Sunday, November 2, 2008

Daylight Saving Time (DST)

This little digression from my usual content won't take long.

There's something wrong with DST, other than the fact that most of the world does not utilize it, so why do we? It's backwards.

If we're going to use it, then use it in the Winter; that's when we need it. Depending upon your location's latitude, it can get dark as early as 4:30 PM in the dead of Winter. We don't need it in the Summer. There really is no need to have it stay light until 10 PM.

Supposedly it saves energy. I don't see how: perhaps we use less electricity for lighting, but we use more gasoline in many cases.

3 comments:

Morealive said...

I am fairly sure that the writer probably hasn't ventured much farther than the boundaries of this country or done any research to have written such claptrap. Much of Europe is on "summer time" which is the same as daylight savings time. Indeed, except for areas around the equator, MOST of the world has had daylight savings time at one point or the other. Almost all of the industrialized world, including areas which are adjacent to it, observes it during the summer months, basically at the same time we do.

Scott Haley said...

Response to Morealive:

Yes, most of the industrialized world does utilize DST. I agree. But most of the world is not industrialized, at least, nowhere near the extent that North America and Europe are industrialized.

How about a comment on the main point of the piece, i.e., that we should use it in the Winter, not the Summer. ???

Thanks.

Scott Haley said...

P.S. to Morealive:

Here's a map showing DST vs non-DST countries...
http://www.worldtimezone.com/daylight.html
Unfortunately, that map projection (like many) does not accurately display the SIZE of countries. For example, the Amazon Basin in reality is almost the size of the lower 48 States of the U.S. The distortion of the map is evident when you compare the two areas.

Perhaps I didn't make myself clear in the posted piece: when I said "most of the world", I meant geographically---land mass. Sorry for any confusion.

Even almost half of Australia (an industrialized country) is not on DST.

Also, your suppositions about my travels and research are (for the most part) wrong. I'm not a widely traveled individual outside of the USA, but I've lived in Europe (when in the Army), and have been to Canada and Mexico. The few articles I read on the subject of DST all agreed that most of the world (land mass) is not on Daylight Saving Time.

Again, sorry I didn't make myself clearer in the original piece.

Thanks for your input.

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