You’ve probably seen several of those from me over the years. Here’s one from Doug Mataconis, titled “Bad For Your Health, Not Good For Much Else”:

The only benefits that can conceivably attached to Daylight Saving Time would seem to be ones that cannot be quantified, such as the psychic benefit of having daylight last longer into the late afternoon/early evening, meaning that people have more time after normal work hours for outdoor activities. Today’s sunset here in Virginia, for example, is at 6:15pm rather than 5:15pm. By mid-April, we’ll have daylight until well after 7pm. Is that a good thing? I suppose it is. Of course, if we just stayed on Standard Time, or for that matter made DST itself Standard Time it really doesn’t matter, we’d get longer days anyway since the days will become longer as we get closer to June 21st. Is there really all that much benefit from manipulating the clock every six months like this? I don’t really see it.

So there you have it. Moving the clocks ahead an hour, and then back again seven months later, is bad for your health, it increases the risk of road accidents, it increases energy use, and it has little if any real benefits to the economy or the environment. So, tell me again why we still have it?

Because the government can never, ever admit that it was wrong about anything: the whole freaking house of cards would collapse. Not that it’s standing particularly tall these days anyway.

Especially since my antipathy toward DST is on the record and all:

Or, as the lovely Goldie Hawn once said on Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, “I wish they’d move Christmas to July, when the stores aren’t so crowded.”

(Poached from Rand Simberg.)

House Bill 1259, by Rep. Wade Rousselot (D-Wagoner):

SECTION 1. [NEW LAW] A new section of law to be codified in the Oklahoma Statutes as Section 70 of Title 25, unless there is created a duplication in numbering, reads as follows:

A. The standard time in Oklahoma shall be known as Central Standard Time.

B. This section shall not be construed to affect the standard time established by United States law governing the movements of common carriers engaged in interstate commerce or the time for performance of an act by an officer or department of the United States, as established by a statute, lawful order, rule or regulation of the United States or an agency hereof.

C. As authorized by the Uniform Time Act of 1966 as amended and notwithstanding any other provisions of law to the contrary by the United States government relating to adoption of daylight saving time by all of the states, the State of Oklahoma elects to reject such time and elects to continue in force the terms of subsection A of this section relating to standard time in Oklahoma.

D. The rejection of daylight saving time as provided for in this section may be changed by future legislative action.

SECTION 2. This act shall become effective November 1, 2011.

The chance that this will actually pass is next to nil, but I’m just delighted that someone actually considers it possible.

(Via this tweet.)

Daylight Saving is over at last, saints be praised: the old VCR dug out of the catacombs, the one that spent the summer futilely blinking “12:00,” is now futilely blinking “11:00″ instead.

One thing that doesn’t adjust itself, however, is WordPress. Under Settings/General/Timezone you find this:

Unfortunately, you have to manually update this for Daylight Savings Time. Lame, we know, but will be fixed in the future.

Since this text has been there as long as I can remember (14 months, in this case), I conclude that they’re waiting for the same thing I am: for the government to recover from its rectal-cranial inversion and put an end to this semi-annual clock-blocking.

Certainly not daylight: we have pretty much the same amount of it no matter how we jerk the clocks around.

And apparently not energy, either:

Focusing on residential electricity demand, we conduct the first-ever study that uses micro-data on households to estimate an overall DST effect. The dataset consists of more than 7 million observations on monthly billing data for the vast majority of households in southern Indiana for three years. Our main finding is that — contrary to the policy’s intent — DST increases residential electricity demand. Estimates of the overall increase are approximately 1 percent, but we find that the effect is not constant throughout the DST period. DST causes the greatest increase in electricity consumption in the fall, when estimates range between 2 and 4 percent. These findings are consistent with simulation results that point to a tradeoff between reducing demand for lighting and increasing demand for heating and cooling. We estimate a cost of increased electricity bills to Indiana households of $9 million per year. We also estimate social costs of increased pollution emissions that range from $1.7 to $5.5 million per year. Finally, we argue that the effect is likely to be even stronger in other regions of the United States.

On the upside, you (or at least I) get the pleasure of driving to work in the dark a lot more often.

You can read the gory details here [link goes to PDF file] should you so desire.

(Via Coyote Blog.)

On the general subject of Daylight Saving Time, I’ve always tended to agree with Robertson Davies, who, in his guise as Samuel Marchbanks, blamed the whole premise on “the bony, blue-fingered hand of Puritanism, eager to push people into bed earlier, and get them up earlier, to make them healthy, wealthy and wise in spite of themselves.” At least our computers can make the switch more or less transparently, though some patching was required this year, no thanks to Congress; I suspect that every last bit of energy that was supposed to have been “saved” was consumed in downloading those patches.

And some things evidently never did get patched. The phone system at 42nd and Treadmill has reverted to Standard Time, even though the server that administers it is a Wintel box that’s still on DST for the next week. I am, of course, delighted that the demented souls who always pop into the customer-service queue at one second past 8 am will have to cool their heels until the time is adjusted.

Even in the dead of winter, we could count on the sun coming up no later than 7:40 am, and in late March when the semi-annual Screw-With-The-Clocks-Fest kicked in, we’d still have sunrise by 7:30 or so.

Not today. In the interest of saving some infinitesimal amount of energy — about as significant as, say, if Al Gore blew a circuit breaker — we get to sit in the dark until 7:48.

As someone who tends to get to work around 6:45, I can’t work up any enthusiasm for this maneuver at all.