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Daylight Savings Change Proposed
AveryRegier writes "CNN is reporting that Congress has added an amendment to the Energy Bill to extend daylight-savings time by two months. They expect to "save the equivalent of 10,000 barrels of oil a day." How long it would take for the associated energy savings to overcome the cost to make, test, and deploy the necessary code changes? How would the cost of this change compare with Y2K? Does most date routines' reliance on GMT make this just an issue of presenting the right time to the user?"
Here's a PDF of the amendment, as agreed, from the house.gov page on the session yesterday. Realistically, if it'll make that big of an impact, why not make Daylight Savings Time a year-round proposal? If this amendment is passed by the House, we will have a period of a little over 3 months annually (Dec, Jan, Feb) in which DST is not in effect. That seems ridiculous. Not to mention that if DST becomes year-round, the change in software becomes a static offset to GMT as opposed to figuring out when the annual switch days are. Even Windows allows you to set a time zone that ignores DST, so a company in permanent CDT would only need set their time zone to EST and not worry about changing the clocks again.
why doesn't congress stop tapdancing around the real issue, and instead pass some well-thought out legislation to reduce wasteful energy use, implement a rational gasoline use tax, and other things that would actually address the real problem? Hm?
Err... Highest percentage of the problem is the military, not Social Security.... The military has a retirement program on top of just social security. Stop listening to the republican on your television please.
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Let me try and get this straight. We'd save 10,000 barrels a day. We use 20 million.
This is a savings of 1/20th of a percent. And I'm not able to make out if that savings ONLY exists for those 2 months or the year round. Not particuarly impressive either way.
Here's an idea. Let's start passing legislation and using incentives to promote recycling, efficiency, and alternate sources of energy. You know, going to the heart of the problem as opposed to screwing around with something that presents piddly savings and smells more like a publicity stunt.
As for the coding repercussions . . . I can't say for sure.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
10,000 barrels of oil a day certainly sounds like a lot if you're planning to put it in my back yard, but exactly what percentage is it. Is it just a drop in the proverbial oil bucket. I imagine so. How would it compare to having cars get one extra mile per gallon?
How does Daylight savings affect the use of energy? Either way, we sleep (using minimal electricity) get up, go to work, come home, cook supper and go back to bed after watching TV.
Please cure my ignorance and tell me how this effects power usage.
DarkMantle I been bored, so I started a blog.
And be done with it!!!
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As a panel programmer (among other things) for a security company, this would be a major pain in the butt. All of our security panels (and I would assume most others) have built-in DST changing abilities.
Having to reprogram each of our panels to change at a different time would be extremely time-consuming for a small company like mine. I don't even want to imagine what bigger companies would have to go through.
The security field is very time-dependant. One hour could mean having the police called thinking someone is trying to break in or having your premise completely unsecured.
I, for one, hope this change does not get approved. At least Y2K had the possibility of not causing problems. This will definitely cause problems.
Why not abolish it?
Seriously, Daylight Savings is the biggest PITA. Either half of your company is late to work or half of them are early and won't get paid for that hour they're sitting around. Then they stand around talking to those of us who are on work on time, wasting our productivity.
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Can we lose the hour in the middle of a work-day, and gain the hour in the middle of the night? That'd get my vote.
Studies have shown that most hackers work better at night, and actually use dawn as a kind of alarm clock "oh shit, suns coming up, better get my head down or I'll never get to work by 9" (I KNOW i'm not the only one who has thought that)
liqbase
Why not just do away with DST completely, and by congressional mandate, require all businesses (banks, stores, employers, etc.) shift their hours back one hour? Requiring such a shift by legislative means is no worse than DST, and it need only happen once.
As far as staying on DST and dropping the shift back to Standard Time, that is one thing that I cannot allow. Noon was traditionally the moment when the sun was directly over the longitude of the observer. With Standard Time, this was quantized in order to create a manageable time system -- this is a perfectly acceptable optimization which was necessary for an interconnected civilization.
Admittedly, we do not directly depend on sunlight as much as in times past, however arbitrarily redefining "noon" to mean "1:00 'PM'" is completely preposterous. Why not just go all the way to metric time while we're at it? (Has the Swatch patent expired yet?)
With the whole 2000 versus 2001 thing, I can let mathematics slide a little due to the sociological significance of changing four digits at once. Declaring that we use the wrong time in perpetuity? That would be the real life analogue of the urban legend about redefining "pi" as equal to the integer value "3".
SUV's, trucks, and 6+ cylinder engine cars for city commuting result in a ridiculous amount more of oil being consumed than anything related to Daylight Saving Time.
[I can picture a world without war, without hate. I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it]
Some states (parts of Indiana, all of Hawaii, and Arizona) have already recognized the general silliness (YMMV) in switching clocks around for some nebulous net gain. The Navajo Indian reservations ignore DST, too.
I expect if this passes Congress, the states will just pass laws to reverse this for their own constituents. Naturally, the net effect of (all of) this will just be extended chaos...
If it's not already confusing enough for only SOME of Indiana to observe DST, whose bright idea was it to make India be ten and a HALF hours off from EST ??
The sun doesnt give us more daylight hours just because we reference time differently.
Your 20+ mpg minivan instead of your 15 mpg behemoth suv?
Yes, let's just tax everything.
If you "tax the hell out of fuel guzzling monster cars," then you are skipping taxation of older fuel guzzling cars that are not as efficient as the newest SUVs.
If you tax gasoline more, you increase the burden on everyone, including poor people that cannot afford to buy a new gas-efficient car. You increase the cost of all goods that are shipped anywhere, or the cost of services that rely on those goods or shipping services.
And where does the tax money go? Does it fund research on alternative fuel sources? No, it is spent on pork barrel projects by Congress.
As/if oil gets scarce, the price will go up naturally, and the market forces will dictate people drive more efficient cars or alternatively-fueled cars.
Artificial taxes on things only screw everything else up, with no actual benefits. Its just a political game.
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
What's so hard about that?
After 3 days without programming, life becomes meaningless
- The Tao of Programming
How about just banning vehicles that get less than 15 MPG? There is no excuse why we should be allowing vehicles that guzzle gas at such a god-awful rate on our roads given the current oil situation. All those stupid soccer moms can go back to driving station wagons and get their damn Lexus, BMW, Mercedes and Hummer SUVs off the damn road.
I submit that the vast number of programs out there are going to rely on the OS for TZ information, instead of trying to calculate DST themselves. Especially given the patchwork nature of DST in the US.
So, 1 OS update later, and most programs will 'just work' with a longer DST. (Yes, some highly specialized programs will need updating)
Damned straight! I'm for this idea, in fact, let's make it a permanent thing. The idea of turning clocks back and hour, then forward an hour each year is a pain in my ass because I have to find every watch, clock, and VCR in the house just to do this stupid ritual. Let's keep Daylight Savings Time (DST) as a permanent setting, forget about "Standard Time" and just use what we're running with now.
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The initial expense of having to change code at such a short notice is expected, but since we're doing it ONLY ONCE, it shouldn't be a problem. Just be glad we're not using the standardized calendar format mentioned here, http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/21/15192
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Oh, don't even talk to me about Daylight Savings Time. I'm still pissed that my state (Indiana) is actually thinking about joining in this moronic ritual.
:-)
Daylight Savings Time is like pulling your bedsheet up because your chest is cold. Now your feet are cold.
My proposal is that we make the daytime minutes longer and the nighttime minutes shorter during the summer. Tadah - sunrise is at 7 and sunset is at 7 all year round.
OS will likely account for much of it, but every damn computer will have to be thoroughly checked to be sure. You know how it is, right?
I once worked in the logistics industry (fancy name for transportation of goods anywhere on a schedule) and we had huge tables of locations and had to indicate whether they were or were not subject to DST. IIRC Indiana has some bizarreness, where Arizona uniformly doesn't do DST. It's an example and I don't know how many others in transportation, telecommunications, etc would have similar concerns. But they have to first be certain whether they will or will not be affected then test the patch, so it's still a bit Y2K-like.
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Too easy.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
The thing that pisses me off is people going "oh, Y2K, nothing freaking happened.". Nothing freaking happened BECAUSE people like me spent a year poring over 20-year-old code in minute detail and at great expense! To consider all that expenditure a "waste of money" because "nothing happened" really pisses me off, like saying "what's the point of paying for seatbelts, when I was driving and dinked that lampost wearing one, I didn't even get a concussion!"
in america, we don't work 9-5, we work, 7:30am to 6:00pm
(officially its 8am - 5pm, but ha! we're salaried!)
May you be touched by His Noodly Appendage. RAmen.
As/if oil gets scarce, the price will go up naturally, and the market forces will dictate people drive more efficient cars or alternatively-fueled cars.
Which is merely putting off the problem. When it goes up in price "naturally" what will everyone who can't afford a new car do then? What will we do about the rising cost of services and goods?
Fix it now, while we still have petroleum to use to make plastics and pharmaceuticals. Then we can deal with the other issues without having our entire economy flop alongside our manufacturing capability and our health.
It has been speculated, and fairly so IMHO, that Y2K was what initially drove the .com bubble.
...because it couldn't possibly have been the Internet.
This is largely a symbolic gesture. It let's congress do something which has little effect on the situation, but allows them to say that they "took measures" to save energy.
Proverbs 21:19
As/if oil gets scarce, the price will go up naturally, and the market forces will dictate people drive more efficient cars or alternatively-fueled cars.
That is a nice, market-driven fantasy that I wish I could believe, but you need to consider the realistic implications of such a scenario. After all, we go to war now over oil, and we are not even at the point of crisis yet. When larger countries like China (which will soon pass us in oil consumption despite being at the beginning of its development phase!) begin staking their claim in the same way that we do now, it is not unreasonble to think that it might be in our best interest to act more decisively and not wait until our hand is forced. I realize that waiting for the market to handle the problem is a possibility... but is it the best one in this case? Compounding the problem with waiting to let the market sort it out is that the cost of oil is heavily subsidized by our government/military, which prolongs your proposed cycle... after all, it is difficult to let the market do its thing when you are keeping oil prices artificially low.
I feel that market-oriented fixes are often a great way of letting situations play themselves out naturally, but also feel that this is not one of those cases. Oil is a limited resource largely controlled by foreign, hostile nations. With competition escalating, it is not difficult to see why weaning ourselves off it should be made a national priority, and that acting sooner rather than later will pay dividends.
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Am I the only one that is bugged by "Daylight Saving" on principle? I mean, if you don't like what time you it is when you wake up, you don't change your clock! IT'S A CLOCK for god's sake! it's an instrument of measurement, more or less. You don't adjust it to you, you adjust to it. Otherwise, why stop at daylight saving? if we want to save even more money, maybe we should implement "sweat saving temperature" time in the summer, where we subtract 5 degrees from the temperature in order to cut our air con bills? But seriously, why can't people and businesses just be more flexible about work hours? this could solve the same problems plus reduce rush hour congestion, which would save much more energy.
there is only the door, the door, the door.
You know what? DST saves *for free* millions of tons of oil worldwide. Oil supplies are being depleted at an alarming rate, and so every little bit helps to conserve it. I repeat again, DST is *free energy savings*. The only thing it costs is a few days of discomfort for people like you, so I reckon it's a really small price to pay. Speaking for myself, and most people I know, the only side effect of going to summer time is being a wee tired the evening after. Perhaps you should go to bed an hour earlier that night?
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Stop going to stores or to the city late in the evening when it's dark and go earlier in the day when it's light. That'll save plenty of oil without screwing up the time half of the year.
Transportation Department estimates that showed the two-month extension would save the equivalent of 10,000 barrels of oil a day. The country uses about 20 million barrels of oil a day.
Anyone else do the math? 1e4/2e7 = 5e-4. That's right people - 10,000 barrels of oil is 0.05% of our annual consumption. Go back and read that again - it's not 5%, it's 0.05%.
If you're going to pick a point to lobby on, this is not it. Try something like, "it will be easier on people's health to not have to change wake up time," or "we'll be more like the rest of the world without a change."
If you want to save barrels of oil, pressure automotive companies to get their acts together.
- Mandatory flex-time (people won't be wasting time idling in traffic jams)
- SUV exclusionary zones, car exclusionary zones
- Carbon depletion tax to gasoline
Any of these will save a LOT more than 10,000 barrels a day.Gee, how much oil could we save if they just made the fucking CAFE standands apply to SUVs???
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
In that case why don't we always use DST? Arizona, Puerto Rico, some of Indiana, etc. all seem to be doing just fine without seasonal time changes. It is quite pleasant not to have to arbitrarily change the clocks twice a year.
I wonder if there's any studies on how much money is lost around the switch to daylight saving time due to people oversleeping and coming in late.
Bears don't normally eat things that talk and move backwards.
If it saves so much, why do we change back? No one seems to have a good explanation for that one.
Stop listening to the republican on your television please.
Stop listening to the democrat on yours.
How about we stop listening to both of them and learn to think for ourselves?
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As an Arizonan first and a programmer second, I think history is going to look back on DST as essentially equivalent to the (anecdotal) story of lawmakers legislating pi to 3.
Arizona doesn't do DST. I've only visited areas that observed daylight savings time, and it never ceases to amuse me. The conversations usually go like this:
Q. Why do you keep changing your clocks around?
A. To get more daylight!
Q. So changing your clock alters the rotation or axial tilt of the Earth?
A. No, see, normally it would get dark at 7. Now it gets dark at 8!
Q. But the sun doesn't rise until 8 or 9 AM. When you need to make your blanket longer, do you cut a foot off one end and sew it onto the other?
A. But...*gzert*...more daylight! More daylight!
Q. Why don't you just wake up an hour earlier, if you want more daylight?
A. *gzert* *pop*
(Okay, they don't actually short circuit, but they tend to run out of coherent arguments. It seems most people haven't really thought about this.)
Add to this my programmer's view of time (as a monotonically increasing quantity [relativity aside] unrelated to human foibles) and this seems a lot like Congress trying to legislate the tides, or apply our IP laws in Norway.
(Oh, wait. Heh.)
- Move to Indiana, unless our asshat of a governor converts us to DST,
:(
Well, I think our previous two governors (not to mention our previous speaker of the house) were more the asshats; they wouldn't even discuss it because they were too busy taxing us into our current hole. Mitch Daniels is at least honest about it: he's mainly doing it because it gives companies one less excuse to move/invest here. Hawaii and Arizona, being those trendy COOL places and a bit more isolated, don't feel the effect of it that we do.Personally, I dislike DST and didn't see any advantage to it when I've lived elsewhere. Really, there is only one legitimate excuse for adopting DST: the rest of the world has. For better or for worse, that is the world we live in.
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The real issue is for the Federal Gov't to realize that our Foreign Oil dependance is a National Security threat as well as an Economic one. We need a Federal program similar to putting a man on the moon to harness alternative fuel technologies. Only the public sector can drive the research against the vested interests. It would create jobs, increase security, and be a new technology that the USA can export to the rest of the world.
Extending Daylight Savings Time by 2 months will break computers (like Y2K) because new 'Timezone' rules will need to be programmed into every computer that manipulates dates. The estimated savings is 10,000 barrels a day when we use 20 million! What a short-sighted idea that totally misses the big picture.
Yes, let's just tax everything.
Well, we already do in one way or another. The question is how much.
If you "tax the hell out of fuel guzzling monster cars," then you are skipping taxation of older fuel guzzling cars that are not as efficient as the newest SUVs.
No. If we (you) tax the hell out of huge cars, and lower the tax on small cars, people will trade in their beaters to get a smaller cheap car. At least now when the petrol price is "high" (You think todays price is high? You're in for a surprise!)
If you tax gasoline more, you increase the burden on everyone, including poor people that cannot afford to buy a new gas-efficient car.
Eh, no. There is a price point that need to be found but good public campaigns and a really low price on efficient cars (and when they sell more, the price goes down. Yay capitalism). Expand train lines and use ISO containers more. Make trailers only do short haul. Watch the transport costs go down.
And where does the tax money go? Does it fund research on alternative fuel sources? No, it is spent on pork barrel projects by Congress.
Well I'm sure that you as a responisble citizen will see to that.
As/if oil gets scarce, the price will go up naturally, and the market forces will dictate people drive more efficient cars or alternatively-fueled cars.
Isn't it better to stop that from happening? And reduce the oil-producing countries' influence?
Well, it's your call. Be sure to stop by when the US invades us, I live in Norway.
Mandatory Flex-time would be good,
Better yet, change the standard Business work day in the US to 4-10's instead of the current 5-8's.
Having 50 or so days of commuting removed from most of the working stiffs yearly schedules would more significantly reduce energy demands.
Anyway, we need to come up with a plan for energy independence. Relying on a bunch of nations who think we're Satan for our energy needs should be giving our politicians the screaming heebie-jeebies. We need an apollo-type program to come up with and implement a cohesive plan to eliminate our need for foreign oil.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Obviously, this is not correct behavior. The actual time change is 1:59:59 to 3:00:00. In the fall, the time goes from 1:59:59 back to 1:00:00.
I looked this up because of a time-change bug I created in perl script a couple of years ago. I used the localtime function to get day, month and year and then fed that back into the timelocal function as (0, 0, 0, $day, $mo, $yr) to get the epoch seconds at midnight of the day in question. Then I could add or subtract 86400 (seconds) from my $epochtime variable to move forward or back a day. Problem there is, the day the time springs forward doesn't have 86400 seconds, it has 82800 (one hour less). When I subtracted 86400 seconds from it, I skipped right over it! My solution was to base my time at 3:00 am instead of midnight (feeding (0, 0, 3, $day, $mo, $yr) into timelocal). This worked peachy.
Just go the whole hog and have car exlusionary zones! I chose to live in a place where I can cycle all year around (downtown Toronto) and my life would be easier without the cars :D
I also think the government should impose taxes on guzzlers and use them for rebates for non-guzzlers. Take an arbitrary fuel consumption number like 10 litres/100km (I'll let you calculate that in mpg), and then tax cars that can't do that. Say for each litre per 100km over that limit, there is an annual tax of 1% of the vehicle's original value. The owner of a vehicle that cost $20K new that does 12 l/100km will have to pay $400/yr extra tax. Give that as a rebate to people who chose to buy cars that do less than 5 l/100km, there aren't many at the moment. So the big three aren't willing to take any initiative and say they do what the market demands... well this will kick-start a change in the market!
If you (general "you") see a third party you like better than the Republicans and Democrats, start advocating them now, not only in the 6-12 months before Election Day like we usually end up doing - by that time most people have already started making up their minds because it's "election time" again, and the old "I'm not voting for them because they won't win anyway" kicks in.
I can't remember where I saw the statistic, but I remember reading that the number of accidents involving motor vehicles sharply increases the week after either DST change. Basically, on the day that people "spring forward," drivers and pedestrians are more exhausted and less likely to be reacting quickly enough. *shrug* And honestly, doesn't the "10,000 barrels of oil" sound like an exact rehash, right down to the amount, of the original DST proposal?
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
and thats probally due to the fact that people forgot to set there clocks forward and are trying to rush to work so they get there own time.
Err... You're forgetting all the analysts, publicists, bodyguards, schedulers, network administrators, chauffers, etc.... That a congressman hires. The 100k a year figure is for the congressman alone while his staff probably costs at least 10x that. 565 members of the HOUSE ALONE talking about this proposal for 1/2 hour, voting for 1/2 hour, you've got 1210 hours right there. The analysts for each one of them costing 80k+ a year (40 salary, 40 benefits / cost of being on staff) spend two days reading it, making it 2 man years of their time.... I mean, these things snowball so quickly when you look at how much time is involved.... Really, I wuold love to see how much a bill put before congress costs ME as a taxpayer.... off I go to google.... Nope, no information there too easily. I'm too bored with this argument to continue looking at it. You're not going to look with a broad mind, and I'm not going to care about your numbers. Both positions are defensible, unless you're a pinhead.
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How exactly does it save anything? Most people work in offices these days, and most offices have artificial lighting that's on 24/7 anyway, so how does it matter? Not to mention that the only thing it can save is electricity used for lighting, which does not come from oil.
Couple of weeks? I'm sorry, I may be rather naïve when it comes to the world of work, but two weeks seems a little extreme when all that happens is you lose one hour of sleep, if you don't go to bed early.
It doesn't take two weeks for a body clock to change by an hour, and indeed, it doesn't really require the body clock to change for you to sleep pretty well.
im in ur
Congress has added an amendment to the Energy Bill to extend daylight-savings time by two months.
Daylight savings time is a stupid, usless, confusing, time wasting anachronism that outlived its usefulness many years ago. Don't tie ribbons on the pig, get rid of it.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
Yeah, but you don't need to change TIME to get those benefits. Just have guidelines that employees come in earlier and leave early. You don't need to screw up the whole time system over it.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
You know what? DST saves *for free* millions of tons of oil worldwide. Oil supplies are being depleted at an alarming rate, and so every little bit helps to conserve it. I repeat again, DST is *free energy savings*. The only thing it costs is a few days of discomfort for people like you, so I reckon it's a really small price to pay. Speaking for myself, and most people I know, the only side effect of going to summer time is being a wee tired the evening after. Perhaps you should go to bed an hour earlier that night?
When DST started, I think that it clearly saved energy. After all, we used *daylight* a lot more than we do today. Even during War Time, we were still more dependent on daylight and less dependent on electricity.
But also consider-- DST was originally designed not to save energy but to give farmers an extra hour of work time during the summer and harvest.
But as our economy has continued to grow, we have essentially deemed it standard that lights are on during work hours. I have never worked anywhere that expended any less energy because it was daylight. Indeed, everywhere I have worked had so little external light that it was not possible to continue to do any work without lights.
So pardon my confusion, but I don't see where the savings come from. Instead, I suspect that it now has the opposite effect in terms of lost productivity and more energy spent per productivity unit. I seriously doubt that our cars get *that* much more mileage with their lights off and at least in the Northwest, if you extend daylight time, you will be using your headlights more during the morning commute, so even that doesn't add up.
If you can explain where this magical energy savings comes from today, I would be happy to reconsider my position.
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Our office lights are on regardless of day/dark.
The grocery, same thing. Fast food.. Yup same useage. Still drive the same distance, still caught in the same traffic jams..
Car lights? Got me on that one...
I really dont see that much of a savings happening. regardless of government spin.
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