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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?
Because our politicans are dumber than yours :-)
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
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?
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.
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]
The sun doesnt give us more daylight hours just because we reference time differently.
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
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)
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.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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.
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
Technically, we *all* pay for gas, in at least two ways. One is the environmental cost, since lower fuel efficiency means higher emissions. And two is the increase in demand which causes all gas prices to increase, not just the gas prices for people who drive SUVs.
Maybe that's an idea in itself - only increase gas taxes on people who drive fuel-inefficient vehicles.
That would be a completely reasonable argument, if gas prices weren't so damn low. The US severely under-taxes gasoline, effectively subsidizing the use of petrol-burning vehicles.
(By "under-taxes", I mean that the current amount of tax collected in the US on gasoline, though it does vary from state to state, barely covers the cost of maintaining roadways, in the best cases. It does not cover the costs of associated damage to the commons resulting from dumping burnt hydrocarbons and various chemicals into the air, nor the damage resulting from spills associated with maintaining the infrastructure to produce and deliver the volume of petrol we use, nor the cost of maintaining sufficient access to world-wide sources of oil reserves so that we can continue burning oil for such uses. I would grudgingly, if not happily, pay more taxes on gasoline so long as (a) everyone did it and (b) the additional funds went *only* to mitigate the costs associated with gasoline usage.)
SUV's are an easy target, but it's kind of like blaming firearms for lots of deaths while ignoring the fact that junk food and incompetent doctors kill over 12x's the number annually.
Go for the $1 solution that gives a $100 reward. If you want to see a huge impact on our total enegery use all they would have to do is ban the good ol incadecent light bulb. It can be done without destroying the heavy manufacturing companies profits, which in any country are sacred cows so it will never happen.
Take it to the next step and all new buildings have at least 100watts or the equivalent of some sort of renewable energy integrated into them. (Inertie solar, solar hot water, or small factor windmill). At the current rate of new home building it would be like taking 40,000 off the grid a year, bump it up to 1000-5000watts and now you'd see a noticeable impact.
The SUV fuel economy is taking care of itself, especially as fuel keeps climbing up. Take a look at some of the manufacturers and you can already see them trying to boost the MPG along without sacrificing all the power people want.
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
- 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.
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?
-- Microsoft is the most expensive commodity operating system and office suite vendor in the marketplace.
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.)
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.
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?
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!
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.