The Perils of Permanent DST: It’s always darkest before the dawn

In this episode, I address the terrible plan to switch the U.S. to permanent Daylight Saving Time.  I start out our journey by covering how humanity laid out the whole system of time that we use today, piece by piece over the span of several centuries.  Then I get into why the heck anyone wanted to get a law passed to change the clocks in the first place.  I take you through all the crazy shenanigans of clock-changing throughout the 20th century.  And then I give you all the latest dirt about how the heck the U.S. Senate "unanimously" passed permanent DST when you'd think someone there would've had enough sense to object.

Then I get into a whole bunch of different reasons why permanent DST is so bad, and why having DST at all really isn't that great.  (I'm sure you'll find at least one in there that really hits home for you.)  And I wrap up with  some steps we should definitely push our lawmakers to take... and some that should, at least, be considered.

Lest this sound like it must be longer than your standard book on tape, worry not-- you're in and out in just over 21 minutes.  And it gets more and more fun and entertaining as you go.

https://savestandardtime.com/ 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hi, today I'm going to talk about a subject that's always timely because it involves time itself. But in some ways it's even more timely right now than usual. And that subject is daylight saving time. Now this episode might be a little less to the point than this podcast generally goes for, so I went out of my way to make sure you get some nice fun commentary in here as well. Okay, firstly, what is time and why do we have it? Basically, animals tend to rely on instinct and repeat certain cycles of activities in conjunction with their genetics. They're not rationally reasoning things out in their minds to plan ahead. You have bears that hibernate every winter, and you have cicadas that hang out underground for seventeen years before doing their thing for about two weeks. So clearly there are natural systems that work according to a schedule of some sort. But since we humans have a great deal more independent reasoning capability than animals do, we needed to set up our own system that we could work with. And we also needed to be able to communicate the details of that system with other human beings so that we could plan out coordinated activities. The year was easy. It gets really cold and dark, and it gets really hot and bright, and then we're back to cold and dark again. Since Earth has naturally occurring cyclical events such as a sunrise and sunset, and the moon cycling through phases, there were obvious markers to work off of. Hey, after the sun rises three more times, let's meet over by that rock at the edge of the town and go out hunting. Or perhaps we've been meeting to discuss matters affecting our community altogether at once. Let's do that every time the moon gets full again. Hence we have days and months. But the week actually started with the first civilizations in the Middle East. The idea was that they designated one day for each of the seven most prominent objects in the sky. You can actually see evidence for this in the names of the days, but you have to use a language like Spanish to see some of them. You have the sun, Sunday, the Moon, Monday, Mars, Tuesday, which is Martez in Spanish, Mercury Wednesday, which is Miarkalas in Spanish, Jupiter, Thursday or Huevis, Venus, Friday or Viernes, and Saturn, Saturday. We didn't know about Uranus and Neptune until much later, of course. Bible followers will insist that we add the week in because God basically decreed that the approach was to work for six days and have a day of rest, but it looks like the Jewish people just adopted this system themselves early on. Regardless, a seven day cycle certainly seems to be a practical one for balancing work and rest days. So there it is, the concept of weeks. It's important to note that humans once looked at sunlit and dark periods as two opposing realms rather than being part of the same day. This probably explains why Jewish holidays start at sundown rather than at midnight. The day could be divided up into increments pretty easily since you could keep track of where the sun was in the sky with sundials. But nights were trickier. Egyptian astronomers observed a set of thirty six stars that divided the heavens into equal parts. So six were kind of visible during twilight hours and twelve were visible when it was completely dark out. Eventually they just decided to simplify things and work with the twelve they could easily see when it was dark out. And they built water clocks to track nighttime progression as accurately as possible. So we had hours, but they weren't fixed because the proportions of daylight and darkness per day varied. It took until fourteenth century Europe and the development of mechanical clocks for people to actually normally use hours of fixed length. Dividing each half of the day into twelve parts has some other practical benefits as well. The number twelve is divisible by one, two, three, four, and six, which gives you a lot more flexibility for breaking up hours into pieces than ten, which is only divisible by one, two, and five. When people stopped seeing the sunlit in dark periods of time as two opposing realms and just looked at it as one cycle, it made more sense to use the point in time when the sun's at the center of its path across the sky, noon, as a good reference point for zero. And then you could still use one to twelve twice per sun cycle, with the other zero point being at midnight. But after you pass the twelfth point either way, you're back to one again, so just using the numbers one to twelve works just as well. Roman numerals, for example, don't even have a character for zero, so having the Roman numerals for one through twelve laid out around a circle with twelve at the starting point in the top middle makes sense. And then for all the events that need that degree of resolution, you can refer back to the clock being at one, two, three, and so forth. What time is it? Well the clock says three, or it is three of the clock, or it's three o'clock. And now we have the concept of hours. Though the idea of using a sexagesimal sixty based system came from the Sumerians in thirty five hundred BC and the Babylonians after them, the idea of dividing units into sixty minutes and dividing minutes up into sixty seconds actually came from Greeks around one hundred fifty AD when they were dividing up latitude and longitude lines. The first division became known as the minute, and then the second level division or second minute became known as the second. I guess that's pretty obvious, makes sense, huh? Hours were divided up into halves, thirds, quarters, and even twelfths, but it wasn't until near the end of the sixteenth century when the first mechanical clocks that displayed minutes occurred that we started talking sixty minutes in an hour. And seconds were applied to time even more recently than that. Anyway, the point is that even though time, particularly hours, minutes, and seconds, are a human construct, they're all still based in natural phenomena. They don't come from some royal decree or something that a church elder relayed from God Almighty up above or whatever. High noon is something you can determine by looking at your timepiece, or you can determine by looking at where the sun is in the sky. Now let's talk daylight saving time. First it's saving the singular. It's not saving the plural. I'll avoid analyzing the grammar. I'll just note that if you're trying to figure out who's an expert on this stuff that you should actually listen to, the first thing to listen for is probably if they actually have the name right. This is going to come up again later. As many know, the early to bed, early to rise concept is often attributed to Benjamin Franklin. But the idea of actually changing the clocks came from an entomologist and astronomer in New Zealand named George Hudson. In 1895, he proposed the idea of changing clocks by two hours every spring to the Wellington Philosophical Society so that he'd have more daylight hours to devote to collecting and examining insects. I'm not sure why one guy would expect everybody to do this brand new clock changing thing just for him, but whatever. It doesn't seem too surprising that the idea didn't take off then. However, in 1907, a British man named William Willett presented the idea as a way to save energy. This time it was seriously considered, though not implemented. However, it wouldn't be long from then before someone actually put it in place. The town of Port Arthur in Ontario, Canada enacted it on july first, nineteen oh eight. Germany and Austria-Hungary adopted it starting on April 30th, 1916. By 1918, many countries across Europe and even the United States had adopted it. In the US, it was repealed in 1919, though some local jurisdictions still used it. Then it made a national resurgence as wartime in World War II, from February 1942 straight through until September 1945. After that, the choice of using or not went back to being a local decision. As you can expect, this was pretty chaotic. Eventually, President Johnson signed the Uniform Time Act into law in 1966 to standardize it so that daylight saving time started on the last Sunday in April and ended on the last Sunday in October. And everyone lived happily ever after and never complained about it again. I'm kidding, of course. There was an energy crisis in 1973, and the idea of having year round daylight saving time to save energy started to become very popular. How popular was this? Well, I'm glad you asked. According to a Washington Post poll in November and December nineteen seventy three, up to seventy four percent of the United States population wanted to have permanent daylight saving time. So, Congress passed a law whereby daylight saving time would be implemented year round for the next two years. It went into effect on january sixth, nineteen seventy-four. However, by the end of January 1974, schools were asking for it to be ended, and only nineteen percent of people thought it was a good idea. I think that bears repeating. Seventy four percent of people thought we should try it. We tried it, and then in less than a month, only nineteen percent of people still supported it. Then we went through that whole Watergate thing you may have heard about, and then President Ford signed another bill into law to end the two year experiment later in nineteen seventy four, and we went back to just changing the clocks again. Daylight saving time has been lengthened a couple times in the almost fifty years since then, but otherwise no one has made any efforts to change the status quo. Well, until now. You probably heard that the United States Senate passed an act making Daylight Saving Time permanent on march fifteenth, twenty twenty two. But you probably didn't hear exactly what happened. Don't worry, I've got all the latest gossip about this for you. You see, senators are actually allowed to propose legislation virtually at any time the Senate's in session, and when matters are being discussed that people aren't too concerned about, then there may just be a small number of senators present. Now you may ask, why don't the Democrats just pass the Build Back Better Act when nobody who opposes it is around? Well, this is because the parties have a mutual understanding that they don't do this. Neither party wants to have to have someone around on the Senate floor every single second that the Senate is in session. It's exhausting. And if one party violates this, then both parties are going to have to worry about that all the time. Plus, getting something to pass through the Senate is just one step. The bill would still have to be taken up by the House and then signed by the president as well. So it's basically a political, mutually assured destruction scenario where you probably won't even get your first attack in. So what's the point, right? In this particular instance, Senator Kirsten Cinema was presiding over the chamber. Now, Senator Marco Rubio, this guy, he's been interested in permanent daylight saving time for a while now. So he figured he'd make a push just for the heck of it right after everyone had just lost that hour of sleep. They say politics is all about timing. In this case, maximum grumpiness timing. So they put it up for a voice vote. It had some support, and no one who was there voted against it. That's how it passed. Then Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, yes, that's his real name, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, who was among those present, made a point to emphasize how big a deal this was, that the Senate had just passed a deal to make, quote, daylight savings time, unquote, permanent. Yes, you heard me. He doesn't even know what it's actually called. Like I said earlier, that's the first step in knowing whether or not you can listen to somebody about it. There's a video you can watch with cinema whispering yes after it passes, and White House knowing how big a deal this is, and it's really annoying. Anyway, I doubt Senator Capital Building, sorry, Senator White House did any research into the events of 1974 if he didn't even do enough research to find out what daylight saving time is actually called. I don't know. He just turned 18 when that 1974 thing all went down, so I'm sure he had less important things to worry about than that back then. Anyway, after that vote went down, some senators privately expressed that they didn't even know that this bill was being brought up for a vote that day. Senator Tom Cotton privately expressed that he is very much against this whole permanent daylight saving time idea, and there's certainly a great deal of backlash elsewhere in the Senate and the House as well. So now let's dive into some of the many, many reasons why permanent daylight saving time, or really even just extending daylight saving time much beyond its current length, is a terrible idea. The most obvious reason is what I made note of earlier, the experiment of nineteen seventy four. Before the experiment started, something like seventy-four percent of the population was in favor of it. Then people experienced permanent daylight saving time for less than a single month in January, and its popularity dropped all the way to 19%. Obviously, each person has their own individual reasons for their opinions on this, but I can still speculate on why so many people may have changed their minds so quickly. In the Northern Hemisphere in general, the shortest days of the year are during and right around January. So you might be getting a sunset at say 6 p.m. rather than 5 p.m. from your January daylight saving time. But you probably also had to get up in the morning to go to work and maybe just send the kids off to school, right? So you wake up and it's dark. And you get yourself and the kids ready, and it's dark. And your kids are out the side of the street waiting for the bus, and it's still dark. The sunrise eventually happens, sure, but that's at 8 AM. By then you've already groggily driven to work, swerving a bunch of times to avoid deer and other people's kids, other bus stops and who knows what else. And then you get to have your extra hour of eating sunlight while you're miserable waiting in traffic on the way home. Yay, sunlight deri the commute home when it's shining in my eyes on the beltway. That's perfect. Yay. And the whole time, in the back of your mind, you're thinking about how people had gone out of their way to cause these months and months of morning moonlit misery. Oh, and I should note that the 8 AM sunrise in my example was for areas in the mid-Atlantic latitude, like Maryland. In Maine, you're probably in the office before dawn hits, and it's probably dark before evening rush hour anyway. That tiny little bit of morning light that you used to cherish before work, completely gone now, and all for nothing. Here's another thought. Building off of what I was saying earlier, noon existed first, and we built our society and its timetables around it. That well established nine to five work day was set up with the idea that the middle of the day happens at noon. Obviously, something about that worked. So we're already partly disconnected from that by having daylight saving time in the first place. Oh, and that's certainly not all. Like ten AM on a January morning, I'm just getting warmed up. If you put permanent daylight saving time in place, mid-March through early November stays the way it is now. But think about what months you're playing around with. December, January, and February. The switch over from one year to the next is in there, so congratulations. Now you're redefining when that happens. Also, inauguration day is on january twentieth. If you're a self-respecting Democrat, ask yourself this. Do you want Biden's presidency to be even one minute shorter than Trump's was? We're talking an hour shorter this way, and I think a great many people would argue that Biden needs every minute he can get. Especially if the Republicans lose the popular vote but still win the election again in 2024. Eighty-one million of us voted for Biden to be in there for the entire four years, after all. Also, that last hour is critical for getting some last minute parties in for a few more people who were wrongfully convicted. Also, to me, permanent the at the same time reeks of hubris and of stupidity. And it makes me weep for society that so many people couldn't care less about which way we go. We are beings that exist in time. Our lives have a beginning at a point in time and an end at a point in time. No matter how much we play around the counter, we don't get to redefine these things. With all this, we're only kidding ourselves and tricking ourselves. We set up our whole society around a timetable where noon is at the middle of the day. Think about it this way. The workday became nine to five because that's what evolved from that. If we do daylight saving time all the time, that's like saying the workday is now eight to four permanently. Would you do that? Would I do that? Would anybody do that? I don't think anyone would do that. It sounds really dumb, doesn't it? But that's what they're going for. In other words, do you really want to have to get up an hour early every single day for the rest of your life? Maybe some people want to, but it's well worth noting that nine to five seemed to have worked for us quite well for a really long time. Also, who's on which side of the debate with all this? Like I said, the Senate thing was not really a hundred senators voting unanimously on this. Sleep scientists and other scientists are resoundingly against permanent daylight at the same time. Some have said that it's like having permanent jet lag. Interestingly enough, this was already somewhat of a problem to begin with because the time zones weren't set up ideally in the first place. They're actually synced on their eastern sides, not in the center. So say you're in Indianapolis, all the way on the western edge of the eastern time zone. If it's normal time, heck, even if daylight saving time had never existed, it would be like this. The sun is actually midway across the sky at about 1 p.m. So you may think, oh, daylight saving time could fix this. Nope. On daylight saving time, the sun hits the middle of the sky in Indianapolis at about 2 p.m. That's twice as screwed up. So who's in favor of permanent daylight saving time? You won't be surprised. So big businesses with lobbyists are. They figure they can get more people shopping after work if it's lighter out longer. Senator Rubio from the state of Florida, where nobody gets screwed over by pitch black morning commutes, is for it. He introduced the bill in the first place. Oh, and he wasn't even three years old yet in January 1974. Senator Cinema is for it. She's from Arizona. Arizona did the daylight saving time thing from 1966 to 1968, and they've completely opted out ever since. You know when Senator Cinema was born? In 1976. So she's never even lived through any of this in her home state. She is probably literally the least qualified senator in the entire Senate to have an opinion on daylight saving time. And yet she was presiding in the chamber when it passed, and she was like, yes, under her breath. Anyway, I don't think either Rubio or Cinema really needs much of an introduction at this point. Neither of them is very well liked, to say the least. As you can see, this whole push for permanent daylight at the same time is the typical situation where the interest of the few is put ahead of the interest of the many. Our loyalty work that way much too often as it is already. Well, the last thing we need is to explicitly go out of our way to add yet another one of these scenarios to the mix. So, what to do about it? Well, here are the steps we should take. I'll start with the easiest and most important one, and then I'll go from there. We don't need to take all of these steps, but even one helps, and every one we do take helps more. First off, don't let the House and the President get this permanent daylight saving time bill signed into law. When you actually ask people what they want, people aren't opposed to standard time, they're opposed to this back and forth clock changing hassle. But that's why we have the other steps. Second, don't push for any further extending of daylight saving time. We have all the months with the long days adjusted already. You know when the latest sunrise is? It's in early November, just before we fall back. We're already pushing it. Third, it'd be even better if we just had standard time all year round. That's what the scientists say. Yeah, yeah. I feel just as tempted by the seduction of that siren's call of late sunset right after we spring forward as the next guy does. And I like all the fun idiosyncrasies of clock changes personally more than almost anybody else does, but we give up much more than we realize to get that. Fourth, it'd be better if we could adjust the time zone somewhat. Indianapolis shouldn't be so far off center that even the default time is about an hour off. Technically, each time zone in the US should be shifted to about half a zone's worth to the east. I mean, we could completely get rid of that Atlantic time zone up there in eastern Canada. That could just be part of Eastern Time. Indianapolis would be right near the center of central time then. And instead of the middle of the day being about 2 p.m. there most of the year, like it is now, it'd actually be between 11 30 a.m. and 12 30 p.m. for them, and for everyone, everywhere in the United States, just like logic and sanity always intended. And then, fifth, the Republicans can get Hillary locked up, and the Democrats can get Trump locked up, and everything else can be all sunshine and unicorns and rainbows forever and ever. Sorry, I got a little carried away there. I'm just saying, ideally, maybe we rethink the time zone boundaries. But realistically, maybe we just solve the clock changing annoyance problem by going to permanent standard time and avoid the 1974 mistake altogether this time. I think we've had the daylight saving time clock changes for so long that we forgot what we actually enjoy about summertime. It's not the later sunsets, it's just the longer days in general. I think we forget that that happens no matter what, and we have no power over it whatsoever no matter what time we officially say it is. If you'd like more information about the cause to save standard time and other stuff related to it, consider checking out the website Savestandard Time.com. I'll try to include a link in the show notes. Thanks for listening. We got to the point, so we are out.