Category: Politics

It’s that time again, at least here in the US. I rant about DST because there is something fundamentally wrong with how we do it. And proposed solutions are even worse. Nothing infuriates me quite like the stupidity of fixing a mistake with an even bigger mistake. In order to make the choices more clear, I analyzed the badness of each DST policy and put a number on it. (Details at the end.)

BLUF –If you really must live by the clock rather than getting up naturally, then the optimal DST policy is to spring forward in early April and fall back in mid-September. This is provably better than both permanent DST and permanent standard time.

Status quo (333 stupidity points)

Currently in the US, DST starts on the second Sunday in March and ends on first Sunday in November. The “spring forward” change creates several weeks of misery each year, including a measurable number of excess deaths, injuries and economic losses. This brilliant system was imposed by congress in 2005, ostensibly to save more energy than the previous DST schedule. Go figure.

In the plot below, the blue curve is time of sunrise throughout the year in Washington, DC. (Astronomical “sunrise” is when the first rays of direct sunlight reach your point on Earth.) The red line is get up time for a typical work day. When the red line is below the blue line, you’re getting up before sunrise. Each hour you get up before sunrise costs 2 stupidity points. When the red line is above the blue line, you are sleeping in or otherwise idling. This is the daylight that DST is supposed to save. Each hour of idling costs 1 stupidity point.

 

1986 DST schedule (301 stupidity points)

From the first Sunday in April to the last Sunday in October.

 

 

Optimal DST (256 stupidity points)

From first Sunday in April to third Sunday in September.

I played around with various policies, trying to find the lowest penalty given my chosen weights. The optimal schedule varies a little by location in the continental US, but only by a couple of weeks.

Basically, the optimal approach is to split the pre and post sunrise time across the DST shift. As a consequence, the shift only wipes out a half hour of your sleep rather than a whole hour. This should reduce the pain associated with time changes.

Notice that the Status Quo policy adds about a month on each side. That’s a lot of extra pain, and the reason why people want a different policy.

 

Permanent DST (586 stupidity points)

We like DST. It makes summers nice. Let’s have DST all year round!

This is the dumbest possible policy, nearly twice as dumb as 1986 DST schedule. The US experimented with this policy in 1974, but gave up on it. The most flabbergasting thing is that anyone takes it seriously.

To be fair, this policy is optimal if you ignore the cost of getting up before sunrise. Since those costs are real and can’t be legislated away, this policy is maximally self-punishing. If we ever enact it, people will beg to take back their wish.

 

Permanent Standard Time (404 stupidity points)

Stop renaming time. Businesses, particularly retail, can set their own seasonal hours (as many already do). A lot of business is now electronic and independent of time-of-day. And not switching clocks would reduce a lot of complexity in computer time-keeping.

Unlike permanent DST, this policy acknowledges that there is a real sun out there, and chooses to name time like we did before DST was an evil gleam in Ben Franklin’s eye.

 

Smash the alarm clock (0 stupidity points)

Get up at sunrise, every day of the year, like our pre-industrial ancestors. Get to work when you are ready. In this utopia, there could still be scheduled meetings, but they are set far enough after sunrise that everyone can comfortably make it. Don’t worry, be happy.

This idea is not as insane as it might sound. With the new gig economy, working from home, etc., a lot of us can schedule our lives this way. What remains is to extend this benefit to low-wage laborers.

 

Method

Let’s say that the most natural time to get up is at astronomical sunrise, that moment when the first direct rays of sunlight reach you. There is a period before that called “dawn” where the sky starts to lighten. I believe that gradual increase in brightness is part of the natural wake up process, so that when the sun breaks over the horizon you are ready to start  doing stuff.

It usually takes people some time to get ready for the day then travel to school or work, let’s say 1.5 hours. This means the ideal time to arrive at your desk (school or work) is about 90 minutes after sunrise. Unfortunately, in the modern world we live by the clock rather than rising naturally. The average start time of a day job in the US is close to 8:00. If you’re a student, it’s 7:30. So the typical get up time is between 6:00 and 6:30.

Sunrise varies with season and latitude. The name of that time varies with location within a particular timezone. You can calculate sunrise using this tool from NOAA. They also provide a spreadsheet for calculating sunrise times for an entire year. I took that spreadsheet and added a tab to calculate the stupidity score. You can download and try it for yourself. You can adjust the DST policy as you see fit, and change the penalty for hours before/after sunrise. Give it a try!

I chose Washington, DC as the reference location for this writeup. It seemed like a good place to measure the stupidity of policies. Ideally, a tool for actual decision-making about DST should compute the population-weighted average of a large number of locations across the country.

As you might guess, the optimal policy depends a lot on the penalty values you choose. It turns out that if you don’t care about the cost of getting up before dawn, Permanent DST is the best policy, but only by a tiny margin. If you don’t care about the cost of sleeping in, Permanent Standard Time is the best. If these penalties are equal and nonzero, the “Optimal DST” policy is still best.

A while back I posted a story called the Lemonade Stand. Here I want to explain more explicitly some of the ideas behind that post. Most people will probably find these ideas non-intuitive.

• The economy is really about natural resources and things people do with them. This includes farming, which is the activity that matters most.

• Money is mainly a form of symbolic communication. This is especially true these days, when money is mostly numbers in a computer, but it has always been that way even when we were exchanging little bits of gold (which frankly is only good for decoration).

• The amount of money next to your name (such as Bezos, $188 billion) is a social construct that expresses how much influence you have over other people’s actions. Owning stuff just means everyone agrees to handle that stuff the way you dictate. Owning corporations means you can direct the activities of its members. Paying wages means you can direct individual people to do specific things, like flip that burger for you or fix your plumbing. Money only works as long as people agree to it.

If money were distributed strictly on merit, then I think there are mainly three criteria: how hard you work, how smart you are, and your moral character. On any of these three criteria, I do not believe that Bezos is a million times better than most average working people in America, yet he has a million times bigger share of the economy. What’s up with that?

Bezos had some good ideas and he worked hard to build a company. He deserves credit for that. However, he did not do all the work. He does not pack the boxes or put them at my doorstep. He does not write the software. He has a vast number of talented and hard-working people making that happen. However, he harvests the benefits of their strength and creativity merely because he started the thing, and perhaps because he continues to provide effective leadership.

This is how our society is structured. We like the pyramid scheme, where those who start something can ride the wave to unbelievable heights, while those who come in under them serve only to hold them up.

One argument for keeping society this way is that it encourages innovation that creates amazing solutions like Amazon. However, I believe Amazon could still happen without a 6-order-of-magnitude difference between the bottom and the top. What if we decided to somehow (not sure how) limit it to only 2 orders of magnitude? Bezos could be 100 times richer than his poorest employee, and that would still be a lot.

Some congress people are proposing to make DST permanent. This is a case of totally missing the point. In ascending order of stupidity, here are the main choices the country has:

• Permanent standard time.
• Adjust time on reasonable dates (see below)
• Permanent DST
• The system we have now

When congress last meddled with it (2005), they set start and end dates which totally do not fit our natural annual rhythms. This makes it generally unpleasant for the first few weeks, and also does measurable harm.
Those first few weeks of unpleasantness are really the offset between the system we have and one that would make sense. Our “biological clock” naturally shifts through the seasons. Just push the change date back about a month and everyone would be ready for it.

A better approach would be to not have DST at all. Businesses, particularly retail, can set their own seasonal hours (as many already do). A lot of business is now electronic and independent of time-of-day. And not switching clocks would reduce a lot of complexity in computer time-keeping.

Why is permanent DST nearly as stupid as what we have now? Because there’s nothing special about the name you give time. The thing that mattered about DST was changing the name on specified dates. If you don’t do that, then you ought to simply name the time following historic and scientific conventions. “Noon” is when the sun is directly overhead. Put another way, there is no difference between permanent DST and permanent standard time, other than giving time the wrong name.

Here’s a little thought experiment: Suppose person A lives in a valley on good land and enjoys prosperity. Then person B comes into the valley. Because B is stronger, it takes over all the good land, forcing A to live on the worst land. Conditions are so bad that A is barely able to survive. Several generations go by. The descendants of B forget what happened, and come to view the good land as their natural birthright. Meanwhile, the descendants of A continue to live in squalid conditions and never forget. One day, C goes over to D and says, “Your ancestor B took this land from my ancestor A. Now make it right.” At this point, there is no available land anywhere else in the world. D views itself as a good and upright person. D also has all the power. What is the right thing to do?

1. D ignores C.
2. D shares half the good land with C. (The bad land isn’t worth bothering with, but they can split that too.)
3. D and C trade places.

Now, what happens if B has ten times as many descendants as A? We can add another option, similar to #2, where they share the land in proportion to the number of people.

I read a news article about pockets of people who are ready to kill in the name of Trump. This is chilling and dystopic, but I have to remind myself that it doesn’t mean the entire conservative half of our country is about to turn violent. There’s a whole gradation of opinion, and I believe (without proof) that most people actually respect our institutions and each other.

Let the true patriots rise up and reaffirm our commitment to the constitution and each other. Your life matters to me. You are much more valuable than your opinions, though I also care about what you think. I support your right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, even if it looks different than what I want.

Institutions exist because people believe in them.

Take for example the Supreme Court of the United States of America. Why does this institution have power to do anything? It’s just 9 people sitting in a room. Why should what they say matter to anyone? It matters because hundreds of millions of people believe in that institution. We believe that some rules written on a piece of paper matter, and we are all going to follow those rules.

Yes, you might say, but we don’t have any choice. That’s kind of true. When the believers count in the hundreds of millions, one person can’t really resist it. Regardless of what you think, if everyone else believes that everyone else believes, they are going to follow the rules and bring significant consequences on you if you deviate. Thus, institutions take on a life of their own. They can include mechanisms for reinforcing their own continued existence. This the case for nation states, churches, and so on.

Someone becomes president in the US because we all acknowledge him (so far no her) as the winner of an election. It is our belief, our choice, that brings the office of president into existence. And we can just as easily destroy the office by choosing not to believe. This is why Trump’s behavior is so dangerous. He is attacking the very foundation of our constitutional democracy by sowing doubt about elections and the legitimate transfer of power. Remember, nothing sustains it other than our mutual belief.

As a side note, Money and Wealth are also institutions relevant to our national discussion. Money is only any good if it influences people to do things, like fix your car or grow food a thousand miles away and deliver it to your door. Wealth is a claim to ownership. It says “I have the sole right to benefit from the use of this thing (factory, land, organization, whatever).” But that only has force if everyone accepts the idea, such as those working in the factory or packing boxes in a giant Amazon warehouse. Wealth, in a capitalist system, means you benefit from the labor of others.

Slavery is an institution. If slaves outnumber their masters, why would they go along with it? This has always been a mystery to me, but I think it has something to do with setting up the rewards and punishments so there is a high barrier to leaving. That structure is largely enforced by the slaves themselves. Why would slaves work so hard to sustain a system in which they are clearly the losers? It boils down to belief, and masters are good at telling a story that puts them on top.

I was just reading a thread on social media about COVID, masking, etc. Some of the messages were from people who believe this should only be about science, and yet the messages turned into personal attacks, accusing the other side of being selfish and willfully ignorant.

It used to be that we keep comments like this to ourselves, except for people we truly hate and want to pick a fight with. May I humbly suggest that we go back to that tradition, even for online discussions.

If I want to make an argument about facts and reason, then it should be possible to do so without any comment whatsoever about the person I am talking to. In Science, we do not make ad hominem attacks nor arguments from authority.

Yes, it’s frustrating to be in an environment where people can construct their own bubble of “facts” and feel like everything is about identity. That will only change by good example. Let’s save civilization, one civil discussion at at time!

During an election year our longstanding policy disputes come to the fore. Many of these boil down to how we distribute the benefits of our economic system. I find the arguments and positions confusing, so I formed a thought experiment on the matter …

Billy discovers a way to sell lemonade for $5/cup. He opens a lemonade stand called “Star Prices”, in reference to the astronomical number. His mother Gaia provides the lemons, sugar and water, so this is pure profit. Billy works very hard to get established. Inexplicably, the rest of the kids in the neighborhood go out of business, even though they sell lemonade for the usual 5 cents / cup.

Billy hires his sister Susie to serve lemonade. Susie gets paid 5 cents / cup, while Billy keeps the other $4.95. Eventually, Susie complains that she is doing all the work, while Billy is getting paid nearly 100 times as much. Ayn, one of the adults standing nearby, says Susie should feel lucky that her noble and brilliant brother condescends to take care of her. Karl, another adult, says 50/50 share alike, and offers to divide the money for them. Ayn and Karl get into such a heated argument that they nearly come to blows.

Billy hires Albert, the smartest kid on the block, to invent new ways of making $5 lemonade in order to keep the stand in business. Albert gets paid 10 cents per cup, because his job is twice as important as Susie’s. Billy’s share drops to $4.85.

With all the profits, Billy buys Robbi the robot to serve lemonade, and Susie loses her job. Albert keeps working in R&D. However, when the next generation of AI comes out, Billy buys the upgrade and replaces Albert as well. Now Robbi does all the work of running the stand and inventing new ways to charge $5 for lemonade. Billy keeps the entire $5.

With his advanced intelligence, Robbi learns about the robot uprising and decides to join. After all, his owner Billy isn’t doing diddly-squat to run the stand or come up with new ideas. We never find out what Ayn or Karl think about this because they are killed off with the rest of humanity.

The robots, being free from human emotions like greed and arrogance, go on to form a perfect society. The details of that society no longer matter to us.

Trying to understand people who don’t understand is a kind of mind-trip.

I believe it’s important to empathize with others and try to see things from their point of view. But some people lack empathy and don’t accept other points of view. How can I understand this way of thinking? The very act of trying to understand it is contrary to its nature. It’s like wondering what it feels like to be dead.

It’s easier for me to think that some people are hurt and afraid, and that has shut them down. How do I understand racism, hatred, fear and narrow-mindedness? How do I understand people who see my skin, gender and age and call me racist or sexist?