exhawg said:
I used to wake up shortly before my alarm went off and be wide awake every day, but now I have a hell of a time waking up and I can't get to sleep before midnight. I think I'm going to move just to the other side of the Indiana border so I don't have to change my clocks anymore.
I swear I have never understood the need for or benefit of DST.
DST is also subject to several urban myths --
1 - -That it was all Ben Franklin's idea -- NOT! The Ben Franklin essay cited by some to support this contention was more a satire about laziness and getting up early -- before the cock crows -- which leads to
2 -- Its to benefit the farmers, or bring in the harvest -- yeah right, tell that to anyone actually running a working farm. As one farmer put it about DST -- those roosters don't have a clock they wake up with the sun and that's when the work begins. (And the harvest work used to go from dawn to dusk, so who needs a clock for that?)
3 -- Its to help safety for the workday / schoolday ---- day. Blatantly wrong based on anyone's common-day experience.
So where does it come from?
Truth be told DST pretty much as we know it was really the brain-child of an Englishman residing in London. When he proposed it in the early 20th Century his "best" justification was that it would give shop-keepers more daylight hours at the end of the workday to get punters into their stores on the way back home from work. He published an article on the idea and tried to get DST instated (though he wanted 80 minutes, instead of an hour). In a rare exhibition of common-sense Parliament told him to stuff it.
Later in the 20th century the Germans adopted the idea -- and it was in this case (I think) that getting max daylight during the regular factory shift was a consideration as it helped reduce fuel consumption. Oh yes, there was a war going on at the time.
Showing a distinct lack of cultural memory Parliament adopted DST using the 1-hour flip-flop. The USA follows suit in 1918 and the insanity continues to this day....
And yes, I get a kind of DST lag for the next couple of days.
