Life With Chronic Pain

But I raise an eyebrow at the “we don’t need a piece of paper to prove our love” and it’s like, that’s not what marriage is. Marriage is literally a contract. If you feel that contract is not for you I have no problem with that. I don’t think everyone needs to marry.

It’s called the Sunshine Protection Act, after all. Who could oppose protecting sunshine? President Donald Trump, who supports the move, wrote in May that it would give people “a longer, brighter Day.”

“And who can be against that?” he added.

Well, as it turns out, lots of people can be. Because they were when the United States tried this back in the 1970s. Americans were soon reminded that there was a good reason that we started changing the clocks in the first place. And public opinion turned on a dime.

In the midst of an energy crisis, President Richard Nixon proposed making Daylight Saving Time permanent for the next two winters in order to conserve it. And the change was quickly implemented for the winter of 1973-74.

But polls showed support falling off a cliff. Data from the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago showed 79% supported the change in December; that fell to 42% by February. Other polls showed support dropping even lower.

The move didn’t actually save much energy, according to a later study from the Department of Transportation. But it did produce a series of other changes that, it turned out, were problematic.

…

The biggest downside of adopting this permanently meant putting children at the bus stop in the cold and dark — which some feared was deadly.

Time magazine reported in February 1974 that eight Florida children had died in early morning traffic accidents a month after the change took place, compared to just two in the same period the year prior. When Congress voted to nix the change later in 1974, The New York Times quoted an anonymous House member saying: “There seemed to be some indication that there were more deaths, and everyone got a little nervous.”

It’s valid to ask whether keeping the clocks on Daylight Saving Time actually led to deaths — or, more specifically, whether it led to more deaths than changing the clocks does. The latter, after all, could lead to accidents by throwing off people’s circadian rhythms and putting them behind the wheel when they might be sleep deprived. An academic study in 2016 estimated that changing the clocks “caused over 30 deaths at a social cost of $275 million annually.”

But that gets at the key point here. This is a choice between suboptimal options created by how our society functions and how sunlight hours shift over the course of the year because of Earth’s rotation. (Read more at link below)