Actually most countries in the tropics don't use it. That's because the
sunrise and sunset don't change much throughout the year so it is
superfluous for them. Russia did away with DST a couple years ago.
However they just stayed on the old DST instead of going back to
Standard Time. There are folks in the US who want that too.
I've mentioned before that the Insurance Institute has found that
accidents increase during the first two weeks of DST but there is no
change when we go off DST. The US Chamber of Commerce loves DST
because research shows that when there is that extra hour of daylight
employees tend to stop off and shop after work.
As I mentioned to Alex, techies want to do away with time zones
altogether and just run on UTC. Makes sense because with the Internet
we live in a global society. Time zones came into being with
transcontinental railroads. Prior to that you had LAT (Local Actual
Time) which was based on sun dial time. But that meant that time might
change too much during the year (especially in more northern towns). So
Local Mean Time replaced Local Actual Time. It's based on longitude.
But then you would have different times among cities in the same state
or country so they came up with standard time zones which worked better
with the new travel venues.
BTW, I also think that DST contributes to obesity because people
suddenly are eating earlier than they are used to and hence putting on
some pounds.
On 11/03/2013 06:02 AM, [email protected] wrote:
Interesting that DST is only used in Western, or Westernized,
countries, vs. most of S. America, Asia, and Africa. As usual, we are
obviously Far More Advanced - lol. I've read all the justification for
it, and yet, the only benefit for DST seems to be a low cost way to
experience jet-lag, without actually going anywhere.
---In [email protected], <[email protected]>
wrote:
This morning, a weird dream woke me up at a little before 2am, and my
first thought was that it would be cool to watch my digital
radio-controlled clock shift back to standard time. But, at the top of
the hour, the clock stayed on 2am, and I realized that I had woken up
during the second 1am hour. And, it got me wondering how astrology
deals with the one day of the year in DST areas where there are two
periods of 1:00am to 1:59am. I guess if an astrologer has to deal with
a 1am hour "fall back" morning birth time that doesn't specify DST or
standard time, he'll have to run both charts and see which one is the
better fit. I'd like to assume that hospitals would make a point of
taking note of which 1am hour, but I know from my own birth
certificate that hospitals aren't always focused on recording accurate
birth time.
