the time change and why it blows

I love daylight savings time. Love it, love it, love it. What i don't love is the time change; I think DST should remain in effect all year long. According to Wikipedia, DST is "the practice of temporarily advancing clocks so that afternoons have more daylight and mornings have less." What I'm arguing for is the elimination of the "temporary" part, and by the end of this argument, I'm betting that most of you will agree with me. Here are the reasons why the time change blows:

1) Morning sucks: This one is basically an opinion, and I realize that not everyone will agree with this assessment, least of all "morning people", but I cannot stand the early part of the morning. Whether it's light or dark outside, I don't want to wake up and go to work... period. So it doesn't make sense, to me at least, for it to be light out when I get up. This serves as a nice segue to...

2) Free time in the sunlight is better than work time in the sunlight: Even morning people would probably agree that they'd rather have light in the afternoon when they get home. Getting up early when there's no light out might be depressing, but it's nowhere near as depressing as the fact that for a few months in the winter, everyone with a 9-5 job spends EVERY SINGLE HOUR OF DAYLIGHT either getting ready for work, commuting to/from work, or being at work. I'd rather have at least an hour or so of personal sunshine time when I get home rather than getting home after dark when you can't do... well, anything. Wanna do yard work on Wednesday? Tough shit, you're waiting 'til the weekend.

3) The spirit of fairness: At times, when on Standard Time, it gets dark around 5pm. Almost everybody in this country is awake at 5pm. The lazy college student who sleeps all day is awake, the crazy people who get up at 3am haven't gone to bed yet, the night shift people are getting ready for work, and everyone in between is also awake. Doesn't it make more sense, and isn't it more equitable to the population as a whole, to have light at this hour than it does to have light at 6 or 7am when not everyone is up yet?

4) Sleep pattern disruption: It's just an hour, so it shouldn't matter, right? Plus, everyone loves "fall back" when you get that extra hour to drink at the bar before last call, right? Right??? Wrong; studies have shown that the extra hour royally throws a wrench into your sleep schedule, even if you don't realize it. For example, the time change kills people. Using data from two years of Canadian traffic accident records (I know, they're Canadian, but still), Coren (1996) found that in the days following the shift to DST in the Spring, there was an increase in traffic accident rates of about 6.6 percent, which can partially be attributed to the loss of that one hour of sleep. Granted, there was also a decrease in fatalities during "fall back" due to the extra sleep, but it was statistically insignificant at 1.5%. If you eliminate the time change, you eliminate the sleep pattern disruption, and you save lives.

5) Clocks, clocks, clocks: The average household has a lot more clocks now than it did back when the time change came about. Sure, the clocks on your cable box, phone, and your computers update themselves, but all those other ones have to be adjusted manually. You either have to take time to do them all at once (which most people don't do), or risk being late or early for something throughout the few days that it takes you to update all your clocks. Minor annoyance, sure, but tell that to the guy with the 9am court date who showed up at 10am, or more importantly, the guy who missed South Park because he turned on his TV an hour late... tragedies, people.

Regardless of which time (Daylight Savings or Standard) you prefer, I think we can all agree that the time change itself is utterly pointless.