daylight savings rant

[merchimerch]

Argh. There is no saving daylight, one can only move it around in relation to the time of day. And when that happens, I get cranky, everyone gets thrown off, people are late or early (depending on which time of year), and things get all messed up.

I do not like waking up at 7 a.m. in the dark, when I've been waking up to sunrise or brighter for the past month or so. It is now almost 7:30 and I am well-slept but groggy and bleary-eyed because the government likes to f*ck with its citizenry's circadian rhythms.

We are not farmers and no longer have an agriculturally based economy, or agro industries that even rely on work being accomplished during daylight hours. Plus according to wikipedia, DST doesn't actually result in saving energy and might actually cause us to use slightly more gas. Why do we do this?

(And no, I'm not planning on moving to Arizona or Saskatchewan just because they don't observe DST)

Comments

[thunderbox.livejournal.com]

Ours doesn't change for another two weeks, but I agree wholeheartedly. I don't have so much of a problem with the spring change, but the autumn one really messes me up for several weeks.

When I was a teenager, we gave up the whole practice and stayed on GMT+1, but there was much fuss about children going to school in the dark. Despite accident figures showing that this was more than offset at the other end of the day:

Analysis of accident data during the experiment indicated that while there had been an increase in casualties in the morning, there had been a substantially greater decrease in casualties in the evening, with a total of around 2,500 fewer people killed and seriously injured during the first two winters of the experiment.

the trial was abandoned.

[merchimerch.livejournal.com]

yep - it has nothing to do with science. And I grew up in Alaska, where you end up going to school in the dark regardless.

It's not the darkness that I object to. Darkness in winter is a fact of life in the northern hemisphere. I just don't like the jarring change of an hour twice a year. For some reason it's really thrown me off this spring.

[thunderbox.livejournal.com]

Yes, same here. My Dad died in September, and so I was already fairly fragile and when the clocks changed at the end of October I wound up in a terrible mess. I think that one was the worst I've ever experienced.

[aelfscine.livejournal.com]

I'm mainly grouchy because now Michigan's a three hour time difference, and that's a lot harder to work around. I think stuff like "I'ma call my best friend Becky!" and then I realize it's midnight there. :P

[rednikki.livejournal.com]

The WSJ reported that Indiana (which used to not observe DST, but started to two years ago) has proven statistically, with hard numbers, that observing DST causes a huge uptick in fuel and energy consumption. People are home during daylight hours and therefore consume way more AC.