Daylight Savings Time 2017: Which way to set your clock

Our clocks “sprang forward” Sunday with the beginning of daylight saving time, but the change could be more than just an annoyance.

These days, most of the electronics we use as timekeepers – smart phones and watches, cable boxes and even some clocks – will automatically make the correction.

“The first thing we need to think about is as a society do we really need to do this anymore?” he asked.

All the US territories (American Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands) do not observe DST. Remember everyone, take this one battle at a time. This translates to the sunrise being after 7 a.m., while the sun goes down right around 7 p.m. on Sunday evening.

The tradition was first proposed by Ben Franklin while he was on diplomatic duty in France in the 1700s. Parisians, he wrote, could save on candles by getting out of bed earlier with the earlier morning light. In 1908, a city in Ontario, Canada, was the first modern region to officially implement DST, according to Time and Date. Today he is often called the “Father of Daylight Saving”. He’d seen it work in the United Kingdom. The U.S. Department of Transportation says yes because a study shows that it cuts electricity usage by 1 percent.

Other studies also found that while children get more exercise during daylight saving time, it can have negative health effects, as well.

“Daylight Savings Time seems like a communist plot to get us all confused and exhausted and thinking the government wants to help us”, wrote Twitter user Michael Farris Jr.

Other say that DST conserves energy by extending summer daylight later into the evening.

Productivity in the workplace suffers as well when daylight saving time is on according to experts, which may dispel the notion that this practice results in higher production in offices or factories. “We in New Mexico like the longer hours of daylight in the afternoons and we don’t want to change back for only four months”. He said changing our clocks- both physical and biological clocks- twice a year no longer makes sense.

Daylight saving is the practice of moving clocks forward one hour during the warmer months of the year, which happens in New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Tasmania and the Australian Capital Territory.