PSCOT — Jay Pscot, Author and Publisher

The work of Jay Pscot

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3 works

It's About Time
Article

It's About Time

By Jay Pscot

Two towns eleven miles apart on the same Tennessee interstate get the sunrise less than a minute apart. Their clocks disagree by an hour. And twice a year both have to reset them.

Jay Pscot lives a mile from a similar line — legally on one side of it, practically on the other. He also worked the Y2K bugs, including the one his own company tripped by ordering further ahead than anybody else in its network.

The House voted 308–117 in July to end the unpopular twice-yearly clock change by settling on year-round Daylight Savings Time. The sleep researchers say it picked the worst replacement available because Standard Time actually saves lives. Both sides are right, which is how this reform has died before.

It's About Time makes the case for the option nobody is discussing: A divide to end the divide. It is not the healthy choice. The math says so. It is the compromise under which neither side comes out the loser.

Nobody has to draft it. The bill has been sitting in a House committee since February 2026.
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It Is Time to Finish the Job
Article

It Is Time to Finish the Job

A Proposal to Modernize American Currency

By Jay Pscot

The United States has always changed its money reluctantly, and for
most of two centuries that reluctance has been a virtue. Currency works
because people trust it, recognize it without thinking, and know
instinctively what to do with it. A system that changes constantly
forfeits all three. But a system that never changes stops being a design
and becomes an accumulation of historical accidents, and American
coinage passed that point some time ago.

In 2025 the U.S. Mint suspended production of circulating pennies
after more than 230 years. The arithmetic had become impossible to
defend: the Mint reported a production and distribution cost of 3.02
cents for a one-cent coin, and projected roughly $56 million a year in
reduced material costs from stopping. Nothing was confiscated and
nothing was invalidated. Existing pennies remain legal tender, they
remain in circulation, and they will keep turning up in drawers and
pockets for years. What ended was the manufacture of new ones for
ordinary commerce.

That decision is usually described as the retirement of an obsolete
coin, which undersells it. It is the first official admission in living
memory that a denomination can outlive its purpose. Having made that
admission about the penny, the country has no principled reason to stop
there.

A more rational system is available.
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The Consolidated Constitution
Article

The Consolidated Constitution

We the people, in plain English.

By Jay Pscot

The United States is governed by three documents that were written across two centuries, in three different registers of English, by people who never sat in the same room. Reading them together is hard. Later amendments silently overrule earlier text without ever quoting it; a clause about counting people for representation sits in Article One while the amendment that rewrote it sits three pages away and eighty years later.
This is one attempt to put them back together. Every operative sentence in the founding law appears here exactly once, in modern American English, in the place where it actually does its work. The Sixteenth Amendment sits inside the taxing power. The Twelfth, Twentieth, Twenty-second, Twenty-third and Twenty-fifth sit inside the presidency. The Bill of Rights is kept whole and named, because it is read and cited as a unit. Everything else has been folded into the body.
This is not the law. It is a reading of the law. Courts apply the original words, not these. Where the original is ambiguous, a plain-English version has to pick a meaning — and picking is an argument. Every place this text picks, it says so in a footnote, gives the authority for the choice, and gives you the strongest case against it. The original wording sits underneath every section, one click away, so you can check the work.
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