Why fall back?

By RICHARD BROWN

There is a worldwide institution that is completely ridiculous. It’s outdated and… There is a worldwide institution that is completely ridiculous. It’s outdated and misrepresented, and the evidence for much of its support is either nonexistent or insignificant. Almost the entire industrialized world uses it, but in essence it is a completely arbitrary and pointless system that does nothing but interfere with the lives of people around the world.

Surprisingly, I’m not talking about representative democracy – zing! – but rather daylight saving time. Think about it: The majority of the world, twice a year, arbitrarily decides to set their clocks an hour forward or back, regardless of what their neighboring countries, or even other provinces within their own countries, do.

For example, the entire state of Arizona has not observed DST since 1967, and until 2006, most of Indiana didn’t either. And just this year the American government decided by legal mandate to change the date of the clock switch and lengthen DST by several weeks, proving that the entire system is based solely on a strange form of reasoning that has absolutely no relation to logic.

Maybe I’m being harsh here. After all, there are several good arguments for daylight saving time. For instance, the inventor of DST, a man by the name of William Willett, wanted to lengthen the amount of daylight on a given day to keep his golf game from being cut short by sunset.

And much of the current argument for DST revolves around its ability to cut power usage by as much as