Off the Mark by Mark Parisi for March 13, 2021

Just call them ‘Wait Watchers’.

I know a lot of people are going to hate me for this. I wish they would do away with daylight saving time. Stay on standard time.

Keep in mind that “daylight hours” shift forward and back throughout the year. An hour after sunrise one day will be an hour before sunrise months later.

Daylight saving time, an idea long past its time.

Just say no to DST. Set the clocks ahead 1 hour and leave them there all year.

Daylight Saving Time is based on an old Indian custom of cutting off one end of a blanket and sewing it on the other end to make it longer.

Willing to bet we’d all like to get rid of this – since we can’t may I please suggest changing the clocks Saturday morning/mid-day? It can help with adjusting to the new time before going to bed.

DST does exactly what it was supposed to do. It reduces energy use and costs. That’s why Congress extended its duration a few years ago.

The important thing to understand is that our measure of time, from seconds to epochs, is not some (literally) universal God-ordained thing. It is simply the way we have developed over centuries of experimentation to track its passage. There is nothing whatsoever immutable about it. It has changed here across cultures and eras. What year is it? The answer varies widely around the globe.

We, quite reasonably, base our system around cyclical events having to do with our orbit around our star, and the rate of spin of the earth as it moves through space. Any civilization that could have flourished on any other planet in the universe would do the same thing. Their orbits and spin rates are not going to be identical to ours. Therefore, their measurement of time is going to be different from ours. Flexibility is, and is going to be, important. We have to get past the notion that time is somehow “fixed,” and should not be changed.

Heh heh. I don’t needs to do this daylights savings things.

Not for another fortnight…

This means my manager will be online an hour earlier – well until summer time starts at the end of March this side of the pond

They’ve gone back to the old standard.

Seriously why do Americans complicate things?? It’s been so many decades since people are using electricity for lighting. Why keep this draconian system of daylight savings??

My favourite part is saying, on the Friday before we get the hour back, “Enjoy the long weekend!”

Think those phones will be at the Deja Vu support group in November?

It was clocks and watches that used to tell the time. Now it’s mobile phones that do that. And watches are used to make phone calls.

Thank the railroads for the time zones. Until then every town kept local time. So Boston was several minutes ahead of New York. It didn’t matter when it took hours, days or weeks to travel from one town to another, but the telegraph made communications instantaneous and those minutes made a difference. Also, the railroads did not want to have to deal with hundreds or thousands of time zones.

Thank World War II for Daylight Savings time. The government could not get people to start work early to take advantage of the naturally-provided extra lighting so they mandated moving the clocks ahead one hour. People are so slavishly devoted to the clock (I think of the March Hare in Alice in Wonderland), that it accomplished pretty much the same thing.

Time is so important that it is almost universal. I can’t think of a country that does not acknowledge the time zones, even if they set them in their own countries. Also everyone agrees on 60 seconds to a minute, 60 minutes to the hour and 24 hours in a day (the old Sumerian base 12 numbering system).

Almost all countries accept the business calendar although certain cultures and religions observe a lunar calendar as well.

On a not totally unrelated note…can someone tell me how to set the time on my microwave?

Florida decided to do away with it but they need federal approval.

Frankly I don’t like feeling like a mushroom in a dark basement during winter months…it’s dark at 5:00 pm. Ridiculous!

One of life’s simple pleasures for me, signaling the return of spring and it gives me a chance to do my happy dance.

I guess I’m the only person who wears watches anymore.

Daylight saving time is such a controversial practice.

I’d like to say it’s useful, but I don’t know what the fact is.

On most purported benefits, we do not all agree.

Does energy see greater use or less with DST?

It’s likely that the crime rate drops when few are out by dark,

But as for traffic safety, well, the figures aren’t so stark.

We spend more time outdoors, but is it better for our health?

And does it help or hinder overall the people’s wealth?

I understand it started with agrarians in mind.

Ironically, the farmers now are highly disinclined.

One thing’s for sure: It complicates, espec’ly in transition.

I see why folks suspect we keep it only for tradition.

A lot of countries dropped it; now it’s mainly in “the West,”

Whose nations mostly prosper, but that doesn’t mean it’s best.

Standard time and time zones make sense, in an industrialized world where people are constantly traveling and communicating over long distances. (If your company has offices in Manhattan, Montauk, and Buffalo, it makes conference calls easier to schedule than if each locality bases its time on the sun’s position in the sky. And of course it saves the railroads and bus companies a nightmare in making timetables.)

Daylight saving time makes no sense; any alleged saving of fuel energy is offset by the time and human energy wasted as people run around their houses (and cars) figuring out which clocks need to be reset and which now have the “smarts” to do it themselves.

Another good one!

Aliens! These are obviously memory-wiped abductees!

Lucky I live Hawai`i. Only time change we get here is Happy Hour.

They must have blank (screened) out.

Missing time is a well-known phenomenon associated with alien abduction.

— F. Mulder

Aliens

Can I NOT change clocks for several years, and just save those Savings up to use all at once?

Boss: “Where are you going? It is 3 pm Thursday!”

Employee: “ Not for me! Since the government has made time abstract, I saved my DST up and it is now 5 pm Friday!”

Mark..this one is so funny!!!!