more.

If it were up to me, we would

By brian1000 on Sun, 04/30/2017 - 5:19pm.

If it were up to me, we would set our clocks ahead or back a few minutes very day so the sun always rises at 6am. You could then get up at the same time every day all year and never waste daylight in the morning by sleeping through it.

If we didn't adjust our clocks at all, then the sun would rise either really early in the summer, or really late in the winter. Our schedules are typically set by work/school and most of us are not going to change them to match the sunrise. The result would be that we wind up having to get up when it's still dark in the winter (which most people hate) or sleeping through daylight in the summer.

The compromise is, of course, to change our clocks twice a year. This keeps the sun rising at approximately the same time all year while requiring few clock changes.

Or, we could move our clocks back

By roadman on Mon, 05/01/2017 - 9:07am.

one half hour this fall and be done with this nonsense once and for all.

Down East

By SwirlyGrrl on Sun, 04/30/2017 - 5:57pm.

This makes a lot of sense, as our chunk of the continental coastline runs a Nor'Easterly diagonal toward Canada.

If you have ever driven to DC on a regular basis, you will realize how far east you swing to get to Boston ... let alone Bangor. When I did a kayak trip around the Solstice in Muscongus Bay, the early daylight was pretty damn noticeable!

Also noticeable: I have attended a conference in Seattle around the Solstice on several occasions, getting up in the wee hours to trek west. It gets light here by 4:30 am, but old Sol doesn't drop below the Pacific Ocean fully until 10:30 at night. I took pictures of a bunch of folks that I went to grad school with at 9:30 at night when the poster session let out - it was still daylight, no flash needed. We had all seen the sun rise in Boston.

Note as well that you enter this time zone in Michigan or Western Ontario ... and then drive over 1,000 miles and you still aren't out of it.

That's how far off of the rest of the world we are.

I've been to Northern Alberta around the other solstice - their sunset is not too much earlier than ours is ... but their sun rise is way later.

We hash this out around here regularly...

By anon on Sun, 04/30/2017 - 10:02pm.

I think being on the same time zone with NYC and DC is beneficial.

I also do calls to SF and LA, and 3 hours difference is already limiting. Moving to 4 hours difference only makes working on both coasts more challenging.

I'd rather go the other way -- figure out how to get the Mountain time zone folks to join Central or Pacific, then move California an hour toward the east coast so we only had three zones...

We'd only be offset from NYC

By JM on Mon, 05/01/2017 - 12:54am.

We'd only be offset from NYC and 4 hours off from CA for the 4 months they're on Standard Time and not Daylight Time.

Also deciding that 3 is okay and 4 isn't is entirely arbitrary. Wouldn't it just be better if there was only 1 timezone for the whole of the continental US? That's what both China and India do after all.

Calls with California

By anon on Mon, 05/01/2017 - 9:23am.

Who cares? I make these all the time. It isn't an issue. You just have to agree to be available at certain hours for certain calls.

Try calls with Europe and California and Australia.

It doesn't matter one hour one way or another - we don't all shift on the same schedules anyway.

If you are in tech, having a stable time zone that never means 23 hour or 25 hour days is a big plus.