I looked for The Master’s past columns, and he didn’t specifically address my question. I mentioned it in the MPSIMS thread about the reminder, but I thought I’d try to post it here for more “factual” answers.
I could see when Ben Franklin first proposed it (jokingingly, IIRC) Daylight Saving could have made sense. But now that we’re a 24 hour society, with electricity and hot and cold running internet, do we really save energy with the time change? Or is it more work to turn back and forth all the clocks? This year, because we are springing forward three weeks early, it actually caused some issues with the computers at work, since they’re not programmed for a time change yet, and we had to download patches and stuff.
Is there data proving we’re saving energy with the time changes?
Mrs essell says that we still do it in the UK because it means the Scotish kids can go to school (or was it come back from school ?) in the light, rather than the dark.
My point is that even if we’re not saving energy, there are other considerations as often happens with traditions.
“In the winter, the afternoon Daylight Saving Time advantage is offset by the morning’s need for more lighting. In spring and fall, the advantage is less than one hour. So, Daylight Saving Time saves energy for lighting in all seasons of the year except for the four darkest months of the year (November, December, January and February) when the afternoon advantage is offset by the need for lighting because of late sunrise.”
and “The new starts and stop dates were set in the Energy Policy Act of 2005.”
Some of us live in places where it’s very nice to be outdoors after supper in the summertime.
Simply switching the clocks by an hour is really so much easier than having everybody change the times of their workdays to take advantage of the extra amount of sun time in northern latitudes in the summer. It makes us get up an hour earlier while still getting out of bed at “the same time.”
For the wage slaves among us, having an extra hour of daylight after getting home from work is absolutely worth the hassle of switching over. Even if it isn’t enough to do something fun, mowing the lawn, or fixing the car during the week frees up the weekends for fun stuff.
If you don’t do any outdoor stuff, then I suppose it makes less difference. Also, I’ve always lived in high, dry climates, so it cools off pretty fast as soon as the sun sets. I can see that in humid areas, it’s easier to make up for lack of light if you can still keep warm.
This is my attitiude about completely. The more after work hours of sunlight the better. I use to work 7:00 to 3:30pm and it was great.
Congress has included plans to abandon the current change if in practice, they find no energy has been saved.
This DST change hit the IT world fairly hard but nothing too terrible. The biggest problem I have seen so far involves Microsoft Outlook and Exchange. Tomorrow should prove interesting.