Time for Year-Round Standard Time

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - DST is bad.

Have you been in the United States of America lately? (Or Inkopolis?) Are you feeling tired and fatigued and miserable? Do you live in a state that ain't Arizona or Hawaii? You're probably suffering from the impact of Daylight Saving Time (alternatively called Daylight Savings Time), which seems portray the daylight as being in more trouble than Princess Peach.

With regards to being out of trouble and not needing saving, Witch Princess was just telling me that the change from Standard Time to Daylight Saving Time ruined her home security system and caused an outage for that whole Sunday, leaving her security system... insecure and not doing what it's supposed to do. In an area where she is living among dweebish farmers and a vengeful Harvest Goddess, that could be problematic for her.

This says...
“Report Communication Failure
The control panel is unable to communicate. This is a serious condition as your security may be compromised and requires immediate attention. Please verify the network is operational.
If you need further assistance, please contact your security dealer.”
Seems like the security system can't handle time travel.

Last year, KoopaTV mentioned the Sunshine Protection Acts of 2021 in the Senate and the House of Representatives), as well as a huge contact list. We then provided an update, upon DST 2021 finally ending, of the total lack of legislative progress besides a few more cosponsors. For 2022, the same bill is still around (bills last two years before there's a new Congress), and there are... a few more co-sponsors since then. (Like Senators Dianne Feinstein and Tommy Tuberville... or Representative Lauren Boebert. People who aren't in the relevant committees.) But still no actions taken.

And that's a shame, because besides Witch Princess's defences being shut down, she—and hundreds of millions of Americans—can also be at risk of many health problems because of the switch to Daylight Saving Time that wouldn't be present in year-round standard time. That's according to articles like “Daylight Saving Time May Be Killing Us — So Why Haven't We Abolished It?” Let's look into what that article says for the rest of this article. (They cite a doctor, and I'm just a politician/military leader in a foreign universe, so I'll stick to what I'm good at and commentate.)

There is more and more research being done and data being collected showing that the time travelling done on Daylight Saving Time at 2:00 local time (which means for an hour, Eastern will be two hours ahead of Central) causes “circadian disruption”, linked to things like heart attacks. The rate of heart attacks goes up in the two weeks after the time shift and I guess it goes down again. Probably not good to have heart problems while everyone is being vaccinated with an untested vaccine that you should be skeptical of that is linked to myocarditis.

Anyway, circadian rhythms are “regulated at the DNA level”, which makes it pretty core to every part of your body. By definition, it repeats every 24 hours. That means all of your cells have a clock, and all of the hormones and blood and stuff runs on the clock. The purpose of Daylight Saving Time is allegedly to have more sunlight in the active hours of the day (midday to evening) with less in the morning by making the new standard 23 hours long for a day and then keeping that schedule for 24-hour periods after... which screws you up every single day until it's Standard Time again. Apparently, when light pours into you that you weren't working on before and your body isn't used to, it makes the clocks go whacky. They mention a hormone called cortisol, which your body releases based on circadian rhythm. It's supposed to be released before you wake up in order to wake you up. However, since it runs based on rhythm and not you actually being awake, when DST happens, it'll release when you're already awake, and there are consequences to that, since cortisol is released with high stress. Apparently too much will make you gain weight, and too little will give you nausea, weight loss, and muscle weakness. Basically, your body is releasing the wrong hormones and they're not balanced because DST ruins your body's ingrained, natural expectations embedded in all of your cells thanks to its tricky time travel.

That article concludes by saying that having permanent Standard Time will help with diabetes, depression, drug use, mental health, and insomnia.

Who wants this clock-changing? Apparently it's a few big industries lobbying lawmakers. But should those select business interests really be in charge of time travel at the expense of the whole country... or the world? Year-round Standard Time is the way to go. (And maybe those business interests can just change their hours.)


Ludwig believes that permanent DST is still better than clock-changing, but permanent Standard Time is the best way to go. That'd make the going-nowhere Sunshine Protection Act a suboptimal solution. Why not message your members of Congress—and your local state officials—to advocate for Standard Time? ...Also, Witch Princess's security system was later restored on Monday, but it was a scary day without it for her.


Here's the article you get when Daylight Saving Time ended in 2022.
Next year, KoopaTV goes into more science about what happens when permanent DST occurs, which is a worse outcome than clock-changing.