... is one reason why I'm up right now. Amidst my mental ramblings at this hour came a question about Daylight Savings Time. While employed in some form for thousands of years, the modern practice of DST came about early in the 20th century and was proposed as a means to allow more daylight hours for leisure and recreational activities. It was then noted to also have potentially promising effects on the economy, energy consumption, agriculture, transportation scheduling, and safety. All of those benefits have fallen under scrutiny and for good reasons.
One of the things I've recognized about the Bush administration is the extension of DST and even the consideration of a 2 hour leap. A lot of emphasis is put on the conservation of energy, but there is also the idea that gasoline consumption increases. Right now I'm finding myself with a different perspective. Once upon a time we used the sun and seasons to track our chronology. Time was, at that point, a tool of human usage. Today we find ourselves subservient to the clock, and instead of time serving us we are its slaves. Come time to execute DST a very large portion of the world finds themselves host to a simultaneous case of jet lag, albeit only an hour's worth. This makes me wonder if there isn't some form of political gain to having so many people operating in such a nebulous state. It seems that every time we make the switch we've just gotten used to the system we'd superficially employed approximately half a year earlier. The displacement of our independent chronology hosts the potential to inspire psychological effects on people. And such is my question. What is your appraisal of the overall usefulness of DST? Do you think it's simply a method employed to optimize our lives with clever manipulation of the clock? Do you think it has the implication, potential, or even practice of serving government bodies with a degree of control over its populace?
Discuss.
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2 comments:
I've always found it strange that DST is an American thing and is not universally adapted across the globe. The very fact that my friends in Russia, Japan, and Brazil are not turning over their clocks when we are goes to show how totally superfluous DST is. If it were really worth the hassle of resetting all the clocks and having our circadian rhythms thrown off, I would think that more of the global community would have adopted the system by now.
There's also a strange assumption behind DST: we want more sunlight in the morning as Winter approaches and more sun in the evenings as Summer approaches. While this might be the case for some people, mandating something as complex as a national time change because of assumed environmental preferences seems spurious and not worth the energy.
On a personal level: I was out drinking late on Saturday night and had to get up on Sunday at 9 for a function. That extra hour of sleep would have been awfully nice, regardless of how much extra light it gave me that evening.
Just one man's opinion.
Isn't it a simple matter of maximizing labor hours? It's to keep the workforce vitamin-d'd up.
Or what you could do is start a campaign to end DST and see who squawks disapproval. Then you'd know which core demographic W is trying to keep happy.
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