Posted on 11/01/2014 11:14:07 AM PDT by BenLurkin
Back in 1784, hanging out in Paris and heady with Enlightenment, Benjamin Franklin had an idea. Struck by the fact that Parisians were sleeping during sunlight hours and then staying up late at night by candlelight, he calculated the number of candles that were being wasted -- and came up with a very impressive number, 64 million pounds worth of them. Franklin therefore jokingly proposed a massive schedule change, noting that a fortune could be saved through "the economy of using sunshine instead of candles," and even suggested at one point that perhaps cannons be fired at sunrise to get everybody out of bed.
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The paper, published in 2011 in The Review of Economics and Statistics by Matthew Kotchen of Yale and Laura Grant of the University of California-Santa Barbara, took advantage of what the researchers dubbed a "natural experiment" with the effect of daylight saving time in the state of Indiana --
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So what caused daylight saving to apparently backfire (rather than backlight)? "In the spring, you are basically making people wake up in the early morning, the coldest time of day, when they might turn up their heat," explains Yale's Kotchen. "And in the summer, if you take an hour of sunlight and you move it from the morning and put it in the evening, people are more likely to be running their air conditioner harder in the evening." That's because heat from the sun builds up over the course of the day, making that particular hour of sunlight hotter than it would have been if it occurred in the morning rather than the evening. So the "Benjamin Franklin effect" -- people using less artificial lighting -- turns out to be overwhelmed by heating and cooling choices.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Later described in greater detail in “The All-Embracing Doctor Franklin”.
;^)
All of this is based upon the canard that energy is something that has to be conserved, because Mother Earth can only provide us so much electricity. If we were change the DST rules for the sake of trying to save energy, the orneriness of people would cause some unintended consequence that would make it useless. If we are going to move clocks backward or forward, let’s do it for our own convenience, not for our inconvenience.
Obviously, it's because the energy companies make money from forcing people to use more electricity.
Probably the Koch brothers are behind it.
I miss my daylight in the evening in winter!
I think we need to stay on Standard (true) time all year.
Just think, without the invention of clocks, there’d be no daylight savings time.
The point of daylight savings time was part of makig time regular, at every point on earth, relative to each other and one place in particular.
Additionally, daylight savings Improves productivity and economic output.
The author misses the point.
You'd want to "save" daylight in the winter, when there's less of it.
So the winter should be DST, not the summer.
It is still dark at 7am.
The rationale now for the time change is—DOE federal control of local school systems and transportation requirements and the need for light in the a.m. when school buses are out and about screwing up adult traffic. And afternoons. It’s FOR THE CHILDREN (illegal aliens these days).
And don’t forget Bush. He should be blamed too!
I’m really surprised Eric the Holder hasn’t sued Sheriff Arpaio and Arizona for not participating in the daylight savings time thing. Imagine how many Arizonans don’t change the batteries in their smoke detectors because they don’t have to reset their clocks.
Back then they said it was to save candles. Now they say that it is to let the chil’run catch buses in daylight.
And shifting the date a week took it away from the “Halloween weekend” party night (most years, people threw their halloween party on Saturday, Friday night halloweens such as last night as less common).
Also showed the power of the government to tell you “what time it is” when they want to change things (electronics that were hard coded to the OLD routine, be damned).
Leave the clocks alone. Adjust the schedules. My grandson catches his bus at 7:05 and eats lunch at 10:30....when he’s in school. Dumb....messes these kids up. No reason for this type of schedule.
So the problem was lazy, partying French aristocrats who stayed up late and slept in late. Seems like the French took care of that problem in 1789 without the need to play around with their clocks.
Get up early or heads... will... roll!
And Cheney Haliburton.
I think I understand what he is trying to say, but DST doesn't magically make the sun hotter.
If the liberals and their busing legislation for false equality could be eliminated, the kids could all walk to their local schools and we wouldn’t need the damned school bus.
Soon there'll be a turf battle between them and the black "youths" for trick-or-treat.
This was my last Halloween. I'm tired of feeding them candy as well as food stamps.
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