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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
Just two quick examples of the COST of the change, due to lost productivity - I live in the Eastern US, and someone in Ireland missed a conference call with us because everyone on both sides of the Atlantic thought that Ireland was always 5 hours ahead (for some reason, people found it impossible to fathom that this wasnt the case if we changes our clock and they didn't, but whatever). Example number two - a contractor in brazil was going to take down our servers at 5:00 EDST but actually took them down at 4:00 since they didnt know about the time change.
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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!
It didn't hurt anything? My "automatic" clock that I bought a few years ago is now worthless. It's supposed to automatically change based on the old DST schedule. Now, I have to manually turn it ahead myself, then a few weeks later, remember to manually turn it back because it automatically went forward on the old scehdule. Ditto for the fall. It's obnoxious. The government owes me a new automatic clock.
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?!!
Water utilities claim there was no measureable impact to water consumption after their "hold your pee in for an hour before going to the bathroom" campaign wrapped up last weekend, in an effort to minimize water consumption and save the planet of resources. =P
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?
I've checked Wikipedia, and I didn't see much of any countries that have followed the USA on this initiative other than Canada. Even Mexico didn't follow (assuming the ariticle is accurate).
I live in Canada, and I can tell you that we followed out of economic necessity, and no other reason. Our economy is so tied to America (in terms of cross-border business) that we realistically had no choice. But we certainly don't like it, especially those further north: with the pushing of the clock so much earlier this year, people were heading to work and kids were walking to school in pitch-black darkness again.
And, of course, we had the same PITA tech issues with the time change the Americans had. For Canadians in general, the negatives of this change outweighed the positive by a long shot.
Look at the tomato! Isn't it sad? He can't dance! Poor tomato!
I'm a lobbyist with the North American Automatically Time Changing Clock, Watch and Timepiece Manufacturers Association and we paid good money to have this bill passed so that we can sell more automatically changing clocks, watches and timepieces.
Record profits this year, my friend, record profits. You should have invested in manufacturers of automatically changing clocks, watches and timepieces.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Wow, sounds like someone woke up on the wrong side of the day light saving time today.
The real Sig captains the Northwestern. This one captains
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.
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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"I never understood school schedules."
Then you haven't thought about it much.
Early to bed, early to rise. School schedules reflected our agricultural heritage, which is often why summers are off, still.
"It has been shown that teenagers naturally wake up later in the day, and that elementary school students wake up earlier."
These are more recent studies, like in the last 10 years or so. Once schedules are set, things are hard to change, as there is a certain expectation.
"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?"
Obviously you haven't worked a hard day in your life. 9-5 is more white collar. Blue collar traditionally was 7-3 for 1st shift. 2nd shift was 3-11pm. For example, where I am, the white collar rush time in the morning is heaviest at about 8:30am. However, most of my neighbors are out the door before 7, and the dump trucks start their banging 10 minutes after 7.
"Some will counter that high school students have jobs in the evening, so let them start earlier. Why should jobs drive school schedules?"
Your older student can take care of themselves if they arrive home around 2.5-3pm. The 2nd grader can be met at 3:15-3:30 by the parent that got off work. Or if the elementary school student has an older sibling, watched by them since the latter got home first. Or, without an older sibling, something that used to be done was that you hired a short watch babysitter, usually a high schooler. Most parents are concerned with what happens after school.
A high schooler can drop off his elementary school sibling, or the white collar see the same off on the way to work. The blue collar with the elementary aged child usually had a stay at home wife, or she worked a more service or white collar job and could see the child off later.
As well, most elementary school students usually don't have after school activities, like theater, marching band, or sports. This gives high school students who want to do those activities time to do them, and still make it home for the family dinner. If they started later, you wouldn't have a nice family meal, since they, as you were earlier quoting studies, are a good thing according to most studies.
And yes, jobs do matter. A lot. High school usually lets out by 2:45. This allows high schoolers to hit the 2nd shift if blue collar (3-11), or the 2nd shift if they work in the service industry like fast food (depends, but usually 2.5-3.5pm to closing which is typically 9-10). Doesn't sound like a big deal to you, if mommy and daddy paid for your toys and food, but for a lot of on the edge students, if you can't have an afternoon job, they would drop out. At least this allows those interested in sports to partake, as well as those who need the jobs or the training to also get it while still in high school.
btw, those sleep studies I don't think accurately accounted for natural light variances, in which case daylight savings actually works against how the teen mind would prefer.
The people that know the most of anybody on the planet about forecasting the effects of DST sit about 20-50ft from me. We develop software that is designed to predict electrical and gas usage based on factors such as weather, time of day (including DST), holidays, etc. I wish they had asked us our opinions or at least used our software to forecast the effects of their new policy before enacting it. You see, DST was designed before A/C was in widespread use. DST saved electricity by shifting working hours into more daylight. However, with the advent of huge A/C and heat-pumps deployed in every office, factory and store in America, DST now shifts the workday into hotter hours. As a result the DST effect has slowly dwindled (with a little work I could tell you just how much it has dwindled), and will soon reverse. The new DST times are more than likely to accelerate the problem.
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