Daylight Stupid Time

Posted March 12, 2010, 9:42 p.m.

Am I the only one who hates daylight saving time and thinks its a big, pointless waste of time? (Get it? Waste of time?)

First and foremost, daylight is a zero-sum game. Whatever numbers we use to identify sunrise and sunset, the amount of daylight is the same. When the U.S. government decided to expand daylight saving time a few years ago, there was all kinds of talk about how it would save energy. Can anybody actually explain how moving the time labels by an hour changes the amount of air conditioning we need in a day, or makes any change whatsoever in how much energy we use in a day? Most reputable studies find no energy savings whatsoever due to daylight saving time.

There is one benefit . . . we get more daylight in the evening during the summer, which gives us more time for shopping, recreation, and so on. If this is the goal, why not just make daylight saving time into normal time? It wouldn’t make any difference in the winter when we’re all indoors anyway, we would still get our ‘extra’ hour of evening daylight in the summer, and we wouldn’t have to deal with pointless changes of the hour (and its requisite hassle and confusion) anymore. Problem solved.

I don’t personally care whether we standardize on ‘normal’ time or daylight saving time, but it’s about time that we standardized on one or the other and did away with the unnecessary time change. If we can’t pick one, let’s split the difference and shift time by 30 minutes. Time is just made-up numbers anyway, so make up some numbers that don’t have to randomly change twice per year.

Scott Bradford is a writer and technologist who has been putting his opinions online since 1995. He believes in three inviolable human rights: life, liberty, and property. He is a Catholic Christian who worships the trinitarian God described in the Nicene Creed. Scott is a husband, nerd, pet lover, and AMC/Jeep enthusiast with a B.S. degree in public administration from George Mason University.

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