The Real Cost of Daylight Savings Time

I've always felt Daylight Saving Time was a waste
of time and productivity. Moving DST around is an
even greater waste of money. To be honest, I'm not
a big fan of time zones in general. What's so magic
about 6AM that it has to be the correct waking time?
I've heard that people want noon to be mid-day (why?),
but noon isn't mid-day anyway. Personally, I tend
to wake up about 5:30AM and go to bed at 11:0PM,
making my "mid-day" around 2:15PM. Today the sun
will be halfway to sunset in Washington DC at
12:40PM. Whatever.

The entire idea is centered around the concept that
people are too stupid to deal with problems themselves.
In a survey, the government found that people liked
DST because it gave them more time to do things in
the evenings before sunset. Duh. Go to work earlier,
get off work earlier. Do you really need the
government to tell you that? If you aren't able to
set your own hours, talk to your boss. Apparently
the majority of the country wants to wake up sooner
and get off work earlier, so what's the issue?

Oh, and it saves money, too. Or at least that's
what the DOE tells us. In a frequently-touted report,
California found DST saves money by shifting power
usage from expensive "peak" periods into cheaper
morning hours.
http://www.energy.ca.gov/publications/displayOneReport.php?pubNum=P400-01-013

Okay, this may sound like a stupid question, but if
the power usage shifts from the "peak" period into
the cheaper morning hours, don't the morning hours
become peak? If everyone gets up an hours earlier,
then they'll turn on all their lights an hour
earlier, and the peak period will start at hour
earlier. What the hell?

The fact is there were no energy savings from moving
DST. Frankly put, DST has no real effect on energy
at all.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070403-the-daylight-savings-change-no-savings-no-point.html

But that's not to say it doesn't have any effect.
Besides lots of computers getting hosed up, and
people showing up to meetings an hour off, DST
actually kept an innocent 12 year old boy in jail
for twelve days. Yep. Next time someone tells you
that we can all just live with the temporary
confusion that moving the clocks causes, tell them
about Cody Webb, a Pennsylvania student who was
arrested for making a prank bomb threat. He had
called the school exactly one hour before the threat
was called in, and well, you can guess the rest.
The best part of the story was the Catch-22 attitude
of his principal, who refused to let him argue in his
defense, stating 'Well, why should we believe you?
You're a criminal. Criminals lie all the time.'
http://www.passablynews.com/index.php?subaction=showfull&id=1175830780

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe these folks really do need
the government to tell them when to wake up and
when to go to bed. They don't appear intelligent
enough to decide on their own.

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