Hello folks....

Hopefully this isn't too wrong a place for this topic, but anyway, I'll start...

I once read somewhere about the daylight savings time, which is 'meant' to make days start and end an hour earlier, and on its early days, it's meant to conserve sunlight. PLease correct me if that source's lying.... but anyway, what's the purpose of Daylight Savings Time now? The same old save the sunlight, or rather, energy (you go to bed at the same hour but you lit the house one less hour)? Well, if that's the reason, I can't find any good reason on why it's applied in the summer, when sunlight is obviously abundant... plus, you know, I'm currently in Singapore, and I really have no clue why SG and Malaysia also applies a permanent kind of Daylight Savings time (sun rises and sets at 7, not 6).....

Any thoughts?

# First thought of by Benjamin Franklin in his 1784 essay, "An Economical Project".
# On March 19, 1918, an Act to preserve daylight and provide standard time for the United States was enacted. Daylight Saving Time was set to begin on March 31, 1918 until the end of World War I.
# It was repealed in 1919.
# President Roosevelt instituted year-round Daylight Saving Time during World War II. He called it War Time and it lasted from 1942 to 1945.
...Truncated...

More information can be found here:
http://familyinternet.about.com/cs/holidayfun/a/bldaylightfacts.htm

It's most effective in spring and fall, when light isn't abundant but there's enough to brighten the early evenings. The rationale is that people are less alert when driving home from work so they need the light then, not for the morning drive.

But people drive such insane distances now and get up so early that this argument is bogus. They drive in the dark both ways and they're NEVER alert! They drink coffee from the moment their feet hit the ground until the moment they go to bed.

I think the loss of productivity and safety during the changeover period is worse than the benefit. People clambering up on rickety office chairs trying to reset their clocks, no two of which will ever again agree. Arriving an hour late or an hour early to meetings and social events. Never getting to see your own garden in the daylight. Having the sun still up at 9pm, there's no time for romance. An artificially induced case of jet lag twice a year for the millions of us who are sensitive to it.

Daylight saving time should be outlawed.

If the government passed a law telling us that we had to get up an hour early every day, we'd riot and burn down their buildings. But they get us to reset our clocks, and now our CLOCK, a stupid MACHINE, is lying to us, and we get up like good little boys and girls.

People will do anything machines tell them to. It's frightening!

Thanks for the link Stryder...

And Fraggle.... whoa.... you mean that office hours in the States last when the sun's up (SGs work from 8 to 5... but then again, SG is tropical...)? That's definitely freaky..... And yeah, people today are machines if you ask me...