Friendly Reminder & Rant
Dean
1) Friendly reminder: Daylight Saving Time is over. Unless you're in one of those lucky, lucky areas that doesn't bother with this, it's now an hour earlier than it was yesterday. Reset* your clocks.
2) Why the f&@# do we let the government do this to us every year? I have never heard a single rationale for it that made the least bit of sense to me.
I notice that President Bush signed a law this year that will experiment with extending Daylight Saving to run from March to November starting in 2007. So instead of getting rid of this distracting nuisance, we get slight more of it--and the government will then conduct a study to measure the impact of the extension.
How about this for an experiment, George: make everyone's life simpler and get rid of it!
My computers on the other hand....
Doing away with time zones completely would be interesting, but we'd wind up with time zones anyway, just in a different way: we'd have to remember that people in certain areas are asleep during certain hours, awake during certain hours, and so on.
I ask again: what specific purpose does the concept of Daylight Saving time serve that would not be served by simply staying permanently on it?
I sure enjoyed the extra hour of sleep I got last night. I dislike the shorter night's sleep I get in the Spring, but it's no biggie. An hour's shift in time is greatly disruptive for some, I'm sure--and I've seen reports that suggest more traffic accidents following a time shift. But most of us manage it pretty well.
Maybe the psychological benefit of waking up to a brighter world is sufficient payback.
Up until now, most of Indiana has been on Eastern Standard Time all year. This past summer, that has put us on the same time as the rest of the Central time zone (Illinois, for example). Now, the rest of the country switches time, we don't, and we are now on the same time as the Eastern time zone (Ohio). But in March, we change our clocks with the rest of the country for the first time in however long, and stay in sync with Ohio. Before that happens, parts of western Indiana may switch to Central time, and stay in sync with Illinois forever.
Not being on DST is a real pain for Indiana businesses, because no one knows what time it is here. My employer has lost business because of misunderstandings about meeting times. Plus, all your TV and radio shows change times twice a year. Out-of-state relatives show up an hour early, or an hour late, to everything. In short, you don't move your clock; you rearrange the rest of your life instead.
If the rest of the country dropped DST, I'd be in favor of that too. But I'm mostly in favor of being in sync with the rest of the country. And I think a move off DST would have to be coordinated at the federal level, as I don't think individual states would want to have to deal with the hassle of being off kilter with everyone else.
So I don't think DST is going anywhere.
Someone agrees Dean.
Here
.
The reason we don't keep it on DST year-round is so that kids don't have to walk to school in the dark. I know that when I was riding my bike to high school that Daylight Savings would end just about the time I was having to leave in the twilight, making it so I never had to ride in the dark.
The really stupid argument for extending DST that came up in Congress was one Congressman said, "It will give more time for kids to trick-or-treat." A local talk-show host (much more temperate than the demons of right-wing talk shows) brought this up with the question, "Did you trick-or-treat before it got dark?" Most callers had not, and found it as strange as those cities that designate Halloween on an arbitrary day.
grr. Grammar.
The question that Dean is asking is why don’t we just stay on DST all winter? If we stayed on DST, then in December and January the Sun would not come up until 7:30-8AM. This means school children would be walking to school in the dark. This gets parents all upset. Now one solution to this would be to have different school and working hours in the summer and winter. DST is the government based solution.
Federal implementation of DST first happened in 1918 with 'An Act to preserve daylight and provide standard time for the United States'. This is the same law that gave us federally standardized time zones in the U.S.
The initial reason was to conserve the fuel needed to generate electricity so that it would be available for the WWI war effort. DST was unpopular, however, and was repealed after the war - with Congress overriding Wilson's veto of the repeal.
DST then became a local option, which, as you can imagine, caused all sorts of havoc with shipping and train schedules. For example, at one time, NYC and Philly had DST but New York State and Pennsylvania didn't.
During WWII, Roosevelt instituted DST year round calling it "War Time." But between 1945 and 1966, there wasn't any federal DST. It wasn't until the 1966 "Uniform Time Act" that the U.S. had what we now experience as DST.
Then, in 1974, Nixon bolloxed everything up again by implementing 15 months of DST as a energy conservation measure.
The thing is, I don't know that it really saves that much energy. I don't think office buildings are built to take advantage of sunlight anymore. They're boxy and too close together.
I have to have lights on in my office at any time in the day anyway, even with my window which overlooks a narrow alley. Then there's my computer, monitor and printer - all of which are sucking juice out of the outlet. All of the lights are always on in the lobby of the building.
The only things that aren't on all day long are the street lights.
"kids going to school in the dark" doesn't move me much since I went to school during dark mornings and it didn't hurt much. Neither would shifting the school day a half hour later destroy most family schedules.
The extra hour was nice this morning. The loss of an hour in six months will suck hard. The loss of productivity, not to mention the confusion caused by people who forget, is really annoying.
I think John J. Miller has it right. (Thanks, Scott.)
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
I think it was W F Buckley who said that one should set one's watch to GMT and do the arithmetic to get local time.
In fact, sitting here on a Monday morning, I still haven't gotten around to changing the clocks here in my house. I've just been mentally subtracting an hour.
Good thing the time change was in my favor. In my line of work, forgetting the time change in the spring could prove embarrassing— as in, hearing the church bell ringing next door while I'm still eating breakfast in the parsonage.
Actually, I've never believed in the whole railroad-era idea of time zones. In a world where we communicate instantly with people around the globe in various time zones, there's no good reason we couldn't go back to sun time. You would rapidly get a fair idea of how many minutes ahead or behind of you communities so many miles to the east or west of you were. And in today's world it would be trivial to write a program (or build the conversion functionality into a calculator) to punch in the zip code or name of a town, and read out its local sun time.
Insofar as people need a synchronized standard of reference, let them use GMT. TV shows could air starting at the top or bottom of the hour according to GMT. In a world of VCRs and TIVO, the time a show "airs" becomes less and less relevant. Or it's no strain on the brain to remember that shows in your locale start at 12 or 42 minutes after the hour— once you become accustomed to it.
I also think we should abandon the metric system, except for scientific use, and go back to a world of pints, gills, rods, dry bushels, and whatever local units of folk measurement people in Russia, India, Burma, or Japan may use. Again, in a computerized world, any unit of measurement and any conversion factor is just as easy as any other— eliminating one of the original rationales for going to the neatly decimal metric system in the first place. Just punch it into your calculator! Let a thousand units of measurement bloom! Liberty Hall, boys, Liberty Hall! But that's a rant for another time.
We don't observe daylight savings here in Arizona, and I like it that way. :)