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Daylight Saving Change Saved No Power
Brett writes "Results from energy companies are coming in, and the word is that moving Daylight Saving Time forward three weeks had no measurable impact on power consumption. The attempt by the US Congress to make it look like they were doing something about the energy crisis has been exposed as the waste it is. But the new DST is probably here to stay — letting the bill expire would mean re-patching a lot of systems again next year. So much for saving energy."
... we can just get rid of DST altogether, since it has been shown to not do dick except annoy people and cost companies money in IT time.
Keep it summer time year round if you ask me.
IANAL, but I play one on
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Actually, it's arguable it did hurt a number of things.
1) A significant amount of manpower had to be expended in order to assure that the computer systems across the world supporting this change were ready for it.
2) A number of home and business computer systems alike failed to change, sometimes resulting in mischeduled meetings and moderate confusion.
3) Congress wasted time on this bill that could have been spent getting something important done, such as finally hammering out a definate government policy on Stem Cell research, abortions, or actually making a true impact on the energy issue we face.
Time and money were wasted, for an energy revenue of nil. It may not have increased energy costs, but costs in general were incurred.
Thunderclone: ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE! ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE!
First of all, this is a move by congress, no one is bashing "The Administration"
No harm, no foul, huh? How about the time it took to patch my file transfer program. I'm sure my employers don't appreciate the extra money spent. Not to mention tying up our IT staff trying to get time clocks/etc. fixed when the Windows patch f#$%ed up the time then fixed it again two days later. There's two days of pay for the IT staff, not to mention lost time where other things didn't get fixed.
And it's us who look like giant douches for complaining?!!
You can with a change in DST that is supposed to save energy on both ends, and only affects one month on each end.
For other things, maybe not.
3) Congress wasted time on this bill that could have been spent getting something important done, such as finally hammering out a definate government policy on Stem Cell research, abortions, or actually making a true impact on the energy issue we face.
See, that's the glass-half-empty talking. Just look on the bright side: When they were wasting their time turning out this ridiculous waste of time and paper, it meant that they weren't really screwing anything else up!
Please, Congress, do us all a favor: spend your time on things like creating new "National $FOO Week"s. What -- there aren't any free weeks left? Okay, I've got one: why don't you guys try to fix the date of Easter? I'm sure that won't take you too long.
The more idiotic, banal stuff that I know the Congresscritters are doing, the better it makes me feel, because at least I know they're staying out of trouble. It's when they go quiet for a while that I start to worry. The further away they stay from the "real issues," the happier I am. As absolutely fucked as the system we have is, don't you even think for a moment that with hard work and diligence, they couldn't make it at least ten times worse.
Congratulations, Congress, on your brilliant plan. By all means, keep up the great work.
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some schoolkids have to wait for the bus in the dark
I never understood school schedules. It has been shown that teenagers naturally wake up later in the day, and that elementary school students wake up earlier. Yet it is the elementary schools that start at 8:30 and the high schools that start at 7:30. Why not make school like work, where it runs 9-5, on a schedule more matching that of the parents? Some will counter that high school students have jobs in the evening, so let them start earlier. Why should jobs drive school schedules?
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
Fine. You like more light. GET UP EARLIER. And leave my clock alone.
I _really_ dislike getting up before dawn. I mean deep viceral psychological bio-cycle "why am I getting up at night" kind of dislike. Just when dawn was arriving at a decent time, you "I want more light so I'll force everyone else to change their schedules" people make me get up at 5:00AM EST instead of 6AM (and now you're talking about pushing it back to 4:00AM?!?).
The clock reflects astronomical realities of earth/sun positioning. Noon is supposed to mean the sun is overhead, mid-day. Cocky people then decide they don't like that arrangement, and declare what _is_ shall be different from what they _want_ reality to be. A rose by any other name may smell as sweet, and calling dung a "rose" doesn't make it smell any better. Calling 5:00AM "6:00AM Daylight Saving Time" doesn't change the fact that it's really 5:00AM, and the combination of light and circadian rhythms means it's still time to sleep.
It's almost enough to make me move to Arizona where they ignore this nonsense.
Seriously, man - it really messes up my internal clock. Midnight to six is my time to _sleep_; mess with that, and you're messing with my ability to function.
You want more light? YOU get up earlier. Leave my clock alone; I'll be a lot more productive that way.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
What amazes me about the whole thing is that nobody bothered to look back to 1973 when Nixon did essentially the same thing. No energy was saved then, either.
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Some tiny number of people had to wrestle with Windows inanity (and that's a self-selected group of people who voluntarily took jobs that require wrestling with Windows inanity).
Meanwhile, a huge number of people get a quality-of-life boost from the extra daylight in the evening, which makes it more pleasant to walk home from work, to run late-afternoon errands, or just to enjoy some time outdoors on nice spring and autumn days.
In an ideal world they'd keep pushing it back until the start and end finally met, and then abolish it entirely, leaving the clocks on summer time all year round. But until that time, at least things are a bit better. And next time they change it, you Windows-wrestlers will know what to do.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
Do you people have any clue what the concept of "noon" is supposed to be? In case you've forgotten, it's supposed to be the time of day when the sun is highest in the sky. It's supposed to be the time when there is as much daylight behind us as is in front of us.
For practical purposes, this isn't exact, but we've done a pretty good job with splitting the world up into 24 time zones so that it's somewhat close.
But not any more! No, now noon is just some arbitrary point during the day when we find it convenient to be. We want more time at the end of the day, so let's just move noon an hour ahead, right?
WRONG! I have a better idea. Instead of dinking around with clocks and redefining what something means that has been around since the beginning of recorded time, why don't we just have businesses shift their hours around?
Imagine how nice this would be. We never change our clocks. Twice a year, government changes its hours. The Post Office, for example, doesn't open at 8:00am during the summer, it opens at 7:00am, and it closes an hour earlier, too. Businesses that choose to do so follow suit and make sure its employees know when to show up. I suspect that almost all of them would, and probably most companies would have a policy that says something like, "When the government shifts its hours, we're shifting ours also."
Everyone's happy. People get their extra hour at the end of the day. No one has to write stupid software patches to account for when DST is. Atlanta, Georgia is always GMT-5, never GMT-4 like it is now. People don't think Arizonans are weird because half the year they're on Mountain time and half the year they're on Pacific. If government wants to change its hours a few weeks earlier next year, there's no issue at all, they can just announce it a few months in advance, and when the time comes, do it.
I'm sorry, but people who think that DST is a good thing are idiots. If you want to change your schedule, change your schedule. But leave my freakin' clock alone.
There are almost 400 million people in the USA. A tiny number of those are Windows sysadmins.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
Basically because you'd still have to do the calculations, but you'd lost the convenience of having the same frame of reference in all locales, as 1200 would cease to be relevant. It would probably just make things more difficult.
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I was late to work that day because no alarm clock whether it be cell phone or manual alarm could cope with the automatic change.
What do you mean no manual alarm could cope? How did manual alarms cope before the change? Thats right you set it before you went to bed, This isn't rocket science. One more point. The Time change occurred on Sunday morning at or about 2am. You had a whole day to look at your clock and figure out it was a hour off before you went to be Sunday night. It's not DST fault you were late to work it was your fault. Nice try though
Oh and for the record my cell phone did change on it's own on time.
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"Back in the day, when people's interactions were mostly local, time zones might have been harmless."
That's funny. Standard time and the resulting time zones came about because there were more interactions on a national and even global scale, thanks to railroads, telegraphs and radio. Keeping the time difference between two points an integer number of hours is far more preferable to what preceded it: everybody using local mean time for their own meridian. Would you like to keep track of the ~12 minute time difference between New Orleans and Chicago? The ~16 minute difference between San Francisco and Los Angeles? The ~12 minute difference between New York and Boston?
"They're just a PITA -- time is an arbitrary number anyway, so who cares if the clock says 6pm or 6am when you wake up?"
We're a diurnal species. If mechanical time did not approximate solar time to some degree, the former would be abandoned for the latter.
"Imagine having every computer (and every log, timestamp, calendar, etc.) in the world on GMT. Imagine scheduling conference calls and not having someone confuse which time zone it was scheduled for."
Imagine a world where not everybody's job involves timestamps, computer logs, or conference calls. Or, instead of imagining, experience reality a little instead.
At any rate, if it works so well, use your life as an example and set all your personal timepieces to UTC.
I don't see how this is saying Bush sucks. It blamed congress for the change in Daylight savings time, and last I checked, congress is run by the Democrats.
BZZZZT! You lose. Maybe you should wind back the clock and note who was in control of Congress when this bill was signed. Can you guess which party had control of both the House and the Senate at the time?
Those who laugh at you for you having a Mac.. are the people who constantly call you to fix their PC.
... completely ignoring the "functioning in society" bit.
People who complain about the gubmint are often just complaining about having to deal with other people.
Sure, if I never had to talk to anyone or do anything, I'd get up at dawn and go to bed at sunset too.
But I'd also be living in a cave, and be dead by now.
You don't have to do any calculations. Why would you ever deal with two time zones?
If you don't have to deal with multiple timezones then what the bloody hell do you care about what time it is in a different timezone?!?
"what time do I wake up in the morning?" and that's not a calculation, but an answer you get handed to you when you get off the plane or ask a local.
Nonsense. "The store closes at 5." "The store closes at 9." You know the former means "early evening" and the latter means "late evening" because we use time zones. Replace that with "The store closes at 0300," and suddenly you haven't a clue. Sure, you can figure out that local "noon" is 1800, therefore it closes at the equivelant of 9PM, but is that really easier?
Yes, one of the side effects is that some locales border timezones and have to do a minor calculation to figure out what time the stores close in the adjacent timezone, but that wouldn't go away with everyone using UTC -- you'd still have to remember that it's an hour earlier/later.
Don't get me wrong, DST is a ridiculous "solution," but discarding local time is equally ridiculous.
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I couldn't handle reading 300 posts, but I did search the whole topic for the word "peak" and nobody at 2+ used it. So here it is: we had a local news article in Calgary about the lack of change in TOTAL consumption,( just as many lights on in the AM as off in PM) but that it was good because it shaved the PEAK CONSUMPTION.
People use the most energy right after they get home from work, basically; TV, computers (like me right now), cooking and other household operations.
Removing added lighting needs AT THAT TIME reduces the maximum generating capacity you need available to meet the peak demand. Which means they build a new power plant for your area in 2014 instead of 2012, or whatever. The time-cost of money means real savings on your power bill - even at constant total kWh consumed.
Perhaps it's not so much needing the government to trick you into getting up earlier, as it is needing the government to trick your boss into opening your place of work an hour earlier.
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