darkness

[chewbeck]

It has been a while since I've woken up before 7am, mostly because I have had no reason to do so. Well, I woke up today around 6:15am, and it is now approximately one hour later, and it is incredibly dark outside. Why have we not fallen back yet? It is not natural for it to be this dark this late in the morning. There should be sun by 7am, and

Comments

[chewbeck]

I thought long and hard about the Halloween reason, which is a fairly decent one. I mean, little kids are walking around and all, so I guess it should be light out for them. However, this is counteracted by the fact that when it is that dark at 7am, there are a lot of children waiting for buses in unsafe levels of darkness. I mean, if it's all about the safety of children, a positive benefit on one light evening hardly counterbalances the negatives of 5-10 mornings of darkness.

On your second reason, I got nothing.

[chewbeck]

Was there a public information campaign telling people the switch was made because of Halloween? The reason DST was extended was to save energy, and it was part of the Energy Savings Act of 2005, which went into effect in 2007. I had never heard the Halloween thing.

I am supremely skeptical that the extension of DST has actually saved any energy. It has merely shifted the time of day when people use energy from the evening to the morning. And any evening darkness problems that are solved by DST are not really solved, but moved to the morning.

I guess I just realized I'm not entirely sure whether I'm entirely opposed to DST in general or not, but I definitely am opposed to the recent extension. It just makes it darker at hours when many people are up and about and getting where they need to go, and has very little, if any, benefit.

[muchabstracted]

Hi! This is Erica, was good to see you yesterday. I feel I should be more creative -- I mean, personally, I'm not a fan of it getting dark at 3:30, which is what happens up here this time of year, so I think we might be on different sides of this whole Daylight Savings issue, but... *overwhelmed by everything to do before tomorrow*.