My Annual Bitch about Daylight Savings Time

Quick quiz:  Are we currently on Standard Time or DST (Dumb as Shit Time)?  Now ask the same question of a couple of friends.  When I tried this, the answers were pretty evenly split.  I’ll give you the correct answer farther down.

There is an awful lot of misinformation about DST floating around out there.  No, the Romans didn’t use DST.  I don’t know who started this silly internet myth, but the Romans did not have accurate mechanical clocks and depended on either sundials or water clocks.  The Romans divided the daylight into twelve parts, and since the length of the day varied with the season, so did the times.  If you had tried to explain the concept of DST to a Roman, he would have just asked why you didn’t get up either earlier or later, as you saw fit.  

Nor was DST invented by Benjamin Franklin.  While serving as the American Ambassador to France in 1784, Franklin wrote a letter to The Journal of Paris, a daily newspaper, suggesting that Parisians could save a small fortune spent on candles if they would just shift their clocks an hour, to use more daylight.  Since then, proponents of screwing around with our clocks have suggested that if a man as wise as Franklin supported DST, we should adopt it.

What these morons fail to notice however is that Franklin’s letter was satire.  It was a joke.  Franklin didn’t really want to make the blanket longer by cutting off a foot at the top and then sewing it back onto the bottom.

And no—periodically messing around with our clocks doesn’t save either energy or money.  Two different government studies concluded that DST either saves negligible amounts of energy or actually increases the cost of lighting our homes.  Think about it for a second:  do businesses and schools routinely turn off the lights indoors during the day and get by on just the light from windows?  Do you have lights on during the day in your house?  

Careful computer modeling of energy costs by the hour suggests that the farther north you live, the more likely that DST might save you an insignificant amount of energy costs.  If you live in North Dakota, you might see 0.5% reduction on your heating and lighting costs.  If you live somewhere warmer, say in the high deserts of New Mexico, messing around with your clocks probably sends your energy bills up an equal amount.  

There are other costs associated with time switching.  The disruption in sleep patterns caused by the shift to DST has been linked to various health issues.  Studies show increases in heart attacks, strokes, and depression immediately following the clock changes, especially in the spring.  The hour lost in March can worsen sleep deprivation and increase stress levels, with some research suggesting that this impacts long-term health and well-being.

Adjusting to DST leads to a temporary drop in productivity.  Sleep-deprived workers are less efficient, and studies have shown that in the week after the clocks shift forward in spring, they suffer an increase in workplace injuries and make more mistakes.  This downtime from inefficiency and injuries adds hidden economic costs.

DST is associated with a higher risk of traffic crashes, particularly on the Monday following the Spring shift.  The abrupt change can make people drowsier behind the wheel, leading to more crashes.  Studies have shown an increase in fatal car crashes by 6% in the days following the switch.

So why don’t we end this nonsense and just leave our clocks alone all year long, like countries around the world have already done?  Many politicians have suggested doing just that, but legislation always fails to pass because politicians can’t agree on whether to just end DST or implement it all year long.  It’s kind of like our politicians all agree that eating pizza is a great idea but can’t decide if they are hungry enough to have the pizza cut into eight slices or just six. 

As the law stands today, any state can decide to end DST—as Arizona and Hawaii have already done—but the states are forbidden to implement DST all year long (that being a right reserved for Congress).  Here’s a wild thought:  Let’s stop messing around with the clocks and just change the time that stores and schools open.  

Nah.  That will never work.  However, if we can seasonally adjust our clocks, why stop there?

Let’s seasonally adjust our scales.  Every year in the Fall, let’s adjust our scales down by ten pounds so that every American can really enjoy the holidays.  Then we can eat all the Halloween candy we want and pig out on Thanksgiving and Christmas, because all of us have received a free ten-pound reduction in our weight.  

Of course, when Spring rolls around and we adjust the scales back up, we’ll have to work off the extra weight.  But we can adjust for that and simply increase everybody’s height by six inches, which should average out the body mass index.  And what short person wouldn’t want to be taller for half the year?

My wife gave me a great little convertible for my retirement.  In the summer, it’s too hot in New Mexico to not use the air conditioner, but the rest of the year has wonderful weather to drive with the top down.  How about we seasonally raise the speed limit by twenty miles an hour in the fall and then drop them in summer?

And the holidays are expensive, let’s seasonally adjust our bank accounts.  Just add $1000 to everyone’s bank account before Thanksgiving, then take it back in February.  It’s too cold to do anything fun in February anyway….  Wait, if we added about 20 degrees to the thermometer in late fall, then dropped it 40 degrees in the summer, we could have “temperate” weather all year long!  In your face Hawaii!

Now if any of these suggestions sounds ludicrous, please tell me how they differ from screwing about with our clocks.  (And for the record, we are on Standard Time.  Temporarily.)