After this past weekend, the internet probably doesn’t need any more rants about Daylight Saving Time. But here goes one anyway.

The whole idea of “saving” daylight is absurd,1 of course, and many people seem to like the idea of eliminating the twice-yearly changing of the clocks. The argument usually boils down to whether we have permanent daylight saving or standard time.

It. Does. Not. Matter. Just pick one and move on to more important discussions.

The difference of opinion seems to come down to whether the person wants the winter sunrise to be placed at 6am or the winter sunset at 6pm. But you’ll never be able to make that happen for every city, even in in any one time zone. It depends on how far east or west you’re located. And how far north or south.

And that leads to another point that I don’t see being made very often: why do we only use four time zones in the continental US? As far as I can tell there’s nothing sacred about that number. Why not five zones? Six zones? Maybe more? That would certainly help with the sunrise/sunset preferences, at least for those towards the center of a zone.

Of course, adding more time zones would inject other problems with the disparity in time between the two coasts. But nothing says the difference between zones has to be one hour. It could be 30 minutes. Or 22 minutes. There are some areas of the world that differentiate between zones using less than one hour. China uses one time zone for the whole damn country, although I understand that’s not especially popular.

Considering that time world-wide is determined down to the millisecond using the GPS system and other technologies that were not available when the modern system was created back in the 1970’s, it doesn’t matter where you live or how time in that area is set. Your phone, watch, computer, television, etc. will keep track of it just fine. As will your analog clocks.

No matter what choice is made in this matter, you’ll never be able to make everyone happy. Just don’t try. Make a decision: standard or “saving”; add one, two, or seven time zones.

Simply stop with the farce called “Daylight Saving Time”, set the time, and let the concept fade into the history books.

While we’re playing what-if, we could make the day 26 hours long. Time, after all, is a completely human invention.

1. The history of this concept is very interesting.