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Is Daylight Saving Shift Really Worth It?
Krishna Dagli writes "Two Ph.D. students at the University of California at Berkeley say that Daylight Saving Shift will not do any good or create any energy savings. We are already spending money for software upgrades in the name of saving energy and after reading following article I wonder has congress really studied the impact of DST shift? " I also read some back story on the concept; OTOH, I found TiVo's suggestions that I manually change everything on my Series 1 device to be somewhat...insulting.
Energy savings or not, I like the extra hour of daylight in the evening. It's extra time to play ball, take the dog for a walk or just let my kid play outside.
I'd go for double daylight savings if I could.
Maybe the PhD guys should get out of their classroom and enjoy the day.
Quick, someone add the tags please.
Prosperity is only an instrument to be used, not a deity to be worshipped. Calvin Coolidge
... that two college students think they're smarter than a bunch of politicians?
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
I agree. I live near NYC and it does WONDERS for my morale. The days of going to work in the dark and leaving in the dark weigh heavy on the soul/psyche. DST is a big boost, IMO.
46. The Hobo smiles, his eyes glaze over, and he burps. "Beware the man who has lived longer than the Wasteland."
I wonder has congress really studied the impact of DST shift?
It is already well-established that the US Congress doesn't bother to read the laws before they pass them.
If they don't even read the law, I doubt they would do any studies.
This change in DST was definitely worth it, if only for the benefit of forcing embedded systems designers to remember to not hard-code DST dates into their code. Historically, these dates have been changed about once per decade in the US alone. Assuming that they'll never change again is plain stupid. This shift will help train the current generation of developers to just not do that.
According to CNN.com, a gas price bump is expected now because people are expected to drive more with the expanded daylight hours.
So wait, Washington passed a law to change DST early...the early DST change is now being used to justify gas price increases? Coincidence? Happenstance?
Sorry all, maybe my TFH is a little tight this morning.
The days of going to work in the dark and leaving in the dark weigh heavy on the soul/psyche. DST is a big boost, IMO.
But that has nothing to do with DST, that has to do with 1) what time you come and go to work and how long you stay there, and 2) the days are simply shorter in the winter because the Earth's axis. In extreme Northern and Southern climates (think North and South polar regions), its daylight and dark 24 hours a day depending on the season, and changing the clock will not change that.
I heard on NPR the other day, that the _real_ reason for DST is not to save energy, but rather to appease the retail sector. They have data that people are more willing to go out and spend money after work if its not dark. So people go motoring around in their fuel efficient SUVs, blow money, and thus energy is saved!
Personally, I don't understand why humans are so clock oriented vs sun oriented. It kills me that houses in the US are built in random directions (unless there is a nice view) instead of oriented around the Sun.
Sometimes I think humans are the silliest of all animals.
Is DST WORTH IT? Boy, Let me tell you a story about the place I come from.
I live in Indiana (a midwestern US state). Up until last year, we'd never done DST before at all (with a few exceptions in towns whose economies were linked to cities across the border in other, DST-observing states).
Before we had DST, it was HELL. All year, it got dark at like 2:00pm. There was no Little League Baseball, no football (american or otherwise) for the kids. Most of our youth joined gangs, who roamed the incessant darkness in large, heavily fortified bad-mpg SUVs, kicking puppies and beating up old ladies just for fun. There was no Christmas and no birthdays, and if we saw the Easter bunny we ATE HIM.
Though many people had the misconception that we were "America's Breadbasket", in fact the darkness prevented us from raising any sort of sustenance crops and most of us resorted to cannibalism to survive. Most Hoosiers (that's what we're called, it means "land of eternal darkness" in a Native American tongue) eventually starved to death, which was viewed as a welcome respite from the hellish, unstoppable night. Dogs and cats, living together, you get the picture.
Then, we elected a new Governor who brought us into the light (literally). With the introduction of DST, and the seemingly random (almost whimsical, really) distribution of our Counties between two time zones, our lives were changed forever. Now, it's light outside pretty much twenty-four-fucking-seven. Our kids are all on at least six sports teams and never shoot each other anymore. They call you "sir" or "ma'am" (these words were not used before, as it was difficult to discern gender in the darkness), shine your shoes for you, and present you with ice-cold lemonade from stands with amusingly misspelled signs. We discovered oil everywhere, we grow more crops than the world could ever possibly use (which has ended hunger globally) and we're all filthy, stinking RICH. All the women have big perky boobs, all the men are RIPPED, and everybody has an IQ of at least 160.
Yes Sir, I don't know what we'd do if it weren't for good ol' DST. I have to assume that with the new DST-extending rule from our good friends in the US Congress, we'll probably just evolve to a higher state of being and shed these silly, out-dated husks to become super-intelligent beings composed of pure energy.
Just then the floating disembodied head of Colonel Sanders started yelling Everything You Know Is Wrong!-Weird Al
My girlfriend's after a house with a south-facing yard, so as to catch all the sun it can (she's a garden enthusiast). It's amazing how many estate agents don't actually know which direction a given house faces.
110100 1101000 1101000 1100110 0 1101111 1101000 1100011 1
"I repeat DAYLIGHT SAVINGS TIME DOES NOT GIVE US MORE DAYLIGHT."
I think we're all aware of that. It must be nice to work in a business that can adjust business hours on their own without any serious repercussions but a lot of us don't have that luxury. I have to be at work when my clients are at work. That's one of the advantages my clients have to using us over using someone offshore. All of our clients live in an 8-5 world so I too live in an 8-5 world. I'm rather fond of my 8-5 world including more daylight after I get off of work. That's extra usable daylight which is the real pro DST argument as far as I can tell. I don't really think anyone believes that setting clocks a certain way impacts the amount of time the sun spends in the sky daily but nice straw man (a term I really think is overused but is unfortunately most appropriate here).
Yup, I heard the story on NPR. It was an interview with Michael Downing, author of the book "Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Savings Time". He said there's not much energy savings, but more shopping because of DST.
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http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?stor
Time zone specific calculations are on the client end, as all NTP sources give time in UST. So even if your embedded device is time syncing, if the software says "DST starts in april in timezone X" it is going to be wrong (even if it is very close to being wrong by an hour). The GP ignores the fact that no amount of "flexibility" in the DST implementation is going to make it economically feasible to support a $50 device for longer than production run. The thing to fix is setting up a public system that stores time offsets for all localities and make it a standard part of all OSes, like NTP.
Unofficial estimates claim that costs due to the DST change well exceed a billion dollars TODAY which is more than the theoretical energy savings added up over 10 years. The cost is real and immediately incurred. The savings is nebulous and not guaranteed. Even 5 year old kid math can figure this one out. Imagine if we spent that billion dollars on alternative energy research, or energy conservation efforts - we would end up saving a LOT more money and energy than any fucking stupid DST change could have. The DST change cost my company alone well over $100K in direct costs and lost productivity. Considering what our company went through, I hate to think of what fortune 1000 companies spent - I would assume that it would be in the millions for a good number of them.
Fortunately, WWV includes a DST flag so that at least those so-called "atomic clocks" (actually radio clocks) automatically changed at the right time.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Whenever I hear someone talk about how awesome it is to have extra hours of daylight, I ask them why wouldn't it be better to just "recalibrate" the time zones so that "daylight savings time" is the new standard time, then just stop all this switching nonsense.
But time zones are another total pain in the ass, even if there's no switching back and forth. I recently found out the China has a single time zone, whereas the country would encompass about eight zones if they used our style of time zones. And have you seen the time zone map of the US? It makes no sense at all. Alabama is completely on central time, but if you go due north, Michigan is in . . . eastern time? WTF?
I personally advocate the abolition of time zones altogether. Let's all use Greenwich Mean Time, no time changes, and deal with it. Businesses and schools can just change their hours of operation, rather than messing with time itself. Sure, it would be weird to have sunrise at 6 pm and sunset at 6 am, but would it be any more complicated than the current system?
Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a soportar Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a espabilar
The thing to fix is, getting rid of the DST change completely, either way, and stop changing clock twice a year. THAT'S the waste here.
Nothing to say here... move along
You'd be surprised. . . .
Psychologically, I feel a hell of a lot better when it's lighter out later. I know there are millions of people who have some sort of seasonal depression thing that are equally as delighted. I don't know if it saves any energy, but driving home from work when it's nice and bright out and being able to go for a nice walk or something in sunlight makes me happy.
In the US, it was changed federally in 1918, 1920, 1942, 1945, 1966, 1974, 1975, 1985, 1986 and 2007. That averages out to about once per decade. Up until 1966, many individual states also fiddled with the times. Even today, states are allowed to opt in and out of DST altogether, and Indiana just recently changed its rules.
Dude, I'm so glad you brought this story to light. I've been telling my friends this story for years, and they look at me like I'm crazy. Truth be told, they look at me like that no matter WHAT I'm talking about, but even more so when I get started on "The Indiana Thing." I drove, naively, into Indiana in 1983, searching for the woman in the L'eggs (panty hose) advertisement in my Mom's Redbook magazine. I was operating under the mistaken premise that Indiana was - rather than the breadbasket of America - the "Pantyhose and Nylons Capital of the World, due to an unfortunate misspelling of "hoosiers" in the budget encyclopedia set that my Mom purchased from someone at her office. Driving around vainly searching for the L'eggs headquarters, the headlights in my '73 Chrysler Newport burned out halfway through my second day there, and I couldn't find my way back to the border. With a horde of cannibals closing in around my car (which only went about 10 miles between fillups - of gas, oil, or coolant) I thought the end was near. Quick thinking saved my life that day, and my penchant for popcorn. I ducked into the back seat and quickly fashioned a mask out of a box of Orville Redenbacher popcorn, and the cannibals began to bow and chant all around the Newport. You didn't TELL your readers that Orville Redenbacher was a God to the denizens of once-dark Indiana, friend. Did you forget? Not likely. Were you, perhaps, brainwashed into secrecy? Possibly. Or, more sinister still, are you STILL a member of Redenbacher's scattered army of darkness? Just waiting for a new Governor to come in and repeal the DST proclamation?? State your motives, Sir!
I have a toddler. Toddlers don't spring forward very well. Put them to bed an hour early and they'll spend two hours fighting it. Then get them up an hour early and see how happy they are to see you.
Please, please, either ditch it completely or use it all year long. I really like having an extra hour of daylight to spend outside with the boy, the dog, and the missus.
This is not my sandwich.