Eastern Fake Time
The thing nobody ever mentions about Daylight Savings Time is that it's almost completely voluntary. You're required to transact your business with the government a little earlier in the day, it's true, but that's not much of a compulsion. It would be so much easier to think of the Federal government having "summer hours" like an ice cream parlor if that was the case.
What Daylight Savings Time really is is the government asserting control over something it's not really clear the government has any relationship with. Much like whole business over whether the courts should redefine "marriage", this might be a sterile debate. It seems pretty likely that the courts can't redefine "marriage" (in the narrow sense). People will use it however they want, and if they want contrary to the Massachusetts Supreme Court, there is nothing the government can do about that. They're not proposing re-education camps for linguistic dissidents; they were just expressing, like, their opinion about what "marriage" means to them.
It's just the same with Daylight Savings Time. Congress is saying, "Well it would be nice if you all set your clocks forward." But it seems to be missing the central element of a law. There's no compulsion. If you want to keep your clock on standard time, feel free. Large portions of Indiana do, for unclear reasons, and the feds are helpless.
Moreover, even if everyone used daylight time, I'm not sure that would be the "real" time. There's a reason noon is noon. It's when the sun is overhead in the middle of the time zone. Maybe you think the government could force us to observe "midnight" at 3 PM, but I don't think they they have the power to move these celestially rooted times, any more than they can say, "The Cartesian axes now officially meet at (1,1)." Some systems just make more sense.
So given that, and the fact that I have never met a single person who appreciates daylight savings, can't we mount a campaign to overturn it? It doesn't actually net you more daylight, people. That's an illusion.
What Daylight Savings Time really is is the government asserting control over something it's not really clear the government has any relationship with. Much like whole business over whether the courts should redefine "marriage", this might be a sterile debate. It seems pretty likely that the courts can't redefine "marriage" (in the narrow sense). People will use it however they want, and if they want contrary to the Massachusetts Supreme Court, there is nothing the government can do about that. They're not proposing re-education camps for linguistic dissidents; they were just expressing, like, their opinion about what "marriage" means to them.
It's just the same with Daylight Savings Time. Congress is saying, "Well it would be nice if you all set your clocks forward." But it seems to be missing the central element of a law. There's no compulsion. If you want to keep your clock on standard time, feel free. Large portions of Indiana do, for unclear reasons, and the feds are helpless.
Moreover, even if everyone used daylight time, I'm not sure that would be the "real" time. There's a reason noon is noon. It's when the sun is overhead in the middle of the time zone. Maybe you think the government could force us to observe "midnight" at 3 PM, but I don't think they they have the power to move these celestially rooted times, any more than they can say, "The Cartesian axes now officially meet at (1,1)." Some systems just make more sense.
So given that, and the fact that I have never met a single person who appreciates daylight savings, can't we mount a campaign to overturn it? It doesn't actually net you more daylight, people. That's an illusion.
posted by apk01004 at 11:58 AM
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