The Volokh Conspiracy
[Eugene Volokh, October 30, 2005 at 6:45pm] Trackbacks
Extending Daylight:

Jim Lindgren's extending Daylight Savings Time plan sounds good, but I'd much rather extend daylight. L.A., where I live, is already on average warmer and sunnier than most places in the U.S. Why shouldn't it be on average lighter?

This whole everyone-gets-12-hours-of-daylight-a-day-on-average plan sounds wrong to me; another example of hyperegalitarianism run amok. Maybe even Communism. We Americans deserve better -- there ought to be a law, or something. Sixteen hours a day of light on average, with eight hours of darkness, sounds about right to me, but I'll be willing to compromise on 14-10. And, no, I'm not in the mood to move hemispheres myself twice a year; I want the light to come to me . . . .

Related Posts (on one page):

  1. Extending Daylight:
  2. Extending Daylight Saving Time.--
Anderson (mail) (www):
Daylight 24/7 seems most efficient. Let's build a new sun! What would it take to make Jupiter sufficiently massive? Can we crash Saturn into it? (Rings, schmings!)
10.30.2005 7:49pm
anonymous coward:
My friends, there is a way to ensure 16 hours of sunlight a day and much else besides: Blow up the Moon.
10.30.2005 7:53pm
Eric Anondson (mail):
I like when the the Royal Astronomer poked fun at the idea of a DST like change, suggesting: “And let it be further enacted that between the months of October and March the thermometer should be put up ten degrees.”
10.30.2005 8:11pm
Aasem (mail):
Hey guys, I was raised in Alaska. Trust me, it is good to have some darkness in the summer, and some light in the winter. Really, that is soooo friggin' necessary!

LA is perfect just the way it is.
10.30.2005 8:12pm
arthur (mail):
So if extended daylight hours were such a good thing, why hasn't any capitalist made it happen? Because lobbyists of "big darkness", principally the lightbulb industry, in an unholy alliance with the trial lawyers who represent skin cancer victims, use governent regulation and the threeat of jury veridicts, to shut down the innovators. Tort reform and abolition of the civil jury would solve the problem.
10.30.2005 8:58pm
Windypundit (www):
It's called electric lighting, Eugene. Check it out some time.
10.30.2005 9:06pm
GuestFella:
Why don't we switch to a variable time system with "1 am" being one hour after sunrise, and "1 pm" being one hour after sunset. Then, we could rise and sleep the same time relative to the rising/setting of the sun. With modern technology, watches and clocks will automatically adjust and we wouldn't even have to think about it. Class tomorrow starts at 3 am. Meet me for dinner at 2 pm. Sounds good?
10.30.2005 9:06pm
Scaldis Noel:
The best solution is to eliminate all time zones and use Greenwich Mean Time (GMT, ZULU, etc.) across the entire planet. At 00:00GMT every day, the calendar would advance by one day for the whole planet all at once. Every organization would be able to decide for itself the best time to be open for business. If you do business across time zones now, you would never need to ask, when setting an appointment or meeting with someone in another area, "Is that my 2pm or your 2pm?"

Of course a change that radical would never happen, no matter how much sense it makes. The real question to focus on is: Why don't we eliminate pennies, nickels, and quarters in favor of a dimes and dollars system?
10.30.2005 9:19pm
Justin (mail):
"LA is perfect just the way it is."

Uh, okay....::giggles::

As a New Yorker, I was always jealous of SoCal, till I spent time there. Talk about soulless.
10.30.2005 9:31pm
Jesse (mail) (www):
Wouldn't it be simpler to ignore the clocks, and just change our schedules in the winter? Just declare that the office will now be open from 8-4 instead of 9-5 (or whatever people decide offers the most light), and save us all the hassle of changing the clocks on our stereos and VCRs, which always takes two hours to figure out.

But apparently this is hopeless. When the Endurance was trapped in the Antaractic ice, cut off from the rest of the world, the crew adopted their own form of daylight savings time, as that was easier than changing people's habits regarding the clock. It will take a lot more than flex-time and DVRs to get us out of the 9-5 habit.
10.30.2005 9:36pm
Cornellian (mail):
"LA is perfect just the way it is."

Uh, okay....::giggles::

As a New Yorker, I was always jealous of SoCal, till I spent time there. Talk about soulless.

One theory is that New Yorkers say stuff like that about LA to cheer themselves up after trudging through the slush and freezing winds towards a 20 minute ride on a subway car packed 4 inches away from some guy with the flu.
10.30.2005 9:52pm
Nikki (www):
The American way of lighting is not negotiable!
10.30.2005 9:58pm
Justin (mail):
"One theory is that New Yorkers say stuff like that about LA to cheer themselves up after trudging through the slush and freezing winds towards a 20 minute ride on a subway car packed 4 inches away from some guy with the flu."

Before I spent time in LA, I believed that theory as well.
10.30.2005 9:59pm
Jadagul (mail) (www):
Professor, please tell me you're joking!

And if you really want more sunlight, I'd be happy to give you some of mine. One of my biggest problems with LA is that y'all have way too much sun. Never overcast, sunlight lasts forever in the summer...a truly miserable weather situation.

And no, I'm not joking.
10.30.2005 10:17pm
Cynicus Prime (mail) (www):
I actually read an article in Popular Science (or Mechanics?) a few years ago that described giant space mirrors that provided light to areas when needed. Quite a ridiculous idea in both formulation and execution. While I generally celebrate man's harnessing of nature for his own purposes, I think the light bulb is far enough here.
10.30.2005 10:23pm
John Lederer (mail):
When I was a young lad I attended a community meeting with our Senator, Hugh Scott. Daylight savings time was recent and a lady informed Sen. Scott that it was wrong for her flowers to lose an extra hour of early spring daylight.

Sen. Scott considered this for a moment then hastened to inform her that it would work out over a year with the extra hour of daylight they had added in the summer.

His aide had a funny expression.
10.30.2005 10:54pm
nk (mail) (www):
Well, actually, as Cynicus Prime wrote, we could try an array of artificial moons (near orbit satellites composed mainly of reflective cloth) which would send sunlight everywhere we wanted whenever we wanted. The havoc it would reap .... We must be on the lookout for anyone who looks likely to put it into practice. Hmm, maybe we should put under surveillance anyone who even suggests it. Especially law professors without a background in ecological sciences.
10.30.2005 11:04pm
JohnG:
Since the world is flat to begin with, why do we have variable hours of sun and darkness? And, what's this stuff about time zones??? Who's responsible for starting that?
10.31.2005 12:39am
Paul N (mail):
Aren't some nanobots going to start consructing a Dyson Sphere soon? 24 hour sunlight, baby.
10.31.2005 2:17am
Chukuang:
"Since the beginning of time man has yearned to destroy the sun."

-C.M. Burns
10.31.2005 7:03am
The Tensor (mail) (www):
I'm way ahead of you.
10.31.2005 8:11am
Shawn (mail):
Arizona doesn't seem to suffer by ignoring "daylight savings". Let's just toss the silly scheme out the window.

Jesse's idea has further merit in that it would encourage businesses to vary their hours relative to each other and thus lighten the rush hour traffic by spreading it out over a greater period of time.
10.31.2005 9:03am
CTW (mail):
the basic problem is that the earth's rotational axis is (relatively) fixed (unintelligent design). when the nuclear holocaust occurs, perhaps it will cause that axis to rotate and then there presumably will be a more equal distribution of light/dark when averaged over the period of the new rotation. not, of course, that it will benefit prof volokh or anyone else.
10.31.2005 1:32pm

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