Daylight Savings Time and Eight Other Very Bad Choices We’ve Made
We all know it: Daylight Saving Time sucks. Like Columbus discovering America and diamonds coming from coal, the story of daylight savings—that we did it for farmers—is complete bullshit. The true origins lie somewhere between wartime, energy conservation, and politics; farmers, in fact, were staunchly against it as a practice, so the fact that they became blamed for it is insult to injury.Daylight Saving Time isn’t the only thing that remains part of American culture out of sheer inertia. The great John Oliver has a superb occasional feature called “How Is this Still a Thing?” that covers ridiculousness like Daylight Saving Time, including everything from Columbus Day to the popularity of Ayn Rand to pennies. But it’s not just tradition that sometimes sticks us with a terrible and yet still voluntary mess—sometimes, we see the pothole, and we drive over the damn thing anyway, wrecking our national alignment. Here’s a list of other disasters we’ve gotten ourselves into…you know, if we really insist.