I saw someone tweet it that it was stupid and we should just stay on it all year and I did a double take when I saw it was Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI). Have we found a bipartisan issue? I absolutely loathe this crap.
Either
1)Abolish
2)Stay on all year
3)Go half an hour forward and stay that way
It’s easy to forgot about this nonsense expect when it’s about to happen but I’d really love to see something done. Add it to the MAGA agenda.
I pretty much hate the clock change.
Always did, always will.
We go back to CST so skool kids don’t hafta wait for bus in the dark ... in morning.
“Either
1)Abolish
2)Stay on all year
3)Go half an hour forward and stay that way”
Maybe I’m the only person who feels this way, but I think that we should keep Daylight Saving Time exactly how it is (except perhaps have it start a week later).
First of all, forget about going half an hour forward all year. The only countries that differ from the others by a half hour are Venezuela and a few other freaks. If you think that doing business with Europe and East Asia is hard now, imagine if we couldn’t even say that it’s now 10 minutes past the hour.
Second, getting rid of DST literally would waste sunlight—why the heck do you want the sun to come up at 5:15 a.m. and set at 7:30 p.m. in the summer months when it can come up at 6:15 a.m. (still way before most people go to work or school) and set at 8:30 p.m.?
And, regarding the solution that everyone seems to be pushing—springing forward and then just keeping it there forever—it just doesn’t work in the winter months. Let’s say that one lives in the cherry and wine country of Traverse City, Michigan. During the shorter days of late December and early January, the sun rises at between 8:16 and 8:19 a.m., and sets at 5:04 and 5:19 p.m. If we adopted permanent Daylight Savings Time, sure, the sun would set at 6:04 and 6:19 every afternoon, which is better than the alternative, but a sunrise at between 9:16 a.m. and 9:19 a.m. would be brutal. What do you propose, making school start at 9:30 a.m. so that kids aren’t waiting at the bus stop when it is pitch black? And will every job also start at 9:30 a.m. so you don’t have thousands of cars in the morning commute in absolute darkness (with the increase in traffic accidents that we’d see)? Having the sun rise so late just isn’t practical (sure, that’s the case in the winter in northern Alaska, which is one of the reasons why almost no one lives up there), which is why DST traditionally ran from April through October and now starts in the second week of March and runs through the first week of November but has not been imposed from early November to early March.
So you get an hour less of sleep one Sunday in the spring (actually, the late winter now) and get an extra hour of sleep in the fall—big whoop. If states want school and government business hours to start one hour later on the first Monday after the second Sunday in March, then they should go for it, but altering the schedule one day a year would be far less onerous than trying live a normal life with post-8:00 a.m. sunrises for 120 days every winter.
So Sheldon Whitehouse did not end his lifelong streak of being wrong on every single issue. : )