Too much time on their hands

Good Morning,

    One of the problems with being on a spinning spherical planet is keeping track of time.  You may have a different way of thinking about time up there, so let me try to explain.  It has been said that time is nature's way of preventing everything from happening at once.  But it's a little more fundamental than that.  Time is the dimension which is not orthogonal to entropy (our word for the degree of disorder of things).  In a closed system that does no work, the derivative of entropy with respect to time is always positive.  Hopefully, you've got the idea.  Your time must be even more complex than ours because whereas we rotate about our own axis once every "day", and that axis itself rotates about the sun (what we call the star at the center of our "system") once every "year", Europa's axis additionally rotates about Jupiter (what we call the enormous gas object that your world rotates around).

   Our axis of rotation is not, however, perpendicular to the plane of our solar orbit.  This results in "seasons".  We are entering "winter", the season of the year where those of us in the "Northern Hemisphere" experience rather less daylight than night.  This means that it's pretty much dark whenever we're at home (mornings, evenings and night-time) but light when we're at work.  C'est la vie!

   During the summer, we have an excess of light.  So much so that we can do things outdoors after work before it gets dark.  If we were to arrange to go to work at dawn (more or less as we're forced to do during the winter), we would have an enormous period of light available after work.  Perhaps five or six hours.  But people are lazy and they like to stay in bed and go to work at the same time as they do in the winter.

   About a hundred years ago some people thought that it would be a pretty good idea to effectively force those lazy buggers (excuse my language) to get up earlier by artificially adjusting the clocks.  We call that "summer time" or "daylight saving time".  Most of the industrialized nations of the Northern Hemisphere have, in their own way, enacted government-mandated time shifts.  But of course we all do it differently.  In these United States, each of the states gets to decide for itself which time zone to be in and whether or not to observe daylight saving time.  And we like to change the dates when it goes into or out of effect every few years just to keep everyone on their toes.

   If you're thinking to yourself "what an unbelievable waste of time and effort", you would be right on!  It is the most ridiculous waste of effort imaginable.  There are no clear-cut savings in energy or other social costs.  And I've never managed to figure out who the powerful daylight saving lobby is but you can be sure that somebody's making money out of it.  The so-called Leisure industry benefits of course (including and especially baseball), and there are a few other markets that benefit.  But really!  Is it enough to make us all go through this charade twice a year?  I don't think so!

From a crazy world,

    Phasmid