Daylight Savings Time

[Aaryanna]

[COLOR=DarkSlateBlue]For those of you who live where Daylight Saving?s Time is honored, tonight or tomorrow sometime is when we change our clocks so that the time is one hour ahead of what it is now. A process that can be quite time consuming if you have a lot of clocks that need to be manually switched.

Originally daylight savings time was started to save energy. Supposedly by having more daylight hour?s people would use less electricity for lights and it would reduce energy consumption. Which in turn would reduce consumption of oil, natural gas and coal.

Though in reality it?s only a trick since you can?t increase the amount of daylight time. It just changes when you go to school so that you have more time after both school and work to do things when nature is providing the light for you.

Every year there is a big debate as to whether or not we should either do away with daylight savings time or make it permanent. And the other debate is that next year Congress had approved extending daylight savings time by two months so that it will run from the first Sunday in March to the last weekend in November.

So what do all of you think? Personally I think constantly changing the clocks is kind of unnecessary. It doesn?t change the amount of daylight only our perception of when we are awake for those hours of daylight. So I think we should either get rid of it altogether or make Daylight Savings Time permanent.

Personally I like the idea of it being permanent since I like long sunny days, even if part of that day is an illusion to make me think it?s longer. That and I hate it when we change back in the fall since it makes it seem like the darkness started taking over. ^_~[/COLOR]

[Retribution]

[size=1]Hm. I was under the assumption that Daylight Savings Time was 'invented' during the Industrial Revolution, but prior to the invention of the lightbulb. Workers could work the same hours off of daylight by changing the country's working hours, so that's what they did. But it really serves no purpose anymore, I'd say. We have artificial lighting, and most jobs take place indoors nowadays anyway.

Seems annoying, the whole springing forward bit.[/size]

[Horendithas]

[COLOR=Indigo]Although I enjoy the illusion of having longer days, Daylight Savings Time doesn't really change anything. Except that we have to change our clocks every year. Technology has improved and people now have the option to use fixtures that use less energy. So it kind of makes the idea of Daylight Savings Time redundant. I think we should quit doing it altogether and instead focus on using energy more effectively instead of worrying about a single hour a day.

If people were to simply switch to light bulbs that provide say 100 watts of light but only use 33 watts of power to do it, (something that you can actually do) then I would imagine that in the long run they would save far more power by saving 64 watts of power every time the light bulb is on instead of not using it one hour a day. In the long run that seems like a far better way to conserve power since you would be conserving all the time. Sure you have to pay nearly 7 dollars for the light bulb, but they tend to last 5-8 years instead of less than a year like cheaper light bulbs do. So for a small increase in price when you buy light bulbs, you not only don't have to change them all the time, you save money all the time on your electric bill and also conserve energy at the same time.
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