In my previous article, A New Calendar, I noted that the time system used in the modern civilized world is somewhat antiquated. It is a mish mash of ancient ideas that have become standards. While it is important to have standards, it is also important that the standards are good ones.
The suggestions made in my previous article weren't all entirely practical. In fact, the main point of my previous article was that I didn't like the holidays the federal government had chosen. The other information was just tacked on there.
This article does essentially the same thing but has more realistic suggestions. The information about holidays is now covered in Rant: Federal Holidays.
The standard week is 7 days. Typically, people work 5 of these days and take off 2 days at the end of the week. This means that approximately 71.43% of days are work days for most people, though this doesn't take holidays into account. "Standard" people work 260.71 days per year, minus 10 days or so for holidays.
A much better option is to move to a 6-day week with 4 work days. This is simple to do and the motivations for doing so are explained below.
People should spend less time working. Most work is useless, so people shouldn't do it. The following table compares various occupations:
| Occupation | Useful? | Why? |
|---|---|---|
| Author | Sometimes | Education and entertainment |
| Border Guards | No | There need only be 1 country |
| Cartoonist | Sort of | Entertainment |
| Cashier | No | Internet stores |
| Coal Miner | No | Pollution caused by coal is killing us. |
| Cook | Sort of | Restaurants are essentially social gathering areas with food. |
| Currency Converters | No | There need only be 1 currency. |
| Doctor | Sort of | Reading their research can keep you healthy, but doctors won't help you personally. * |
| Doctor (researcher) | Yes | If you read their research, you can keep yourself healthy. |
| Farmer | Yes | People need food |
| FCC censor | No | Who needs this? |
| Repair Man | Yes | Fixes stuff. |
| Software Development | Sometimes | Some programs are useful. Others aren't. |
| Solar Engineer | Yes | Solar power is clearly the power of the future. |
| Stock Broker | No | Doesn't produce anything; just rearranges arbitrary wealth values. |
| Teacher | Yes | Day care provider |
| Telephone Sanitizer | No | Germs never hurt anyone |
* If a doctor does help you, you may be in big trouble. Extending your life by 5 years often requires that you carry your intestines in a bag or something. And they might just chop off some your body parts for no good reason.
As you can see, most jobs are useless. And many useful jobs are the kind you can work on in your time off from work. Hence, people should have more time off from work. If a job is really useful, the employers will hire some of the people who work at the useless jobs to pick up the slack.
Hence, we should try to reduce the number of work days per week. The obvious solution would be work 4 days out of 7 instead of 5 out of 7. However, there are some alternatives. The following table compares several options:
| Work Week | Weekday % | Weekdays Per Year |
|---|---|---|
| 5 out of 7 | 71.43% | 260.71 |
| 4 out of 7 | 57.14% | 208.57 |
| 4 out of 6 | 66.67% | 243.33 |
| 3 out of 5 | 60% | 219 |
| 5 out of 8 | 62.5% | 228.13 |
| 7 out of 10 | 70% | 255.5 |
Keep in mind that this table ignores federal holidays. Some of these holidays always occur on weekdays, while others can occur any time of the week. So there's really close to 10 less work days per year.
The 5 out of 7 day work week is the highest number of work days on the table. The 4 out of 7 option seems like the obvious solution, but that gives a 3-day-weekend every week. Or there could still be a 2-day-weekend with some kind of "hump day" in the middle. The hump day option doesn't sound like a bad thing, but it doesn't give people enough time to recover from drinking and whoring during their time off.
Options that increase the number of days per week would most likely make things more complicated. Reducing the number of days per week seems like it would make things simpler. Having less day names to learn and remember can't be a bad thing.
Right now, people are working 260.71 days per year. Many of the options seem to reduce this number by too much. Only working 208.57 days per year might sound like a good thing, but it's not enough to get anything done. 243.33 work days per year is most likely enough even after federal holidays are taken into account.
Hence, the United States (and the world) should move to a 4 out of 6 day work week (which means that overtime would be paid after 32 hours rather than after 40). There are a number of benefits to having a shorter work week:
To make this all happen, one day of the week must be eliminated. The best day to eliminate would be Thursday because:
There are some potential objections to this plan. Some people may say that they need the work time they have now to make enough money. This doesn't seem to really be the case, but payment amounts and the cost of living can be tinkered with. (They are constantly changing anyways.) More to the point, people who aren't making enough money could probably use their days off more productively than the days they spend at work.
The only "valid" objection is a religious one. If some religious nut thinks there should be 7 days in a week because some fictional being or another did something in 7 days, there's little that can be said in response. From a common sense point of view, going to church once every 6 days rather than once every 7 days should seem like an improvement to religious people. Even so, if someone chooses to cling dogmatically to some random week structure, there's little that can be done about it. Church and time should be separate, as should church and state.
It's also possible to make months more uniform. There's no good reason to have a 28-day month. Since the rent doesn't change every month, the months should all be close to the same length.
6 months could be 30 days (exactly 5 weeks each) and 5 months could be 31. February has 29 rather than 28 and has 30 during a leap year. Though it doesn't matter which months are which, I propose that the distribution be as follows:
| Month | Length |
|---|---|
| January | 31 |
| February | 29 + leap day |
| March | 31 |
| April | 30 |
| May | 31 |
| June | 30 |
| July | 31 |
| August | 30 |
| September | 31 |
| October | 30 |
| November | 31 |
| December | 30 |
Aside from February, the number of days per month alternates 31-30. February is now the only oddball month. No silly rhymes are needed to remember the lengths of the other months because they just alternate.
One possible source of weirdness is that no date after February 28 in the new calendar matches up to the same date on the old calendar. This should be ignored except when the date is on a date that no longer exists (August, October, or December 31), in which case it should be moved 1 day forward.
Long ago, Benjamin Franklin observed that French people were staying up late at night and waking up late in the morning. He wrote a letter that was partly intended to convince French people to go sleep earlier and partly intended as a joke. In this letter, he said something about how they could save alot of candle wax by setting all their clocks an hour later. He did not invent daylight savings time [1].
Later, someone who collected bugs after doing shift-work proposed daylight savings time so that it wouldn't be as dark when he was looking for bugs. During World War I, some politician remembered this guy's idea. The politician decided daylight savings time would be reduce the amount of electricity used for lighting and thus save coal. And, thus, daylight savings time was born.
More recently, the federal government has extended it in the hopes that it would reduce electricity usage from light bulbs (which is a relatively small portion of U.S. electricity usage). Some studies indicate that daylight savings time does reduce electricity usage, while others indicate that it doesn't [1]. Since businesses use far more lighting than individuals and keep all their lights on during the entire business day whether it's dark or not, the effect on electricity usage is probably negligible.
In any case, high wattage bulbs are being phased out in many countries, including the U.S. [2] Once they are gone, the new reason for daylight savings time is no longer valid.
The problems with daylight savings time are as follows:
Hence, it should be eliminated.
Copyright (C) 2009-2011 Steven Fletcher. All rights reserved.
