Here it is, a day after the scaaaarrrryyy time change — no planes fell out of the sky, the planet didn’t stop spinning, and no one I know was late for a meeting.
Don’t you just love media hype? I mean, the world is going to hell in a handbasket, our government is slipping more and more toward fascism, genocide is happening, and the world is heating up like it’s in a toaster oven because we can’t stop burning fossil fuels. But the top story tonight: you have to reset your clocks!! Doom! Disaster! People running an hour late!!
Anyway, what is the point of Daylight Savings Time in the modern world? I mean, even at it’s conception by Ben Franklin it was nothing more than a way to impose human law-and-order on nature. Rather than live life with the cycles of the sun — for instance, opening your business from daybreak to sunset, or changing your working hours depending on the seasons — DST lets humans force their own arbitrary time system onto nature. Dammit, we are going to work from 9 to 5, so if we have to we will change the clocks to make 9 and 5 mean what we want them to mean.
People hate to change their routine, so it seemed easier to change the universe instead.
At the beginning, this had the side effect of saving resources — people wouldn’t have to light candles for the later part of the day. Today, this vaunted energy saving component of DST is just a complete lie. We all have enough common sense to realize that it doesn’t save electricity — when was the last time your office turned off the lights during the sunny part of the day and only turned them on when it got dark? The lights in offices are on during the working day regardless of whether it is daylight outside or not. Street lights generally go on at dusk and off at sunrise; they don’t care what time it is. And by moving DST up a month, we now are waking up in the dark… meaning that we are turning lights on in the morning, using more electricity.
It’s time to eliminate DST. In this era of 24-hour services and global business, standard working hours don’t exist anymore. So why change hours to maximize daylight? What is the real point of this? It is disruptive; results in no energy savings and in fact may increase energy usage; creates consternation around the world… and worst of all, results in weeks of annoying media coverage.
