On Sunday, in a long, rambling Truth Social post, President Donald Trump revealed the real reason he's been pushing for permanent Daylight Saving Time. Unsurprisingly, it's for the benefit of golf. What's more, in the same post, he doxxed a Republican senator by revealing his personal cell phone number.
"Everybody in Arkansas, [Senator] Tom Cotton (R-AK), a friend of mine, is holding up a very important Bill," posted the president. "It’s called, 'The Sunshine Protection Act' or, 'We Don’t Want to Change Our Clocks Twice a Year Act.' For some reason, Tom is stopping the Bill and, in the Senate, it’s very easy to do, it only takes one! It should pass overwhelmingly, in a Bipartisan fashion. So, everyone in Arkansas, a State I love, and won 3 times, the last by by 34 points, tell Tom to, GET IT DONE! It will be appreciated by all. Nobody wants to spend their precious time running all over the place, turning Clocks back twice a year and, having sunshine in the afternoon is better than early in the morning!"
Here Trump tipped his hand, revealing his actual justification for the bill: "The PGA TOUR, as an example, needs more Daylight in the afternoon in order to finish their Tournaments. Likewise, regular Golfers, Tennis Players, Hunters and, perhaps most importantly, Farmers who want more Daylight to play or work. See letter from Brian Rolapp, CEO of the PGA TOUR below. 65 percent PLUS want more sun in the afternoon, Daylight Saving Time (The way it is now!), but 100 percent don’t want to change their Clocks twice a year. They want to, as they say, 'LOCK THE CLOCK!' Who doesn’t? It’s very expensive for our Nation where you have high and dangerous steeples to reach, like on churches and municipal buildings. Almost everybody wants 'The Sunshine Protection Act' to pass, except for Tom Cotton. To the Great People of Arkansas, please let your Senator know it would be a GREAT Bipartisan WIN for the United States Senate, and for America, itself. Call Tom on his cellphone..." The president went on to reveal what he asserts is Cotton's actual phone number.
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Farmers literally don’t care what time it is. They aren’t waiting until 9am to do work their fields, they are going out when they should regardless of the time. No farmer is going to say “damn, sure would be nice to work on my field, but it’s only 5am so I can’t go out yet.”
It was a way to save fuel and coal during WW1. It should have been over turned after the war. It’s not needed any longer
The argument I've always heard isn't that it helps them with their work, but that it helps them with the rest of their life. Since so much of their work has to be done during the day, having more time at night to go to the store and such could potentially be nice.
It's still dumb, but it's slightly less dumb.
That makes no sense. This doesn't change the amount of time in a day (or daylight in a day). They still have to get everything done in the same amount of time. Farmers have always been a red herring for DST.
I think the real problem is that our time zones are too fat. The best modern reason I can find for DST is reducing accidents during typical "rush hour" commuting times. No matter what we choose, one or both "edges" of a time zone will be left doing either the morning or evening commutes in the dark, which significantly increases likelihood of accidents. We usually err on the side of evening commute if there isn't enough daylight for both because we tend to send kids to school around the same time as the morning commutes, and having a bunch of children walking around in the dark while assholes are in a hurry to get to work is a recipe for disaster.
Yet another problem that could be solved by better infrastructure for public transit...
During the morning, I mean. When the morning comes earlier, in theory the farmer that started at sunrise can get everything done at an earlier hour and be able to, like, go to the bank or whatever. Like I said, it's dumb, but slightly less dumb than "farmers get to work earlier.
That said, though, I don't see how we could have "thinner" time zones. If you divide a 360-degree sphere into 24 equal arcs, you're kind of stuck with 15-degree time zones, give or take. I guess we could redefine an hour to be 40 minutes, and thus have 36 ten-degree time zones, but that seems like a lot of work. And time zones that aren't an hour apart are madness.
Yeah, public transit would fix this pretty nicely. That plus a shorter workday, and a commensurate shorter school day.
I'd buy that any of that mattered if our time zone borders were straight vertical lines, but they aren't. The time zone borders are wonky as hell already. Also, we have 25 time zones currently (-12h through +12h with 0h in the middle), and there are exceptions all over the place. There are places that are +13h and +14h, there are 30m and 45m changes, etc.
We don't need the whole world to redefine an hour for us to go from 4 time zones to 6. We could have extreme east and west regions joining with their nearest oceanic time zones to give us a broader range of times and then re-align the interior regions in a way that makes as much sense as possible and probably be in a much better place.
edit: Also, I don't really know why I am doing such a deep dive into time zones, I really don't care that much personally. All my clocks change themselves basically, and my commute is going to be in the dark all winter anyway...