Why Daylight Savings Time?

Daylight Savings Time is ending tonight, let's consider first the idiocy ofpoliticians thinking they can legislate daylight and then the history and reasoning behind DST.  We are currently on DST 7.5-8 months of the year now.  It was 6.5 months until 2007 when congressmen Fred Upton and Edward Markey got it extended, they wanted it from the first of March to the end of November originally, but fortunately that got changed to something slightly more sane.  Their rationale was "isn't it nice to get home when the sun is still out", and that it would save energy based on energy studies from the 1970's.  It was supposed to automatically go back if the energy savings weren't realized, which they weren't because energy usage is different now, it isn't the lights using up the fuel, it is computers and TV's and such, and those are going all the time when you are home regardless of daylight, and then you are using your lights in the morning when it is dark anyway. 
Originally proposed by Ben Franklin as a joke, DST ended up being used during WWI and again in WWII and was called War Time, at one point even being 2 hours instead of just 1.  In 1945 we stopped War Time until the mid-60's and the Uniform Time Act of 1966 where a number of states opted out of the whole thing because they recognized how stupid it was.

The energy crises of the early 70's brought back DST in force but it was from the last Sunday in April to the last Sunday in October. We tried a permanent DST in 1974 due to the energy crises, the problem was that it caused sunrise to be so late that kids were walking to school in the dark and getting hit by cars so was switched back.

Then in 1986 the "Federal Fire Prevention and Control Act" was passed that extended it to the first Sunday in April.  In reality, believe it or not, it was the BBQ lobby that got it extended, they wanted people out there on the grill more often, but it was euphemistically put in to the aforementioned act.  As a software developer, I gotta tell you, these changes were a real pain in the butt, there was no automated way to change computers back then, we had to shut them down and then change the dates on the way back up.  This is just an example of the rule of unintended consequences when Congress thinks they'll just make a law and all the infrastructure around it will magically appear.  I'm reminded of the current Obamacare debacle for example.

At the end of the day so to speak, there are a fixed number of hours in the day, if you want it to be light later, get up earlier and start your day earlier.  Kids don't like getting up in the dark.  There is no reason for DST at all, it is already light later in the summer, and it has virtually zero impact on modern energy usage, especially with federally mandated changes to light bulbs.  If you find the practice of DST as annoying as I do, then write your congressperson and let them know you want them to go back to something more sane, like 5 months a year, say the last Sunday in April to the first Sunday in October.  You can find them all at http://www.contactingthecongress.org/ - sure they have other priorities, but they are always wasting time on something stupid anyway, and their own law said this was supposed to revert, they are simply not looking at the analysis to cause it to automatically revert.