Okay, DST will soon be upon us. In case you have been living under a rock for the last 20 years, DST means “Daylight Shifting Time”. This is the twice-yearly folly of changing the time displayed on our clocks in order to provide the illusion that we are actually doing something.
In all honesty, Daylight Saving Time is meant to force people to use less energy. By putting more daylight between the time when people come home from work and sunset, it essentially forces less time between sunset and bedtime, when most people turn off energy-using devices. Thus, energy should be saved.
Except that it’s offset by more lights used in the mornings. And it’s also offset by the extra “things” that we drive to in the summer because there’s more light to do them, like going shopping or driving over to a park so we can exercise. I heard a radio piece (I know, fantastic journalism there, Steve, providing made-up facts without any kind of reference at all…) a couple of years ago talking about the change to extend DST by a month a year. Evidently this was intended to save even more energy than we were saving before. The Federal Government was so sure that this was going to work, the earmarked $100,000,000 to study the effects of this change. Just think – for that amount of money, we could either:
Provide 500,000 laptops to kids in poverty.
Partner with Food for the Hungry and give something like 5,300,000,000 pounds of food to people who need it (that’s 5 pounds a day for 10 years for 290,411 people).
Provide 25,000,000 Bibles through the Bible League.
Give 20,000,000 mosquito nets to protect against disease in Kenya through ProjectMosquitoNet.org.
Support 3,333,333 missionary months with Gospel for Asia. That works out to be 27,778 missionaries for 10 years.
Or, we could study an effect of changing our clocks.
Personally, I think we got ripped off. I want my $0.33 back.
See these sites for more information:
Study on DST
One Laptop Per Child
Project Mosquito Net
Food for the Hungry
Bible League
Gospel for Asia
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