[somehnguy]

>It aims to shift the usable daylight hours to correspond with human activity.

But it fails miserably at it.. Here in NYS all winter long it gets dark at 5PM. Summer, 9PM.

It's useless and just causes inevitable confusion every year.

[jws]

There’s nothing to be done about winter, that is the “regular” time and you live in the north. You only get the sun above the horizon for 9 hours a day in late December.

The summer 9pm is the advantage of daylight savings. You get the sun up for 15 hours a day! Norther summer is great. Without daylight savings time, you’d get dark at 8pm in the summer and have an hour of “wasted” daylight before you got up. The “savings” part is to take the wasted light while you are sleeping and move it to the evening when you can enjoy it.

It does cause confusion though, and having implemented daylight savings code there are a bewildering number of rules around the world, there are even places that have double daylight savings. They shift once, then shift again for a two hour offset.

[somehnguy]

I appreciate the response and explanation, I guess I was mistaken on which direction DST was being used for! All my life I was under the assumption that it was the other way around, to try and get back more time during the winter. Thinking about it more now though, that doesn't even make sense given the direction the clock changes..

I'm still not sure it is worth the confusion it causes but I do have a better understanding of why it exists now. Thank you!

[1strepublicusr]

I love the extra hour of daylight in summer evenings and anytime I'm anywhere where it gets darker early in the summer I feel like I'm giving up part of the fun of my life.