I’m usually at the business and tech conference South by Southwest in Austin, Texas when the government sucks an hour from everyone’s lives.
When I’m there, I’m usually so hopped up on energy drinks and natural endorphins that I don’t notice the temporal sadism as much, however there are typically much smaller crowds at the Sunday morning panels and I don’t think it’s because everyone’s at church.
This year, however, I was with my family of five, including three youngsters under the age of three.
If you’re wondering what Daylight Saving Time does to toddlers, it’s akin to the psychological warfare the FBI uses to turn people in a hostage situation crazy.
I don’t quite understand the mechanics behind it, but it’s not pretty. Everyone’s confused. Naps are a nightmare and there’s poop everywhere.
Kids give us a glimpse of what really goes on in adults’ minds during the Daylight Saving shifts, but we handle the subtle psychological terrorism much better; and that’s not a compliment.
Let it be made abundantly clear that we don’t gain more daylight during Daylight Saving Time. We don’t save anything.
This is going “red-pill” quite a few people: the amount of daylight actually doesn’t magically change twice a year. The daylight stays the same; we just change our schedules.
As the old meme has the Indian chief say, “Only the government would believe that you could cut a foot off the top of a blanket and sew it on the bottom to get a longer blanket.”
Of course, I’ve heard all the arguments and none of them are good.
“It helped the farmers…” No, farmers obey the natural clock and work when it’s light out. And plants don’t care what our clocks are set at. If they did, they’d probably all die at the idiocy we display.
“The Germans scientifically proved DST worked…” The Germans were the first nation to make DST official in 1916 as a way to save energy for the WWI war effort. Great, so we’re going to let the same people that gave us the Prussian industrial education system and the Holocaust dictate what we do on a societal temporal scale?
“People like the time change much more in the fall when we gain an hour…” But what good is that extra hour when you have to spend the entire time changing all your clocks?
Perhaps the worst argument I’ve heard was some lady who said she “wouldn’t trade anything for the adventures she and her dogs got up to in the dark mornings after the time change.”
So, evidently, the time change not only wastes time, but also makes victims utterly incapable of producing a sound argument.
The worst part is that there is no actual proof that DST saves energy. One study, conducted in Australia, in which one state extended DST to account for the 2000 Summer Olympics and a neighboring state did not, found that DST did reduce energy in the evenings, but it also increased energy usage in the mornings.
Another study looked at my home state Indiana’s change to DST in 2006. The conclusion was:
“We find that the overall DST effect on electricity consumption runs counter to conventional wisdom: DST results in a 1-percent overall increase in residential electricity demand and the effect is highly statistically significant.”
There may be merit in shifting our artificial schedule to be later in the natural daylight cycle, but this benefit doesn’t magically end in November. If we’re going to shift the clocks back, let’s do it like we mean it and keep it that way!
Is it a massive scale IQ test to see who’s capable of changing all their non-smart clocks?
Is it psychological test to see how much arbitrary nonsense we’ll put up with?
Is it just societal busy work generated by the most massive bureaucracy on Earth?
No one really knows, yet we do it because “that’s just the way it is.” Really, this acquiescence shows that we are no better than Germans who succumbed to the psychosis of the Nazis. Yeah, I went there. If you’re not there, try having kids.
Daylight Saving Time is a waste of energy and sanity. It’s time to end the temporal burlesque once and for all.
Want to write for Being Libertarian? Click Here.
Latest posts by JSB Morse (see all)
- “Government Shutdown?” We Should Be So Lucky - January 10, 2019
- No, Vaccines Should Never Be Mandatory - October 4, 2018
- InfoWars and Why Censorship is Suicide in the Information Age - August 10, 2018
