Tomorrow, most of America will be forced to change their clocks, setting them forward or backwards depending on if it’s Spring or Fall – you probably know this. If you’re under 25, though, you may not realize we used to walk around the house and manually reset every clock; back in my day, there were no super computers doing it for us!
The New Zealand entomologist George Hudson first proposed modern DST. Hudson’s shift-work job gave him leisure time to collect insects and led him to value after-hours daylight.[4] In 1895 he presented a paper to the Wellington Philosophical Society proposing a two-hour daylight-saving shift,[11] and after considerable interest was expressed in Christchurch, he followed up with an 1898 paper.[31] Many publications credit DST proposal to the prominent English builder and outdoorsman William Willett,[32] who independently conceived DST in 1905 during a pre-breakfast ride, when he observed with dismay how many Londoners slept through a large part of a summer day.[16] An avid golfer, Willett also disliked cutting short his round at dusk.[33] His solution was to advance the clock during the summer months, a proposal he published two years later.
The U.S. was more typical: Congress repealed DST after 1919. President Woodrow Wilson, like Willett an avid golfer, vetoed the repeal twice but his second veto was overridden.[56]
This is everything wrong with the world: rather than simply GETTING UP AN HOUR EARLIER ALL ON ONE’S OWN, these people demanded the whole world change along with them. No one is ever satisfied living one way unless they can force everyone else to come along for the ride. Nope! Everyone’s life for the next few centuries has to be uprooted because some loser in the 1800s needed more time to play with his bugs.
And ol’ Woodrow can get fucked too.
Wilson’s successor Warren G. Harding opposed DST as a “deception”. Reasoning that people should instead get up and go to work earlier in the summer, he ordered District of Columbia federal employees to start work at 08:00 rather than 09:00 during summer 1922.
I want to invent a time machine and donate to Harding’s campaign.
In May 1965, for two weeks, St. Paul, Minnesota and Minneapolis, Minnesota were on different times
These days, most of the arguments you’ll hear for DST come from environmentalists – a group known not known for advocating wholesale changes to every facet of one’s life. They claim it saves energy. It does not.
In fact – he writes with all the authority of a mildly curious fellow with a little too much time and a willingness to read Wikipedia (let’s not pretend I went to more than one website) – energy consumption during DST increases,particularly as one gets closer to the equator, so, as is typical of basically every left wing idea known to man: in the end, it does doing more harm than good.
Time is an artificial construct and we need to jointly rise up against those in Congress who willingly manipulate it for their own leisure gains.
