Ann Althouse throws off some good advice for those of us bugged by twice-yearly clock-changing: How to stop fretting about the coming and going of Daylight Savings Time and live by the light not the clock..
I know you have appointments and work and social obligations and need to observe the time of the clock to some extent, but your waking and sleeping and much of the rest of what you do — eating, going out walking, chores, reading, napping, conversing, and generally being the human animal that you are — can and should be done according to the time of the sun, which doesn't leap forward and fall back in one hour chunks semiannually, but changes very slightly day by day.
The easiest adjustment you can make is to get up at dawn, which is about half an hour before the sunrise. I recommend getting out and about and really experiencing the early light. Lots of health benefits to that — circadian rhythms and so forth. There's nothing about your "o'clock" affairs that should stop you from doing that. Set your day by the sun. I've done that since 2019, and I didn't need to be retired to do it.
OK, first, Ann: it's "Daylight Saving Time", not "Savings". The good people at Time and Date will explain that, if you'd like. (My mom had a bee in her bonnet about this, and I continue the tradition in her memory.)
Ann calls her the basis of her daily regimen "Sun Time", which makes a lot of sense. There's even an app for that!
Unfortunately, I've long been on "Body Time". And my body simply can't believe in 25- and 23-hour days.
Also of note:
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Wisdom, there for the taking. Veronique de Rugy writes on The Market’s “Marvel”: What Hayek Still Teaches Us About the Limits of Power.Every few decades a fantasy returns that with enough data, political will, and clever economists, governments can steer an economy better than millions of dispersed, self-interested individuals ever could. The twentieth century’s socialists believed it. Today’s industrial planners and “national capitalists” believe it again.
Peter Boettke’s recent essay in The Dispatch, “What Hayek Understood About the Unknowable Nature of Markets,” reminds us why this conceit always fails. It also reminds us what makes capitalism—not the caricatured greed of textbooks, but the dynamic process of price discovery and adaptation—the most extraordinary cooperative system human beings have ever built.
I linked to Boettke's essay a few days ago, but Vero's commentary is worth a read as well.
Plus, it gives me a chance to recycle another Salma pic.
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Speaking of Fatal Conceits… Andrew Follett describes what I might be looking forward to this winter: Wind and Solar Blackouts Threaten New England. (archive.today link)
New England’s deep-blue states may become all too familiar with energy rationing and blackouts this winter, courtesy of the region’s overreliance on green energy.
The Northeastern states face an immense shortfall in conventional electrical generation capacity, leaving the power grid extremely vulnerable at times when wind and solar power are offline. This precarious situation is expected to continue for at least the next decade.
“We cannot operate the system in the wintertime without a dependable energy source that can balance the system when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow. I think policymakers sometimes lose sight of that fact,” Gordon van Welie, president of Independent System Operator (ISO) New England, which manages the region’s power grid, said at a recent energy conference in Washington, D.C.
New Hampshire is really not that deep a blue, despite our Congressional delegation. And our nuclear reactor down in Seabrook should help out. Still, we are on the ISO-New England grid (at least for now), so we could be dragged down the Road to Energy Serfdom by our delusional neighbors.
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And is there anyone more fatally conceited than Liz Warren? Joe Lancaster brings the evidence: iRobot faces bankruptcy after Elizabeth Warren helped kill Amazon merger.
A robotic murder mystery worthy of Isaac Asimov. Joe's bottom line: "Instead, iRobot was forced to die a slow and painful death because government regulators thought they knew better than consumers."
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Not just fatally conceited, but also unconstitutional. George Will reveals the stakes facing SCOTUS: Presidential power and the Supreme Court’s own stature ride on this case. (WaPo gifted link)
Decorum might dissolve during oral arguments on Wednesday in the Supreme Court. The justices might guffaw when Trump administration lawyers say: The president’s tariffs should be exempt from judicial review because they respond to an “emergency,” emergencies, like beauty, are in the eye of the beholder, and presidents alone are our designated beholders.
This momentous case must either undermine or buttress the Constitution’s architecture: the separation of powers. Six amicus briefs explain why.
The conservative Goldwater Institute and the liberal Brennan Center separately argue that the statute the president says gives him unreviewable power to impose taxes (which tariffs are) of whatever amount, and for as long as he chooses (the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977), does no such thing. (Neither does the National Emergencies Act of 1976, which also is invoked by his defenders.)
GFW also looks at briefs from other folks, including Cato scholars. Interesting, and I hope the resulting decision winds up with Congress putting on its big boy pants, growing a spine, biting the bullet, and doing whatever other clichés might apply.
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