To those who would say DST “serves no real purpose,” I’d offer this: in southern California, the shortest day of the year has just under 10 hours of daylight and the sun is up before 7 even on standard time. The longest day of the year is just over 14 hours of daylight, and the sun would be up just before 5 on standard time.

In northern Maine, that swing is much, much greater. On the shortest day of the year, there’s less than 8.5 hours of daylight. On the longest day of the year, there’s more than 16 hours of daylight, and the sun would rise at 3:38 AM and still set at 7:30 PM if standard time were observed year-round.

Most of us in today’s society don’t have the luxury of adjusting our work and play schedules to account for such wide disparities between solar time and the inflexibility of clock time. In northern latitudes, and especially in time zones drawn for more political than practical purposes*, DST is actually a very useful kludge for making widely-variable sun time fit better into inflexible clock time.

I’m sure I’d disagree with me, too, if I lived in sunny southern California instead of trying to eke out every ounce of daylight I can get from a bleak Great Lakes winter…

(*New England should really be on Atlantic time, and Detroit and Indianapolis on Central, but there are strong economic and political reasons for maintaining the same time as New York year-round and for not adding a fifth mainland time zone in the US, so that’s not a winning fight.)