I believe it just started as a means of "maximizing the daylight."

So when you wake up at 6-7AM, the sun will be up, whereas if we didn't move the clocks back, it would be dark until almost 8-9am.

Are we not getting rid of daylight savings time, thought it was taking place next year?

The politics of "time" has alway fascinated me. All of China is "officially" on Beijing time. There was a single issue political part in Australia known as the DS4SEQ (Daylight Savings for South East Queensland). Their only issue was to enact Daylight Savings Time. Think of the "the Rents Too Damn High" party in NY.

Most countries not near the equator had DST at some point but now it is found mostly in Europe (known as Summer Time), US and Canada, Australia, NZ, and a couple of countries in South America. Some states like Hawaii and Arizona do not observe it. Though in Arizona, the Diné nation (Navajo) does observe it.

Historically, it was to promote energy savings because people would be active during sunlight rather than darkness. Ben Franklin thought it would save on candles, for example. Some argued that by extending sunlight in the evening, people would shop and have more leisure activities in the evening during Summer

As one who drives East in the morning and West at night, I always felt it was designed to give me more opportunities to head directly into the sun's glare in the morning.

Many here are probably too young to remember this, but we had non-connected transistor clocks that were programmed to fall back and spring ahead. The clocks got all screwed up when Congress changed the dayes for the time switch and there was no easy way to reprogram them.

Yeah, so the whole Daylight Savings Time thing here is a bunch of bullshit basically lobbied for by the US Chamber of Commerce (not an actual government entity despite its efforts to sound like one).

The pinheads here figured out that if we had more daylight in the afternoons and evenings when it is in effect, people would be more likely to go shopping and spend money in stores. Aaand they were kinda right.

So now we have two days a year (I would argue two weeks but I'm totally not going to bother backing my claims with anything like actual data) we have seriously elevated rates of traffic deaths until everyone adjusts to the clock changes.

Money > Life. Make sense, now?

Have at me with the downvotes, I don't have the energy to do fucking citations today :p

I just want to wake up at 6 and see the sun within a few minutes instead of darkness until almost 730.

Daylight Savings a really stupid idea that never really did what it claimed it would. But it claimed that it was going to reduce electricity use. Globally, it may have a reduction of ~0.3%.

But we did it because of the "you have to do something" mindset. Then, once we did the stupid thing for the sake of doing a thing, we kept it because "no no no, it's doing a thing".

At this point, undoing it means either someone in power sticking their neck out and saying "we're doing this", or getting a lot of people on board. And people are inherently resistant to change, especially when it's a thing they've always done.

We set them forward in the summer to maximize daylight in the evening. But during the winter it stays dark too late in the morning so we set them back to standard time.

I don't understand the comment on being international. It seems to me that most countries have some form of daylight savings time. Not all, but enough where it wouldn't seem like a foreign concept.