Daylight Savings 2018: the Continuation of 100 years of Scientific Garbage

Who's ready to spring forward?? This weekend marks the 100th year anniversary of this outdated and (in my opinion) ill-conceived tradition that's changed many times since its inception and is a burden to so many of us westerners.

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From the title and intro of my post you can probably guess what my stance is on this practice that we westerners still do even many years after it hasn't really shown savings in energy or much else beneficial for that matter. Sure, I love getting that extra hour in the fall and having an easier time getting up in the morning for a few weeks and going to bed at a reasonable hour, but in the spring time it's the opposite.

Tonight when we skip forward from 2 a.m. to 3 a.m. it'll mean the beginning of a few weeks or a month or who knows how long of me having a hard time going to sleep on time and getting up on time for work. The later sunsets and more daylight in the evening is nice, but I don't think the trouble I have with sleeping enough is worth it.

Proponents of it such as the federal government have always stuck to energy savings and economic impact arguments and the logic goes something like this...

• Because people won't have to turn as many lights on in the evening due to the sun setting later, we save electricity (Never mind that it doesn't get light outside until an hour later in the morning and lights will inevitably be turned on because of it). I'm always up before the sun on work days so I'm using electricity regardless.
• People are more likely to go out and do things and buy things in the evening after work if it's light later (which requires some sort of energy consumption such as the burning of fossil fuels to get where people are going and many businesses will stay open an hour later which requires more energy consumption to run anything that relies on electricity)

It's a net zero effect at best as far as energy goes. Is it worth it? I think it's like taking money out of your right pants pocket and putting in the left pocket and proclaiming you've just saved yourself that amount of money as far as energy savings is concerned, which is absolutely absurd.

What they don't say is there are negative effects from it including an increase in traffic accidents (and FATALITIES as a result) the Monday and for the rest of the week after due to all the tired people--tired people like my wife and I who often have enough trouble getting enough sleep during the work week as it is. Fatality stat source

I can sit here all day and poke holes in all the arguments but instead I'm going to stop complaining and start thinking about what might be a better alternative.

I'm not necessarily opposed to shifting the time so that the sun sets later in the evening and rises later in the morning, but can we just pick a time and stay with it year round like the state of Arizona does? Florida is considering implementing a permanent one hour forward shift and I have a feeling this movement is probably going to spread to other states soon.

There's a good bit of info in this article from the Washington post about a permanent forward setting of the clocks by one hour if anyone is interested in checking it out.

One problem is the time relation to the rest of the world that doesn't engage in this practice. Florida's proposal would put it one time zone ahead of the rest of the east coast and eastern part of the United States but at least they'd be on a consistent time year round. If the rest of the country were to do this, it would make things kind of screwy in relation to other regions of the world as time zones would shift out of sync by one hour from other places along the same coordinates of longitude.

Really there's no solution that wouldn't have some kind of negative impact and I suspect that's part of why we still do this crap.

I think maybe rolling the clocks forward 30 minutes permanently to split the difference of the change would be a decent idea, but then again there lies the problem of being out of sync with other parts of the world and time zones not lining up with their respective lines of longitude going across all latitudes.

I don't have the answer, but I'll conclude by saying I'm not happy about springing forward and losing an hour of my weekend. Anyone else with me on this? Or do you enjoy this 100 year old tradition? Maybe if my sleep didn't suffer for it I wouldn't be so opposed to it...but it does, so I am.