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Showing posts from March, 2021

It's time to end Daylight Savings. Ourselves.

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Daylight Savings Time is unpopular. So why do we still do it? I'm not asking why we started  DST, which is stupid but doesn't matter. I'm asking this: what is preventing us from stopping this unpopular practice? I've met several people who thought that California had ended it by referendum with Prop 7 in 2018 . It's fitting that a measure about DST is misunderstood by many Californians. But the literal explanation is that DST is imposed by the federal government, and Prop 7 merely demonstrated Californian's preferences as the first step of asking our federal government to free us from daylight savings. This feels absurd though, doesn't it? The federal government? Why is congress in charge of what time Californians set their clocks to? The answer is that just as a dollar is just piece of paper that gains its worth from our collective agreement, their authority exists so long as we believe it does. We set our clocks forward because everyone else does, and if w