Semi-Annual DST Rant

I grew up in Arizona, one of the few places in this country that does not observe the practice known as Daylight Saving Time. There's no point down there, really, there isn't that much difference from season to season in the number of daylight hours at that latitude. Plus, it's a hundred degrees every day in the summer, nobody wants to wait until 10pm for it to cool down.

Even though it makes more sense up here, where we go from around eight and a half hours of daylight in December to sixteen in June, I still find it to be kind of silly. Though fascinating as a proof of concept—an achievement of social engineering that would likely be utterly impossible in this culture without the artifice of changing our clocks. Because when you get down to it, Daylight Saving Time is simply getting everyone to agree to start their days an hour earlier from mid-March through October than they do the rest of the year, for businesses to open and close an hour earlier, and so on. If you just asked people to do that, what do you think the compliance rate would be? 20%? 10%? So instead we just move the clocks by law. And everyone complies without even thinking about it.