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Down with social constructs

Flier calling for end of daylight savings time

Tenar Arha spotted this protest flier in Coolidge Corner last night.

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NOT ART

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Do we know who the man in the photo is?

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This guy: George Hudson
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Hudson_(entomologist)

Hudson is credited with proposing the modern daylight saving time. There are other pictures of him on the internet that more closely resemble the one on the flyer.

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It's William Willett, not George Hudson. The exact photo appears here: https://beckymbarker.wordpress.com/2015/01/21/world-war-i-and-the-beginn...

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It's an obscure British figure named William Willet who stole the idea for the mechanics of modern DST from Germany who, as we all know, was a wellspring of positive and healthy ideas in the first half of the 20th century.

Despite Hudson being more widely known, Willet is on this flyer because Willet was a freemason, one of the two groups who Control the World according to schizophrenic sign makers. I'm 100% sure the flyer is a parody by someone with a sincere distaste for DST. It's crafted with love.

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What can I say except that b&w photos of early 20th century old guys all look alike? But Willet has the heavily-hooded eyes shown in the image on the poster. Leaving my original comment below, with the correct link to Hudson:

Yes, it George Hudson thanks for the research. But your link is for different George Hudson profile -the GH who proposed daylight savings is the Brit/New Zealander who lived until 1946:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Hudson_(entomologist)

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Sleestak

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New England is not in the right time zone. We should be on Atlantic time. Our time zone is ridiculous in the northern reaches, spanning nearly a thousand miles.

We are too far east to fall back - spring ahead and stay there all year!

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Boston (and all of New England) gains substantially from being in the same time zone as NYC and DC.

Really, DC to Boston is a megalopolis. There's no part along the stretch where creating a 1 hour gap wouldn't create frustrating gaps and errors every day.

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I'm fine with DST. I could live if we were permanently in EDT or EST.

But being in a different zone than NYC/DC would kill us. Countless office workers would have to work on NY time anyway to coordinate finance/banking/customer needs. All your TV and national programming would be off. Never mind the disaster if MA was in Atlantic time while CT and RI stayed on Eastern time...

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A big chink

Not the preferred nomenclature.

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Countless office workers
. . .
being in a different zone than NYC/DC would kill us
. . .
disaster if MA was in Atlantic time while CT and RI stayed on Eastern time

Calm down, there. You're hyperventilating.

I think you overestimate the number of workers who depend on those cities. Being an hour ahead of NYC would hardly kill anyone. It would probably be an advantage. If I'm not mistaken, several NE states have indicated a willingness to go to Atlantic time, if we did.

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Cue hysterical cries of "but our children will be waiting for the bus in the dark"!

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Sorry but that’s a legit concern.

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Streetlights are a viable solution.

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So is delaying school opening one hour.

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Sorry; do you live in a Transylvanian village?

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And I'd quite like it if they walked to and from in the sunlight, thankyouverymuch.

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you'd like us to make purely on what you would like for your own children? I promise you, your offspring will be walking somewhere, without daylight, at some point in their lives.

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...a better solution would be for your children's school to adjust its hours as needed.

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It is kind of wild how places in Ohio and Michigan can be on EST and also downeast Maine.. Atlanta is spitting distance from the CST line and it gets dark here a full hour later than New England on the same time zone. I believe it's around 700 miles west from Boston.

OTOH down here I'm really glad for the fall back. Sunrise here was around 8am before DST and makes the first few hours of the day feel gloomy.

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If we could go right between (:30 ahead of now), we'd have an equal 5ish hours of daylight on each side of noon today.

No I'm not actually proposing that.

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Newfoundland time is half an hour later than Atlantic Time (or 1:30 later than Boston time)--but that's one relatively small island, which has used that time zone since before it became part of Canada.

It could be a lot worse: Greenland uses four time zones, and all of China is on Beijing time.

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the latter of which is not an island

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If you look at ideal (i.e. longitudinal) time zones, New England is well within the UTC-5 zone, which is about 770 miles wide at our latitude. The distortion of statutory time zones tends to be in the west, and that is true of EST. If we consider only geometry, Detroit should be in CST, but Boston belongs squarely in EST, along with all of the eastern seaboard except for Machias, Maine, and a few towns in its vicinity.

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I've lived at the other extreme end of ET- Cincinnati- where sunset today is an hour and 1 minute after it is here (4:29)- the idea of taking Boston/ New England off ET has been a non-starter in past

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If time zones were determined strictly by line of longitude, the western boundary of EST would be at 82.5 W (or 82°30' W, if you want to go oldschool). Cincinnati is at 84.5 W, two full degrees of longitude into CST territory. At that latitude, that's around 107 miles. A time zone is (or should be) only 15 (360/24) degrees wide, so two degrees is a pretty big error.

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SwirlyGrrl, you keep saying this, but I don't think it's true. If 12:00 is supposed to be mid-day, EST is definitely much closer to Boston's natural time zone than AST is. On what basis do you say that AST is more correct?

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If 12:00 is supposed to be mid-day, EST is definitely much closer to Boston's natural time zone than AST is.

Today's meridian was at 11:27AM. If we were on Atlantic Time, it would be at 12:27PM. On what basis do you say EST is "definitely much closer" to having the meridian at Noon?

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Try plugging Greenwich, UK, into that same calculator, and it will tell you that the meridian is at 11:43 AM. If there's one place on Earth that's guaranteed to be smack dab in the middle of its time zone, it's Greenwich. Even there, the meridian time changes every day. It won't reach noon until a few days after the Winter Solstice.

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This time of year, midday is about as early as it gets. In February, we get midday at 11:59.

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Boston is much closer to the "ideal" -5 zone's center than -4. You can do the math pretty easily, and I would encourage you to do so:

West 71 out of 360 degrees of longitude is 71÷360=0.197. The same fraction out of 24 hours is 24×0.197=4.73 hours. Time zones are centered on the integers, and 4.73 is closer to 5 than to 4, so we should be in the -5, aka EST.

Easy.

It looks like almost the entirety of Maine should in -5 for that matter: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/88/World_Time_Zones_Map...

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IDNGAD that we are not pedantically in the Atlantic Zone-- countries, states, localities noodle with their times all over the world (hello, India!). Let us join the zone that brings us joy, and also brings us one hour closer to European times which could be parlayed into a financial advantage, for those worried about such things. If anything, having businesses & markets open one hour earlier than NYC may be a boon for us, who knows.

My pick, though, would be to keep the time change but to also have daylight savings, because I love having late sunlight in the summer, being able to sit on a porch at 10PM without turning the lights on, walking home from work when I get off at 8PM, all that stuff.

Cheers, Swirly!

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or maybe 6?

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Given that there are 24 time zones and that the earth’s circumference is about 25,000 miles, 1000 miles at the equator is about right. 1000 miles at 45 north, not so much.

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I'm not scientist but there's definitely the same amount of sunshine today as there would be if the clocks didn't change.

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A couple of the best arguments against DST I've heard:

  • The extra hour of sunlight is killing my grass.
  • It's bad for the wildlife.
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Those advocating for what we do in the summer becoming year round can just wake up an hour earlier between now and March. Meanwhile, I will be happy to get up after the sun tomorrow.

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The claim that DST helps farmers is also fallacious. Think about it. Do cows know what time it is? Do crops? The activities that control a farmer's day have nothing to do with clocks.

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The historical argument was that on a small family farm, some family members worked at jobs in town, and DST gave them an extra hour to do farm work after getting home from work.

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DST HISTORY

Daylight saving time, in this or any other country, was never adopted to benefit farmers; it was first proposed by William Willett to the British Parliament in 1907 as a way to take full advantage of the day’s light.
. . .

Farmers were extremely opposed to having to turn back and forward their clocks. In fact, according to National Geographic, farmers had a lobby that campaigned aggressively against Daylight Saving Time. The time change disrupted their schedules. For the farmer – and the plants and animals – it’s the sun and the seasons that determine the best times to do things. It also made it more difficult to get the most out of their hired help.

More farmers saying otherwise
More
Still more

So please give a citation for your historical argument.

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Yeah, the farmer thing is really weird. If there's one profession that doesn't care which number the small hand is pointing to, it's farmers.

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The traditional small family farm was highly dependent upon people being able to do farm work by daylight after getting home from school or in-town jobs, both of which are scheduled by the clock rather than by the sun

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I stand corrected. I didn't make the child labor connection.

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Small family farms still work this way. It's called "chores".

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My mom grew up on a small farm, and most of her 9 brothers and sisters went on to become farmers. Neither she nor they ever had much good to say about DST. If you have more personal knowledge about life on a small farm, I'd be surprised, and this is one of those subjects where a little research would probably change your ideas.

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If you have more personal knowledge about life on a small farm, I'd be surprised

in your eagerness for conflict, you obviously missed the point I was making, which is that before- and after-school chores are normal for kids living on small farms today. Whether DST helps or hinders that is a different discussion. To satisfy your curiosity, I live surrounded by small farms, have many farmers as neighbors and know a bit about their kids' schedules, so be careful that surprise doesn't knock you over.

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Whether DST helps or hinders that is a different discussion.

Well, that's the discussion we were having, during which you seemed to be supporting Bob Leponge's position that farmers liked DST because chores. I'm saying they didn't and don't. Perhaps you saw the several links I posted above, where farmers are saying they don't like DST.

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having to work late every day.

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then this argument might mean something.

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... they are. Don't know about where you live but where I am the demand for athletic fields in the summer is high. Most don't have lights. Schedule can't begin until after work / school hours for obvious reasons. So having an extra hour makes a difference.

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Leisure hours are no doubt controlled by the sun. Not much else is, although arguably it should at least be taken into consideration.

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They Have Played Us For Absolute Fools

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And so is punctuality. Abolish time keeping.

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No, time is an abstract concept. This is a wristwatch.

(open challenge to see if anyone spots the reference, no cheating with a search)

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We have Ed Markey to blame. In 2005, Congressman Markey was the person who wrote legislation to get Daylight Saving extended into November under the pretense of Halloween, which doesn't make sense anyway because you can trick or treat in the dark.

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I fail to see your argument as valid. Might as well blame Obama for it too since he voted for the bill. But DST would have existed in the US with or without the change in 2005...

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In 2005 Congress passed a big energy bill. At that time, DST ended the last Sunday of October. Markey (and someone else in the Mass delegation I forget who) injected a change into the bill to extend DST into November. Markey still brags about that.

Beginning DST earlier made sense. If you're going to do DST, it may as well begin mid-March. Ending DST later did not make sense. The only groups lobbying for that were candy manufacturers like Mars, Hershey's, and Nestle.

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I looked up the bill, but we're talking about abolishing DST entirely, not reverting back to the pre-2005 period of DST. All he can be blamed for is for when the changes happen each year now. The changes existed before then and would be happening at some point each year without his changes.

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With all of the problems our planet faces, daylight savings is one of the less-important items to worry about.

Flyers of this are sometimes produced as a tongue-in-cheek attempt at humor but in today's world there are far-too-many that will take it seriously.

I've always fancied myself as being, in general, left of center and even voted for Bernie, but a lot of what I seem to be seeing and hearing from some of our far-left progressives is mostly Marxism. They just seem to be using a softer name for it now. This is why the far right is labeling them communist and socialist, in so far as what they seek to sell is textbook Marxism.

Certain social programs are beneficial to society, but there can be extremes, and as this last few years have shown, much of the population is incapable of discerning well between these two extremes to see where common ground may exist to serve a broader range of people.

While daylight savings was an effort to aid an agricultural segment of the public, it really didn't have a serious impact on the rest of us when you take a deep look at the whole thing. Seriously, did you really lose that hour of sleep and take days to recover? You knew it was coming. Go to bed a little earlier. Watch your TV program when it repeats.

Making this a political hot point to rally people around is only going to create a segment of the public to be defined that can easily be rallied for the next goofus plan, until one day those same people find themselves in opposition of our democratic public.

This is what is happening in the GOP states. Just because your political bent is different does not mean that you may be susceptible to similar extremes.

Stop. Read. Apply rational thinking.

As to my own struggle with daylight and standard time, it was harder to reprogram the digital clock last night. Otherwise I rose and had my coffee and life went on, leaving me to try to fathom why this is even an issue for anyone. Or is this just another tool and excuse to drive the stake between people who think different and have different opinions.

We saw a lot in the press about Russian interference in elections. What's the chance that there is an effort in the smaller things in life that a handful find irritating? By all means lets toss some kerosene on those glowing embers and see what happens.

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You are a true sleep champion!! I am so happy that changing the clock does not disrupt your circadian rhythm or your life at all and that you struggle to fathom how anyone could be thrown off by such an unnecessary and arbitrary change.

-probably a paid Russian troll just trying to divide you

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...when someone gets on a plane and flies to Chicago, you'd think they were dramatizing if they moaned about how disrupted their circadian rhythm was and how much they were thrown off by this "unnecessary and arbitrary change".

Normal people change time zones fairly frequently and without being overly fazed. Just sayin'.

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Magoo here. Magoo was a fussy budget this morning in bed laying next to Mrs. Magoo around 5 AM and couldn’t figure out why. Finally Magoo remember that indeed it was daylight savings time and that’s why Magoo was being such a fussy budget because Magoo wanted to get up but for the early hour. Magoo.

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If you had mentioned that you missed your usual daily bowel movement time at the first commercial break during Jeopardy I would've liked your comment. No poop joke, no thumbs up.

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Is that each time we change time, the collective disruption of sleep causes an increase of heart attacks, strokes, car accidents and deaths, likely due to sleep deprivation. So those kids waiting for the school bus could lose Nana or Yayo to a stroke, or a parent to a car crash. Not to be grim, but seriously, daylight savings is actually killing people twice a year. Definitely not worth it. It would be better to install lights at the bus stops, and have us all keep our regular sleep cycles.

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daylight savings is actually killing people twice a year

So's the Super Bowl. So are elections. So is bad weather. So are Black Friday sales. So are a great many things, most with a less tenuous cause-and-effect than DST, and some of which can actually be changed. Why not change those?

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just as they increase for the other. I think it might have been heart attacks? But yeah, both are definitely disruptive overall.

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This is what They are starting the Radical Reich protests with today...

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I have no good argument. I just think it's unnatural and messes up my SAD.

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… so long as we chose one and stick with it year round.
The time change twice a year is annoying. Dangerous too because of the increase in traffic crashes attributed to commuters being more tired in the days after the changes go into effect.

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Wait… is this the right thread???

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The reptilians are laughing at us.

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Move the clocks by one-half-hour and then leave them there permanently.

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Avoid the sudden disruption to people’s sleep cycles by phasing DST in by changing the clocks 5 minutes per day for 12 days!

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Why have you come at 4PM?

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We need to go to Atlantic time as well.

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You're saying go to Atlantic time as well as year-round DST? So the sun wouldn't rise until after 9:00 for two months of the year?

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The effect would be to leave everything here unchanged for eight months of the year, and to have sunset at 5:30 pm instead of 4:30 pm during the cold months.

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