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In fact, for many years, I have used the term "Daylight Wasting Time". I'd rather have an extra hour of light in the morning, than at night.
Here's an idea that should work just as well as "daylight savings time". Every spring, we skip March and go straight from February to April. Then, in the fall, we go back and do September over again. Why wouldn't that work just as well as doing it with one hour on the clock? We would get one more month of summer and one less month of winter.
Here is the one and only good reason for having DST. Rich golfers get an extra hour to play the links. Everybody else hates it. Well, here's an idea for the idle rich. Take off an hour earlier in the afternoon to head for the golf course. You're not needed around the office anyway, you don't do any productive work.
You live fairly far south, so your earliest sunrise in June is around 6:30 a.m., so without DST, you'd have the sun up at 5:30 a.m. and light in the sky well before that. At further north latitudes, like here in Denver, we'd have a sunrise of 4:30 a.m. if we didn't do DST, which would be extremely annoying. And for comparison, Seattle, being much further north, already has an earliest sunrise of 5:11 a.m. Without DST, it would be getting light a little after 3 a.m. in Summer!
See I would love the sun awake @4:30 AM!! I don't need it light out til almost 9PM
It finally got to the point that when I left for work @ 6:15 AM it was light out..now next week I'll be back in darkness
Takes me a good week to adjust but I don't have a problem adjusting when the clocks go back
I don't think the average person needs or wants light that early! I don't like adjusting either, but I'm glad we do it. It'll only take 3 weeks or so and you'll have your light back early in the morning.
First, daylight savings time runs about 8 months, not 6.
It's was first enacted in the US in 1918 as an energy saving measure; it's main purpose being to reduce the use of residential lighting in the evening, then a primary use of electricity. During daylight savings time in high latitude summers, most people do get up after the sun is up, even during daylight savings time.
Not a lot of people liked the way it was set up, so it was stopped until WWII.
Some studies have shown that DST reduces automobile accidents with the additional hour of light at the end of the day, however, some studies have shown that it actually increases oil consumption.
My own opinion as to why it is used is because of what so many things boil down to...money.
Studies have pretty conclusively shown that retailers, sporting goods manufacturers, sporting events, etc. make more money during DST then not. More people are just willing to get out after work and do things if it's still light.
Those are some of the reasons put forth...of course, not everyone likes it and for every study put forth as evidence of its benefits, I'm sure there's probably one against it.
Personally, I liked it when I used to have a job determined by the clock. And where I grew up, it sure made the evenings looooooong in the summer. Light enough to work outside by 4 a.m. 'til nearly 10. I can remember my grandpa saying he sure wished it'd get dark so he could go to bed!
As it is, I have problems sleeping in in Summer because it gets light so early. I'd hate to have the sun coming up at 4:30 a.m.!
Instead of the government forcing to us to watch X number of watches every 6 months.
We could just leave it up to businesses to open and close when there's daylight.
Anchorage's sunrise during the summer is at 4:00am, and I've never heard anybody from Alaska complaining about it.
The part of the deal that always puzzles me is this: not all 50 states subscribe to the policy. I know that Indiana doesn't--which creates all kinds of havoc with railroad schedules on the nights when the clock is either pushed back or forward.
Unless I'm very much mistaken, the original idea behind DST was to give farmers an extra hour for their work in the fields. But things have changed over the last half century, and this isn't a nation of farmers any more. Daylight Savings Time has become irrelevant. I think we should start taking bets: which irrelevancy will be eliminated first...DST or the Electoral College?
I say keep it, but limit it to six months a year instead of eight. It wasn't so difficult to adjust to DST when we went on it the last Sunday of April. But the second week of March? That's just way too early in the spring to be moving time from the morning to the evening. Like here in Atlanta, we have a current sunrise of 6:51am, with a sunset time of 6:42pm. After we go to DST, it'll be something like 7:49am, with sunset at 7:44pm. Having that much dark time in the morning just doesn't make sense - at this point, we might as well as stay on DST all year around.
But having it go from late April to late Oct like they used to have it would suit me (and others, I'm sure) just fine.
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