Time Policy
Well, it’s EST here again, and I’m not sure if my Movable Type setup supports it or not. But Kevin Drum has some thoughts on time changes - mainly that we should make small time changes all year round to maintain a sunset time of 8 PM. I agree with the goa l- I’ll trade any amount of morning sunlight in return for evenings that don’t make me want to kill myself. But it’s not that simple.
The first problem is that we would need more time zones, divided by latitude as well as longitude. Miami and Montpelier are in the same time zone, but their sunset schedules are not comparable. We’d need at least eight time zones in the continental US, possibly twelve, each changing at least six times a year. Ouch.
A more feasible (but still totally infeasible) way would be for society to adopt these lifestyle changes voluntarily without changing the clocks at all. I, like a lot of people, wake up at 7:30, work 9 to 6, and go to bed around midnight. What if a subset of northeastern US society agreed to do everything 3 hours earlier in the winter? Sleeping from 9 PM to 4:30 AM wouldn’t be so bad, although cars would take a tiny bit longer to warm up in the morning.
But maybe we’re so conditioned to be governed by these time numbers that, no matter, what the benefits, that schedule would be frowned upon. What if we overhauled how we talk about time? Say your local sunset time is 7:19 PM - let’s call 7 PM your Sunset Hour. What if a business voluntarily declared itself to be open from SunsetHourMinus11 to SunsetHourMinus3?
That’s the best time policy overhaul I can think of, but it would take massive leadership to make it happen, and I’m not the guy to do it.