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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?
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?
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
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.
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
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.
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.)
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
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.