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."

Comments

Who Benefits?

[Bruce Perens]

The story I've heard is that Daylight Saving Time legislation is driven by the companies that make charcoal barbecue briquettes. They don't care if your home uses more heat in the morning. They just want you to have a nice, long, bright evening in which you will have the desire to use their products.

Bruce

Re:Who Benefits?

[edwardpickman]

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.

Re:Who Benefits?

[Bios_Hakr]

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.

Re:Who Benefits?

[belmolis]

Uh, there are such things as curtains and shutters.

The Japanese didn't see the benefit of DST. The US imposed it during the Occupation. The first thing the Japanese government did when it regained control was get rid of it.

Re:Who Benefits?

[Bios_Hakr]

No confusion. In the summers in Japan, the sunrise times are between 4:30am and 5am. DST would push that back to a more reasonable 5:30~6am.

Also, with DST, you get another hour of daylight tacked on to the end of a summer day. In Japan, the summer sunset is around 7pm. It'd be nice to have sun until 8pm.

A third point to consider is that these are the hours that the sun breaks the horizon. It starts getting light as early as 3:30am and is usually completely dark by 8pm.

In short, DST is nice if you like to do things on summer afternoons.

Re:Who Benefits?

[LordVader717]

http://www.sunrisesunset.com/custom_srss_calendar.asp

Hokkaido in June for example, reveals times all before 4am.

Re:Who Benefits?

[locofungus]

The sun coming up at 4am is not a cool thing.

WTF? Are you confusing Daylight Savings Time with Time Zones maybe?

No. It's called living in high latitudes.

In London, even with daylight saving, the sun rises at 04:45 for all of June.

Even now, it's light when I get up in the morning at 06:30 but it's dark before I leave work in the evening.

It's much harder to take advantage of daylight hours in the morning when you are working. I cycle - but I can't go out for half an hour in the morning because I need to be in the shower by 06:35 if I'm going to catch my train to work in the morning, which means I'll be getting at this time of year just around sunrise. Give me that hour in the evening instead and I can have a shower, get cleaned up, whatever, once the sun has gone down.

I'd like summer time in the winter and double summer time in the summer (or even triple summer time). On the longest day It's sunrise at 04:43 - and almost nobody is up and around at that time. But it's sunset at 21:22 and there are lots of people out and about at that time. And that's with summer time giving us an extra hour in the evening.

Several safety groups in the UK claim (I haven't seen the figures) that there's a spike in road traffic accidents to children when the clocks go back. Roughly, it goes from sunset at 17:45 to sunset at 16:45 across the UK.

Aberdeen, at the other end of the UK, gets sun from 04:12 to 22:08 on the longest day. On the shortest day it's 08:46 to 15:27.

Tim.

Re:Who Benefits?

[Rob Simpson]

Curtains and shutters are nice. But how do you plan to get that extra hour of sunlight after work? Work 8 to 4?

Re:Who Benefits?

[SnowZero]

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.

Re:Who Benefits?

[Bruce Perens]

Programmers that have to adapt their code to take in account daylight savings time.

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.

Re:Who Benefits?

[kklein]

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.

Re:Who Benefits?

[Bruce Perens]

Here's the Zoneinfo article in Wikipedia. Impressive.

Re:Who Benefits?

[ultranova]

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.

Ever heard of curtains ?

Besides, here in Finland, you go to work before sunrise and home after sunset. Not that the Sun is usually visible during daytime, either. Now that global warming has taken snow from the ground, this place makes Hades seem like a carnival.

So don't complain that Sun rises before you do where you live.

Re:Who Benefits?

[Waffle Iron]

Work 8 to 4?

That's right. And the most surefire way to convince your boss to let you work 9-5 in the winter and 8-4 in the summer is to institute DST.

Re:Who Benefits?

[harrumph]

The oil companies benefit. This was known before the new rules went into effect in the United States.

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.

Re:Who Benefits?

[Bert64]

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.

Re:Who Benefits?

[Bert64]

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?

Re:Who Benefits?

[mattcasters]

What makes it more reasonable?

The fact that everyone in the same geographical area does it together I guess.

Re:Who Benefits?

[Rosy At Random]

Because you're then out of sync with your social circle. You might have more sunlight to enjoy in the evening, but you'll spend the first hour of it on your lonesome, and head off to bed before everyone else. I've worked night-shifts; being out of sync is Not Fun.

Re:Who Benefits?

[locofungus]

So get up at 5:30, start work an hour early, leave an hour early.
By changing the definition of time you're defeating the point of having a clock. Why are people so set in their ways that things must happen at fixed numerical times? If you changed the clock so that 9am occured during darkness, would people still go to work at that time? It's utterly absurd.

You know, my employer has these strange things called employment contracts that includes the hours I'm expected to be at work. And trains for my commute have things called timetables.

And people going to work in the dark? That's absolutely standard for me for half the year. Coming home in the dark as well.

But rather than use up two hours of daylight commuting during the summer I like the clocks to change so that I only have to use up one of them. But they don't change early enough to allow that.

Tim.

Re:Who Benefits?

[digitig]

So people are really so stuck in their ways that work has to start when the clock says 9? No, but they're so stuck in their ways that if you leave an hour before everybody else you're seen as slacking.

Re:Who Benefits?

[lt.com.riker]

I think we're all confusing an important distinction here. Any point in time has no predefined label. When dealing with measurements it is important that a meter is always the same length and that a second is the same length, but what we call any particular second doesn't matter because it's just a handy way for us to keep an organized life.

Maybe I can explain what I mean... So, the label of "04-March-2008 7:57am" is just a label applied to this moment in time; it's not some undeniable fact of the universe. Since we're naming it we can name it whatever we want. On another planet this same moment in time is labeled entirely different. On a planet with 30 hour days maybe this moment in time is "27:36".

Heck on that note, why do we even make a distinction between the AM and PM? Why doesn't everyone just use 24 hour time?

I hate to reference Star Trek, but this is the reason why a Stardate was created, so that planets, spaceships, and other interstellar outposts could all have the same time reference. A Stardate would be defined somehow so that regardless of local time all clocks throught the Federation are standardized, just like a second is standardized.

Re:Who Benefits?

[Zenaku]

Well, Star Trek is fiction, and doesn't take into account relativity. The very concept of "On another planet this same moment in time" is a contradiction, because the passage of time depends on your frame of reference.

I am not a physicist and don't follow the math, but one of the things that general relativity says is that just because some event A happens before some event B when observed from our frame of reference, doesn't mean those same events happen in that order when observed from another frame of reference. If you are on Earth and I'm on Chiron Beta Prime, and we are looking at two stars going super-nova, and in your frame of reference Star A goes before Star B, I may observe Star B to go nova before A.

It's not just a speed of light thing either, there is simply no absolute frame of reference for time, just as there is no absolute "center" of the universe. The lack of an absolute frame of reference makes it impossible to define a consistent "universal clock."

Re:Who Benefits?

[bcattwoo]

"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.

Re:Who Benefits?

[fizzer82]

First, I have to mention that I don't believe that you "hate to reference Star Trek". We can see your username, I'm sure you're a huge trekkie, don't be coy.

Also, swatch has already tried this in an effort to sell us a new kind of watch. http://www.swatch.com/internettime/

There was a decent amount of press when they started it, but of course its just a stupid marketing thing and nobody really cares. A universal time standard just doesn't add any real value. Timezones work out pretty well and people like the fact that daily schedules map pretty well to the same time no matter where you go. Oh, and I hate to break it to you, but we're not going to have to be dealing with interplanetary time synchronization for quite a few lifetimes.

Re:Who Benefits?

[BigDogCH]

If DST was abolished, and all companies were encouraged and allowed to alter their hours accordingly, they would. States that didn't have DST still survived, happier by many arguments.

In manufacturing, hours are already often changed due to heating and energy issues. Office workers hours could be changed for similar reasons, and the general customer service industry will follow suit.

DST is the tool of the Devil.

Re:Who Benefits?

[DudeTheMath]

Indiana, which was the subject of the study, lags quite a bit. The eastern edge of the state (Fort Wayne) is about 85 degrees west longitude, 10 degrees west of the notional center of "GMT+5" (360 / 24 = 15; 5 * 15 = 75). So the eastern edge of the state is already ten minutes into the notional "GMT+6", and the western edge (Vincennes, Terre Haute; Gary is on Chicago time anyway) is about 87.5, a full twenty minutes into GMT+6. So the particular money-wasters mentioned in TFA, heating in the morning (from getting up earlier) and cooling in the afternoon (getting home from work/school earlier) are exaggerated by the fact that the state's solar time is already, on average, forty-five minutes behind the clock time. I've long maintained that Indiana (and Michigan and western Ohio, for that matter) belong on GMT+6 anyway. But nobody listens to mathematicians.

Re:Who Benefits?

[Kagura]

I think most people would have the same issues. I know it's a little bit of a loony idea, but if we could make some sort of legislation that FORCES everybody to change their schedule an hour earlier, we might be able to solve some of these problems.

Re:Who Benefits?

[Teancum]

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.

You forget how timezones were created here. Before the concept of a time zone, current time was regulated by determining the local mean solar time for you particular location... meaning your exact longitude. Defining what "now" was could be different even on opposite sides of a college campus, much less between different cities. At least with the concept of a time zone, all the arithmetic you have to perform is to add or subtract a few hours, unless you are dealing with truly global enterprises or projects.

On a historical note, the concept of a time zone was introduced by the railroad companies, who found that it was incredibly difficult for them to make train schedules where each individual town on the route would have its own definition of time. Imagine the locomotive engineer who had to have something like a complex GPS receiver that would give the local "time" as they moved across Kansas heading for the Rocky Mountains built out of 19th Century technology. It just didn't work, so instead the idea of a time zone that would only have to be occasionally adjusted for genuinely long distance travel was created.

This also had the advantage that it was at most about a 1/2 hour off from the "local time" used in the previous definition of "now". In other words, it wasn't too difficult to move people off of the previous "standard" onto the newer "standard" of time zones. With your proposal of elimination of time zones (which is pretty much the case anyway in terms of synchronizing computers and other scientific experiments needing that level of organization), getting ordinary people to adjust to a global clock is going to cause many other problems. Such as why should Paris/London be selected as the "ideal" time zone, as opposed to Moscow, New Delhi, Beijing, or New York/Washington DC? GMT/UTC is an adopted standard only because that is what mariners for the UK Royal Navy used during a period of global colonial dominance, not that the French didn't mind using the same standard either for the most part as Paris and London are nearly the same longitude, at least for time considerations.

One other thing to consider (and I've had to be blunt with people from different time zones to point this out)... 8 A.M. "local time" is when most people get up, and about 10 P.M. is when most people head for the bed. If you are aware of this when dealing with people in other time zones, you can be much more polite and note when they may be "in the office". Having a bill collector call you at 6 A.M. is not only annoying... it can even be illegal, especially if they ignore the concept of a timezone when they call you. And yes, that has happened to me.

Re:Who Benefits?

[marcosdumay]

"It's gotta be only one guy at Microsoft, the way of handling this in Vista is so dumb."

It is hard for an individual to be dumber than a big team. It does happen sometimes, but not often.

Re:Who Benefits?

[Belial6]

That argument requires you to believe that it is ok for you to create a huge hassle for the entire country so that you can passive aggressively force all of your peers to hang out with you.

Re:Who Benefits?

[russotto]

Actually, it's called the Broken Window effect. Look it up :)

Sure, but just because the broken window is a net negative for society doesn't mean that glaziers don't benefit.

Re:Who Benefits?

[ArikTheRed]

And what really pissed us IN. citizens off was that Congress decided that next year to play around with the definitions of DST and when they switch. Really? I always figured what really pissed off you IN citizens was having to live in Indiana.

Re:Who Benefits?

[Rosy At Random]

Look, don't diminish my argument by being reasonable. It's rude.

Re:Who Benefits?

[Jerf]

Well, Star Trek is fiction, and doesn't take into account relativity.

Actually, the point was to take into account relativity. There is no unique "simultaneous" between two distant places, but you are free to define a "now". It's just that the universe won't respect it; the mere definition of a "now" won't prevent the usual litany of FTL paradoxes, which Star Trek (and all TV science fiction) generally just ignore... what else can they do?

This isn't fiction, we already do this. We have several systems that have tight enough tolerances that we need to define a "now" that is much more precise than the lightspeed communication delays inherent in the system. The GPS system is one of the more well-documented instances of that; the entire system needs to share a "now" to much greater precision than they could hope to directly communicate, and we don't have a problem defining a useful "now" for the system.

Re:Who Benefits?

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

"So people are really so stuck in their ways that work has to start when the clock says 9?"

When you've got multiple people on a team and customers/clients to work with, then yes, they're 'stuck' in their ways. If you've ever described somebody as a 'flake', then you already understand this concept.

"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."

Okay, you win, if you take something to an absurd extreme, people won't follow it. Glad we got that all cleared up.

"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."

All you'd do is solve one problem and create a whole bunch of others. At least, right now, I know roughly what time of day it is in Australia. I know what the hour offset is, and I know the sun sets there roughly the same time it does here (relatively speaking.) With your proposed system, I'd have to know what time of day the sun sets for them over there. "Their sun rises at 9am and sets at 8pm... Oh, wait, it's summer for them right now, so it's like 10pm.. I think... " Since our days are tied to the light/dark cycle of this planet, we'd have to make a lot of other things relative with the only common base of reference not really being all that intuitive. It makes getting that conference call in Tokyo a little bit easier to arrange, it makes picking the right time of day for everybody to get involved a bit harder.

"Why is it that the idea of things occurring at specific numbers on the clock is more important than what those numbers actually mean?"

Because if you poke your head outside at several times over the next 12 hours, you're likely to catch a glimpse of the sun. Our bodies are tuned to that. Our lives are tuned to that. We haven't reached a point yet where we're ready to shed ourselves of that. The Time Zones solved a huge problem, as did DST, by giving everybody an intuitive point of reference. Switching to 'stardate' will solve a few problems, but it will not actually reduce the number of problems we have. As the years go by, and technology becomes more and more ubiquitous, your suggestions may come to pass. Actually, I have no doubt that'll happen. But right now, despite how whizz-bang our communications capabilities are, we're still heavily influenced by the sun. And that means we need things like Time Zones to co-ordinate. Sorry.

Re:Who Benefits?

[Heian-794]

Japan did indeed see DST as something not worth doing, but even before that comes the problem of what time zone Japan actually lies in.

Look at a time zone map and you'll see most zones leaning over to the west as people try to get a little more sunlight in the evening. France and Spain are particularly noticeable. Japan, on the other hand, leans to the east. Japan's time is the same as Korea's, despite lying well east of that country, and Vladivostok lies west of Japan, yet is an hour ahead! Why did Japan do this?

Answer: Since there are 24 time zones around the globe, and thus a new one every 15 degrees of longitude, Japan decided to base theirs on the point in their country that lies on a multiple of 15 degrees, which is a point in Hyogo prefecture. The problem is that the vast majority of the population of Japan, including almost all the big cities (Kobe, Osaka, Kyoto, Nagoya, Yokohama, Tokyo, and Sapporo) lie east of this line.

Nobody in Okinawa clamors for DST, because the time zone positioning is just right for them. It's the people up in Sapporo whose kids are walking home from school in darkness at 4 PM who want it.

What Japan really should do is break the country into two time zones, with the Kyushu/Shikoku side keeping the current time, and the rest of the country jumping an hour ahead. Barring that, just have the entire country jump an hour ahead and stay there permanently. It would even give them the chance to distinguish themselves from the rival Koreans just a little more!

What we're stuck with is a country where we have to endure 28-degree (83 deg F) indoor office temperatures in the summer for the sake of power conservation, yet no thought is ever given to fixing the clocks. The cynical, conspiracy-theorist answer is that they'll never do this because the electric companies make too much money from people using their lights in the early evening!

Re:Who Benefits?

[TheLink]

"people seem to cope OK with them, week in week out"

Well you can cope with not enough sleep. It doesn't mean it's good for you.

DST offsets of 1 hour _might_ make sense in some places where daylight hours reduce by 1 or 2 hours in winter.

But for other places I don't see the point - it's still going to be mostly dark in winter anyway. No point fooling yourself that way, after all we've already got this new fangled electric lighting thing nowadays.

I currently live in an equatorial region, but I've stayed for a few years in a country with DST, and I don't think DST was worth the hassle.

BTW, China has just one timezone, I'm not sure how people like solar noon happening at 15:00... I wonder when their mealtimes are in those areas.

Re:Who Benefits?

[leenks]

And the managers have to issue a change request to the manager of the programmers in the other department, so that a change advisory board can sit (involving all the managers but no technical people) so they can decide which programming resources to allocate. The programmers wont ever be allowed to communicate with the request originator though, and the solution invariable wont be right because the managers changed it before it got to implementation stage, 12 meetings ad 6 months after the request went in.

At least that's how it is where I work :(

Re:Who Benefits?

[Translation Error]

Or in other words, "None of us is as dumb as all of us." Courtesy of Despair.com

Re:Who Benefits?

[iabervon]

The point of time zones (including DST) is that you can find out the local current GMT offset, and you'll know what hours to expect local businesses to be open. Sure, I could guess that the bank will be open 13:00 to 21:00 UTC (14:00 to 22:00 UTC during the winter), but if I went to Chicago, branches of the same bank will be open from 14:00 to 21:00 (15:00 to 22:00 in the winter), and I'd have to remember what business hours are there, instead of having a device that conveniently maps those business hours to the same business hours we use at home.

Furthermore, in California in the winter, people working desk jobs would be leaving work on a different date than they arrived. If you were told you needed to get something in by closing time on Wednesday, you would have to figure out if you had to get it in before the closing time which is on Wednesday (UTC) or by when the business closes after opening on Wednesday (which may be the end of the Wednesday work day, but is on Thursday).

Like it or not, there's a lot of things that are common to events that happen at noon of the time zone they happen in. If you find out something was stolen at 13:50 UTC, and you don't know where it happened, you don't know if this was a bold daylight robbery or a thief in the night. If you know it happened at 4:50 am local time somewhere, you have a better idea of what the event was like, even without knowing where it was. The fact that, in other places, businesses were open and people were around isn't very helpful.

Re:Who Benefits?

[krazytekn0]

I own a business in Arizona, and during the summer we start work at 6:00, when the days start cooling off and getting shorter we move to 7:00 then 7:30. Another added benefit is the the human physiology is more suited to an activity schedule that changes with the seasons. Also during the summer many employees opt to wait until shift end for lunch giving them an extra hour with their families. In the past we had not always had this dynamic schedule but upon implementing it productivity during the summer months went up greatly (no matter what kind of work you're doing, your body just doesn't seem to want to work at 4:30 in the afternoon on a 115 degree F. day)

Why not do it like AZ?

[Xenographic]

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.

Re:Why not do it like AZ?

[Baricom]

And it seems that it's much less wasteful, too. Very true. In fact, I wonder what the actual U.S. labor cost of changing clocks for DST would come out to. Even if you say it takes 10 seconds to reset each clock, that adds up over millions of people.

Re:Why not do it like AZ?

[Endymion]

The one I want to know is how much energy it takes all of the people across the country to separate out and otherwise deal with recycling. Sure, it's just a few seconds here and there, but added up, that's probably a significant number of Joules of energy being used.

And then to convert that amount of energy into the number of barrels of oil it represents. I don't think most people have ever considered the equation of how much oil we are spending to enable us to use less oil. (only talking plastic, of course - aluminum is a pretty clear case of a win for recycling)

There's probably other things, too, that we just take for granted as they are such small impacts on our time (energy), yet add up to significant amounts in aggregate.

Re:Why not do it like AZ?

[QuantumG]

Take vitamins.. lot safer than being in the Sun. Do you have a family? Every minute you are in the Sun is another chance that you will get skin cancer and DIE.. then who will take care of your kids? Don't you think it is a bit selfish of you to be endangering your life like that? :)

Re:Why not do it like AZ?

[arivanov]

While your argument is correct, logical and makes sense it is not applicable in most places around the world. At least here the Trade Unions have managed to have the working hours for retail premises legislated. Similar legislation exists for premises selling alcohol, pubs, cafes, etc around the world. Politicians have been busy and it sometimes it is really easier to move the clock and get over with it rather than get two fat volumes of century old legislation off the books.

Re:Why not do it like AZ?

[vux984]

Yeah, and oxygen is what leads to old age and ultimately 'so called' natural death. So breath less. Breath slower. You only have so many. Make them last. ;)

Re:Why not do it like AZ?

[QuantumG]

Don't get me started on how bad exercise is for you.

Re:Why not do it like AZ?

[Bios_Hakr]

Bullshit! did a show on recycling. More or less, the only recycling that matters is aluminum. All other recycling *only* works if subsides are in-place.

Most plastics can't be recycled. Type 1, 2, and 3 are *recyclable* but type 1 is the only one commonly recycled.

Most paper will degrade anyway. A lot of landfills can use this degradation to power equipment and produce electricity.

Re:Why not do it like AZ?

[alshithead]

"Skip DST entirely. No clock changes at all."

Yeah, let's do away with all of this time zone crap too. I think the folks on the other side of the world from me can all go third shift.

Re:Why not do it like AZ?

[MoogMan]

And while you're there, use UTC. There is no sense in using timezones, it just causes pain and suffering for people that talk to others in many different countries.

Re:Why not do it like AZ?

[Phroggy]

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. Because somewhere, somebody is making money on this, and they would stand to lose quite a bit if we all adopted Arizona's model. The question is, who is that somebody? Bruce Perens above said it's the charcoal briquette manufacturers; I've heard it's WalMart and other retailers (selling charcoal briquettes, but also other picnic/outdoor/camping gear). It's pretty obvious that the official reason (saving energy, which is why the DST change was attached to an energy bill) is a load of crap.

I wouldn't be surprised if all the required computer updates cost $2 billion for IT.

Re:Why not do it like AZ?

[Bruce Perens]

Glass is a win, too. Lasts forever in a landfill, but makes great house insulation if you recycle it. Given that sand mining in California is now from underwater, that's got to be a win. Paper and used cartons get bought, so I'd be surprised if they weren't a win too. Out here in Berkeley there's a biowaste can for yard and food waste, and they compost it en masse, with proper temperature and agitation, not like most backyard compost. The city doesn't buy fertilizer, and they get enough extra to hand out sacks of beautiful carbon and nitrogen rich black soil to the residents. Plants shoot up on that stuff. There is a commercial styrofoam recycling plant in Oakland.

So, what's left is plastic.

Re:Why not do it like AZ?

[amRadioHed]

There's probably other things, too, that we just take for granted as they are such small impacts on our time (energy), yet add up to significant amounts in aggregate. I guess that depends on how you define significance. Someone a little down thread figured that the US wasts about 95 man years changing clocks for DST every year. Ok, that sounds like a lot but only if you pretend it isn't an aggregate of millions of peoples time. Any insignificant amount multiplied enough will come out to a significant amount but that doesn't make it significant. I just tried to imagine something that American's spend less time doing than changing their clocks and I drew a blank.

Re:Why not do it like AZ?

[SixArmedJesus]

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.

Re:Why not do it like AZ?

[f1r3f0g]

Birthdays are bad as well. Too many will kill you.

Re:Why not do it like AZ?

[Hognoxious]

Beware of hydrogen hydroxide!

Re:Why not do it like AZ?

[Asic Eng]

Won't that just replace the problem with "what time do you guys start work over there?" If I call a colleague in Australia or India now, and they till me it's "11am here" I at least know what that means in relation to their normal daily routine.

Re:Why not do it like AZ?

[greyhueofdoubt]

One of the nice things about time zones is that it preserves the experience of time across locations. For example, "morning" means a time, usually around 6 am, and it is a concept that is easy to translate. Morning means morning no matter where you are, excepting very northern and southern latitudes.

Your system would work fine for internal time systems, but humans I think need that common ground for communication. Instead of saying, "an earthquake struck the Azores at 1300, which was 2 hours after sunrise," you could say, "An earthquake struck the Azores at 8 am." Or 0800. I don't object to a 24-hour clock; it's what I use at work.

I just don't see how it would be easier to say, "call me in the morning, which is 1500 your time," vs "Call me at my 0700. I'm 9 hours behind you." Human experience rotates around the sun, not numbers. Having morning be a different hour each thousand miles would not be any different from having morning be the same hour that happens over again every thousand miles. You need to remember eithe time zones or, er, a different kind of time zone. Unless you expect people to wake up in the middle of the night to suit your new time convention.

IMO.

-b

Putting the thermostat above 60 wastes it too

[istartedi]

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.

Re:Putting the thermostat above 60 wastes it too

[amRadioHed]

If we do away with DST, who says we need to stick with the summer hours all year round? If we keep the winter hours than we get more of that nice daytime after work all year long.

Re:Putting the thermostat above 60 wastes it too

[rrkap]

You have it backwards. Summer hours give you more daylight after work. Given my choice, I'd switch to DST year round and deal with going to work in the dark.

Or the sample is not enough?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Or the sample is not enough?

[dkleinsc]

Indiana isn't exactly balmy or southern, suggesting that Mr Markey is talking without any clue as to US geography (or is making excuses). The southern tip is at roughly the same latitude as D.C., and the northern end is right near Chicago.

Who's shocked?

[grasshoppa]

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.

I can only speak for myself

[pembo13]

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?

Re:I can only speak for myself

[olof_the_viking]

That would be a really interesting experiment here in Sweden, where the laplanders would then have both the whole summer and the whole winter off from work :)

DST Improves Quality of Life

[ortcutt]

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.

Re:DST Improves Quality of Life

[compro01]

We did that here in Saskatchewan. We've been on year-round DST since 1966, a fact the "let's go DST" crowd seems to blissfully ignore.

Re:DST Improves Quality of Life

[Gutboy]

Maybe we should just set the clocks so the sun comes up at noon. That way you'll get to see a beautiful sunrise over lunch, it will be nice and bright outside when you get home, and the sun will set sometime after you go to sleep.

Re:DST Improves Quality of Life

[Kokuyo]

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?

Alternate interpretation

[Sneftel]

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?

Re:Alternate interpretation

[Anonymous Coward]

I could simply say RTFA, but I'll also mention that they used the data from other illinois counties that used DST before and after as a control... funny how researchers think of these silly details before it reaches slashdot...

more recreation time & increased economic acti

[Marbleless]

... 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.

Give me more light in the evening

[PhantomHarlock]

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)

Re:Give me more light in the evening

[qwer_tea]

I think it should be permanently 'sprung forward' so we get more light in the evening.

I think you're confused about our time system. Hint: there is a reason that 12 at night is called midnight and 12 at noon is called midday.

If you want more daylight, wake-up ealier rather than messing with your (and our) clocks.

well thats different

[malignant_minded]

...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...

then a study by University of California-Santa Barbara economics professor Matthew Kotchen and Ph.D. student Laura Grant

...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...

No, Really!

[Bruce Perens]

Look at how Kingsford crows about the earlier institution of DST in this press release. I bet they do serious lobbying on this issue.

I want a different kind of daylight savings time.

[fredmosby]

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.

Re:Daylight savings is great. I vote we keep it.

[compro01]

how about you follow our (Saskatchewan's) example and have DST year-round? We've been on DST full-time since 1966.

Letter to my congressional reps

[swm]

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, ...

You're close, actually

[IdahoEv]

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.

Re:You're close, actually

[Phroggy]

The other end was extended to include Halloween for safety reasons; kids can go Trick-Or-Treating in daylight.

Re:You're close, actually

[harking]

You're both wrong!

DST has been lobbied for years by Cat Inc. Think of how many more birds can be killed with an extra hour of daylight!

IMO the extra hour of light is nice when recreating outdoors.

First post

[Morgor]

This would have been the first post, if I remembered to set my clock for DST.

Here is a solution for you

[patio11]

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.

And Eliminate Time Zones Too

[RailGunSally]

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.

Re:Who Benefits? (OT rant)

[totally bogus dude]

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.

Split the Difference

[Tekoneiric]

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.

Year old paper that came to same conclusion

[Spikeles]

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 live in Alaska...

[TFer_Atvar]

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.

Um...

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not adjust the timezone permanently?

Re:Um...

[Jarik C-Bol]

exactly, every time the time change rolls around, i go around swearing it'd be simpler to just change the clocks 30 minutes in the direction we're supposed to change them at that time and then never ever ever do it again. I'm obviously not complaining to the correct people.

Re:Um...

[WK2]

Because Daylight Saving Time is a method to control people. Without DST, business will start at 8 or 9, and then quit at 5 or 6. By implementing DST, the government can effectively coerce these businesses to start at 7 or 8, and quit at 4 or 5. If DST was permanent, businesses would gradually go back to what their customers want them to do, and start at 8 or 9 (but will be called 9 or 10). Then the government would have to add another hour to force the businesses back another hour.

Basically, the clock is just a label. If the government stops shifting the clock around, and gives every point in time a constant label, then it just becomes an unbiased way to label the day, and no longer a way to control people.

Not a downside

[Woldry]

What's wrong with spending an hour on your lonesome? Being the antisocial curmudgeon that I am, I'd look forward to it.

Re:Not a downside

[Rosy At Random]

Damn your friends and their social ways! Why can't they just leave you alone with your faithful petunias?!

Re:Wait a sec

[chanda3199]

If Indianaians are using more A/C and more heating, its they who are at fault.

We're called Hoosiers you insensitive clod!

Star Trek's Fictional Time

[alexhmit01]

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.

Re:Wait a sec

[spun]

Well, I should know Slashdotters aren't familiar with sexual terms. In this case, "Who's your daddy?" does not in fact indicate any kind of father-daughter relationship. It's used to elicit an admission of submission, "You're my daddy" which simply means "You are dominating me (and I like it)" The 'daddy' is the top, the dominant person, the one controlling the experience. This is often followed by light verbal humiliation, spankings, pretend choking, rough oral sex, things like that. I know you may never get a chance to try these things out in real life, but perhaps this will help explain some of the confusing and frightening images you've seen whilst masturbating to porn.