In the United States, daylight time has always been opposed by farmers. Dairy farmers, for example, milk on a schedule and any disruption of the schedule upsets the cows and causes a loss in production. Dairy farmers do not observe daylight time with regard to the milking schedule. 

There are always safety concerns about children having to wait in the dark for school busses, right after the change is made.

There seems to be a growing dissatisfaction with the practice, particularly since recent studies seem to show that under current conditions, the amount of energy actually saved is at best negligible, and that it may actually increase energy use.

I support it, mostly because I'm accustomed to it, but if clear evidence emerges that it doesn't really save energy I certainly wouldn't mind doing away with it. A pity, because just the other day I finally bought an alarm clock that makes the adjustment automatically for me.

We do it in the United States. We are on "daylight time" and in the winter will switch to "standard time." We use almost the same memory aid, but we says "Spring ahead, fall back."

Well, we do it in most but not quite all states. It is yet another illustration that we really are a Federal republic and that each state has a great deal of autonomy. It wasn't that long ago that each state decided for itself when to make the change, and they changed at different times! Congress passed a law saying that states could decide whether or not to observe daylight time, but that if they chose to observe it, they all had to follow the same rules--currently, we "spring ahead" on the second Sunday in March and "fall back" on the first Sunday in November.

It was first instituted during World War II. In that era, many factories and schools were designed with windows and made use of daylight, as much as possible, and daylight savings times reduced the amount of artificial light that had to be used and thus saved energy.

What people think about it depends to some extent on where they live. The United States is a big country, and even the continental U.S. spans twenty degree of latitude, from 25° in Miami to 45° in Maine. Where we live, the difference in day length and in the time of sunrise is very, very obvious. In fact my wife and I are already grousing about how depressing it is to see it being pitch black at 8 p.m., after those wonderful long summer nights when it was still light at 9:30. The sun rises almost 2 hours earlier in midsummer than in midwinter, and changing the clocks seems to make some sense. In Miami, the difference is less than an hour and it probably doesn't seem worth the effort of changing the clocks.

In the UK we need to do it as it affects our agriculture in the North. 

There´s always a discussion about whether it is really necessary in the UK. If they stopped doing it, Scotland (our Northern part) would need to continue with it for safety reasons. it would be dark until 11am in the morning otherwise and sunset at 4pm. Concern has been raised about Children going to school in the dark. 

In short, to discontinue this practice would bring divided opinion and would put Scotland in a different time zone.

We did miss one year in the 60s to see what would happen and it wasn´t very pleasant. 

Joseph

Hi Joseph!

We do the same in Ukraine :) Very soon (at the end of October) we will adjust time for one hour back. I see only one advantage in it - you can sleep for one hour more at the day of fall adjustment :)