Daylight Saving Time Myths
What does daylight saving time really do for us, and what are the real reasons we have it?
Filed under General Science, Urban Legends
| Skeptoid #172 September 22, 2009 Podcast transcript | Listen | Subscribe |
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Today we're going to turn our clock back (or forward, as the case may be) and screw up our sleep cycles, casting everything into disarray for a good week until we recover — for today's topic is daylight saving time: The myths, the fallacies, and the facts. Why on Earth would we ever want to change our clocks a few times a year? Is it actually a good idea? In today's day and age, is it still good, or is it outdated?
Benjamin Franklin is often credited with inventing the concept of daylight saving time, on the principle of conserving candles. However, a closer look at this popular tale reveals cause for skepticism. Franklin's paper was actually a satire poking fun at the partying lifestyle of Parisians, not a serious recommendation. It was a letter written in 1784 for the Journal de Paris in which he proposed firing cannons at sunrise to wake people up and break them from their nocturnal habits. To justify this, he suggested that sleeping instead of burning candles all night long would save Parisians 64 million pounds of candle wax over six months.
The first serious propositions came independently from different sides of the world a century later: from New Zealander George Hudson in 1895, and Englishman William Wennett in 1907. Both recommendations were to provide for additional sunlit leisure time after work, and it was proposed for use in the summertime only because if it were done in winter, the shorter days would force morning activities (like children walking to school) to happen while it was still dark. That's why we have the current schedule of observing daylight saving only in the summertime: Our workday squeezes into the middle of that narrow band of daylight during the winter, and it drops down to the bottom of the wider band of daylight in the summer; keeping our morning wakeup times roughly aligned with sunrise, but giving us an abundance of extra daylit playtime after work when the days are long enough to permit.
Perhaps the most pervasive popular perception about daylight saving time is that it's all about farmers, the idea being that certain farm tasks should be done at sunrise, whether it's milking cows or watering or harvesting crops, and changing the clock makes this easier somehow. The obvious response to this is that these tasks are going to continue to be done at sunrise, regardless of the time shown on some irrelevant clock. When you dig in and read the arguments for or against daylight saving put forth by various groups, farmers are said to be among the most vocal opponents of daylight saving. Here's a quote that I must have found a hundred times in different sources, word for word:
Farmers, who must wake with the sun no matter what time their clock says, are greatly inconvenienced by having to change their schedule in order to sell their crops to people who observe daylight saving time.
No matter how many times I found that same sentence, I could never discover its original source. The concept is illogical at face value. In the morning hours, daylight saving's effect is to keep the clock more in line with sunrise: i.e., 6:00am comes an hour earlier in the summer when the sun is rising earlier. If farmers need workers to arrive when the sun starts drying the dew, daylight saving is clearly their friend. I found many, many articles repeating the presumption that farmers oppose daylight saving, but almost nowhere did I find a good reason articulated; at least not one that pertains to farming. The president of the New South Wales Farmers Association could only come up with this argument:
Daylight saving has a significant adverse impact on rural families and communities businesses. An example is children traveling home from school in the heat of early afternoon sun. Members also say they have trouble getting their children to bed at normal bed times, and farmers indicate that they work longer days.
...which says nothing about daylight saving creating a problem for the practice of farming. At the same time, other farmers express the same pleasure as other people at an extra hour of sunlit family recreation time after a summer workday.
Dairy farmers have the closest thing to a cogent argument that I could find. Let's say that their product has to be to market at a given clock time, and twice a year the clock changes by an hour. This forces the cows to be milked at a 23 or 25 hour interval, once each year, instead the 24 hour interval to which they're accustomed. Evidently this disruption to the cow's schedule is problematic for the cow. If this really is a significant problem for cows, it constitutes one of only two farm-related arguments against daylight saving that I could dig up.
The other is not unique to farms, and has to do with moving heavy equipment on roads in the early morning. Many such vehicles can only be driven during daylight, and many of the rest shouldn't be operated in darkness for safety reasons. When daylight saving drops the working man's start time down closer to sunrise during the summer, this problem is prolonged for more of the year. But I'm still not convinced by this argument's logic. Farm work starts with the sun. Safe equipment operation starts with the sun. That's how it's always going to be. Daylight saving keeps the clock time at the beginning of the workday more consistent with sunrise year round, so, from a rational perspective, the people who depend on the morning sun for their job have every reason to be the biggest supporters of daylight saving: It brings them better consistency.
So now we come to what everyone believes, and what's written down on paper as the official reason we observe daylight saving time: The conservation of electricity. The idea is that residential power usage is reduced because people don't have to turn their lights on until an hour later in the summer. This was indeed true the first time the question was deeply studied, which was during the oil crisis of the 1970's. The Department of Transportation calculated a 100,000-barrel savings in oil, from a 1% savings in power usage, compared to if we'd stayed on standard time. However, in the decades since then, air conditioning has become much more ubiquitous, and its power consumption greatly outpaces the reduction in lighting — although this is slightly offset by reduced heating on fall and spring mornings. In addition, people have many more electronic gizmos around the house then they did in the 1970's. Having people at home for an extra hour is not nearly such a great way to conserve electricity as it used to be.
Nowadays, people studying power usage during daylight saving get mixed results. There's a lot of regional variation. Places like Florida, with maximum air conditioning needs, clearly use more electricity because of daylight saving; while cooler northern states may still see overall savings due to reduced lighting needs. Generally, reports of national energy consumption combine results from a cross section of utility companies nationwide. Depending on what utilities you include in your report, you may get very different overall results. A truly comprehensive report that accounts for all data is probably outside the realm of practicality.
If you do a Google search for daylight saving energy consumption, you'll find reports are all over the map. In fact, the year after the Department of Transportation found a 1% savings, the National Bureau of Standards reviewed their data and found no savings. Some reports find that it uses as much as 1-2% additional electricity; some find there's a savings of as much as 1-2%. Most fall within the statistical margin of error. The one statement I'd feel comfortable making with authority is that any possible energy savings that may be derived from daylight saving time is statistically insignificant.
There's one powerful reason that daylight saving is probably here to stay, and it has nothing to do with farms or electricity or road safety. Strong reasons usually have to do with money. Not money that you send to your utility company, but money that you hand over at the cash register. During the warm summer months when it's possible to do so in comfort, people like to be out and about in the evening. They like to go out for dinner, drinks, or a movie, or wander through stores and galleries. They also like to play golf and tennis. Whenever they do these things, they spend money. Lots of money, in the collective. Give them an extra hour to recreate in the summer, and they spend even more money. In 1986, an extra month of daylight saving was added to the calendar, and representatives of various recreational industries appeared in front of Congress to testify about the effect it had on their bottom lines. The golf industry is said to have benefited by an additional $200 million, just from that one additional month; and the barbecue industry is said to have sold an additional $100 million in barbecues and charcoal briquettes. The additional extension in 2007 into November was supported strongly by the candy industry, who can sell a lot more Halloween candy when kids can spend an extra hour trick or treating before bedtime.
There is even a certain lobby out there that points to the environmental impact of this extra hour of shopping, dining, and golf. One paper from UC Santa Barbara calculated the cost of the resulting pollution as several million dollars per year. Whatever your particular fancy, you can probably find someone who's written a paper saying that daylight saving is good or bad for it. Daylight saving is one case where the fewer words you use to describe it, the more accurate you are. One word: Money. The more details you go into beyond that, the more treacherous your footing.
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References & Further Reading
AAP. "NSW: Farmers work longer and kids won't go to sleep: association." AAP General News Wire. 22 Oct. 2007, Wire: 1.
Aries, M.B.C., Newsham, G.R. "Effect of daylight saving time on lighting energy use: A literature review." Energy Policy. 1 Jun. 2008, Volume 36, Issue 6: 1858-1866.
Downing, Michael. Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time. Berkeley: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2005. 147-151.
Franklin, B., Goodman, N. The ingenious Dr. Franklin: selected scientific letters of Benjamin Franklin. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1931. 17-22.
Kotchen, M.J., Grant, L.E. "Does Daylight Saving Time Save Energy? Evidence from a Natural Experiment in Indiana." NBER Working Paper Series. National Bureau of Economic Research, 1 Oct. 2008. Web. 22 Sep. 2009. <http://www2.bren.ucsb.edu/~kotchen/links/DSTpaper.pdf>
Reference this article:
Dunning, Brian.
"Daylight Saving Time Myths." Skeptoid Podcast. Skeptoid Media, Inc.,
22 Sep 2009. Web.
10 Sep 2010. <http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4172>
Discuss!
Remember, you should always read with skepticism the comments of anyone too lame to put their real name & city.
Isn't it actually called "Daylight SAVING Time"? "Savings" is a common misnomer, from what I've heard.
Neal Edwards, Huntsville, Alabama
September 22, 2009 8:05am
How appropriate to talk about time.
I'm on the east coast today, and when I got up, no new Skeptoid. (bah!)
But then I realized where I was, and of course, it was 4:00 am on the west coast, so I guess that was ok.
Glen Wolfram, Eugene, Oregon
September 22, 2009 8:11am
In my current career I work in an office 8-4 and I go to work at the same time all year around. Since we need lights to see in our interior workspace the energy use for lighting is the same winter or summer. So absolutely no benefit to changing to daylight savings.
Also in the darkest part of winter it is mostly dark going to work and dark coming home, so changing the clock really doesn't help although I guess moving the clocks back 4 or 5 hours would give us nice evenings.
When I used to work outside (carpenter) like other outside workers we adjusted our schedule to match the availability of daylight, starting work earlier in summer and later in winter. If we needed to work longer hours (after dark) we used lights whether winter or summer.
Similarly, the time on the clock really does not much matter to my relatives that farm. In the summer and the winter the work day starts some time after dawn and ends some time before dark. When harvest comes around, the work continues as conditions allow day or night.
pcjohnson, rural canada
September 22, 2009 8:17am
You have completely missed the boat on Daylight Savings Time.
During the Cold War we lived with the reality of a possible nuclear winter should the war go hot. To avoid nuclear winter, the USA decided to use DST to store the saved daylight in massive warehouses scattered throughout the USA. If the nuclear winter scenario ever happened, the USA would have the advantage in any postwar scenario since the Russians don't have any daylight saved.
Scoff if you will, but I happen to know that the Daylight Savings Repository for the Southeast United States is in Marietta, GA.
Ray, Kathleen, GA
September 22, 2009 9:50am
The fact of Daylight Savings Time is indisputable, but I find cause for skepticism about what is actually being DONE with the daylight that is supposedly "saved". This is a giant unregulated underground economy pushed on consumers without tangible return benefit!
I believe we should found a system of National Savings & Loan institutions to ensure that the claimed savings are being realized, and to recirculate those saved daylight hours into the economy and ecology where we currently experience a deficit (such as the Winter months, Congressional hearings, or Sylvia Browne appearances... anywhere the light of day is sorely lacking).
As I've explained elsewhere (http://tinyurl.com/mw5a2o), this can also be a major tool in combating global warming. Don't hesitate to support this important initiative.
Benjamin Franklin Leigh, Union, SC
September 22, 2009 10:03am
It's entirely believable that DST is around entirely due to money. Anything to make corperate america happy. Just keep in mind that the current worldwide financial crisis was caused by 2 things. First was shady bankers doing dubious things with money (not relevant to this topic). And the second was rampant consumerism.
Robert Mcbride, Columbia, MD
September 22, 2009 10:23am
RAY,
They had to get rid of all the stored daylight from the Cold War era to free up space for the FEMA concentration camps.
Now what do we do when the Reds attack? OWN3D.
H. Tiberius Miser, Secret Underground Lair, Earth
September 22, 2009 10:43am
Uh, Daylight Saving Time, not "Savings". Any scholarly discussion of the subject ought to start with getting the name right.
tudza, Seattle
September 22, 2009 12:46pm
Robert: So all we have to do is abolish people, and there won't be any more economic problems?
Cambias, Massachusetts
September 22, 2009 1:05pm
It's Daylight Saving Time (no S). Think "time for saving daylight" :)
Matthew Orlando, Santa Rosa, CA
September 22, 2009 7:16pm
DST screws with your heart.
http://www.webmd.com/heart-disease/news/20081029/daylight-saving-time-may-affect-heart
"They discovered a 5% increase in heart attacks in the first three workdays after clocks were set ahead for the beginning of daylight saving time in the spring and a similar decrease on the Monday after clocks were set back for the end of daylight saving time in the fall."
As long as it adds up to zero, I guess it's fine.
Max, Boston, MA
September 22, 2009 7:50pm
I enjoyed your presentation on daylight savings time, but I would point out a money-related argument that you missed.
The recent switch in daylight savings observance in the US cost the makers of many computer software products money. I don't have any facts or figures on this, but consider this:
The calculations for when to enable/disable DST were based upon a given algorithm which was changed when the new DST changes were enacted.
Add in the extra complexity of calculating time differences (date math and so-on) for operations that need to cross the boundary of old vs new DST, and you've added extra complexity to said DST calculations.
Any software library or application directly calculating the DST switch would need to be updated, costing time of developers and testers as well as bandwidth costs for distribution. There is also the possibility that these code updates may have introduced new bugs which went undetected in the initial software development process, and will cost time and money down the road when they manifest and need to be addressed.
Again, I have no direct facts or figures, but as a software engineer, I know first-hand that I had to spend quite a good number of hours testing my applications to make sure they didn't do anything unexpected after the US expanded DST in 2007.
In the end, you still covered it in one word: Money.
DigitalSorceress, Longmeadow, MA
September 23, 2009 5:52am
Cambias,
You have taken my point and jumped into the wilderness with it. I'm not anti people, but pro people (not withstanding over population concerns). I'm anti mega corporations who are a big beneficiary of DST.
Robert Mcbride, Columbia, MD
September 23, 2009 10:12am
Here in Saskatchewan we don't follow Daylight Saving Time. The story I've been told is that the time zone boundary would run down the middle of the province splitting a province of one-million people in two. While those in the west side of the province deal (i.e. "money") with Alberta on Mountain Time and those in the east side deal with Manitoba on Central Time it was decided to compromise and leave the province on Central Standard time so that we share the summer months Alberta (with whom we deal with the most... "money") and the winter with Manitoba.
This has caused no end of confusion for those outside of Saskatchewan ("So, what time is it there?") but the rural organizations tend to enjoy Standard Time (more agricultural dealings with Alberta... "money") while the urban organizations would like to see us adopt Saving Time (confusion over business start and end times... "money"). The stalemate continues.
Having lived in regions with Daylight Saving Time I personally enjoy seeing the amount daylight hours change as the year progresses and one doesn't realize how quickly they do change until you can see it without the interference of a changing clock.
I also enjoy not having to readjust my internal clock to match the one on the wall.
This was a great podcast topic. Thanks.
watchful stone guardian, Saskatoon SK
September 23, 2009 12:37pm
Daylight savings has its positives and negatives.. Well explained Brian... except... During daylight savings, we all get "amorous" on the morning bus to work....
Is that Solar or temporal philos?
Henk van der Gaast, Sydney
September 23, 2009 7:59pm
I enjoyed the episode, Brian. You could have made it longer, and still have been fascinating. I would like to expand on what Digital Sorceress (ahem--real names, please?) said about the cost to software engineering. I would like to ask the collective Skeptoid wisdom if there is also a cost to users of big software systems? That is, am I right in supposing that any corporation large enough to have business processes that span time zones around the world, with the data transfers that go with those processes, has to do some fiddling to make sure they all still match up as the US shifts in and out of DST?
Brad Hall, Tokyo
September 24, 2009 2:51am
Fascinating podcast.
Over in the UK, there's an ongoing low-level debate about whether to move from GMT+0 in the winter and GMT+1 in the summer to GMT+1 in the winter and GMT+2 in the summer.
There are a few reasons behind this. One is business - it would effectively put the UK on Central European Time, meaning the business day would be the same for us as in Europe. Indeed, Spain - which lies mostly to the West of the UK - is on CET.
Another is accidents. The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents has called for an experiment to see if shifting time along an hour zones would reduce accidents. There was an experiment - British Standard Time - between '68 and '71 that suggested that the increase in accidents in the morning was considerably more than outweighed by the decrease in accidents in the evening.
Lord Tanlaw introduced a bill that (unfortunately IMHO) would have had a three year trial of moving to GMT+1. http://tinyurl.com/ydu5qqr
I really enjoyed your podcast - I've added you to the RSS list. Thankyou!
Dave Cole, St Neots, UK
September 24, 2009 3:07am
Having lived without DST for years and failing to see any real benefit of everyone changing their clocks at once, I was more than thrilled to hear this skeptical look at the subject. Skeptoid is on a roll. Keep up the good work!
Patrick Murphy, Osaka
September 24, 2009 7:32pm
After having a nice beer with a group of local friends(I am currently stationed in montana), one of which who owns, and operates, a dairy farm, I brought up this episode. While obviously not able to speak for the entire industry, His business practice is not affected by DST. The cows are milked at exactly the same time, every day, regardless of the time on the clock. The milk does not go directly to market, instead going through another company that processes the milk, making it ready for human consumption.
been a listener since episode 24, happy to finally be able to contribute.
Edward Fleming, Great Falls, Montana
September 25, 2009 10:31am
Hey Brian (and All),
I once asked a local police department how they keep track of when crimes are committed during the extra hour of a time change. If you set your clocks back to 1:00a at 2:00a then you have two 1:00a - 1:59a. I was told that I had asked an interesting question that they didn't have a good answer for. If someone committed a crime at say 1:35a, they wouldn't know if it was in the first or second occurrence of that hour. They can tell, due to their numbering system if a crime occurred before or after another crime. I wonder if this has ever been used to throw out a case due to lack of knowing when a crime was actually committed. I found this interesting and wondered how others keep track of this issue.
Keep up the great work.
Dave
David Charney, Chicago, IL
September 25, 2009 1:39pm
Long before my birth, Saskatchewan voted not to be bothered with this DST folly. Especially at time, agriculture was the main industry in the province, it rather dismisses any argument that DST helps the farmer.
Most of my life I've just shook my head at the silly song and dance the rest of the world underwent twice annually. Sadly, this is no longer so easy to ignore. Each year the internet and improved communications means a more international world. Most everyone has done their little harmonious hop&skip forward or back, leaving me as the poor slob trying to remember what time it is in Toronto or Timbuktu.
Blaze Morgan, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan
September 26, 2009 10:24am
I lived with a bunch of old farmers in the mid-70s and they were convinced that Day Light Savings Time was evidence that golf course owners had bought off FDR - More PM light - more time for the rich to play golf!
I loved sitting around with them because it was like being transported back in time to the early 1930s.
Lloyd, Central PA USA
September 29, 2009 5:17pm
In Israel religion get thrown in the mix.
Religious adherents have to wake up at dawn for prayers. If dawn is clocked at five they have to wake up too many hours before work. The religious parties in all government coalitions had been protecting DST against any changes.
Shahar lubin, Ha-Noi, Vietnam
October 07, 2009 11:35pm
I just listened to your show about Daylight Saving Time. Years before your broadcast, mine own research came to the same conclusion:
“Money”
My comment is something I concluded years ago when I first learned about the candy-industry wanting Daylight Saving Time in late October; the executives of the candy-companies are idiots:
The bedtime is fixed and none could cool trick-or-treat before sunset. Switching from Standard Time to Daylight Saving Time reduces Trick-Or-Treating by an hour. As Homer Simpson says:
“¡Doh!”
As the saying says, “there is being smart and there is being greedy.”. The candy-industry looses money because it is too greedy to think through its own actions.
Another factor the candy-industry misses is that if people do not buy more candy if they run out because by the time they return, the trick-or-treators will be home. Basically, people buy all the candy they will buy before sunset.
If I would be a smart candy-executive, this is what I would do:
I would lobby the government to get us back onto Standard time before Halloween. Once I accomplish that, I would start an advertising campaign explaining that we have an extra hour of trick-or-treating, so everyone should buy twice as much candy before sunset on Halloween so that it does not run out. On November 1st, I would count all of the extra money I made.
Walabio, Petaluma
October 23, 2009 1:10pm
"Places like Florida, with maximum air conditioning needs, clearly use more electricity because of daylight saving;"
This doesn't seem to make sense. The temperature in a 24 hour period is irrelevant to the time on a clock.
Whether it's Standard time or Savings time, the AC would run exactly the same in that period.
Ed, New Jersey
October 23, 2009 5:06pm
To Ed in New Jersey:
Daylight Saving Time makes people in Florida use more electricity for air-conditioning because these people get home in the hottest most humid part of the day instead of an hour later. These people turn on their air-conditioning an hour extra every day.
Walabio, Petaluma
October 24, 2009 9:02pm
Do people really turn on and off their air conditioning daily? I doubt it, most wait til it gets hot, turn in on, and leave it on all summer until it gets cold. Only time I hear people say they turned it off is when they go on vacation or something. Ideally folks would turn on and off and adjust the thermostat to save energy, but they don't.
James, Cochran
November 12, 2009 10:19am
There is another slight issue with transporting oversized loads during time changes...
Truckers have to account for:
driving time
rest time(sleeper)
off time(hotel/home)
Work time(other than driving)
US DOT regs are PITA.
StinkyPooPooHead, Kansas
November 13, 2009 1:18am
Hmm, the candy industry accusation is suspicious. Kids' bedtime doesn't have anything to do with when the sun sets, and in my neck of the woods, trick-or-treating doesn't start until after dark, so Daylight Savings Time would actually work against that.
Bryan, Albany, California
November 25, 2009 9:52pm
Bryan, Albany, California, you need to read my comment above. The candy-industry did want Daiylight Saving Time for Halloween and they did shoot themselves in the foot:
There is being smart and being greedy. The greed of the executives convinced them that if it was lighter, more parents would let their children trick-or-treat because the parents would feel their children are safer. Their greed kept them from realizing that it is not cool to trick-or-treat before sunset:
¡Doh!
They shot themselves in the foot.
I do not want to repeat myself, so read what I wrote above, but I have a funny anecdote for you:
This year, I handed out candy to the trick-or-treaters. Across the street was the most unorganized family I ever saw. It took them an hour of milling around their porch after sunset before they got going trick-or-treating. Because of the lost hour and many adults running out of candy, those children probably got less than a third the candy they would have, it they would have started at sunset instead of waiting for their disorganized parents. Every child knows:
“¡When the sunsets, one starts trick-or-treating immediately no matter what!”
It took all of my self-control not to yell at those stupid unorganized parents.
Walabio, Petaluma
November 27, 2009 7:01pm
One area totally opposed to daylight saving is IT. I've seen systems crash because they hadn't been tested over a time-span when the clocks moved forward or back. The complexity of making systems tolerant of this can be huge. I personally maintain software which not only has to be aware of daylight saving but also of different applications of this in different zones of the world. These zones are not always countries. Some countries have several zones. DLS is not always 60 minutes. In most cases its' applied on the 3'rd Sunday of a month but not always. Sometimes its on a particular date in the month. Some countries don't apply it at all. Some countries refuse to publish any scheme by which it is applied. They just make it up as they go along. In USA time-zone regions do not always follow state boundaries. In short it's a real mess and one of the banes of my life.
Peter, Bristol, England
December 01, 2009 3:05pm
http://blog.rescuetime.com/2009/03/11/daylight-savings-time-costs-the-united-states-480000000/ would be worth noting as an argument against daylight savings.
ChristianK, Berlin, Germany
January 26, 2010 8:07am
I already solved this and knew about it before I read this article:
The day is not 24 hours long. It is 23 hours and 56 minutes long. We round this up, and it costs us 4 minutes of leftover every day for six months, that adds to 12 hours. Double that, and you have 24 hours.
Whoopee, I completely and utterly missed the point, and ended up describing the need for leap year. I think I even screwed that up.
And there, children, is why you must read/listen to these Skeptoid articles, so you don't become an illogical loon like me. But in my defense, I have Asperger's syndrome, so things like what I just said make sense to me... initially.
Andariel Halo, Miami, Florida
February 01, 2010 9:16am
We should make the WHOLE YEAR on Daylight Savings Time. If we Spring Forward and stay that way (and ignore the whole Fall Back period), people could enjoy an extra hour of daylight in the winter months as well as the summer months.
I grew up in northern New England, where the sun set around 3:30pm during winter. That's just completely unnecessary. It meant the sun set when school let out. It meant ski resorts had to start their nighttime discounts at 3 or 4pm. It meant people ate dinner at 5 or 6pm and went to bed at 10pm.
Imagine shifting that forward just one hour. People would spend more time at the mall or the movies or eating out, because they would have that extra hour.
Abby, Austin, TX
February 23, 2010 3:10pm
To Abby in Austin Texas:
You seem to have fallen for the logical fallacy of “The Grass Is Always Greener On The Other Side”. The candy-industry fell for this fallacy and it costs them dearly. Please read my 2 posts about Halloween-Candy attached to this article.
¿Would it be a good thing if the sun rose at the crack of noon? ¿What about the farmers? ¿What about the computer-code one must change? ¿What about international scheduling?:
As far as international scheduling goes, it would make more sense to use only GMT and ISO-8601. I have said this for years. I would like to take credit for it, but unsurprisingly however, others have had the same idea for for much longer than I have been alive. The most famous proponent was Arthur C. Clark.
Walabio, Petaluma
March 15, 2010 1:03am
I still think that daylight savings is for farmers because it stays lighter later and so they have more light to see what there doing and longer to work with repairs and washing animals or doing other farm work...so in my mind it is for the farmers....WOOHOO GO FARMERS!
Courtney, Oregon
March 16, 2010 3:59pm
Another point for your discussion about DST: I was mentioning your podcast to a farmer and they brought up a noteworthy point regarding the working day. He said that the work is "never finished" and that you tend to work until the sun goes down. During DST, his "work" day is longer. You could argue that it is a benefit, allowing you to do more in a day but he looks on it as a drawback. Cheers and thanks for the great podcasts!
Obviousman, NSW, Australia
April 03, 2010 6:23pm
This article reminded me of a story I read back in a 1986 issue of Readers Digest where an old lady in Arizona was complaining about the extra month of daylight savings time the USA had recently adopted by arguing that the "extra hour of sunlight every day would damage her beloved flower garden".
Kenneth Kowalsky, New Jersey, USA
August 26, 2010 12:09pm
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Of course you'd say that! You're just in the tank for Big Clock!
This was much more interesting than I expected a post about Daylight Savings Time to be. I always thought DST was a concession FOR the farmers. I had no idea they opposed it.
But who will speak for the deranged night stalkers? Surely aligning the day with the light doesn't benefit them.
Ryan, Toronto
September 22, 2009 7:52am