The "DST all year" proposition passed here in California a few years ago, then appears to have sunk without trace; your mention of national shenanigans goes some way to explaining that, though I still suspect the state just has other things preoccupying it. In the aftermath of the vote it emerged that many people voted for it as the best of a bad job and even those who proposed it admitted it would have been better to make it for abolition of DST, but they figured the school sports lobby would doom that. I'm afraid I have a strong opinion on this.
Farmers have a point—as your animals just demonstrated. The actual time of day doesn't change, DST forces people who operate on the basis of when it's daylight to muck about fitting their appointments with offices and their TV watching around the fixed constraints of their job. The argument that it saves power is obvious garbage; the lights just get used at the other end of the day. The primary argument, since the wartime one for maximization of labor became obsolete, has always been that we should inconvenience everyone—and risk children's lives on dark streets going to school in the morning—so that those kids whose parents view school as a vehicle for sports have one more hour when they don't need lights on the field. It would save far more energy, and possibly lead to some of those kids learning more in their school years (I don't think all of them are voluntary sports majors in high school or before) if we instead restricted school sport to weekends and, for practice, to the hours between school letting out and 5 pm, so the kids' onsite workday was only an hour longer than an adult workday instead of the Olympic-style training hours high school athletes currently put in. And reinstated natural time, which most people have never experienced year-round because of this stupidity.
I lived through an experiment in year-round DST in the UK: the time was relabeled British Standard Time from British Summer Time, and Wikipedia tells me it was in force from October 1968 to October 1971. They're more sanguine about the public response than I remember from the time; I remember people really didn't like the dark, cold mornings and were horrified by the increase in road deaths. My one good memory from that winter is when the Underground train I took every morning to school climbed onto the elevated track near Turnham Green station and the dawn sky was apple green, with the thick trackside wiring on its short scaffold outlined against it. I was in a half-waking state and cold, and it was a moment of poetry. But the experiment was judged a failure and abandoned, and I remember us all being very glad of it.
no subject
Farmers have a point—as your animals just demonstrated. The actual time of day doesn't change, DST forces people who operate on the basis of when it's daylight to muck about fitting their appointments with offices and their TV watching around the fixed constraints of their job. The argument that it saves power is obvious garbage; the lights just get used at the other end of the day. The primary argument, since the wartime one for maximization of labor became obsolete, has always been that we should inconvenience everyone—and risk children's lives on dark streets going to school in the morning—so that those kids whose parents view school as a vehicle for sports have one more hour when they don't need lights on the field. It would save far more energy, and possibly lead to some of those kids learning more in their school years (I don't think all of them are voluntary sports majors in high school or before) if we instead restricted school sport to weekends and, for practice, to the hours between school letting out and 5 pm, so the kids' onsite workday was only an hour longer than an adult workday instead of the Olympic-style training hours high school athletes currently put in. And reinstated natural time, which most people have never experienced year-round because of this stupidity.
I lived through an experiment in year-round DST in the UK: the time was relabeled British Standard Time from British Summer Time, and Wikipedia tells me it was in force from October 1968 to October 1971. They're more sanguine about the public response than I remember from the time; I remember people really didn't like the dark, cold mornings and were horrified by the increase in road deaths. My one good memory from that winter is when the Underground train I took every morning to school climbed onto the elevated track near Turnham Green station and the dawn sky was apple green, with the thick trackside wiring on its short scaffold outlined against it. I was in a half-waking state and cold, and it was a moment of poetry. But the experiment was judged a failure and abandoned, and I remember us all being very glad of it.