On Sunday, in a long, rambling Truth Social post, President Donald Trump revealed the real reason heās been pushing for permanent Daylight Saving Time. Unsurprisingly, itās for the benefit of golf. Whatās more, in the same post, he doxxed a Republican senator by revealing his personal cell phone number.
āEverybody in Arkansas, [Senator] Tom Cotton (R-AK), a friend of mine, is holding up a very important Bill,ā posted the president. āItās called, āThe Sunshine Protection Actā or, āWe Donāt Want to Change Our Clocks Twice a Year Act.ā For some reason, Tom is stopping the Bill and, in the Senate, itās 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!ā
Here Trump tipped his hand, revealing his actual justification for the bill: āThe 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 donāt want to change their Clocks twice a year. They want to, as they say, āLOCK THE CLOCK!ā Who doesnāt? Itās very expensive for our Nation where you have high and dangerous steeples to reach, like on churches and municipal buildings. Almost everybody wants āThe Sunshine Protection Actā 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 cellphoneā¦ā The president went on to reveal what he asserts is Cottonās actual phone number.
That makes no sense. This doesnāt 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 ārush hourā commuting times. No matter what we choose, one or both āedgesā 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 isnāt 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 transitā¦
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, itās dumb, but slightly less dumb than "farmers get to work earlier.
That said, though, I donāt see how we could have āthinnerā time zones. If you divide a 360-degree sphere into 24 equal arcs, youāre 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 arenāt an hour apart are madness.
Yeah, public transit would fix this pretty nicely. That plus a shorter workday, and a commensurate shorter school day.
Iād buy that any of that mattered if our time zone borders were straight vertical lines, but they arenāt. 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 donāt 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 donāt really know why I am doing such a deep dive into time zones, I really donāt care that much personally. All my clocks change themselves basically, and my commute is going to be in the dark all winter anywayā¦