Put your clock ahead... it's the hour of stupidity!

On the morning of Sunday, 8 March 2009 at 01:00, Daylight Saving Time begins in Ontario and clocks are to be set ahead one hour.

It is amazing that we still practice this ludicrous event semi-annually.  Daylight Saving Time saves NOTHING.  Never has, never will.  It's just annoying.  Worse, it's annoying and we cling to it because it is shrouded in mystery.  We've all heard the stories:

• We do daylight saving time so farmers will have more daylight hours to work.  Umm, no... the amount of daylight hours is a function of one's latitude and the position of the Earth in its orbit.  Changing the number on the clock has no effect.  More importantly, cows need to be milked irrespective of what time it says on the clock.  DST buys farmers absolutely nothing.  In fact, in the ultimate irony, the province most heavily populated with farmers doesn't do Daylight Saving Time (Saskatchewan).
• We do daylight saving time to save energy.  There is no evidence of any significant saving in energy as the result of switching the clocks back and forth.  There is some evidence that certain types of energy use actually increase.  The Wikipedia article on DST has links to various studies.  Even the Government of California admits that the evidence for saving is weak.

What I've wondered is why we don't stay on daylight saving time all the time.  Redefine 1 PM as the time when the sun is overhead.  Calling that "noon" was arbitrary anyway, so arbitrarily redefine it.  Thus, any benefit of having daylight saving time can be realized all year round.  In much of Canada, this will mean it will be dark later in the morning in winter, but let's face it: it's dark in the morning anyway, and once you're at work or school, you're indoors with the lights on anyway, so who cares?  It's not like the lights in buildings are turned off when the sun is out.  It would mean that everyone might have a chance of seeing some daylight in the winter.

Pick a time and run with it... that's what I say.  This switching back and forth is silly.  It causes disruption in people's lives, it causes annoyance with computers, and it generates no appreciable gain.  Let's do away with daylight saving time switches.