Welcome to Uno Dose of Trace.

I am Trace.

Daylight savings time is based on a false assumption.

We do this every year where we spring forward

and we fall back, and we spring forward and we fall back.

But we could just stop.

We should just stop.

We just switched from daylight savings time to standard time.

And not only does switching from summertime to regular time

make life more difficult and more complicated,

there's evidence that it literally kills people.

California voted to abolish daylight savings,

and to that I say no thank you, sir, madam, people.

I say no because standard time is terrible.

The sunset on the summer solstice,

the longest day of the year, would be 735 PM.

That sounds terrible for summer.

Ugh, no, no, no.

Instead, let's just keep daylight savings time forever,

endless summer time.

If we adopt daylight savings forever,

it is always later later, always.

It's just sometimes dark earlier.

There are a bunch of arguments for daylight savings,

and I'm going to go through each one.

And some of them go back centuries,

but they're all pretty much wrong.

And I'm going to tell you why they're wrong,

and also why we should just stop doing this to ourselves.

So get ready to alohamora all of these arguments.

That didn't make any sense.

Hey there, second law of thermodynamics.

This is Trace here, and I've been

thinking about daylight savings for a while.

Happy Halloween, by the way.

That's why I'm in costume.

I've got to go to a Halloween party later.

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And thank you.

Daylight savings is a result of our creation of time.

Time is a construct.

We invented it, it doesn't actually exist.

Yeah, yeah, time passes, second law of thermodynamics.

Everything increases in entropy on our inevitable march

toward the heat death of the universe.

But seconds, minutes, hours, these concepts

were created to make society run smoother and more efficiently.

They're not constant.

In ancient Rome, they recognized that the days

were longer in the summer, so they just made hours

longer to accommodate for that.

A Roman summer hour was 75 minutes

and a winter hour was only 45 minutes.

Like all human things, our approximations of nature

are imperfect.

And today we adopt daylight savings time, or summer time,

to approximate a solution for the same problem.

The days are longer in the summer.

The reason of this is the earth.

The northern hemisphere summer seems

longer because of the tilt of the earth as we orbit the sun.

The Earth's movement in space also

contributes to the shifting of sunset and sunrise

over the year.

Our chasing of the sun around the clock

was first suggested by Ben Franklin,

but it was never implemented by him.

You're probably thinking that we switched time

because of some ancient or old agrarian society thing, right?

Farmers, argh.

But that's actually a big myth.

Full time farmers don't need to move time around.

And in fact, in 1919 when daylight savings was

first adopted--

it was later repealed, we're going

to come back to that-- farmers were against it.

Moving the clock actually harms farmers.

Because if you milk the cows at 5:00 AM and then we fall back,

it's 4:00 AM and the cows still want

to be milked at that same time.

Them cows still need milking, so the dairy farmer just

has to get up earlier to milk them cows.

That's the way it goes.

So if it's not farmers, why do we do this?

Capitalism.

But to get to that takes a minute,

so we have to go back to the late 19th century

when we stopped using sun time and we

switched into standard time.

For most of our history, clocks were not

synced with each other.

Instead, some person set the clock in the center of town

to noon or rang the town bell so we could all set our watches.

When the sun was right overhead, that was noon.

This means each town had its own time.

It was called sun time--

or God's time in the US, no surprise there.

This time was different everywhere.

Every town at different latitudes and longitudes

would have a different noon, and thus a different time of day.

This is an 1870 pocket diary that

includes how to convert Boston time to other places.

A Bostonian heading to Detroit, for example,

would subtract 47 minutes and 56 seconds

from their watch to be on Detroit time.

The state of Wisconsin had 38 different times.

And I'm sure this would be very confusing

if you were traveling around Wisconsin trying

all the cheese.

But in the 19th century, that wasn't too much of a problem

because we didn't have a society that relied on specific meeting

times, like down to the minute or to the second.

There were no tight deadlines like that.

But as trains and faster modes of transportation

were invented, we needed a better, more standardized way

to measure time.

And there was push-back, but eventually governments

adopted a standard time.

And this was a huge shift for humanity as a whole.

We divested ourselves from the sun.

We created this imperfect time system separate from nature,

and we were running into problems.

Under sun time, the sun's position

was determining noon every day.

It was literally noon.

And throughout the year, the length of the day would change

and we'd move noon around, keeping in sync

with the length of the day.

The middle of the day would still be the middle.

But without that movement, we started to have problems.

And for the first time in history,

the sun was out of sync with how we were living our lives.

A British builder named William Willett noticed on a morning

horse ride, allegedly, that people were

sleeping when the sun was up.

And like a lot of annoying morning people he was all like,

I don't get it.

Wake up and do something.

He felt that we needed to shift the hour to wake people up.

This was called Willett's summer time.

He pitched it to Parliament, and it

would encourage the British people to get up and be

more active and outdoorsy.

And Parliament rejected it.

Turns out, governments don't really

care about people being active.

But they do care about money.

When Brent Franklin suggested daylight savings time,

he thought if it were lighter later we

would burn fewer candles and save on energy.

During World War I, Germany established a summer shift

to do exactly that, burn less fuel.

Allegedly, they wanted to save energy,

so they would shift the clock.

And once they passed it, Britain did too.

And so did other European countries and the United

States.

I'm sure Willett would have been very pleased.

And this was the first adoption of daylight time.

As I mentioned earlier it was repealed after the war.

During World War II, we all adopted it again,

and it expired six months after the war ended.

No one wanted daylight savings time.

Throughout the following decades,

daylight savings was tried a few more times,

like during the oil embargo to save energy in the '70s.

And selectively, by some states and towns,

each area started and ended daylight savings time

on different days.

Or they just ignored it, making things very confusing

for train scheduling and for TV broadcasters.

Every region still had its own weird time.

Until in 1966, Congress passed the Uniform Time Act, which

said if you adopt summertime, it has

to be from April to October.

That's when it was.

It was either an up or down vote.

And they did this to keep it simple,

but also to save energy.

The US Department of Transportation

says today on their website, energy consumption

is the purpose of daylight savings.

It saves energy.

But what if I told you the whole energy saving

thing, the 18th century Ben Franklin assumption,

that actually doesn't save any energy.

A 2008 study from the National Bureau of Economic Research

found that daylight savings time actually, quote,

"increases residential electricity demand".

And in the fall, it increases it the most, by 2% to 4%.

Another study in Australia found the same result, no energy

savings.

They were able to do this because,

until 2006 Indiana didn't use daylight savings time.

So the researchers looked at how much

energy people were using before summertime adoption and then

after.

And it turns out, lighter later doesn't really save energy.

And they say in the study that places further south of Indiana

might have worse energy consumption using

daylight savings time.

It might be worse in the south.

If the whole premise is wrong, then why do we still do this?

Capitalism, my friends.

Saving energy is a red herring.

It doesn't matter if it's real or not.

But another major reason for adopting daylight savings time

is being more active, right?

We'll be outside more.

We have altered daylight savings time multiple times

since 1966 when it was adopted.

The most recent one was the Energy Policy Act of 2005.

We made daylight savings time longer,

stretching it from early March until early November.

Why is that?

Because of shopping.

Retailers lobbied Congress hard to extend daylight savings

in the 2000's because later sunset times encouraged people

to visit stores and restaurants, and they allegedly

would spend money.

The Department of Transportation says

they want to make people more active, i.e.

they want people to go out and do things.

And what do people do when they go out?

In the US at least, they spend dollars.

But to be honest, this isn't a thing either.

Consumer spending does increase slightly

after the spring daylight savings time shift,

but the drop after the fall shift actually outweighs it.

So there's still no real reason to do this.

The third reason the Department of Transportation website,

and another commonly cited reason

to keep daylight savings time, is reduction in crime.

Some say that daylight savings reduces

crime and sexual assault because fewer people are out

in the dark of the evening.

You know, it's dark, so crime happens.

And a study in the Review of Economics and Statistics

from 2015 found during daylight savings,

when it is lighter later in the evening,

robberies are reduced by 7%.

They also looked at rape, and aggravated assault, and murder.