The U.S. has Benjamin Franklin to thank for daylight saving time, although it was not adopted until more than a century after he first proposed it. At 2 a.m. this Sunday, the clocks move forward by one hour, causing most people to lose an hour of sleep and refreshing the heated debate about whether the practice should be continued. Although naysayers tend to be the most vocal, there are winners in the daylight saving time game as well as losers.

Television networks tend to be on the losing end of the deal, as people tend to be outside taking advantage of the longer hours of evening daylight, meaning outdoor activities benefit. Theaters are another venue to take a hit. When it is light outside people just do not want to be sitting in a dark room with a bunch of strangers.

Criminals are losers. They like to work under cover of darkness, and tend not to do their dirty work in the early morning, so the extra hour of evening light hurts them. According to the National Incident-Based Reporting System, robberies decreased by 40 percent due to having an extra hour of evening daylight. They go back to higher levels when daylight saving time ends.

Farmers have long been against the time change, even though they are often credited with getting the practice started. Farmers set their schedule by daylight hours, still the case even in modern times. When the rest of the population shifts to an extra hour of light in the evening, farmers have fewer morning hours to get their produce and other wares to market. It is also difficult to change the clock on dairy cows.

Daylight saving time was repealed by Congress after World War I, mostly due to complaints from farmers. It was reintroduced during World War II as an attempt to save energy for the war effort.

A Rasmussen Reports telephone survey found that, although 81 percent of Americans know they have to change the clocks this weekend, 11 percent think they are supposed to turn them back and 8 percent just do not know. The confusion used to be even worse. Before the uniform daylight saving time act was created by Congress, individual towns opted in or out of changing time.

There is still inconsistency. Arizona and Hawaii do not observe the time change. Neither do Guam, American Samoa, the Virgin Islands or Puerto Rico. Prior to 2006 parts of Indiana did not observe the time change, although now they are back on daylight saving time, although the state is split into two different time zones, with 80 counties on Eastern Time and 12 counties in Central.

Foreign governments are sometimes confused by the U.S. habit. In 1963 when Yugoslavian president Marshal Tito visited the U.S. his welcoming events were disrupted by daylight saving time because they landed in a Virginia town that did not advance clocks with the rest of the state. No one was there to greet him. The same year Pentagon officials were two hours late for a military conference in Alaska because no one knew what time it was there, even though Alaska had been a state since 1957.

The Soviet Union, who first observed daylight saving time in 1930, turning the clocks forward that spring, has had confusion as well. After an edict by Josef Stalin caused the clocks to spring forward, they never turned them back in the fall, so for the rest of World War II and the Cold War no one really knew what time it was in Russia.