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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."
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)
Programmers that have to adapt their code to take in account daylight savings time. They get more work out of the deal. Kind of the Y2K effect. I live in the one state with the sense to ignore it, Arizona. Perception is everything and if there's a perceived benefit it won't change. The real problem is you aren't changing the day length all you are doing is moving the extra daylight from the morning to evening. When I lived in a state with daylight savings I always found it annoying because one day I'm getting up after the sun is up then suddenly the next day I'm getting up and it's still dark. All it does is throw off body clocks and cost productivity until people adapt then in six months they go through the same mess. It's interesting that it actually costs power but there's little doubt it costs money and productivity so it's a pointless exercise.
So just because you can't get your lazy ass out of bed in the morning means you should get more sunlight in the evening... right. What about those who enjoy a quiet morning stroll in the park before they go to work? What about all of us who take weeks, two times a year, to get their sleeping under control because their internal clock gets all messed up? Do I need to walk around like a zombie for days afterwards (again, twice a year!) just because YOU think nature has to adapt to your schedule?
I agree. Not only that, but also get rid of AM/PM and just go to a 24 Hour clock. In all seriousness, it would get rid of ambiguity when referring to time in any medium. It would take some adjusting for people to get the hang of the sun rising at 13:30 where they live, or working from 18:00 to to 2:00. But when you want to call your relatives that live on the other side of the country (assuming your country spans multiple current time zones) it will be easy to say, "Hey, I'll call you tomorrow at 11:00," and there will be no question of "your time or my time?"
No DST.
No Timezones.
No AM/PM.
*slight crashing sound*
What makes "changing the concept of time so that people can get up an hour earlier but still call of 6am" more reasonable than "getting up an hour earlier at 5am"?
What's to stop you starting work at 8am instead of doing exactly the same thing and calling it 9am instead? You'd finish at 4pm instead of pretending it's 5pm, and still get your evening.
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So people are really so stuck in their ways that work has to start when the clock says 9?
If you're going to change the clocks, change them drastically, make 9 occur in the middle of the night, see if people really are stubborn enough to go to work at such hours.
I also think timezones should be abolished, they only serve to confuse, especially with the global communication we have now. Time should be something that always remains constant, so things can be kept in sync. Having multiple timezones confuses that, using dst to manipulate those timezones even further just makes the problem even worse.
Why is it that the idea of things occurring at specific numbers on the clock is more important than what those numbers actually mean?
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