Slashdot Mirror
Daylight Saving Time Wastes Energy
An anonymous reader writes "With the time approaching when we'll be changing our clocks again, the Wall Street Journal is running a timely article on a study done by a UC-Santa Barbara economics professor and a Ph.D. student. The study unambiguously concludes that Daylight Saving Time not only doesn't save any energy, it actually wastes energy and costs more. The study used energy company records from Indiana before and after that state mandated DST for all of its counties, and calculated that the switch cost Indiana citizens $8.6M per year. 'I've never had a paper with such a clear and unambiguous finding as this,' the professor said."
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Skip DST entirely. No clock changes at all. You want more daylight? Get up earlier. Need more time to work? Work summer hours.
It's MUCH easier than having to change your clocks all the time. And it seems that it's much less wasteful, too.
Is it just me, or do I see some sort of story about Daylight savings every year. Some tout a study about a waste of energy/money. Others talk about we are just one step away from changing the system. If you ask me, society wont change the system. We are too ingrained with it. Yes, there are better methods. Yes, the Military has been using a 24 hour "Zulu" clock based on GMT. So what... we as a society are not going to change it any time soon.
Some days I get the sinking feeling Orwell was an optimist.
I mean, after all, you're not going to get hypothermia. Most of you will be miserable of course, and the cost of that is rather difficult to calculate. I don't know about the rest of you out there in Slash-land, but my co-workers and I have been looking forward to coming home after work and having an extra hour of daylight. It's priceless. So. Put that in your penny-pinching pipe and smoke it.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
From TFA:
"One study of the situation in Indiana cannot accurately asses the impact of [daylight-saving time] changes across the nation, especially when it does not include more northern, colder regions," the congressman (Mr. Markey) notes.
I've had my suspicions for a while, but honestly, who's shocked? This world is run on money. If you see a politician pushing something, just follow the money trail and you'll find their backers.
Puts a whole new spin on our candidates, don't it? Look at their "platforms", then look at their voting history. The patterns are usually blatantly obvious for any who so chose to look. It's then the job of the candidates ( and their parties ) to bullshit us into believing we aren't seeing what we're seeing. It's all smoke and mirrors.
Don't look behind the curtain, folks, just punch the ticket and elect the next nutjob into office.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
As someone from the Caribbean now in the Midwest (of the USA), it makes no sense to me in everyday life and is purely annoying. In areas where the sunset/sunrise times are that much affected, is it not possible to have individuals/businesses allow for the change?
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
DST would be worth it even if it wasted energy. Morning hours of daylight are useless to me considering that I am either at work or on the way to work. I can actually use after-work hours of daylight to do something enjoyable. That's the original rationale for DST and it still applies. DST should be extended year-round.
The conclusions seem reasonable, but I'm disturbed that the researchers didn't consider the potential impact of overall hotter summers. Did neighboring states have relatively flat energy usage over the same period?
The opinions stated herein do not necessarily represent those of anybody at all. Deal with it.
And that horrible, evil, upcoming day when we "spring" forward is a miserable, deplorable day for those of us who don't get along well with morning.
We figured out a long time ago that it's easier to elect seven judges than to elect 132 legislators.
... both of which would use more energy I would have thought.
Show me the figures with those items adjusted for and there may be something worth a story.
--I thought I was wrong once, but I was mistaken.
I actually like being able to come home from work, and there's still plenty of light left in the sky. Otherwise, almost all I'd experience of my house is when it's shrouded in darkness. Except for those weekends when the light doth shine through the darkness.
Apparently the study covered only household electricity use. Since offices, shops, etcetera use plenty of power, that would seem to leave a huge data in the data.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
I think it should be permanently 'sprung forward' so we get more light in the evening. Otherwise useless to us non-morning people. Bah! (image of Catbert holding rolled up newspaper)
...even though I attend Purdue. Though I, in general, found DST more of a hassle than a hindrance, I wonder how many of fellow Hoosiers did. Does the study take into account the groans and awkwardness of switching gears?
I do hope that they continue the study, to see if the difference between pre-DST Indiana and post-DST Indiana starts to reach an equilibrium after the residents have had time to get used to it.
The imminent collapse of space and time is just the Universe's way of hugging you.
...Still, the Transportation Department study stuck. Speaking before the House of Representatives in 2002, Indiana Rep. Julia Carson said that under daylight-saving time, Indiana families would save "over $7 million annually in electricity rates alone...
...Using more than seven million monthly meter readings from Duke Energy Corp., covering nearly all the households in southern Indiana for three years...
...Their finding: Having the entire state switch to daylight-saving time each year, rather than stay on standard time, costs Indiana households an additional $8.6 million in electricity bills...
then a study by University of California-Santa Barbara economics professor Matthew Kotchen and Ph.D. student Laura Grant
Look at how Kingsford crows about the earlier institution of DST in this press release. I bet they do serious lobbying on this issue.
Bruce Perens.
Adjust business hours periodically. Don't change the freakin' clock and have an hour go missing every 6 months. It didn't even make sense when we were still hand plowing. It certainly doesn't now!!!
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Usually by the time I get off work it's almost dark outside. It really sucks to be looking out the office window seeing what I nice day it is and not be able to go outside. Business hours should be from noon to 8:00. They way I could get up and go enjoy some of the daylight hours even though it's a work day.
how about you follow our (Saskatchewan's) example and have DST year-round? We've been on DST full-time since 1966.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
The cows get confused and the curtains fade faster.
While of course there is no such thing as 'good waste', simple math will tell us that the monetary loss to the people of Indiana is minute. According to the 2006 census, the population of Indiana is 6,313,520. So if DST costs the state 8.1e6 per year then that is a meager 1.28 dollars per capita, or a single order of In-n-Out fries per person.
I wrote this to my congressional representatives last fall:
...
Dear Sir:
Daylight savings time hits hard this time of year.
It was cold and dark when I got up this morning, so the
first thing I did was was turn up the heat and turn on the
lights. That's going to jack up my energy bill for the
month.
Then I drove my son to school. He missed his bus all five
days this week. That's going to jack up my fuel bill for the
month.
Then I dragged myself through another day at work. I don't
function well when I have to get up before dawn.
The people in my family are all diurnal (dI-UR-nal). It
means we sleep when it's dark and wake when it's light. The
problem is that in northern latitudes (like Massachusetts)
the sun rises later in the winter than in the summer.
To compensate for this, we have a scheme called Daylight
Savings Time. Daylight savings shifts our school and work
schedules forward in the summer and back in the winter, to
keep them roughly in sync with the sun. It used to work
pretty well, but congress broke it a couple of years ago:
now it goes too long in the fall and starts too early in the
spring.
Most of the damage that congress does affects me at some
remove, but this--this comes right out of my hide. When I'm
stumbling around in the dark for three weeks next spring,
I'll be thinking of you.
Sincerely,
about DST, but he "nailed" it when he said to put a basket over her head.
The Admin and the Engineer
Or you could, you know, go to work an hour early and leave an hour early.
Sort of like you do anyway with DST, but just do it without fucking up everyone else's clock.
If you want the "extra hour of daylight" move your own damned day an hour back. Hands off my clock!
seriously, here in WA the cows won't know what time it is, hence we shouldn't have daylight saving!
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
I lived in Saskatchewan for a while and not changing time is freaking annoying. They have it set up to give more sunshine hours in the morning for farming, but really I hated it. All summer the sun sets earlier so its harder to spend an evening out, and then you have sun up at 5 in the morning which I found just to be useless. But thats how they do it here in Saskatchewan Canada.
You snark, but I've heard fairly serious accusations that DST is primarily driven by the golf-and-country-club lobby, which wants more months in which wealthy businessmen have light in the evenings after they get off work.
The results of this study are entirely unsurprising. DST saved energy when lighting was the primary use for electrical power in the home. More light in the evening, fewer lights on. But since the 1970's or so, air conditioning has come to consume far more energy in the summer than lighting, so sending people home from work while the sun is still strongly heating their homes means more home AC units. And it's far more efficient to cool a few large buildings (=low surface area) with industrial AC than millions of individual home-sized units.
And yet... just last year, the Congress voted to extend DST by a few weeks on each end, way out in the spring and fall when it can't possibly make much difference.
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
Specially my own biological energy!
This would have been the first post, if I remembered to set my clock for DST.
Tim Brown has has many interesting things to say about daylight savings.
the rest of us should have to live through this sillyness because you can't figure out that working 8-4 instead of 9-5 would achieve exactly the same thing. Duh.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Congresscritters have to be told again that in a networked, computerized world where accurate, continuous time- and record-keeping is of the essence, it has become one of the worst ideas ever to mess around with the clocks twice a year (in particular now that everyone has about a dozen of them in various devices), at different dates and points in time all around the globe. High time indeed, literally, to put an end to this tremendous waste of resources (and everyone's time) that is Daylight Saving Time.
Deleted
If you go to one of the local 100-yen stores, you can find this nice little blindfold thingee. With one of those you can sleep in until 3 PM if you want to. I have two -- one is the standard elastic-headband contraption and the other is just a black anime-esque cat which sits on your face all night. More for the novelty value than anything.
Now, while the USD has been falling against the yen recently, I'm going to wager that 100 yen is still less than $8.6 million.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Japanese don't do this "sleeping in" thing. If you do, maybe you ought to invest in some curtains?
As a side note, I live in Yokohama and have no trouble whatsoever sleeping until noon when I feel like it.
The worst part about daylight savings time this year is that everyone getting SSBB at midnight on Sunday loses an hour of valuable playtime!
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
Do you know what a hassle it is to reset my sun dial twice a year? And you thought you're digital clocks were a pain to reset.
If we get rid of the semiannual clock switch, we'll have one less hilariously painful reminder of how poor our memory as human being is.
Every year, without fail, it's "Man, it gets dark EARLY!!! I mean, I know it's just an hour earlier than it was last week, but certainly it didn't get dark THIS early last year! This is just frickin NUTS how EARLY it gets DARK now!! Really, like, this time last year, at this time of day, you could still see things outside, but now, like, it's PITCH BLACK!!! Oh, man!!!"
Followed, 6^Dsome months later by a depressingly similar rant about how late one is now able to continue doing things outdoors without artificial light.
-- I prefer the term "karma escort."
Seriously. The entire objection to eliminating DST seems to reduce to people wanting more daylight playtime in the evenings. So, go to DST and quit. Done. And now that we're going to have to patch and boot every last server in the enterprise (again) lets do something really smart and put the whole planet on GMT permanently and have done with it. Yes, that means you too, Indiana.
Practical timekeeping involves nothing more than assigning an arbitrary set of integers to the position of the Earth relative to the Sun. Why make anybody correct for time zone? This is nothing more than a senseless source of error. We can do the big shift while my aged parents are preoccupied with the Commie plot to destroy analog TV signals. Hell, they're still stunned that their man Mitt gave up on the White House. They have bigger fish to fry.
and never believed that it actually really helped a significant amount of people.
If there would be a real reason, some kind of benefit for a larger group of people then I would gladly accept the annoying time shift. But I don't know anyone, never seen anyone that really benefit from it and the majority of the people were at most neutral ("I don't care") or negative ("Screws up my everyday life schedule").
So I'm all for getting rid of this. Sadly in Europe it will take another 200 years before someone will even start thinking about changing back and letting the clocks run the same way all year.
I don't care whether DST uses or saves energy. I don't like to get up early in the morning so sunlight early is useless to me. I'd much rather have it be light when I go home.
If you are getting up before the sun comes up, it's a sign you are getting up too early. The only time a geek should see the sun rise is after pulling an all-nighter.
I hope all those idiots in the Southeast of Queensland take notice of this. They want to foist Daylight Savings on the rest of the state, or even worse split the state into two time zones, just because the state bordering to the south observes Daylight Savings.
Admit it. You post strawman arguments as AC so you get modded Insightful for refuting them, rather than Troll
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
We actually tried Daylight Savings Time in Jamaica for about a year. It was an absolute and monumental disaster. You see around here the days are very close to the same length as the nights. Even in mid Winter. Too bad we never got around to keelhauling the politician who came up with that plan.
Remembering this did clue me in as to why DST would increase energy usage even in temperate zones:
People get up in time to make it to work, school or wherever else they are compelled to go each day. How early they rise is a function of the length of the commute and the scheduled arrival time.
This means that making that arrival time an hour earlier results in everyone getting up an hour earlier. unless the original wakeup time was more than 1 hour after sunrise, that means using electricity which might otherwise be saved.
Worse yet, the energy you wasted in the morning is not saved in the evening. People go to work and school on someone else's schedule. They go home and go to bed on thier own. Regardless of when you wake up an evening out will start AFTER sunset. TV watching, Internet abuse etc... fit within that self assigned schedule.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
Last year at the last minute the Australian Government decided to postpone Daylight Savings a couple weeks, to accomodate the Commonwealth Games. What could possibly go wrong?
Microsoft issued a hotfix to alter the automatic daylight savings changeover. But those IT workers who work with Windows networks where systems are only patched for major rollups or service packs came to work one morning and found dozens of servers offline, because their clocks were out-of-synch with domain controllers. Or even worse, domain controllers with out-of-synch clocks.
All this so that the activities of a bunch of sporty types running around and throwing things wouldn't be disrupted. I'd like to know the eventual cost of disruption to IT infrastructure on that day...
Don't forget the sysadmins that have to implement the new code that tries to deal with DST!
Exchange and SharePoint both seem to have huge issues with daylight savings. I think Microsoft must have gone out of their way to ensure they have as many different places to store timezone information as they could find. You need an update for Windows to get the new definitions; that's cool. Then you need an update for Exchange. Then there's another update for MAPI. I think there were a few more than this as well, but (fortunately) I'm not our Exchange admin. I can't believe how much of a mess it all was, though.
Then there's the brand spankin' new SharePoint 2007, which sits around scratching its balls for an hour during DST because the part that schedules jobs to run and the part that starts them running at the scheduled clearly have different ideas about timezones. What a joke. Why does any of this even HAVE its own timezone database, and not just use the system one? It boggles the mind. Even now after their hotfixes to resolve this issue, the jobs still say they're scheduled to run at some point in the future. But hey, under the hood it works properly, so I can deal with the UI telling lies.
Wandering even further off-topic, the human-readable part of meeting requests sent by Outlook uses the wrong timezone. Here's one I just sent myself to schedule a meeting at 6.30pm:
When: Tuesday, 4 March 2008 6:30 PM-7:00 PM (GMT+08:00) Perth.Very nice, really - it tells you the exact offset from GMT so there's no question about when exactly this meeting is. Unfortunately, +0800 is our usual non-DST timezone. During DST (which we're in now until the end of March) it's +0900. Apparently the GMT+08:00 is just part of the timezone name, but it's confusing as hell to anyone who receives these messages. This is particularly problematic if you're scheduling conference calls and the like with people in other states (or countries) who can't reasonably be expected to know about WA's DST trial.
I would've thought a problem like that would have been noticed and fixed a long time ago, given that most of the USA do have DST.
DST is ambiguous. On morning of the day the clocks go back there is a repeated hour. Scheduling something to happen at a particular time during that hour is ambiguous. It is necessary to say if you want it to happen on the first or second occurrence of that time. Of course that is one of the reasons software should use UTC internally. But what about the human interface? If I want to let people specify a time using their own local time with DST then a bizarre complexity is added to the interaction. Perhaps a dialog box should pop up asking if they want the first or second occurence of 02:21am.
DST is a bad solution as it increase the complexity of the time model everyone has to use. Our experience of programming teaches us that solutions that increase global complexity are rarely a good thing.
I worked in the NOC of a fledgling ISP in the 1990s. We had a monitoring room with a large projection monitor and four analog electric clocks, representing the four time zones of the USA. Well, when it came time to "fall back" and reset those clocks after DST, college student Mike performed his job nicely. When Jimmy and I came in around 9am, we noticed the clocks were all properly set. Then Jimmy asked Mike, "How'd you do it? Did you take each one down and set it back an hour?" "Yep," says Mike. Well, Jimmy chuckles and explains that Mike had wasted a lot of effort - the proper way to do this was to adjust the Pacific clock to Eastern time, and move the other clocks to the left since they already showed the correct times for the other zones.
Why not just split the difference and adjust year around time to the half way point between standard time and daylight savings; no more switching.
*It's not what you can do for the Dark Side but what the Dark Side can do for you!*
Skip DST entirely. No clock changes at all. You want more daylight? Get up earlier. Need more time to work? Work summer hours.
Who cares about local time? Aren't you running on GMT, UCT, Zulu -8 or something? I schedule a call time with suppliers in Japan, I simply schedule a GMT time, and I don't worry about DST. Now if I can find an atomic radio clock that lets you choose something other than EST, PST, or something inbetween, then I would know what time it is.
The truth shall set you free!
This study hardly worthy of a PhD student, let alone a Professor of anything, fails to mention (let alone consider) well known side effects (which translates to costs) of the ever changing amount of daylight. These range from statistically significant changes in the number of violent crimes, property crime, traffic fatalities, and SADDly suicides which all can be directly associated with more or less waking hour daylight. The attempt to shift the working day to coincide with the available daylight is an obvious solution to a very difficult problem.
I have tried to come up with a better solution, and I always end up with the same conclusion. The 'official' working day needs to follow the sun.
To illustrate:
At the Winter Solstice my day is just under 8 hours, waking 15 minutes before sunrise is quite reasonable, and I have a 1 hour commute (typical for people living in metropolitan areas), so I would be expected to wake at 0750, and be in the office by 0905. It is also reasonable to expect to be home within 15 minutes past sunset, so I leave the office at office at 1510. That gives me an effective workday of just over 6 hours, so I need only take a 15 minute break in the middle.
Now summer comes along and on June 21st I wake at about 0430 (This is daylight savings time, I get confused when I try to figure this out in standard time), and am in the office by 0545, I have a purely notional deficit of 2 hours (when I try to compensate for 21st December), so I need to work a 10 hour day, thus I work until 1545 (you could add in an hour for lunch and still have a very reasonable day), but that's fine, because sunset isn't until 2125, so I still get home with plenty of daylight left.
Using this system, I am always traveling to work and back home in good light. My circadian rhythm is not being tortured by being forcibly de-synchronised with the sun. The office and home lighting and heating/cooling requirements are hugely reduced ( BTW: how much (percentage) cooling occurs as a result of heat from artificial light ?) and the work year still contains the same number of hours.
If I ever get to the point of employing people, I'll definitely allow that system.
If you see a politician pushing something, just follow the money trail and you'll find their backers.
There is a website which is devoted to following the money. It is interesting to see who Comcast supports, Johnson & Johnson, etc. I don't think the parent was that far offtopic. After all, the DST issue was a political move that had to be sold to the public. When you actualy analize it, you wonder on what the decisions was actualy based on. I think follow the money is a data point any time politicians are involved. This was not based on a peer reviewed white paper and a large sample controlled experiment.
The truth shall set you free!
Follow the money here,
http://www.opensecrets.org/
The truth shall set you free!
I wonder if they read a similar paper from a year ago?
RYAN M. KELLOGG and Hendrik Wolff, "Does Extending Daylight Saving Time Save Energy? Evidence from an Australian Experiment" (February 14, 2007). Center for the Study of Energy Markets. Paper CSEMWP-163.
http://repositories.cdlib.org/ucei/csem/CSEMWP-163
Maybe there should be some kind of central place we could all use to search for papers that have some bearing our subject matter?
I don't need to test my programs.. I have an error correcting modem.
Time is supposed to be constant, how can it remain constant if it changes twice a year?
If it's really sensible for people to start work an hour earlier, why can't they simply start at 8 instead of 9, rather than taking such a drastic measure as changing the definition of time?
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
When there's 22 hours of sunlight a day, it kind of makes Daylight Savings Time kinda moot. Even for folks in Ketchikan and Juneau, there can't be that much benefit. I wonder why the hell Alaska observes it.
I've worked those hours before, at a large corporate bank no less. You really don't miss anything from 5pm-8pm except rush hour, and the difference in the drive home is often enormous (1 hour drive at 5pm turns into a 20 minute drive at 8pm). The extra time in the morning is very nice, especially for dealing with 9-5 shops like government, banks, or whatever. An alternative, if you have kids or a spouse with an earlier schedule, is 7am - 3pm, something else fairly common and still gives you time to hit up 9-5 shops.. but I've found from experience that it's much easier to arrive late than to leave early if you're in any kind of problem-solving role. If you're not there yet, they'll deal without you till you get there.. but if you're already there and try to leave, you'll catch grief.
Could someone explain to me what this daylight stuff you are all on about is, I live in a cellar, My food is delivered, I work from home, are you on about the fireball that was in the sky the day my connection went down and I went outside for lack of anything to do?
you believe that using the force of government to make everyone else bend to your petty desires is appropriate. You must be from California.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
This has absolutely nothing to do with daylight saving time. Talk to your boss and get flex time or something. You can have your wish fulfilled instantly. Redefining time for your whole country/world just to change your working hours is a pretty crazy suggestion.
I lost my sig.
It has nothing to do with getting up earlier or not. It's society that is "off" from the sun cycle. We are not agrarian anymore. Businesses don't open at 6-7 and close at 2-3 -- not even in DST. instead it's 2-3 hours later, some businesses opening at 9 others at 10, very few even at 8. Closing...4 is rare, then 5 & 6 for businesses. So in summer, do you want the sun to rise 3-4 hours before you go to work, then have it set 2-3 hours after you get home, or do you want it to be 2-3 in the morn, or 1-2 and have that extra 1-2 hours tacked on in the evening?
I don't know about others, but the idea of me trying to go out and enjoy "daylight" for 2-3 hours before work in the morning -- just wouldn't work. I'd much rather have the extra hour or two (depending on where you live) in the evening.
To think it is just about "personal choice"? Ha! I can't expect to go run "half my errands and leisure life before work!" Maybe it has to do if you are a morning person who usually is up 3-4 hours before work or an evening person. Also may have a bit to do with what time zone you are in. The two 'coast's are both on "late-night' schedules with TV-prime time going from 8-11...so news, comes on 6 & 11 (or 10 if you do early news). In the center states (Mtn+Central TZ), they are already an hour earlier, with their prime time from 7-10 and everything else falling place.
AZ is a southern state. Being lower in latitude, it wouldn't be expected to be as much of a difference as for Seattle or Portland, D.C. or S.F. But "Indiana" -- since they are in the central TZ, they're already an hour earlier (clock time) than would be "normal" for an East or West Coast resident, so I wouldn't expect Indiana to save as much. But I know on the west coast, the sun's overhead right near 1pm in the summer and right near noon in the winter -- and in the summer, it's great -- with twilight happening around 9pm.
I seem to remember around Paris, France, it getting dark around 10pm in the summer and getting light around 6 or maybe a bit earlier. Seems a hole lot more 'civil' if you want to have a life (or family life) outside work.
Cmon, some hippy prof at a UC decides that something about our lifestyle is wasteful, and its even printed? Hello, Ric Romero calling.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Why not adjust the timezone permanently?
Ugh.....they're basing it on the mess that is the state of Indiana? How does it compare now that the state is at least in sync with the rest of the area instead of the backwards way it was before? As someone who moved from Michigan to Indiana right before they switched, I find it hard to believe these numbers. Any area near the Michigan border (I'm looking at you, South Bend and friends) was a complete mess. How much money was lost due to having to explain you were on the same time as your clients two miles North part of the year, but you were an hour off another part of the year? How many shipments were wrong, or meetings were missed?
How stupid do you think these researchers are?
"Readings from counties that had already adopted daylight-saving time provided a control group that helped them to adjust for changes in weather from one year to the next."
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Most of Indiana, as I recall, is at the extreme western edge of the eastern time zone, so the astronomical day is already very late relative to the clock day (on standard time, astronomical noon is close to 12:30, so on DST it's close to 1:30). So that's an extreme example. One could have picked the other extreme (say, Maine, or Illinois in the central time zone), and the results might have been different.
What's wrong with spending an hour on your lonesome? Being the antisocial curmudgeon that I am, I'd look forward to it.
How can a post be modded "overrated" or "underrated" when it hasn't been rated yet?
It's supposed to save daylight. From days of yore, it's supposed to let you till the soil in the light for more hours.
Of course if you want to end DST, pitch it as a danger for the Chiiiiilllllllllddddrrrrrreeennnnnnnnnnn!!!!!!!!! that is, sell it as a problem for early morning bustops and how your snowflakes will all get run down in the dark.
daylight savings time might save light energy. But people seem to drive more and therefore use more gasoline.
DST give me that extra hour in the evenings during the warm months to exercise outdoors. Sadly, the whiny bunch whines about it every spring, but they NEVER whine in November when they get that extra hour of sleep back.
-- I am. Therefore, I think!
You can always use swatch internet time.
Exercising.
Zing!
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
The only group benefiting from daylight savings time, are those in the leisure time activities. With an extra hour or so of daylight, people are more apt to do recreational activities in the evening. It's nothing more than money.....follow the money. I would rather they just leave the damn clocks alone. If you want an extra hour of daylight, then get up an hour earlier, finish your work an hour earlier and you'll have that extra hour.
That is why This Indiana Man has always supported staying on one time zone and not switching to DST. I still have not heard a good (financial) compelling argument to stay with DST. Lets stay on Standard Time, and deal with it.
Congress debated endlessly on the wonderful savings from reduced lighting costs, when switching to DST.
Has that changed?
NO!
If Indianaians are using more A/C and more heating, its they who are at fault.
Not poor congress. *sniff*
Wait, what? When did Perth join the 21st century and get DST????
Right, but Star Trek's Stardate idea was mostly to "seem" cool, and I think was at some point established how it synced to "Earth" time (probably in San Francisco).
However, in the Fictional Star Trek Universe, it still solves a problem (remember, Star Trek assumes instantaneous communication, they have FTL communication). Sure, the visibility of stars going supernova from various outposts with ships traveling at near light speed has relativity issues. However, what is more likely, the people on Earth and Chiron Beta Prime observing a supernova and caring who sees it first, or the new Chiron Beta Prime Multiplanetary Company has a regional office on Earth, and a meeting between the regional sales managers all need to sync up time. The regional sales managers DON'T care about special relativity and time dilation, they care that they are all there for the conference call at the same time.
The fact is, when doing multi-timezone conference calls, there is a bit of confusion always in setting them up (takes an extra 15 seconds, is that 11 AM your time or mine), but we all get by and function, and usually make them. The inconvenience for us that do distance business in syncing up times is FAR less than the mess of forcing everyone to establish different local hours.
The timing of the US Market being open drives a LOT of the timing for white collar workers, albeit indirectly, and and Federal Reserve for banking, I presume that that is true in other developed economies.
The solution to Daylight Savings Time is to just go a half hour in whatever "direction" we need to go for whatever locations, then lock that time in as THE new time, and abolish any future changes. That way developers of this generation still get a ton of new work, and we're at the appropriate average.
The key word is "extended." I don't give a shit if it's daylight savings time or standard time as long as it doesn't change. I don't like the damn flip flopping twice a year.
Do you really care if the sun is on peak at noon or at 11:00? I don't.
There are three significant communities right on the border with California - Tijuana, Tecate and Mexicali. Many residents of these cities commute daily across the border, be it for work, school or errands/shopping. Needless to say, the symbiosis between communities on both sides of the border is quite significant.
Two years ago, I wrote to the Baja California governor's office, Eugenio Elorduy back then, asking what they intended to do about the looming DST expansion in California, considering among other things, the huge number of people who drive back and forth across the border on a daily basis, business transactions between the two countries (banking hours being a major issue), etc. Three March weeks is a very long time to be out of sync, and would surely create acute social and economic repercussions.
The governor's reply was that they were on top of things. Nine months later, the expanded DST came, with not a single peep from the Baja governor. The result was mass confusion, propitiating extended working hours from the US border crossing office. Still, tardiness and even absenteeism increased significantly, both in work and school.
Monetary and customs operations became a mess, costing millions of dollars on the business end of things.
People that usually shopped after work or picking up their kids, were too tired to do so, costing a ton of money to retailers on the US side, even. You see, Juan Q Citizen had to get up in one time zone, live his day in another one, then go back to his own time zone.
When the Baja press, asleep at the wheel, was awakened from its' slumber and addressed the governor about the public outcry, the little man stated that they "had insufficient notice about the DST change", a monument to his mediocrity and insincerity. Private enterprise retaliated by saying that sufficient notice had been given, but the governor's attitude "had been one of complete disdain". And so it went, and Baja, like the rest of Mexico, sprung forward its' clocks three weeks later.
Now here we are, a year later, a new governor in office, same mediocre political party, and the cycle repeats itself - no advance warning from the press, no statement from the governor, no nothing. Brace yourselves in northern Baja and southern California's border community, here comes another three weeks of chaos.
I would imagine that the same situation applies to Ciudad Juarez and El Paso, and all other symbiotic communities along the Mexico-US border, but the highest concentrations of population, therefore social and economic activity, is certainly between Baja and southern California.
Well, now that I've gotten my disgust with Baja's PAN (National Action Party) government out of the way, I'm all for an extended DST.
Here in Baja, at the beginning of March, the sun comes up at 6:30, yet the sky is light by 5:50. Getting in sync with California would mean that by the time most people leave the house for work or school, there's plenty of sunshine already. Rural communities that depend of farming can keep operating by the "sunshine clock". Working hours here are usually until 6:00 pm, and the sun sets at around 5:40. An extra hour of sun in the evenings is a fantastic thing to have, getting off work and still managing to catch a bit of sun on the face makes just about everybody I know happy. It's a significant quality boost in the daily grind.
Lil' Thindime, lilting a lacrimose lament, krashes the kwaint konfines of Kokonino Kounty
Will this mean that we might go back to the old time change plan?
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I generally don't changed my sleeping patterns for daylight saving time. I find it too disruptive. As most sane people, I want an end to DST.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
Of course, it's obvious that Indiana is not equivalent to the United States in general, but in particular when considering whether DST costs the US more, one should consider that Indiana is not your average state. It sits on the far western edge of the Eastern Time Zone. Additionally, the whole western edge of the time zone is pushed about 5 degrees west of where it "should" be according to solar time (http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/education/images/time1pr.gif); the combined effect is that even on standard time there's plenty of daylight in the evening and less in the morning. Changing to DST results in more daylight than people really use (IIRC from visiting it's still twilight until nearly 10 pm) and there's insufficient light in the morning, leading to increased energy usage. So the western edge of the time zone has been spending more money all along, and Indiana was previously saving it. I don't understand why the change has to be mandatory, and you can insert your favorite theory about interests there, but the fact remains that Indiana's geography is significantly different from most of the country (though I would note though that the western edge of the Mountain Time Zone is also pushed west, which might explain Arizona's case), so that it is far from proven that DST costs more across the US as a whole.
make 6 am equal to what is now 3 am
that way everyone gets up in the middle of the nigth to go to work, but by the time they get off work, they aren't really falling asleep until midnight, which is what used to be 9 pm. all those hours of glorious light for recreation, work done in darkness, since you can't get outside anyways, who cares?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I'm betting that the reason so many of these applications have their own TZ info is that the interface to the existing TZ information is weak. If your only interface is the POSIX API, about all you can tell is whether a time you give is in DST or not. If you want to do anything reasonably fancy (e.g., "Is DST this weekend?" or "what time does DST start/end?"), there is a lot more work involved: you have to create multiple unix times, query the POSIX API for each one, and check the flag returned. And the POSIX API is then doing a lot more work than you really care about, which means wasted time there, too.
Instead, with your own TZ information, you can have your own internal API that accesses exactly the information you want, in the most efficient manner that you can develop (which may not be the most efficient possible given skill and/or time available).
I suspect that this all is the reason why, for example, Java has its own TZ info built-in, rather than calling to the C API.
What we basically need is for the POSIX timezone API to expand beyond asctime, difftime, gmtime, localtime, mktime, strftime, strptime, timegm, and tzset: the ability to query the underlying tz data set in a portable way (unix/linux/mac, windows, mainframes, etc.) that is valuable in our modern internationalised market.
I'm a Hoosier too and there are lots of stories about the origin of the word. The one i suspect is correct is that hoosier was french slang for poor white farmer or as the southerners say cracker. Hoosiers being who they are (especially those of us from southern Indiana) I suspect that they liked the term and made it their own.
I hear some chuckles about people having a extended problem with DST changes. However, I really do have a problem when we "fall back" in the winter. It takes me weeks to get used to it. I tend to wake up around the same time every morning (before the alarm goes off) so I wonder if some of us are just more in tune with an internal time clock. I'm also naturally a "night owl" (although I can't usally keep those hours unless I'm taking time off.) So I've wondered if that had anything to do with it....
It's also a pain if you're dealing overseas--unfortunately other countries have been infected with changing clocks...but now we changed our dates so everyone's changing them on different days.
If you've never been modded as "flamebait" or "troll," you've never tried to argue a minority viewpoint here!
I think most of us here ignore UTC. Non-geeks don't know what it is most of the time and geeks only care when in full on geek mode.
I don't think of standard US, Central as UTC-6 and standard US, Eastern as UTC-5.
I think of Eastern as "what time it is here plus one." and similar for the other two zones I deal with once in a while.
I'm just guessing that when we organize a conference call with someone from each zone, they're more likely to think "They're in central time, so (add|subtract) an hour or two to get what time I need to call." rather than "it says UTC-6 and we're UTC-5..."
Our Exchange admin still bitched about the update process and I too find it rather silly that they all have to implement their own time subsystem. But I think this might be why there isn't much (if any) outcry from end-users.
This news story is typical of the press. There is no information here for the reader to determine the validity of the "study". Did the "study" take into account things like: changes in population, environmental (average temperature extremes) differences, or changes in cost of energy? I cannot trust this kind of news as accurate unless they can report the whole story, not just part of it.
Athiesm is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby.
Of course, the best way to get an American politician to vote for or against something is to tie it to child safety. Want to censor the Internet? Introduce a bill called the "Child Online Protection Act." Want to kill one? Rename it the "Whoever Votes for this Likes Rimming Little Boys Act."
Lots and lots of kids get run over crossing the street in the dark on Halloween. They really do. I'm sure there were not a few monied interests pushing this for their own reasons, and aside from keeping kids safe on Halloween they've got it dead wrong: It easily cost a few billion dollars to update all the software out there, and played merry hell with any devices that had DST info embedded in the firmware. And Outlook's calendar still breaks my meeting schedule at work.
I think that for every dollar we save in electricity we're losing a thousand in lost productivity and errors and accidents attributable to lost sleep. And as has been pointed out elsewhere, we're probably now losing on electricity, since coming home an hour earlier means cutting on your A/C for an extra hour of the hottest part of the day.
This is not my sandwich.
Swatch Internet Time is a decimal based time where the day is divided into 1000 beats. It would have worked too if the government would have mandated it. Imagine how fun that would be.
Hell, want to muck with the time? Why not go with a 28 hour day and have only 6 days in a week. This would screw everyone's circadian rhythm equally. Sounds fair enough.
I find it annoying that the governments that are pushing the world to go to DST (and then changing when it occurs) are the same governments that still have problems getting their citizens to adopt the metric system. Let's just convert the world to an even more wild new standard and watch as the people go insane.
Kudos for modding this funny. Let's get it to 5. What a lame suggestion. Hey, Bert, did you ever notice that we use terms like noon and midnight, that are generally expected to correlate with specific clock times? You're asking for a couple hundred years of human behavior to be eradicated. Why not suggest that each day should be divided into 1000 units called 'beats', and have them be the same everywhere around the world? Oh yeah, Swatch tried that 10 years ago, and it never amounted to more than a stupid publicity stunt.
In Miami, the effect of DST's end is profound and dramatic with respect to evening traffic -- it's several orders of magnitude worse during the winter, especially during November and December. Why? People hate to get home from work after dark. No, not everybody... but most do. When the sun doesn't set until 7 or 8pm, most people leave their offices between 4:30 and 5:30... but ENOUGH "stragglers" linger until 6 or 7 to keep the 5pm traffic surge just slightly below the 'gridlock' threshold. When November hits and DST ends, just about EVERYONE runs for the door by 5pm in a desperate attempt to beat the sun, causing MAJOR gridlock that's visibly worse than it was the previous week.
My biggest complaint with federal law regarding timezones is the fact that a state can choose to opt out of DST entirely, but can't choose to make it year-round. I think it's safe to say that if Florida had that option, the part that's currently in 'Eastern' time would quickly vote to spend the whole year in EDT/AST. Even on the darkest day of November or December, there would STILL be visible sunlight by 8am in Tallahassee (the northwesternmost major city in 'EST/EDT' Florida). As for the part of the state that's in Central time (ie, Pensacola metro area), I'd leave it up to them to decide whether they'd rather move to CDT/EST permanently, or do whatever Alabama does. If they decided they'd rather follow Alabama and be up to 2 hours behind Tallahassee, so be it. Personally, I suspect Alabama and Georgia would quickly follow Florida and adopt DST year-round, and the "Pensacola" issue would quickly become moot anyway.
Because I live in Los Angeles. It's sunny here all the time! Even at night!
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
I had a class last semester at 7:30 AM, and right before DSL ended, it was getting to the point that I couldn't see to get up in the morning(this was like 6:45, I was never one for getting up *too* early), so when the changeover happened, it was a relief. But it's kinda sad because I love the way time is in the summer(golden mornings aren't worth it any earlier than 7, imo), but it gets quickly unusable during the winter. Time is just a number I guess, though.
Hardly...They are already among the western-most states in the "Eastern" timezone. Their sun schedule is already "latest in the day" in the time zone, so they would show the most distorted figures. Compare figures for New York or Massachusetts...
http://www.nber.org.nyud.net/~confer/2008/EEEs08/kotchen.pdf
I found that at the wikipedia link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time
It does discuss how they used the existing Indiana counties that were already DST to control for non-DST changes between the sample years. The thing that gets me is that it states but does not explain that DST impacts heating/cooling. As best I can tell, the idea is that people are more likely to turn on the heat or A/C when awake. I wish that they had investigated that more.
It's also worth noting that the study says that DST does save electricity in the spring. It's the fall when DST has the negative effect overall. That suggests to me that we should end DST earlier if we want to maximize the electricity benefits.
Clearly the answer is to do all scheduling based upon a fixed time source. Pick a WoW server and use that as "official time."
This could not possibly lead to productivity issues.
Freedom isn't free; its price is the well-being of others.
Obviously the best solution is to redesign all clocks so that 6am is always sunrise and 8pm is always sunset. This is easily achieved by merely expanding the length of a second during the day in Summer and contracting it in Winter. Vice versa for nights.
Of course the contraction/expansion factor is a function of both date and latitude, but that's no problem for modern electronic clocks. Everyone knows how easy it is to enter your latitude while calibrating your clock.
This also means that 6am comes later for people in the North than it does for people in the South, and that Southerners will have longer workdays. But that's fine too, since I live in the North.
-- The reader anything less than completely failing to not misunderstand this sig is cursed.
I just heard a radio public service announcement to that effect here in Virginia.
Ben Franklin described DST in an essay about life in Paris where so many candles and lamps were burned during parties. It was SATIRE. A joke. He was making fun of them.
http://infinitygoods.wordpress.com/2007/11/04/daylight-saving-time-dont-blame-it-on-benjamin-franklin/
Now - Can we all stop this Daylight Savings Time nonsense for good!
---- "Logoff! That cookie shit makes me nervous!" - A. Soprano
Actually, Indiana is largely an Eastern TZ state. 12 counties, including mine, are on central. 80 counties are on eastern. The area around Indianapolis, which is where the study numbers came from, is on eastern time.
DST would be worth it even if it wasted energy.
If there are benefits to using the extra energy then it isn't wasted energy. That said, there is no conclusive proof that productivity is increased substantially by adjusting clocks so that people get up an hour earlier in the morning during non winter months.
Morning hours of daylight are useless to me considering that I am either at work or on the way to work.
Jurisdictions with large rural populations (such as Saskatchewan) tend to resist DST because morning daylight hours ARE useful, because work is outdoors and working in the morning light is more comfortable than in the hotter afternoon daylight.
I can actually use after-work hours of daylight to do something enjoyable.
I can probably speak for a lot of Canadians when I say we have TOO MUCH DAMN DAYLIGHT ALREADY in the summer. I don't even live THAT far north and with DST the sun sets after 10 PM in June and July. It can be hard for some people to get to sleep early enough when it stays light for so long.
DST should be extended year-round.
Fine enough for me because it's annoying (and in some cases dangerous, as traffic accident studies have shown) to switch from standard to daylight savings time. Howeverm, if we must have DST, then it should be reversed, especially in Canada. It makes no sense at all to "save daylight" during the time of year when dyalight is in excess. OTOH, in December it is pitch black by quitting time. If we enacted DST in the winter months then the sun would set at 17:30 instead of 16:30 and thousands of workers would be able to leave the office before it is completely dark. If DST is about "enjoying after-work hours" then this would make way more sense.
Still a stupid reason. First, which applications care about when DST starts or ends? Almost none. Second, what is more polite to the end user: to call a C89 function iteratively and waste a few milliseconds (you may be able to cache the result, and/or use a binary search), or to subject her to a maintenance nightmare? If you roll your own, you have to collect DST data for all cultures and countries, get it right, and explain to the users that your software may break at any time due to political decisions, while all other software continues to work properly.
Not Invented Here is a safer bet when it comes to Java ...
If you want a good example of a broken standard C API, try locales. Environment variables affecting the workings of a wide range of function calls, and no sane way to (for example) format a date or compare strings in some other locale's format without expensive setenv(3) calls which affect the whole process.
I love having more sunlight in the evening, when I'm awake and out doing things.
Yeah, I'm going to use more energy.
No - I am not going to huddle inside my house doing nothing so that we will "save energy". Go stick that idea where the sun don't shine.
Not only that, but also get rid of AM/PM and just go to a 24 Hour clock
Why stop there? Why not just get rid of time altogether?
Think of the many benefits:
I urge you to write your congressman today to put this into law and thus end temporal oppression!
Soylent Green is peoplicious!
I live in Indiana, and I don't know anyone who wanted DST, or has warmed up to it in the short time we've had it in most of the state. (Right, most. Some counties had it before, just as some counties are in Eastern or Central time. Most were with Indy in year-round EST (GMT-5) before. Most changed to Eastern Time (EST/EDT), some didn't. The curse of being adjacent to states with different timezones.) Fact is, it's dark when I commute during the winter and light in the summer either way. Most people I know have the lights on in their office whenever they're there regardless of whether the sun is out or not, and many do the same at home.
I'm sure people who actually spend leisure time outside might care, but they aren't using more or less electricity to do it, are they? The idea that "more daylight" would mean less electric power consumption due to lighting is foolish. The two things don't seem to be related in modern, urban life.
According to the report on the $8.6 million more spent on residential electricity in the state (as reported in the Indianapolis Star), they think there was some saving in lighting but that heat and air conditioning more than made up for it. That makes some sense too- the cost of AC in an office building has got to be lower per person than everyone going home and turning on their own. Heck, I stay late at work for the climate control sometimes, so that's no surprise to me.
But energy savings wasn't the compelling reason for Indiana to go on DST according to the governor. The reason given was business: companies dealing with other companies were supposedly having problems because no one knows what time it is in Indiana. I don't get that either. That's even lamer than not getting up earlier if you want to. And now Chicago's in a different timezone than us (the middle of the state- some of that corner is with them) year 'round, which seems like more of a business problem than their only being in our timezone half the year. Being in the same timezone as NYC seems less useful. Anyone in a non-US timezone isn't going to guess which one we're in anyway.
*cough*...um exactly my point...(sorta)...they aren't fully in one time zone or the other. They are in the western-most region of the eastern-time zone, so the sun will rise the latest of any eastern time zone -- and part of the state ... .. central. Didn't part of the state used to "not change time"? As a western-most time-zone border state, it's usage wouldn't be "typical" of states on the east coast, for example. I knew Indiana was strange for more than one reason, including Steve Martin's remark about the major excitement in Terre Haute being watching the RR cars go by while you are stuck at one of the crossings waiting for a long train...:-)
Seems to me you would measure (and report) energy consumption in kilowatt hours or something, right? Not in dollars? At least, you would explain how you calculated the increased costs with some background detail...wouldn't you?
After all, I think energy costs were up at least "1% to 4%" over the time period discussed. Increased "bills" don't equal increased "consumption".
Finally, I don't know whether you can use 2 counties prior bills as a control for statewide weather patterns, and thus variability in consumption patterns across the state. Her results would only be interesting on a county by county basis.
In other words, localized weather conditions SHOULD have produced disparate results in various counties. The effect of GENERALIZING results across the entire state obscures the facts...
Light effects productivity, consumerism, personal health, and other aspects of the economy. Running this computer I am typing on wastes electricity, but this computer generates revenue for me that makes the cost of electricity acceptable.
DST might cost a little more, but one of the main reasons it was put into effect is that it keeps people from having morning rush hour take place during the dark in higher latitudes (like Alaska, where I live). Lack of DST would be devistating up here, or in northern states.
So efficiency aside, it would be a bad arguement to stop DST. Also, it would royally screw up inter-state communications/trade if some areas had DST and some didn't... it's just best to keep it.
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
"When did Perth join the 21st century and get DST?"
I believe they are just completing the second year of a three year trial of DST, after which there is supposed to be a referendum on making it a permanent, annual event.
There are lot of unhappy people in WA who are trying to get the referendum moved up so they can have DST tossed out (again).
Most profesional people don't need to do this. When I traveled across the country doing business, I would book appointments based on the time of where I needed to be but logged my trip and expenses in my home time (central at the time). So whether this was a tele-meeting or a on site appearance, I had to know what time it was where the customer was and know that 8 am was always their 8 am even though it could be my 7 am if they were easter and my 10 am if they were pacific.
It got a little more confusing when I would fly to california and meet directly with someone while getting a teleconference going in eastern and central time. I would figure their local time out, tell them that it is X am or pm (I usually used military time to get around the AM or PM but almost always had to explain to someone what 1800 hours meant) based on the customer time and then tell them what their local time should be. There are charts, calculators, hand held and updatable computers that make all this a breeze. In the 5 years I did this, I only had one break down in communications and that was actually because one of the destinations had a glitch that required restoring some files while deleted our appointment altogether. Out side of someone needing 5 minute more to prepare or something, it all went smooth.
Why in the world would you reboot for that?
Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power. -- Mussolini
So, by "Daylight Saving Time Wastes Energy", they actually mean "poorly insulated houses with insufficient thermal mass waste energy in Daylight Saving Time".
If the same house uses artificial heating in the morning and artificial cooling in the afternoon, it is not the fault of the time set on the clocks.
p, and dark getti
Instead of wasting even more daylight hours sitting in front of a computer at work, I at least get to go home from work with a few hours of daylight left to do WHAT I WANT TO DO WITH IT.
Where I am in OZ, with DST, the sun can set as late as 9:30-10pm in the summer... which means 3 hrs a night for me to play with the kids outside, get into my power tool collection, get stuff done around the house. My choice. My time.
Winter OTOH sucks. Its dark getting up, and its dark getting home. Any time useful for anything outdoors is spent inside in front of a computer.
They just want you to have a nice, long, bright evening in which you will have the desire to use their products.
where do I sign ?
Trust Indiana to leave a simple system with no DST for a complex one that screws with my sleep twice a year, because businesses could not *stand* to not follow the rest of the country.
Just before congress changed the whole thing, rendering the DST capable alarm clock I bought a waste of money after one year.
Just so we can prove the whole reason we were supposedly doing this was a crock anyway.
Can we go back to regular Indiana time now please? Oh, wait. Republican administration, they'll just change the reasoning again.
sigh.
Pug
An Invisible Entity of Vast Power whose existence must be taken on faith alone: Liberal Media
Are you kidding? Group calendaring is *the* reason that Microsoft Exchange Server is by far the #1 communications platform in use in businesses. By a huge margin over Notes, Groupwise, and . And Google calendar sucks in comparison. It's really tough to suck at anything in comparison to Outlook, but they manage.
s/reasonably fancy/else
s/lot/little
And the POSIX API is then doing a lot more work than you really care about, which means wasted time there, too. That would be your fault for writing or implementing your algorithms stupidly. Dates are not complicated, nor is any data type, inherently. If you can't make them work for you, it's not the fault of the programming language of the data types you're misusing.
All 19 hijackers were known terrorists 09-10-2001. Lack of FBI intelligence does not justify warrantless wiretaps..
that personifies "clueless."
The government can also redefine the mile to be 4000 feet, immediately increasing everyone's gas mileage. That's a perfect parallel, equally wrong, and just as stupid as "daylight saving time."
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
You cannot be serious. I have two such packages (0.5%) on my Linux system: cron and at.
They surely handle DST, timezones etc in some more or less complex way. But not even that is very complex: if the user says at some-time command all at has to do is to calculate the (first) corresponding Epoch time in the user's time zone. Then it can forget all about time zones and use UTC.
We had to apply DST patches acounting systems, ERP systems, CRM systems, mobile devices, VOIP software, HR systems,payroll systems, messaging/groupware systems, backup software, and probably a lot of others.
Almost everything at the enterprise level has some form of scheduling and calendaring. For example, our VOIP system needed the DST patches to correctly generate call activity reports (which are used for departmental charge-backs) correctly. It needed to know the correct hour locally to know the correct rates to charge back.
If everything could use a standard OS library, that would be great. But there is no universtal standard at the OS layer, and even the most common OS-layer APIs (POSIX, Java, Windows) have crippling limitations for some applications. There's also no time zone standard defined in ANSI SQL. Many apps need to support more than one OS or database, so they use their own static table for time zone info.
The typical advice of "store everything in UTC and use an OS library to convert" just doesn't work in many application domains. Microsoft Exchange did it like that, but still required patches because appointments would shift after time zone definitions changed at the OS layer. You needed to know exactly when the appointment was scheduled, and the source time zone definition in use on the client at the time an appointment was scheduled. The user wants the meeting every Wednesday at 1:00 PM local time. There are a lot of edge cases that need handling.
I'm 20 minutes west of the time line and now our idiot guberment have added DST. It also gets to 110F here in the summer - anyone with half a brain was up a dawn exercising in the cool
(or sleeping in the cool if last night was #$%@$ng hot). Then one hides in the air conditioned office until the worst of the day is over.
DST means there is no pre-work time - it's sun up at 07:45 by the end of DST. And you get to commute home in the hottest time of the day. Then you need to get the kids to sleep at what is really 18:30. And still bright daylight.
Give me DST in winter, and winter time in summer. DST sucks if you're less than 30 degrees from the equator and 20 minutes west of the time line.
-- Butlerian Jihad NOW!