Is that Daylight Savings ends and we feel as though the clocks have returned to normal. It's a comforting, safe sort of feeling. One less thing to be aware of that's Not Quite Right.
I read somewhere that 47% of Americans think DST is stupid (or some other word; I am the lazy automatic thesaurus). Unfortunately, this alone will not drive change. The only way to kill DST is if it is shut down one municipality at a time. If its death crawls across the nation as if killed by a plague, and it goes quiet county by county and state by state, someone at the federal level will eventually notice, and maybe, just maybe, a moment of bipartisan intelligence (did I just coin an oxymoron?) will lead to its demise.
Would this movement ending Daylight Savings Time then run like a wildfire across the world? No. No one does what America does just because America does it anymore. So the question is raised: DST in its current form was imposed by President Wilson (I think). How and why did the rest of the world climb aboard? What would be other nations' reasons for keeping it if we do not?
Tuesday, November 4, 2014
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6 comments:
I attempted to comment a while ago, but it never "took". I'll try to recreate it ...
Someone recently told me, but I have not bothered to verify it, that when Indiana changed to 100% DST (some counties apparently were not on DST), they took that opportunity to compare cost savings from before (with no DST) and after (with DST). They learned that it actually costs (someone) more with DST than without.
If I get restless, maybe I'll go hunt that down and get more deets.
So stuff like that could help. If you point out to municipalities that, hey, you're spending X% more because of this 18th century notion and the emotional distaste people have to the thought of getting up in the dark for some part of the year. Bottom line, people!
Saw that too. Fussbook somewhere. Don't hold your breath. When I bring it up face to face people seem to want to keep it. Usually because they like there being more daylight after work. I wish the holes to be found in many people's idiotic logic could surprise me, but alas.
I vote to just leave it off. No DST ever. Isn't that what Arizona does?
There is data to support the idea that every time there is a time change, the incidents of pedestrian fatalities goes up at either morning or night, for about a week, when drivers who normally commute at a given hour in daylight are unaccustomed to driving in the dark, morning or evening, depending if it is the onset of DST or the end of DST and which commute is thrown into darkness.
That was really hard to write, right there. I hope you appreciate that. Maybe that's part of the stress--we don't even have language to accommodate the weird thing we are doing to the time of day. People still don't remember which way it's going, ahead or back, every time it changes. The whole practice is alien to human psychology. We are slowly and steadily driving ourselves stark, raving, mad, I tell you.
Yes, no DST in Arizona. Plenty of light in the evening for us in the summer, but we're fairly south of many of y'all.
The clock changing seems like such a pain in the ass. I was in AZ when the clocks changed, then flew back to MD and was annoyed that the clock in my rental car was an hour late. I effing had to effing change the clock! Eff.
Isn't it the Navajo that have no words for time. That sounds so refreshing--very zen-like.
Someone from down there had no words for falling, or ridiculous heights, or something, and were valued in construction of the Empire State Building. Either that or I am conflating multiple factoids into a new mythology, as people do.
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