Trump says he wants to abolish Daylight "Saving" Time. Hopefully, he isn't like most people; confused about which is which. Standard Time is the one in effect now; DST is the other setting where everything starts an hour early and pretends it doesn't.
Even a Google search result that relies on AI got it wrong, saying something about "the transition to autumn DST". Yes, it was focusing on "Autumn DST" [sic] to argue there is no increased mortality due to that particular clock change. No, the autumn transition is to Standard Time. That's the one that doesn't have increased mortality. DST is the one that kills people.
Daylight "Saving" Time, and every argument in favor of it, is based on lies.
Supposedly, farmers needed that imaginary "extra hour" of daylight. That was a lie. Farmers never started work by the clock anyway; they go by the sun and weather. Your clock settings are irrelevant to their workday.
People say they want more sunlight after work/school. I suggest they just wake up earlier, and petition their job to open earlier in the summer and they say they can't. But that's EXACTLY what's happening anyway. Businesses are opening and closing earlier, it's just that self-centered people demand everyone mis-set their clocks to hide the fact. That doesn't change it. It's a lie.
Plus, DST is the summer setting, when most govschools are closed anyway. Another lie.
When anyone argues in favor of Daylight "Saving" Time, I'm always reminded of the old joke about the old Native man observing that only the paleface are stupid enough to try to make a blanket longer by cutting a foot off the top and sewing it to the bottom.
It may have been a joke, but it's still true.
It takes me a month or more to adjust to DST (if I ever truly do), but a day or less to adjust to Standard Time. I'm not a morning person, and every person I've ever seen who insists on forcing everyone to pretend businesses aren't just opening and closing an hour early, but that "time changed", is a morning person.
I hate DST. I've always hated it. I hated it when I was a kid in school. I hated it when I had a normal job. If there wasn't much daylight left after I got home, I didn't demand everyone else change their clocks to suit me. I just lived with it. In the summer, there was plenty of daylight left (here, it doesn't get dark in the summer until nearly 10pm during part of Government Wrong Time). In the winter, it's just winter. The sun goes down earlier regardless. Mis-setting your clocks won't fix that.
Set your clocks however you want. Just don't coerce others to adopt your setting.
DST affects me more than most people because I live on the western edge of the Central Time zone where solar noon is already an hour late most of the time. I can live with that because there's a reasonable argument for time zones. There is no such argument in favor of DST. During DST, my clocks are wrong by up to 2 hours.
Daylight isn't being "saved" by mis-setting clocks for most of the year. It's all lies.
I appreciate any support.
Either clock setting -- "Daylight Saving Time" or "Standard Time" -- is just a human convention that has nothing whatsoever to do with what "time" it "actually" is.
ReplyDeleteI would prefer the government stay out of setting that convention.
But if the government is going to attempt to mandate such conventions, I'd prefer it pick one and stick with it year-round.
And if it's going to pick one and stick with it year-round, I'd prefer it be the convention currently known as "Daylight Saving Time" for the simple reason that for purposes of interacting with those who place importance on what clocks say (e.g. businesses who want to be able to tell customers what "time" they're open until) I have more daylight "later" than "earlier."
It used to have *something* to do with what time it actually is. Noon is supposed to be when the sun is at its zenith. Not when the sun is still deep into morning. DST messes with my circadian rhythm too much. My body knows DST is wrong.
DeleteIf we're going to pick an arbitrary "time" for clocks to display, why not just go with UTC/Greenwich Mean Time?
"Noon" is a name for a particular, very momentary, relationship of position between 1) the sun and 2) a particular spot on the surface of the earth.
DeleteIt's not a measurement of time, nor is it very useful for "telling time" since it occurs later on some "days" and earlier on others. Noon is noon whether you call it "12pm standard time" or "11 am Daylight Saving Time" or "w00t w00t gambol frackajack."
DST only messes with your circadian rhythms if you make both of two specific choices:
1) To observe it at all; and
2) To set your bedtimes and waking times within it as if you were using "standard time."
Observing it at all makes SOME sense vis a vis scheduling appointments or other activities that involve other people who probably also observe it (which sucks for people who work in mass-employee environments "on the [same] clock").
Making yourself get up or go to bed earlier/later than your body tells you you should just because there are certain numbers showing on a device in your house makes no sense at all.
As for the social convention / group scheduling matter, I wouldn't mind just going with UTC.
There's nothing specially or magically "right" or "wrong" about any given time-keeping convention at a sub-day level of granularity. Our bodies tend to be most comfortable on a sunset/sunrise convention evolved over millions of years and until fairly recently that, with "noon" thrown in, was the prevailing time-keeping convention as well. Even as smaller conventions came into use, until medieval times, the lengths of hours varied on a daily basis because there were (in most systems) 12 of them for daylight and 12 of them for darkness.
As far as the numbers on the machines go, I really don't care what those numbers are. I just would like to see them not swing back and forth twice a year.
Yes it's all arbitrary to some extent, but all animals seem to have sun-related circadian rhythms, and solar noon is a part of that.
DeleteI wouldn't mind if businesses simply chose to adjust their hours earlier if that's what they want to do- some parts of the year or all of the year. I just hate the lie of it.
I avoid altering my schedule as much as possible, but some is unavoidable and it makes me mad that everyone participates in the lie that time has "changed" because we were told to "spring forward".
Also, are you a morning person, by any chance?
By nature, I'm an evening person. If I did things exactly the way I wanted to do them for no other reason than that I wanted to do them that way, I'd sleep in until I felt like getting up, which would likely be after sunrise, and stay up until I felt like going to bed, which would likely be well after dark.
DeleteBut I do put out a newsletter every day, which by convention comes out fairly early in the morning (no later than 8am on whatever standard is the convention in my area at any given time of year). So I am up at 4:30am (Standard or Daylight, no matter), and TRY to make myself go to bed by 8:30pm (in practice, anywhere from 8pm to 10:30pm most of the time).
As time goes on, the newsletter publication time MAY change to "comes out when Tom is up and damn well ready." But I like being time-reliable to readers.
I think I would have to kill myself if I had to get up at 4:30 on a regular basis.
DeleteI have finally adjusted myself to going to bed by midnight, but most of my life I couldn't go to sleep before 2am or so, no matter what time I was forced to wake up. And, no matter what time I "wake up", my brain doesn't really kick in until mid-morning. At my last normal job they knew not to try to get me to think or speak (or socialize in any way) until 10. When they changed our hours from 8am to 7:30 I told them they were just cheating themselves out of half an hour. I asked if I could keep coming in at 8 (since I always had to stay at least an hour later than all but about 3 others- and sometimes as much as 4 hours later), but they said no: "everyone has to work the same schedule" (which was a lie, since 30 people left when the clock said 4, but I didn't).
I started the 4:30am to 8:30pm routine as an experiment. For most of my life I've considered myself a "night owl," and for many years I worked "graveyard" shift factory jobs. I decided to try two things, just to see how they made me feel:
ReplyDelete1) "Early to bed and early to rise;" and
2) Doing that on a strict schedule -- no exceptions.
My personal/anecdotal impression is that the first part works well for me. I seem to feel better for the most part than I did staying up late, etc.
The second part proved hard to keep to on the bedtime part. There's always something going on, even if it's minor and optional (e.g. started a movie and want to finish it), to keep me up a little late.
On the getting up end, once I had a little time to get used to it, my body adjusted that even on the days I've set aside for "sleeping in" (Saturday and Sunday), I tend to wake up around 4:30am and almost never sleep later than 6am.
But that's just me. While our bodies did evolve to a "sleep when it's dark, get up when it's light" tendency, there will always be outliers. Just like there will always be people who need less than eight hours of sleep or more than eight hours of sleep per day.
The social convention of running clocks that keep everyone in an area treating a particular part of the day as the same "time" down to the second is just that -- a social convention. It makes certain things (like scheduling personal appointments to finer degree than "some time after sun-up when I happen over that way," or groups that work together showing up to the factory at the same time) easier and more practical, but there's nothing about it that's some cold hard fact of objective reality.
I just wish that if government is going to turn that social convention into a political mandate, it would pick a number system and stick to that number system instead of flip-flopping back and forth twice a year. It doesn't change the number of ounces in a pound, or the number of feet in a mile, twice a year.