How to become a Republican.

I know that this is not a compelling argument, but I figured I should alert you to this fact anyway:

The non-Indiananites of America don't know why you're whining so much about Daylight Savings time.

I think part of the purpose of these posts, george, is to explain why everyone should be whining about it.

Also, I would keep the word "whining" in quotation marks. "Whining" is what people call criticisms that they believe are invalid, but that they have refused even to consider.

I think part of the purpose of these posts, george, is to explain why everyone should be whining about it.

Then they are failing miserably. I don't care whether or not DST saves energy. Even if it used somewhat more energy, it would still be worth it to me. Here on the east coast, I like to have long, light evenings that give me more time to work outside after work. I'd support year round DST, because then I'd have a little light after work even in the dead of winter. The climate here is mild enought that there are things I could be doing outdoors year round. I'd be getting up in the dark regardless of whether we have DST or not, so that's not an issue.

And I'm not in Indiana, so I'm really not too distressed that DST annoys some of the people there.

Nick,

I think it's important to keep in mind that Zach's arguments are made from a specifically Hoosier perspective. Being on the extreme western end of the Eastern time zone, Indiana now has very late sunrises and sunsets thanks to DST. (Sunrise today in Terre Haute was at 7:16 AM.) So what makes sense on the east coast doesn't necessarily make sense in Indiana.

Personally, though I don't live there anymore, I think the most sensible thing for Indiana would have been to implement DST and join the Central time zone.

Eric,

If Indiana had moved to the Central Time Zone DST would have followed automatically. There would have been no need to implement DST. The old (and for my part cherished) exemption from DST covered only the Eastern Time Zone portions of the State.

I've followed Upton's ramblings on DST for a couple of years now. He usually gets in a mention of the importance of having Halloween occur while DST is in effect. Knowing that the candy industry has for years pushed for just that I wonder just what he is gets from that lobby. And an "energy saving" argument that looks exclusively at electricity usage (and may well get even that wrong) and ignores most transportation demand for energy is just specious.

Eric,

yes, I realize that Zach's arguments are Hoosiercentric. But, see Joshua's response to George above. When George explained that most people outside Indiana don't understand the fuss over DST, Joshua implied that we should all be complaining about DST.

My comments were more in response to Joshua than to Zach. If people in Indiana want to complain about DST, it's no skin off my nose. Though, perhaps someone could explain what happened the time that I drove at extremely high speed from Ann Arbor to Goshen, thinking I was late for a wedding, and arrived an hour early. I'm not sure if that was due to DST, some other timezone weirdness, or time dilation due to near-c velocity.

Sunrise at 7:16 wouldn't bother me if it meant a really late sunset. I used to love living in Norway where I could mow the grass at 10:00 pm in the summer. Of course, there we had early sunrise, too, but I'd take the late sunrise in exchange for late sunset.

I agree with Zach that it was dumb to change the DST rules for the lame reason of saving energy.

That being said, I think we should keep the change the way it is. All of the computers and information systems have been changed to accommodate the change, so any further change in the law would just cost business more money to fix their computers again.

Of course, DST is dumb and unnecessary in general, but since the world uses it, we might as well comply.