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Notes -
The Time Wars Have Begun.
President-Elect Trump has put his weight behind ending Daylight Saving Time. Pretty much everyone likes the idea, but immediately the perma-DST vs. Noon-Is-Noon factions drew up battle lines.
I’m not here to litigate that battle, it’s tiresome; all the points have been made elsewhere and basically come down to if 9-5 or 8-4 (solar time) is what our civilization should stick with, and what we should call them, for the sake of the children and for having some evening daylight after work.
Instead I propose that schools and businesses start using “sundial time”.
They’d open at, for example, one hour after dawn and be open 8 or 9 hours. Retail stores, bars, and other businesses that rely on evening business could base their workday around sunset, closing at (let’s say) three or five hours after sundown.
Their door signs could be IOT smart displays, automatically coordinating with a virtual sundial based on their GPS coordinates, with translation into noon-based time. Smartphones could show these times pretty easily, via a settings switch.
We even have the Latin abbreviations AL (ante lucem), PL (post lucem), AV (ante vesperum), and PV (post vesperum) ready to go.
The major plus would be health, as instead of one hour jumps in spring and fall causing heart attacks, times would adjust only minutes each day, steadily.
Would you be opposed to this in your city/town, and would you be more or less opposed if your political rivals suggested this? Do you have any priors re which political tribes would hold which opinions?
Are you PDST or NIN and a night owl or early bird, and do you think that influenced your other answers and arguments? (For transparency, I’m a Noon-Is-Nooner night owl.)
I will confess myself as a completely confused person when this comes up. The switch never affects me and the different times dont seem too different. My mother strongly prefers permanent DST and so do animals of the farm type, so why not do that? I guess?
Animals of the farm type don't know what time humans' watches are showing.
The argument that "farmers start work at 6am and it will be too dark to do farm work that early in the morning if we have permanent DST" is widely made in the UK, and believed by significant numbers of farmers, but it is the stupidest argument on either side of the debate. Farmers have to start work at dawn (or slightly before, depending on what they are farming) regardless of what time the clocks are showing. All moving to permanent DST would do is take away part of the early-riser machismo that attaches to getting up early (relative to dawn) when we have set the clocks so that urbanites do that.
I thought the idea with farmers is that, yes, they start their day at dawn, and DST helps them stay in sync with the rest of the country. Probably obsolete now that a very small fraction of the UK and US populations are family farmers, but I think it's a coherent idea.
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