The Born Loser by Art and Chip Sansom for March 13, 2016

Everybody should just leave the clocks alone. You really can’t save daylight.

Why do they have to do it in the middle of the night? On a weekend? How about 4 PM on a Friday?

Actually it’s Daylight Saving no “s”.

There’s no reason for “Daylight Savings” time in the first place.It was set up to account for the fact that the eggheads at the Royal Observatory made their time calculations at the wrong place on the globe—instead of where the Equator met the Prime Meridian, these eggheads made their calculations where the Prime Meridian crossed the 55th North Parallel at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich.To make matters worse, the stuffshirts in the Colonial Office on Fleet Street and the brass at the Admiralty’s Office enforced the miscalculations and in turn forced them on us, who were too lazy to do things differently.The eggheads failed to take into account that there is a 23 degree tilt in the Earth’s rotational axis and that makes things a little off along the Prime Meridian, where southern latitudes may see the sun rise and set at different times than what is observed at the Royal Observatory.To make up for this miscalculation, especially at the lower lattitudes below 55 Degrees North Lattitude, “Daylight Savings Time” was proposed in the 18th Century and implemented at times in the 19th Century, especially after the development of electric light and that to save on both power and the life of these bulbs in the Summer months when the sun was at the Tropic of Cancer instead of the Equator, Daylight Savings Time was implemented so that factories could keep on producing, especially ammunition and war materiel during World War I.After the war, Daylight Savings Time was dropped, but resumed for World War II, where it became the standard to this day.The problem here still goes back to the original miscalculations that the eggheads at the Royal Observatory made and that we may have to scrap it in favor of local conditions where the sun rises and falls at various places instead of one.The problem being that the sun does not always rise and fall at the same time even in the same arbitrarily assigned time zone, where given the Earth’s rotation, the sun rises sooner in the eastern areas of a given time zone than in the western areas—for instance, if the sun rises in Colby, Kansas at 7:00am, it won’t rise in Colorado Springs, Colorado until 7:30am even though both places are in Mountain Time Zone, and it will be past 8:00am the same day in Richfield, Utah when the sun rises, there, which is also in the same time zone as both Colby and Colorado Springs, when the sun rises in Richfield and all these places are along the same latitude in the same time zone. We probably need some more time zones set up based on local conditions so instead of 24, perhaps we need 48 or even more.

I wouldn’t mind if it would stay at DST all the time. The difference is where you live. We’re in the South, on Central time, but very close to the Central/Eastern line. In the summer, at its longest, sunset is around 8:00 DST. On Standard that would be 7:00. If you get home from work at 5:30-6:00 that doesn’t leave much time for outside activities.

Doing a time change at 4:00pm on Friday is not going to work, especially because it may appear that employers may be cheating their employees an hour’s time when they “spring forward” and deduct an hour’s pay for that change.

But changing the time at 2:00am on a Sunday morning is less of an inconvenience, especially since most bars close at 2:00am, where it does not affect their business in the Spring, but will impact their business in the Fall, when 2:00am becomes 1:00am—an extra hour to stay open at that point, serve more drinks and make more money.

Only the folks who work “graveyard shift” or work a compensated “on call” shift get impacted by a change at 2:00am because their wage may be affected by this change whereas if it was done at Friday at 4:00pm, almost every wage worker would be affected and a lot of people would be very upset especially when their employer appeared to “short-change” them in the Spring.

Daylight SavING time not savings. Daylight Saving.

Our shift workers got eight hours pay if they worked only seven hours during a time change.

There is no reason for people to get up early on Sunday unless they have work, or if they just want to. We don’t change our clocks until Sunday afternoon. Man made time is arbitrary. Whether we say it is 7 am or 8 am it is still the same. Nature has NOT changed at all.

I would be quite happy to just stay on standard time and get rid of daylight saving time. We don’t need it and there are no real benefits to it anymore. Those who advocate on staying on daylight saving time, would subject children getting to school in the mornings in the dark.

DST is so Bankers and Doctors can have an extra hour of daylight to play golf and bar-b-que.