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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."
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.
DST seems like a pain. However, after I moved to Japan, I realized how nice it actually is. The sun coming up at 4am is not a cool thing. Makes sleeping in virtually impossible.
So, you can change the clocks, or change your schedule. Having DST ensures that everyone changes together.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
It's not just DST; Much of the population of Japan is at the extreme east of the longitudinal time zone. Many areas of the US lag the true zones, and you just get too accustomed to what "early" is. The solution is simple; get up earlier. That's what I did when I was working in Tokyo. Unless you work at one of the more insane places, if you get to work early enough then you can leave right at 5 without anyone complaining. If that's not possible, try to make the morning your free time. Mind you this is coming from someone who is no morning person at all; The simple truth is that you have to adapt to the local circumstances. Besides, if you live in a city there's likely a 4:30am train that will wake you up anyway even if it is dark (damn Gotanda line).
DST is not a panacea, and is more trouble than it is worth IMO, especially when politicians start changing it for no good reason. I think we should just stick to the "early" schedule, and live with the idea that you need to get up when it is still dark in the winter. After all, you have to come home in the dark during the winter anyway, so there isn't much of a difference. The "schoolchildren excuse" doesn't really apply anymore either since few kids walk to school nowadays, and if it is really that big of a problem the school could use a later schedule for young children or alter it for part of the year.
That's Arthur David Olsen for all Unix, Linux, BSD, Macintosh, and then the guy from Microsoft. It's gotta be only one guy at Microsoft, the way of handling this in Vista is so dumb.
Bruce Perens.
I actually think that the whole Japanese time zone is wrong. The sun is up for 4 hours before anyone leaves the house, and you're still going home in the dark. It's a total waste of daylight, but it isn't a DST problem so much as it is one of the timezone being totally screwed up.
Here's the Zoneinfo article in Wikipedia. Impressive.
Bruce Perens.
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.
When it's light later in the evenings, people drive more.
People use cars in the mornings to get to work, and that doesn't change with lack of daylight.
While the new rules expanding daylight saving time had been promoted as environmentally beneficial, the promoters only claimed it was to reduce home energy consumption (as electricity and heating fuel). The new rules were expected to increase total energy consumption as people stayed out later and used their cars more. This has meant a net increase in energy consumption, heavily weighted to increase the consumption of oil.
While an increase in home energy consumption may surprise some, the increase in oil consumption is no surprise; it's exactly what the legislation was intended to do.
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?
"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."
My boss. Well, actually I could probably do that. But then my daughter's daycare has to agree to open an hour earlier, which means her teacher has to agree to go to work an hour earlier, my co-workers have to agree that all meetings will end an hour earlier in the afternoon, etc, etc.