I’m a night person. Your diabolical plan to set the clocks back and make it dark out before dinnertime is really just an effort to make me depressed and filled with Nordic despair.
When I am president, the Sun will never set!
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
You sound like a Republican POTUS candidate.
And HRC will not let herself be overtrumped by a lowly blogger: ‘When I’m president the sun AND the moon will never set!’ So there. You now know your place. ‘Now for Bernie Sanders, who keeps being a stick in the mud.’
You’re crazy. Only Trump has the skill and experience to put together a deal with the Sun that will get this done.
There have been experiments with permanently switching to DST, such as in 1974-5 during the energy crisis and in other countries. In most cases the experiments are abandoned because of the very late sunrises that causes in winter. Notably this complaint is uniform across different latitudes. Those in northern locations, where 6-7 hours of sunlight on December 21 is expected, generally hate pushing sunrise into mid-day. Those in southern locations in the US also generally hate it being dark when they are already at work and school.
The spring forward/fall back is basically an extra cost for something with no measurable benefit. DST isn’t a new idea – I think Ben Franklin is credited, accurately or not, for first proposing it. But the justifications have changed over time. Originally it was supposed to help farmers – ironically the farm lobby was the strongest opposition to extending it after WW1. In WW1 it was supposed to save energy, specifically electricity. The idea is that people would have electric lights on less of the time during the day because the last hour that most people sleep in the morning had sunlight, and that was being shifted to the end of the day to be part of the waking hours. That may actually have been correct – but at the time burning a few light bulbs was a very significant part of electrical usage whereas today it’s not.
Later the justification was more about heating fuel savings. People tended to set thermostats lower during sleeping hours, so shifting the sleeping patterns one hour later reduced heating costs. Again, this probably was a benefit at the time but due to efficiencies in new technology it’s much less so now.
But today, with the coming of universal A/C and the resulting population shift southward DST actually increases net energy use. Commercial buildings generally change thermostat settings to reduce energy use during off hours. DST shifts by one hour their opening times from the cooler morning hours to the hotter end-of-business day hours, and this makes a very measurable difference. A comparison of Indiana from year to year when they converted from no-DST to DST a few years ago found an increase, but when adjusted for the cooler temperatures the next year the increase in energy use was probably higher. But, also, Indiana is on average a cooler climate than where most people live in the US so the variance is probably greater on the whole.
I think the way to kill DST is to tell the conservatives in Congress that this is a liberal idea.
If we just call lunch dinner, and dinner breakfast, and give breakfast an new name. . .
Nordic despair. I like it. It could be a new perfume scent, or a video game.
Actually, when you look at folklore, it’s pretty accurate.
I DEMAND PERPETUAL DAYLIGHT AND FLYING UNICORNS AND TALKING MONKEYS! I particularly like talking monkeys.
Just please, no flying monkeys…
Agreed. Super creepy thing from my childhood. Also Dorothy seeing Auntie Em calling out for her in the crystal ball and being unable to respond, and a few other things from that movie. It really pushes the buttons.
As a night person, shouldn’t you revel in the early dark hours, BooMan? Your logic escapes me.
That’s just what I was going to ask.
I was wondering that too. 🙂
Are you running for president of the British Empire?
Whatever, you’ve got my vote, Boo.
In my location (NM ) today, the day was 10 hrs and 44 minutes long. That doesn’t change whether you call it DST or BVD or XYZ. Let local businesses or other entities adjust their schedules to fit local needs and conditions. Changing everybody’s clocks twice a year is nuts and the changeover probably causes more problems and accidents than the change purportedly saves. I hate it.