"There's also, however, a serious downside: In the heart of winter, the sun wouldn't rise until almost 9 in the morning, which may mean getting up in the dark."

If I'm reading the proposal correctly, by adopting Standard Time as a year-round condition, nothing in the winter months would be different than what we currently experience, since during the winter we're already on Standard Time.

I'm pretty sure you've got this whole thing backwards.

California voted to make Daylight Savings Time (what we do in the summer, biasing daylight to the end of the workday) permanent, not to abolish it.

https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_7,PermanentDaylight_Saving_Time_Measure_(2018)

Dark mornings are already bad enough in October and that's just a month out from the Equinox. Adding November through March would be brutal.

Fine for golf-playing geezers, I guess. But some people get up in the morning.

AAAAAARGH. Saving. Not Savings.

Most people go to school or work in the dark in winter anyhow.

However, perma-DST would mean the period of time where you go home in the dark is vastly reduced. Our work day isn't centered on local noon.

While we're at it, can we switch to the goddamn metric system finally please?

2 is correct. You are entirely wrong. Proposition 7 empowers the legislature to make Daylight Saving Time permanent in the state of California. It may never happen, as Federal law requires a state/region either adopt the DST switch as is common or default to permanent Standard Time (like Arizona).

I'm also a bit terrified that you, apparently, have no idea how the time change works based on these great moments from your post:

"the power to extend Daylight Saving Time and implement Pacific Standard Time (PST) all year round." Extending DST and implementing year-round PST? Those are mutually exclusive.
"he plans to introduce a measure that would make (PST) last year-round in the coming legislative session, as does Sen. Kim Thatcher in Oregon." If they do that, it won't line them up with California since that's not what Californians want to do.
"that switching to Daylight Saving every fall" We switch FROM Daylight Saving in the fall to Standard Time.

It's so frustrating that people have such strong opinions about the time changes and, yet, there's so little common understanding of what we all actually do. Every year. Twice.

We are on PST now. Equivalent to UTC-8. If we switch permanently this means we would have an earlier sunset year round. Very few people actually want that. What most sane people want is UTC-7 (what we have in the summer), having a later sunset year round AKA make daylight saving permanent - not end it.

Of all the stupid things to be spending legislative time on, this has to be right up there at number one.

Daylight Saving Time is pretty meaningless to us west of the mountains, and having lived places that don’t use it or understand it I agree it is pretty fucking outdated and unnecessary. My only thought is that no matter how much they suck up our tax dollars, since we aren’t about to let the farmers in eastern WA succeed, IF they still need it for farming we gotta give it to them.

Yes. Stop switching the fucking time. It is a stupid idea, created by the fucking Nazis. OK, not the Nazis, but the German Empire. Fuck that. Just pick a time, and stick with.

No, Cat, it isn't the most important thing in the world, but let's just pick some easy fruit, OK?

Is there even ONE RepubliKKKan out there who ISN'T totally in the dark?
@10 Catalina Vel-DuRay: Agreed.

OK, permanent standard time I'm dead set against, don't take away my spring and summer daylight hour after work, but permanent DST I could get behind! It would really help those 4 dark months. of the winter!

Jackkay dear, we are in complete agreement on this. Why are we wasting legislative resources on something that really doesn't need fixing? People who whine about the time change have too much time on their hands. Find a real cause to get worked up about.

This ridiculous clock-shifting has got to stop!
The daylight IS lessened in winter, and, to repair
that, let's just make each hour a little bit shorter.

So you could get up to a sun already risen and
watch the sunset an hour before bedtime, year-round.

Why must we be slaves to the sixty-minute hour?
Tempus Fugit!

I've a semi-radical proposal that I think should satisfy both camps here. What if, instead of basing time zones on north-south extending longitudinal demarcations, we instead used east-west latitude based latitude based zones? Unfortunately, I think this might also entail our flipping the directional rotation of earth's axis, though you've gotta break some eggs.

*"latitude based latitude based"...

Damn it! Give us an edit function, slog overlords!!!

Everyone talking like this takes time from anything else. Lol. What are we, 5th graders?

I think this is a horrible idea for the simple reason that it makes it so much harder to work with people in other time zones if part of the year you're X hours apart and other parts of the year you're Y hours apart. Arizona? Northeast AZ does observe Daylight Saving and the rest doesn't Argh! Fuck that!

Scheduling a series of on-line meetings with Europe there are a couple weeks there where it switches to 9 hours instead of 8 and then back again (thanks a lot George W.!). Horrible idea.

A Republican with a good idea... I never thought I would see such a thing in all my days.

We matched our time system to the relative movement of the sun, so that midday is when the sun is at the midpoint of its visible arc. We should leave that as is and just change the time of day that we do things instead of altering the entire timing system if we want more daylight during certain parts of our daily routine. Lots of businesses already have different winter and summer hours, and if we want people to have more after-work time in Summer, we should have people start work earlier in the morning. California apparently managed to do what I think is the worst option and settled on the needlessly altered timing system as the (potential?) permanent one.