Frazz by Jef Mallett for September 22, 2024

If only you could save the summer sunlight for the winter would the name make sense. I like an early sundown in the summer, myself.

Daylight saving time has run it course and needs to be abolished. Only reason it is still in effect is because someone is making a profit from it…………

She’s not a “guy”, dude.

I love her answer. And I know why: Inertia starting with when people used whale oil to light their lamps at night. Now, studies show that changing the time COSTS directly in money spent on running the AC (more expensive to run than LED lights), indirectly in lost productivity twice per year, doubly indirect in accidents caused by folks working or driving tired. AND there is hardly anyone who actually likes or wants it. But we can’t seem to get rid of it. As a species, I sometime wonder how we’ve survived this long.

Mrs. Olsen and I are a pair in this. Caulfield’s suggestion is in another world entirely.

The change that was supposed to be beneficial for certain areas simply exchanged some of the benefits with others. But, as central VA is a kind of pivot point for ‘sun time vs dark’ the proof of that escapes me.

However, just to be accommodating, I still crank my wrist sundial a point or two just to try to keep up. : )

It says something about humans that it’s easier to change the way we tell time than to persuade businesses to have seasonal hours.

I prefer DST for the ritual and the conceit of so much daylight later in the day!!

Leave it at Eastern Standard Time, as far as I’m concerned.

I despise the time change. Don’t care where we leave it, but the change itself is remarkably disruptive and takes some people (not to mention pets on a feeding/walking schedule) more than a week to adjust to.

Leave Daylight Saving Time in the dustbin of history!

I think the main reason for the time change is, it gives us something to talk (or gripe) about twice a year. Wouldn’t we miss that? (sarc)

Put noon back at the middle of the day, where it belongs.

DST used to end some time in October. People were concerned about kids going Trick or Treating after dark, so it was moved to November. I’d vote for permanent DST, no time change. The Senate passed a law to end it several years ago. The House has yet to act.

He’s the one with an invented problem. She has the solution.

It is absolutely idiotic we still change clocks. We certainly can’t depend on the federal gov’t do anything about it. I hope a couple states, besides AZ, just start doing it. I bet it catches on within a year.

So, are things entirely different for the people of Arizona & Hawaii?

I’m with Mrs. Oleson. Put it back where it belongs and leave it alone.

No daylight is saved!! Geez, the change from am to pm should be when the sun is straight up, all year round.

We evolved to rise with the sun and sleep with the dark. We also evolved much closer to the equator, where the winter-summer swings are much less than at the latitude of, say, Rodney, Michigan.

The only purpose of clocks and standardized time (that is, everybody in the Eastern zone agrees it’s 9:06 am as I am writing this) is to facilitate commerce (all the factory workers arrive at the beginning of the shift; stores can tell people when they are open for business) and transportation (two trains can share a track without colliding). There is no reason for a school or business at the western end of a time zone (where the sun rises and sets later) should be required to keep the same hours as a school or business at the eastern end (where it rises and sets earlier), other than wooden-headedness. There is also no reason why things should open at the same time in December (when the sun rises late and sets early) and June (when it rises early and sets late). A hundred years ago, when a mechanical clock was state of the art, perhaps this was the best we could do. Today, with the technology we have, with powerful computers in our pockets, we could handle time in a way that is more compatible with our biological nature.

We won’t, of course, because then we’d have nothing to bicker about. But we could.

Life is simple here in Arizona. We have all the daylight we need, so no reason for chronological contortions.

We are no longer a primarily agrarian economy and culture, this modification has run its course. Let’s use standard time!

ABSOLUTELY NOT!!! That would put you on Daylight Wasting Time (or D@mn Winter Time) almost two months earlier than necessary. Move the clocks forward TWO hours and then LEAVE them there and never move them again.

All the bickering. Has no one ever traveled and had to change time zones? Did it kill you?

Because getting dark before the little kids did their trick or treating was too dangerous. By postponing the change until after Halloween, it became possible to get them into their costumes and take them out on their rounds before dark. Many places don’t take advantage of that and the little people are out on unlit streets in the dark still, but lot of cities do. Doesn’t really answer the question, because I don’t think it as ever on the equinox — who wants to lose an hour’s sleep mid-week? Unless, you work on weekends of course.

I am with Mrs. Olsen. We should leave the clocks alone.

As more people move to the South where it is often still 95 at 8pm the idea that DST allows more outdoor activities is bogus.

The changes are at the midway points between the equinox and the solstice. That’s a pretty obvious point.

Does Frazz World not have Wikipedia?

More countries, and more people, do not change the clocks for “summer time.”

There are going to be more hours of daylight in the summer, no matter how you set the clocks, and whether you like it or not. There are too many as far as I’m concerned — I like evening to be evening: a time after work for starry-night recreation and relaxation before you have to go to bed. Others like their weekday evenings to be the same as weekend afternoons; fine. Every summer, they will always get their wish. I just don’t see why they are so impatient to have daylight in the evenings that, instead of having everyone change their clocks every spring, they don’t just wait a few weeks, because we are all going to get months of daylight in the evening anyway.

Happy Frodo and Bilbo’s birthday, everyone!

Daylight saving time has always been a horrible idea.

If you want an extra hour of daylight in the evening then you can get up an hour earlier if you want but don’t force an entire nation to share in the delusion that you somehow saved time by doing so.

If you don’t like the time of sunset or sunrise where you live you could adjust it by moving north or south. You can also adjust a little by moving east or west in your time zone. Or we could just appreciate the rhythms of Earth, our home.

Daylight SAVING time? Seems to me more like WASTING time with having to reset clocks twice a year.

Why do I hate the semi-annual time transitions? Yes, the computers and cell phones update automatically. Many others do not. These are the clocks I need to change by hand: conventional oven, microwave oven, the office wall clock that’s supposed to be radio controlled but isn’t, the battery-operated alarm clock next to my bed, the vintage cuckoo clock my wife has mounted in the vestibule that I need to stand on a chair to get to, the big battery-operated one on the living-room wall that she always needs to look at when she’s working from home and which invariably takes me up to 5 minutes to re-hang on that tiny little nail, thermostat, dashboard clock on my car, the same on hers, and the automatic on-off timer for the outdoor lights.

It takes over an hour to get to all of these, twice a year. With about 100 million households in America, that’s 200 million COMPLETELY WASTED HOURS per year to ACCOMPLISH NOTHING! That’s 22,831 person-years of effort utterly lost every single year. After year. After year. After year. Why? Just so everybody will have the same idea what time it is? They already did BEFORE all the clock-changing.

Why should I even have to make this case? Why isn’t the burden of proof on the people who claim that daylight-saving time is supposed to be a GOOD idea? Where is all the daylight that’s supposedly been saved?

“Current evidence best supports the adoption of year-round standard time, which aligns best with human circadian biology and provides distinct benefits for public health and safety.” —cnn.Com/2022/11/06/health/permanent-daylight-savings-health-harms-wellness/

I agree that, if we’re going to pick one, standard time would be preferable to daylight saving time as currently implemented. But better to pick the poorer one than to keep switching back and forth.

The circadian-rhythm considerations are real, but they can (and I believe will) be addressed in the future by simply adjusting business hours, which are arbitrary. My city (Madison, Wisconsin) already did something like this decades ago to relieve traffic congestion for the early morning and late afternoon commutes. Festooned as the downtown was with government offices, they hit upon an agreement to open county offices at 7, state offices at 7:30, and city offices at 8. A lot of businesses (not coffee shops) then opened at 8:30, and the university kicked off the academic day at 9. People managed. They fell into routines.

The trick is to localize these arbitrary times to match local sunrises. And we’ve had practice doing that already, due to the nature of time zones. People on the eastern edge of a time zone can open for business at 8 AM but those on the western edge are more comfortable opening shop at 9. And maybe those in the middle go with 8:30. And so what? We don’t have to all change clocks to do what we’re already doing naturally anyway.

UTC EVERYWHERE!!

I’m with Ms Olsen. Let’s go with the easy solution and not change them at all.

Seems to me that not changing the clocks at all is the solution. Thankfully, where I live, we don’t.

Easy answer: Because we want to pretend that DST means it will still be light out for trick-or-treating. It was still pitch dark here last year, but half the country is south of me, so maybe it worked somewhere?