Daylight Saving

At the GNU Public Dictatorship we are nothing if not concerned with conservation of our resources, which is why we have been militant supporters of Daylight Saving.  As it turns out, however, we may have been too hasty, as the following analysis will show.  The goal of this post is to keep our supporters informed so that they will not realize too late that they have joined up to fight the wrong enemy.

The first thing to note is that daylight is not, as been widely reported, a non-renewable resource.  We initially doubted this claim, and sent for our scientists.  Even though they already believed that daylight was a renewable resource, they set up several experiments to help us understand it more fully.  These experiments all involved a long-term study of the intensity and duration of daylight and was adjusted for weather conditions.  As it turns out, our scientists were unable to design a single experiment that showed that our consumption of that daylight affected the future availability of that daylight, try as they might (they created 406,123 separate experiments).  In fact, what our scientists' experiments showed was that we have very little or no impact on how much daylight is present, and that seasonal variations and weather variations account for much of the difference.

The second thing to note is that daylight is not evenly distributed around the globe.  Some of you may have heard that the seasons are caused by the tilting of the earth's axis relative to its orbit around the sun, but you may be surprised to know that the amount of daylight received at any point on the earth's surface is correlated to the latitude of that location.  This results in an uneven distribution of daylight, meaning that, during winter, those in higher latitudes are often starved of daylight while those in lower latitudes are not subjected to such privations.  On the other hand, during summer the situation is reversed, with those in higher latitudes receiving excessive amounts of daylight.

At the GNU Public Dictatorship we find this inequality disturbing, and we had thought that by fighting for Daylight Saving we would be able to create a bank of daylight that could be used to redistribute the wealth, but, as you will see in the next paragraph, that is apparently not the case.

The third idea to note is that daylight cannot be stored and retrieved in any reasonable manner known to our scientists.  While we can convert the energy to other forms, such as electrical charges, and then convert that back into light, we have as yet been unable to convert it back into daylight.

Lastly, Daylight Saving Time doesn't even attempt to actually save daylight or redistribute it to those who need it most.  It doesn't attempt to store it for future needs, and it doesn't do anything to address the cyclical nature of daylight levels.  In fact, all that it does it to change what we call certain times of day in order to encourage us to change our behavior based on this label.  In short, it is poorly named.  It should be called something more like "Daylight Shifting Time" as it accomplishes little else.  We apologize for being led astray thinking that we were saving the environment, but we are grateful to our scientists who helped us discover our error before we has spent too much time supporting a cheap trick instead of investing in technologies that will actually store, transport, and restore daylight.  We're still trying our best on these technologies, and now that our scientists are freed up we may make swifter progress!