For my entire adult life—and I do mean entire—we've been having precisely the same argument about Daylight Saving Time—and I do mean precisely the same. There are two sides:
- Make it permanent so we have more evening light all year round.
- That's a bad idea. Children would have to go to school in the dark during winter.
This never changes. Twice a year newspapers roll out the same stale DST thumbsuckers copied from the previous year. You know the drill: It started during WWI, Arizona and Hawaii don't use it, etc.
There's long been a substantial cadre of DST fans who want to make it permanent. For example, Donald Trump:
Making Daylight Saving Time permanent is O.K. with me!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 11, 2019
There's also a substantial cadre of opposition to permanent DST, which is what's kept the clock-changing status quo in place. The one thing there's never been is a substantial movement to completely eliminate DST. Until now:
The Republican Party will use its best efforts to eliminate Daylight Saving Time, which has a small but strong constituency, but shouldn’t! Daylight Saving Time is inconvenient, and very costly to our Nation.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 13, 2024
So, seriously, where did this pop up from? Has there ever been any hint that Trump felt this way? Is it some kind of Elon Musk obsession? Or maybe RFK Jr. convinced him it was unhealthy? Or he decided that standard time was God's time? Does anyone know what the deal is with this?
I’m pretty sure it just popped into his mind
Occam’s Razor: He’s a fucking moron and a blowhard.
Someone told him that eliminating the clock change would be popular, as it has been for decades.
Actually, I've always wondered why we don't just leave the clocks alone but just go to work and/or school an hour earlier in the summer and then switch back in the fall.
Or just drop DST, which is a very stupid thing that we just keep doing because no one wants to admit that we've been doing a stupid thing for no reason.
It's popular all right. The problem is that nobody can agree on whether we stick with standard time or go year around daylight time. People in the north or who live on the western edges of time zones might favor standard time so it isn't dark until almost 10 in morning at this time of year. Others might like daylight time so that sunrise isn't at 4 am in the summer.
Pick your poison. Personally, as more and more of my clocks reset automagically I give fewer and fewer fucks about the time change.
We don't "fall back" until after Halloween so it won't be so dark for kids going out for Halloween.
Oh, good grief! It SHOULD be dark on Halloween. Yes, it's been a good long while (the 70s) but guess what-- I trick-or-treated in the dark every Halloween. Really young children would be taken by parents to trick-or-treat while it was still dark, but older kids did it by darkness-- at the terribly late hour of 7 or 7:30.
DST has not been eliminated because of heavy political lobbying by the recreation industry. The strongest supporters of DST? Golf courses. When someone points this out to Donald he will announce that he has always supported DST.
“Actually, I've always wondered why we don't just leave the clocks alone but just go to work and/or school an hour earlier in the summer and then switch back in the fall.”
Because literally everything else - TV showtimes, “after work” plane departure times, etc - would also need to change to accommodate everyone suddenly going to and leaving work or school one hour earlier. And that disruption would be a pain for the people who have to implement it.
This is exactly right. We can't change it because it would amount to admitting what idiots we have been.
Yes, drop daylight saving time. Daylight saving time is all about shifting the clocks. If you don't want to do that anymore (and I don't), then daylight saving time is pointless. Businesses, schools, broadcasters, and government offices can all be free to set their hours to what works best for the people they serve, including local seasonal changes where they make sense.
Oh, for crying out loud. There doesn't have to be a *reason.* It just has to control a media cycle. And so it has. Again.
Actually the answer is Musk and Ramaswamy:
Washington
CNN
—
Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are suggesting the country stop its biannual ritual of falling back and springing forward – advocating a permanent end to time changes in a move that has garnered broad support in the past.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/03/politics/elon-musk-vivek-ramaswamy-time-changes-doge/index.html
(Link courtesy of cld)
It's the right-wing oligarchs' campaign to repeal the 20th century.
Playing the media like a fiddle… 😂
I've never understood the antipathy toward DST. Is it the horrible inconvenience of having to change the clocks twice a year? What? Personally, I like having more daylight in the evenings during the summer. What's the beef?
"Is it the horrible inconvenience of having to change the clocks twice a year?"
This is not even an inconvenience anymore, since smart devices, which are the norm nowadays, automatically make the switch for you.
That is so long as you are not managing flight schedules for an airlines.
I've never understood why anyone wanted to keep it. The loss of sleep at just the point in the year when you need more sleep is all but physically painful to me.
An hour's sleep is physically painful? You know, you can always go to bed an hour earlier. Seriously, if that's the best you can do, you've made my point.
No, it's most of the day and it's more than an hour's loss of sleep, it's a loss of focus, loss of energy, a sense of being dragged along and forced through something, with an anxiety as you go to bed knowing you'll be forced awake too early and have to go through all that yet again that acts against really deep and refreshing sleep. It takes a month or more to adjust after the clock change.
If it takes you a month to adapt to a 1hr change, then you might have an underlying medical condition, because for most people the adaptation takes no longer than a day or two. If that 1hr change was as devastating as you claim, professional sports wouldn't be a thing, nor plenty of jobs that require some travelling, or with varied shifts.
Seek help for your condition.
Dude. Chill out. There's no reason to be so antagonistic towards cld. There are some people that are sensitive to time changes and it affects them more than the average bear.
Just because it doesn't bother you doesn't mean it doesn't bother anyone.
Well, the older I get the more I hate it. And changing to daylight time in early March is absurd-- and I live in Florida. If we have to keep it whey can't we go back to six months on, six months off with the change dates being the last weekend of April and the last of October.
Here in Minnesota, starting DST in March is ridiculous. No one is out golfing at 5PM, or inviting the neighbors over for a barbecue when it's still 36F. The extra hour of sunlight in the evening does nothing for anyone.
On the other hand, those of us heading to work early are just starting to appreciate the early sunlight when bam! that early sunlight gets shifted to evening, and I'm heading to work in the dark for another three weeks.
It's depressing that after all this time, Kevin still thinks Trump's tweets have a goal more significant than getting everyone talking about Trump's latest tweet.
The news media has to cover it. If the President says it, it's news, no matter how inane. But there's no requirement for everyone else to bite on the same chum time after time. Even a fish will learn.
Not the President yet. Still time for the cheeseburgers to do him in.
+1
God damn it. I hate to agree, but let’s do it. Next, he’ll try to ban the penny and I’ll absolutely blow a gasket.
More likely we'll have to start minting gold and silver coins again.
Banning the penny is a good idea; Canada did it years ago. The mistake is not banning the nickel at the same time. I'm getting old and the cost of pretty much everything is up by a factor of more than ten since I was a kid (my main reference is a 10 ounce container of soda; when I was a kid, a ten ounce bottle at the corner store cost ten cents plus bottle deposit, whereas in most stores it's well over a dollar for a ten ounce can now) when one cent was an amount with which you could actually buy something. Even a dime these days doesn't buy much, but abolishing all coins and leaving a dollar as the minimum unit of money would be going too far.
Ban the penny?
Then they will have to ban penny candy too
(I can still get penny candy - its not as good as it was when I was a kid0
Those red licorice coins were a favorite
Trump doesn't care about you or me or unborn babies or trans people or immigrants or the groceries or daylight savings time or anything that doesn't affect Donald Trump personally. He just doesn't.
+1
That doesn't stop him from screwing these things up for the rest of us.
His mental state is irrelevant to that fact.
But he liks "strong" dictators. That is really the only exception to his narcissim.
The corruption is in full swing. Looting.
NEW YORK (AP) — ABC News has agreed to pay $15 million toward Donald Trump’s presidential library to settle a lawsuit over anchor George Stephanopoulos' inaccurate on-air assertion that the president-elect had been found civilly liable for raping writer E. Jean Carroll.
This is what you should care about. ABC sucks up to trump. Extortion.
I thought he was? No?
Sexual assault. Totally different. 😉
Looks like a creative way to bribe Trump.
Except it was rape in most of the nation.
There was a rape claim, but it didn't hold up, because she testified she couldn't be certain if he had penetrated or not, which is a threshold requirement in NY law.
However it could be considered a massive burn on him, and I'll take what I can get. Tends to validate some of Stormy's remarks too.
It wasn't inaccurate.
Why are we sending our troops to save Daylight!!! It's not our fight! Daylight should have to fend for itself!!! We're not going to spend any of our money saving DAYLIGHT!
Heh!
Okay, good on him for saying the correct "Daylight Saving Time" rather than savings.
And for exactly that reason, I'm certain that someone else wrote this tweet. (Also because it's generally coherent and stays squarely on mission.)
It was probably written by Co-President-elect Musk.
When I went to school as a child I arrived at the school at sunrise and got home at sunset.
Gimmer DST all the time so at least I get sunlight on one end of my day!
You either had long school days, a funny schedule, or lived at very high latitude. Where I live, school runs from roughly 9:00 am to 3:00 pm. Even at this time of year, sunrise is earlier than 9:00 am and sunset is later than 3:00 pm
Did you ever have to ride a school bus for 45 minutes or an hour before and after school like I did?
My longest one was two hours! School only had two busses, so it was a long trip.
My dad had to walk 5 miles to school, uphill both ways,
Yes, I needed to be at school before it started. And I couldn't start the trip home until it ended. That's how school works.
I support keeping the time change. DST is clearly superior during the long-light months, and Standard Time is clearly superior during the short-light months. The biannual time change is inconvenient but worth it.
I do think that we should shorten DST from its current dates, starting it in April and ending it before Halloween (because we WANT it to be dark on Halloween, it's supposed to be spooky!) and change some time zone boundaries because the westward creep performed by evening light fans has clearly put some people in the wrong time zone. Morning light matters for people's health and shouldn't be sacrificed when the season doesn't afford a surfeit of it.
But for the fact that I'm an atheist, I would agree that standard time is God's time. As it is I would say it's nature's time, slightly modified. Standard time was invented to overcome the difficulties caused by every locality using solar time, which really is nature's time, which was complicated for rail roads because they had to reset their clocks at every stop. However, under standard time, noon arrives in the middle of the day somewhere in the time zone, usually roughly in the middle of the zone, and by the same token midnight arrives in the middle of the night somewhere in the time zone. Permanent DST is completely arbitrary.
Well said.
We should do away with Daylight Savings Time. And other things about molly-coddling children from the dark. Half of our lives happen in the dark. Children should get used to it. Sun rising below the horizon. A chance to participate in the coming dawn. Could we also please go back to having Halloween trick or treating on the 31st of October (the actual All Hallow's Eve), in the evening, after dark, before parents started thinking of their kids more as investments than people? What fun is going door-to-door begging for candy wearing a costume during the day? On Daylight Saving Time, and this one, like one or two others, I agree with other sane people, Republicans included.
What if, instead of constantly falling back and springing forward, in the winter quarter, schools started an hour later and ended at the same time as usual?
So basically they would have an hour less of school from November to March. And yet they would still somehow learn everything we expect them to learn with more time to do it today? Yeah, totally makes sense.
Sorry, changing school (and business) hours is impossible. That's been proven repeatedly. We MUST change clock settings instead.
Not too long ago a local restaurant announced it would change closing time from 11 PM to 10 PM. Outrageous! The hours should have remained posted as 11 PM and all our clocks should have moved forward instead. That's the logic of permanent DST.
While we're at it, why not change all bathroom scales to display a weight that's 10 pounds less - so we can all feel good about ourselves - even though the "real" weight is different. And change rulers so they all start at 6 inches to make us feel taller.
I like that. Dicking around with standards based on physics to help the summer outdoor recreation industry and what ever else is hurtful to our egos. Let's do it.
All we have to do is call is Daylight Justification Time
The same initials as you-know-who
If you can't get your face on Rushmore then........................
Permanent DST - something Marco Rubio, who hails from a state below latitude 30° that doesn't need any time changes - is THE STUPIDEST THING IMAGINABLE.
Re; Children would have to go to school in the dark during winter.
Here's an idea. Why not change business and school hours as appropriate for the time of year and latitude* a community is located. It's not hard. We even had a nationwide test in 2020 with COVID. School starting hours were staggered or made later, and you know what? We survived that horrible ordeal. Really we did.
You want DST? Okay if you must for part of the year, but to have the entire nation adopt permanent DST, which makes the clocks always off from the sun's position is nonsense.
* also longitude for instances places at the far east or west end of a time zone
“Why not change business and school hours as appropriate for the time of year and latitude* a community is located.”
Would be a mess for (1) TV schedules, (2) flight schedules and (3) anybody needing to schedule Teams calls with people scattered across the nation.
“We survived that horrible ordeal.”
Yes, with half to two thirds of the nation bitching the entire way about it.
My thoughts on this are not mainstream.
1. School days could be shortened by more than an hour if some of the BS were eliminated. I never learned anything I needed to know at a Pep Rally. What exactly is the point of home room? I can see why kids need a recess to break up the long, never-ending school day and learn how to socialize, but what they get instead is the horror of PE. And for about a third of kids PE comes at the beginning or end of the day; it doesn't break their day up at all. Shorten the school day by one to two hours: problem solved.
2. Where I live we need reverse daylight savings time. In the late summer, it usually doesn't cool down to enjoy the outdoors until after 6 or 7 PM with daylight savings time. If you need to be at work at 7 or 8 AM, you need to squeeze in supper and all before bed. Not much of a window to mow the lawn or take a walk or sit on the porch with a book and a drink. In the winter you could enjoy mild days in the afternoon, but it gets dark by 5 or 6. Doing daylight savings time the other way around would make life better here.
I'm that odd duck who basically thinks the status quo is fine: no change is needed*.
If I had to choose between eliminating DST and making it permanent (ie, no clock change) I'd go with the latter. But I don't really mind the clock change: it has always struck me as a pleasant rite of seasonal passage. Yeah, you lose an hour of sleep in the spring, but not really—you can go to bed earlier. Or nap a bit for a week or so! And in return you now have golden sunlight well beyond 7pm (or much later, depending on where you live). It's bliss. And by mid summer it's wonderful: Seattle has usable daylight until around 10pm. Even near-the-eastern-edge-of-timezone Boston has got a bit of mid-summer light until nearly 9pm. Who doesn't love that?
Yes, going back in the late fall isn't always wonderful, but you do get an extra hour of sleep, and you at least are spared the extreme of having absolutely black mornings until way after 7am. And by mid January you notice the afternoon light starting to tarry a bit longer. And by Valentine's Day you can drive home well after 5pm with usable light (I'm going by Boston reckoning). And at that point it's only a few weeks until...
*If you twisted my arm, I'd move the clock switches to Thanksgiving weekend and President's Day weekend. It would extend DST by about six weeks. But still avoid pitch dark midwinter (December, January, early February) mornings. And the first of these weekends would be a nice one to have an extra hour of sleep, don't you think? And the second of these would be a better time to lose an hour of sleep, as so many people have that Monday off! C'mon, Donald, get it done!
Ah, finally, a subject that Trump is fully mentally capable and competent to have an opinion about.
I'm surprised there isn't more of a constituency for just pick one and stick with it; I don't care which.
Are there parts of this country where kids don't go to school in the dark? Because that is pretty normal for winter in northern states, and it's going to be dark at the morning bus stop in winter with DST or Standard Time. The only way to avoid dark bus stops is to fund schools enough that they can afford to bus all the kids at the same time, instead of staggering start times to fit in 3 routes.