Rant on.

I have ranted about this before, and I am sure I will rant about it again.  I think Daylight Savings Time is, at best, an annoying idea.  It was questionably useful when it was first put into place, and its modern use seems counter-productive.

Although I don’t think science fully understands it yet, living things all have a biological clock they run on.  This includes people, who have the advantage of knowing they have an internal clock.  Changing the time of day throws this clock off.  Some proponents of DST like to say that the shift at this time of year is good because it “gives you an extra hour of sleep.”  Bullshit.  My body is used to sleeping a certain number of hours.  I am pretty sure most people are the same way, and so they either don’t sleep that extra hour or have a very restless sleep for it.

The night after the shift, my body thinks I have stayed up late.  This doesn’t affect when I wake up, relatively speaking; I tend to awake at roughly the same time of day I did before.  Except it’s not the same time of day, it’s an hour earlier according to the clock.  Again, I am certain I am not unique in this.  I am pretty sure most people go through a few days like this as their biological clock adjusts to the new time frame.

There have been studies done, of course.  Overall, as I see it, the advantages and disadvantages even out.  In some places, energy consumption rises while it seems to lower in others.  Wikipedia has a good article on it.  Quite simply it seems like an awful lot of hassle to go through for such minimal advantages, especially with evidence pointing to some quantifiable disadvantages as well.

The fact is that today’s world is a twenty-four-by-seven world.  Many businesses are open late or all night.  People routinely work late, sometimes to the wee hours of the morning.  Our computers stay on all day, consuming power constantly, and will do so regardless of what time of day it is.  Shifting our timepieces around is a terrible inconvenience, and it is–no pun intended–high time we got rid of this archaic practice.

Rant off.