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To: fidelis
But there's a big difference between Arizona's location and size vs. Massachusetts. Arizona is at the western end of the Mountain time zone and during the winter is on Mountain Standard Time along with neighboring New Mexico to the east. By not switching to daylight time in the summer, Arizona is effectively on Pacific Daylight Time along with neighboring California to the west. No big deal.

Massachusetts on the other hand is at the eastern end of the Eastern time zone. By staying on Eastern Standard Time they would effectively be on Central Daylight Time, but with states far to the west, with many states in between one hour ahead.

But, maybe Massachusetts would rather be in synch with places like Illinois and Texas rather than New England and the East Coast during most of the year which should lead to some interesting scenarios!

69 posted on 01/11/2017 7:26:45 PM PST by glennaro
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To: glennaro
In my experience I've found that DST is pointless at far southern and northern latitudes.

The closer you get to the equator, the closer you get to days that are 12 hours from sunrise to sunset through the entire year.

The further north you go, the less impact DST has because the length of the day changes so quickly between the summer to winter solstices. In Anchorage, for example, you go from about 18.5 hours between sunrise and sunset in June to 5.5 hours in December. This means that once you reach the longest day of the year on June 21st, the days get shorter by about 4.3 minutes every day. So the sun rises about 2 minutes later each morning and sets about 2 minutes later each evening until you get to December 21st.

Pushing the clock ahead one hour for DST in Alaska gets you one extra hour of daylight in the evening, but the days shorten so quickly that you "lose" that hour within about 27 days anyway.

82 posted on 01/12/2017 3:52:12 AM PST by Alberta's Child ("Yo, bartender -- Jobu needs a refill!")
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