Daylight Savings leaves again

I live in the eastern part of my time zone, so the end of
daylight savings always means that it’s dark when people leave work.
This
article wins this year’s prize for best complaint about
daylight savings time.

Here’s part of the argument:

Daylight saving time ends Nov. 3, setting off an annual ritual where Americans (who don’t live in Arizona or Hawaii) and residents of 78 other countries including Canada (but not Saskatchewan), most of Europe, Australia and New Zealand turn their clocks back one hour. It’s a controversial practice that became popular in the 1970s with the intent of conserving energy. The fall time change feels particularly hard because we lose another hour of evening daylight, just as the days grow shorter. It also creates confusion because countries that observe daylight saving change their clocks on different days.

I missed a Sunday afternoon train in Brussels once because it
didn’t occur to me to think about whether they changed time. But
the real point of the article is that not only should a given
place not change time twice a year, but that there should be fewer
time zones. Specifically, the continental US should have only
two — Eastern and Western.

In reality, America already functions on fewer than four time zones. I spent the last three years commuting between New York and Austin, living on both Eastern and Central time. I found that in Austin, everyone did things at the same times they do them in New York, despite the difference in time zone. People got to work at 8 am instead of 9 am, restaurants were packed at 6 pm instead of 7 pm, and even the TV schedule was an hour earlier. But for the last three years I lived in a state of constant confusion, I rarely knew the time and was perpetually an hour late or early.

It makes one wonder whether the world needs time zones at all
— maybe it should just be like the northern and southern
hemisphere — in some countries, Christmas is in summer and in
some it’s in winter. In some countries, you could go to bed at
midnight and wake up at 7am; in others, you might go to bed at
noon and wake up at 7pm.