How dark will it be in the mornings? The recently passed energy bill adds another month of daylight savings. (The bill calls for daylight savings to begin three weeks earlier, on the second Sunday in March, and to end on the first Sunday in November, one week later.) This, in our view, is absurd. It's getting close to the all-time insanity of 'total' daylight savings. From Slate's
explainer: (emp add)
American daylight-saving time began in 1918 as a way to conserve energy for World War I. (Germany adopted it two years earlier; British "summer time" followed soon thereafter.) But our six-month schedule of clock changes was repealed just after the war in deference to farmers, whose sun-based schedule works best when the rest of the world is on a standard clock. FDR signed a more extreme form of daylight-saving time into law during World War II, also to save fuel. "War time" set the clocks forward one hour on a permanent basis, without a fall-back. Once again, the law was repealed during peacetime.
What's the point of moving all the clocks ahead one hour
for the entire year? Must school start at 8:00 AM no matter what? In our opinion there should be no daylight savings at all.
Businesses and schools should adjust their hours throughout the year - just like they do on weekends and holidays. Clocks should not be adjusted. Also, by allowing each entity to set their hours, you get a more efficient schedule for a particular latitude
and longitude (remember, some cities are near the edges of time zones, which can be a significant factor).
Eliminating DST can result in optimal configuration of human behavior with respect to sunlight. But we don't expect anybody to agree with doing away with DST. You know how it is. Establishing, and tweaking, daylight savings is a way of feeling as if something has been accomplished - misguided though it might be (and it's a hell of a blunt instrument).
In any event, to see how wonderful the extension of DST will be, we direct your attention to
a website calculator that tells you when the sun will rise and set, depending on city (or latitude/longitude) and time of year. Here is when the lucky people in various cities can expect sunrise to occur in November:
- Seattle, Washington - Shifts from 7:00 AM to 8:00 AM
- Boise, Idaho - Shifts from 7:25 AM to 8:25 AM (even though Boise is at a lower latitude than Seattle, it is near the western edge of the Mountain Time Zone).
- Fargo, North Dakota - Shifts from 7:16 AM to 8:16 AM
- Detroit, Michigan - Shifts from 7:10 AM to 8:10 AM (this city is also significantly to the west of the Eastern Time Zone 'midline').
posted by Quiddity at 7/30/2005 12:22:00 AM
So, now the Rethuglicans want to tell us when to rise and go to bed.
Yeah, keep that govt out of our lives...........
I like it. I would say we should move it even later in the winter. As it is in west michigan in the winter I will never see the sun going to work between 8 and 5pm. Since we cant make the day length longer, lets just all get up earlier and maybe get in a run after work.
Wasting what little day light there is by being at work is dumb. As a former farmer you are right about their protests... dumb
Ugga is the only person I've run into who agrees with me that DST is silly. As payment for the non-value it delivers, it demands that I loan it an hour in the spring which I get back in the fall, *without interest*.
In a sane world, if you wanted to do your living later, you would just get up later, go to work later, leave work later, and retire later. No need for the semi-annual, "Achtung!!" None of this silly springing forward and back.
The reason this won't happen, and while I'll always be owed that couple of minutes every year, is that hours are considered sacred, and deviation from mechanical regularity of business hours is considered sloppy.
Except, as I understand, in Hawaii, where even TV programs appear to be free from this chrono-procrusteanism, beginning and ending within, oh, five or ten minutes of the hour and half-hour marks.
I guess I oughta move, huh?
-F
