2021-03-19

1918 Congress, time zones, and daylight saving time

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Now daylight savings time (DST) and Eastern standard time (EST) are the same animal with one accommodating the longer days of summer and the other optimizing the shorter days of winter.

My personal feelings are that I can take it or leave it.

It's just something that has been in effect my entire life so I grew somewhat used to it. I do admit to arriving quite early for work a couple of times due the the time change — but all in all it hasn't really fazed me.

So some of the people are fairly against the time changes, others are adamantly in favor of the time change ...

Still others like myself are quite ambivalent and could really give a rip one way or the other.

On this day in 1918 Congress of the United States established time zones and approved daylight savings time.

The rationale was a provision of additional daylight hours to accommodate our largely agrarian and rural society at that time.

However, DST clock shifts were found to complicate timekeeping sometimes disrupting travel, billing cycles, record keeping in general, medical devices, heavy equipment, and sleep patterns.

Nowadays, computer software generally adjusts clocks automatically and many devices are equiped with radio control (so-called "atomic" clocks) which are radio controlled and synchnronize with "official US time" kept by the National Institute of Standards and Technology of the US Department of Commerce.

Some places in the United States do not recognize Daylight Savings Time. There are somewhat controversial efforts to eliminate it altogether as unnecessary in our more modern world which is far less dependent of daylight hours than it once was.

The jury is out on the final disposition of Daylight Savings Time and I don't know if any taxpayer's will serve in the decision. Much of the tedium assoicated with national adoption of conventional event handling is secondary to the legislative branch which enjoys taking charge of matters regarding which they are unqualified and then committeeing and caucusing it to death.