DST

DST – Not just annoying, but Deadly???

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I haven’t always hated Daylight Saving Time (DST).  As a kid, Daylight Savings Time was kind of cool… Indiana didn’t participate in the nonsense, but since the network TV shows came from the east coast, when DST rolled around, those shows were on earlier.  Shows that were past my bedtime in the winter were on the schedule for the summer.  Cool!

Then I moved to Georgia after college.  Since I moved there in the Fall, my first taste of DST as a participant was “fall back”.  This was cool!  An extra hour of sleep!  But then in the following Spring I experienced DST’s dark side… “spring forward”.  What fresh Hell is this?  It was just starting to get light in the morning and now we are plunged back into darkness!?!  My Monday morning commute, which was never fun anyway, was now an hour earlier and populated by thousands of other grumpy commuters dealing with lost sleep.  For the next six years, I spent weeks in the Spring being grumpy and chastising Georgians on this affront to my constitution while expounding on the brilliance of Hoosiers for opting out of the silliness.  When I moved back to Indiana I took some glee in poking fun at my friends in the South as they went through the fruitless exercise of DST…  That was until 2006 when Governor Mitch Daniels pushed through legislation that forced Indiana to join the insanity.  Trust me… nothing cheered up my Georgia friends more during spring forward than laughing at me as I once again joined them in the insane practice.

But now this year, the University of Michigan has come out with a study saying that DST is not just an inconvenience that makes me feel like crap, but it could actually kill me!  Heart attack occurrences increase by 25% on the first work day after the Spring time change.  That will make my morning commute less stressful!  Geez!

I don’t expect this revelation to change anything.  DST supporters have a form on insanity I can’t understand, but I do know that they will not be influenced by logic, facts or rational arguments.  I’ll just take an aspirin tomorrow morning before heading to work.

Wonka Image Source:  daylightsavingstimechange.org

University of Michigan Image Source:  Summer Institutes

Down with DST

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Well, here we are suffering through DST (Daylight Savings Time) again.  While “Falling Back” isn’t a traumatic as “Springing Forward”,  I still prefer leaving things alone.  I used to think Indiana was progressive for not participating.  That was confirmed when I lived under DST for a few years in Georgia that pretty much confirmed my feelings, so I was pretty vocally against the change when it happened.

I ran across an article by an economist, Allison Schrager, titled:  “The US needs to retire daylight savings and just have two time zones—one hour apart”  I learned a few things including how little of the world observes DST.  The cool map above is from her site.  The Wikipedia link to Daylight Savings Time above shows a map that indicates large portions of the globe that did observe DST no longer do so.

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