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Daylight Savings Time Increases Energy Use In Indiana
enbody writes "The Freakonomics Blog at NYTimes.com reports on a study of Indiana energy use for daylight savings time showing an increase in energy use of 1%. 'The dataset consists of more than 7 million observations on monthly billing data for the vast majority of households in southern Indiana for three years. Our main finding is that — contrary to the policy's intent — D.S.T. increases residential electricity demand.'" Maybe that's just from millions of coffee makers being pressed into extra duty.
I've gotta say, I'm in England and as soon as the clocks change, my power consumption goes way up. I don't even use heaters where I live so I've never worked out where it's coming from....
I can say, living in Eastern Illinois (Chicago), that when Daylight savings rolls around, we do engage our coffee maker to make the transition a little easier. If enough households do this, I wouldn't be surprised if the "coffeemaker" effect is significant enough to cause serious change in energy usage. For example, our coffee maker draws 1200 watts(!) while brewing.
Of course it is very difficult to make an apples to apples comparison since energy demands are changing year to year anyway. Observed changes cannot be only attributed to the DST changes.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I still have a number of computers that are running older operating systems for which there is no patch. The best thing to do about this ridiculous time change stuff is just to put it back the way it was.
NO SHIT.
Of COURSE daylight savings stuff changes how much electricity you use.
Afterall, if they give us an extra hour of daytime then your appliances are running for a full 25 hours a day.
you have to run all your appliances for that extra hour every single day all winter.
liqbase
Daylight Saving Time. Saving, singular, not Savings, plural.
As you were.
In order to really determine the effect though, they need to look at all power usage not just households. What about municipalities (street lights, water pumps, etc.), businesses, office space, Government offices, etc.). If you don't calculate it all - and you come out with a 1% difference - you may just have found nothing of any relevance since the intent is to save power overall.
I live in indiana and i can see why. Since it starts getting dark here about 5:30-6 and is fully dark by 7-7:30.
When we fall back from DST to standard time, I notice a lot of people seem more visibly depressed, or "blah." I think there is something about the day ending at 4:30 pm that feels unnatural. Not only are the days getting shorter in the Fall, but then people have to deal with the sun setting an hour earlier.
This indicates to me that people actually enjoy DST. If anything, I would support a year-round DST.
I don't care if it uses more energy, I like it when it gets dark later. I like getting out of work while it's still light outside.
The article doesn't describe how the produced the estimate of 1%. If they just looked at the year-over-year change, the number could be meaningless as that might be within the normal variation/trend of energy consumption.
The method economists use in this situation is to look at the group that your changing (Indiana) and compare the change in energy consumption to a nearby control group (Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky). You can then look at the RELATIVE changes to get a valid answer.
***
Ok, I just followed the link to the actual paper, and it looks like they used several Indiana counties that were on DST prior to the policy change as their control. So, yeah, their results look pretty valid. In conclusion: Down with DST!
Where I live, switching to DST means I'm getting up earlier, before sunrise and running lights I otherwise wouldn't need. Although it makes sundown later, it doesn't seem to save me much energy. I may run fewer lights, but I still have to run A/C, which is the major hit on my electric bill in the summer.
Plus, I find the sudden shift back in the fall to be rather depressing. One Friday I'm coming home after work in the daylight and the following Monday I'm driving home in the dark. The gradual shift of the seasons would be less jarring for me at least.
Beta sux! Join the Slashcott! http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4760465&cid=46173047
I thought the change of DST rule was to create IT jobs in adopting the old system, and troubleshooting the mess introduced by the old rules, etc....No?
Anyway, every time operation should be done in UTC in the core especially when it has to deal with cross timezone operations and globalization.
On the other hand, It's stupid to see Windows can only handle 2 active rules before Vista at any given time, on the other hand *nix and Vista can have define unlimited rules given a period of the time. I couldn't imagine how one would devise a local time using the DST rule of time in Windows XP, probably revert to reinvent-the-wheel?...luckily I don't have to deal with anything like that yet.
DST has been studied many times over the years and the informed consensus is that it just doesn't work. Here's a good link about it: http://www.autobloggreen.com/2007/03/11/think-daylight-saving-time-saves-energy-think-again-or-not/
The long and the short of the matter is this. It's good for business - it gets people out of the house and into the stores after work. So business lobbies government for the required legislation and pushes the energy saving myth to snow the public into going along with it (despite it being an inconvenience in the minds of many).
Why didn't they test this in a few states before doing it nation-wide? They fuck with our clocks, operating systems, and minds with no rational plan.
Table-ized A.I.
I think the key phrase is "D.S.T. increases residential electricity demand."
The company or what/whoever you work for will see a positive effect, at the expense of the consumer. That is exactly what I've always believed DST was meant to do (by those who invented it), in the first place.
Second, what is the one percent based on? Previous months use? Historical and adjusted values for same month use?
Third, do the increases adjust for changes in fall activities. For instance, were the kids all going to school at the same time? Does the start of school effect the figures?Do the number of holidays effect the figures?
All I really know at this point is that some people stuck some number in spreadsheet and saw a spike. Next thing you will telling me is that the only reason the days start getting longer is that, fortunately, some traditionalist still hold a ceremony on the 21st to make it do so, rather than the much too late 25th.
I really don't know if DST helps, or if this paper is valid. However, it appears that the only variable this paper controls for is weather, and rather For instance, their data shows an increase over the month of September, exactly when parents are getting up earlier to get the kids ready for school, while July through september, months when parents do not get get kids ready for school, is not increased, even though children may be home during the day using electricity. I do see how any question is answered. Some nice data analysis, so nice inferences, but who knows if anything else.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Every year, the energy utilities report that they observed no difference in energy use when daylight savings time is changed. It really is time to stop this annoyance.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
The whole idea of having to develop an entire infrastructure and spend so much effort (e.g. writing software, following changes in policies, synchronizing between different DST zones, even manually correcting clocks) just to supposedly save a little energy thanks to "using more sunlight" is beyond idiotic. I won't even touch the fact that to me it is kind of obvious that the DST could never work as intended. But even if we were certain it would work, the CHANGE twice a year add such an overhead that would wipe out any potential gain.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
Anybody else out there think it's a little odd to be using the term "Standard Time" for a period that covers only 4 months of the year now?
I live in Indiana in a county that had no daylight savings. I would get up and the sun would be just rising. I would shower and drive to work in the morning sun. I would work all day and come home and the sun would still be up. I would do my house work and eat dinner and the sun would be setting. During the winter I would get home just a hour or so before dusk and nothing else would much change.
Now I get up and it is dark. I turn on lights, take a shower and because it is dark out I just feel more tired. This means I actually take longer to take my shower and get ready to go to work. On top of this I find myself drinking coffee to stay awake. I get home and it is still daylight, but it still feels like it gets dark just as quickly.
Worse then that is the period leading up to the time change. It was dark when I woke up and dark when I got home. This was the previous month before we switched times again. Daylight savings is a stupid premise imho.
How long must we continue this DST insanity? It doesn't accomplish anything beneficial. Nothing, nada, zip. If you like getting out of work in the light, then lobby to switch your state to a different time zone year round, but please please not DST.
On the other hand DST costs us plenty in confusion and lost work hours, and in maintaining software that deals with 24x7 matters. All such software must deal with one 23 hour day an one 25 hour day each year. Especially when said software integrates with external software and people it is next to impossible to assure error free transition to or from DST. Someone in the chain always drops the ball. One of these days, we're going to have an accidental missile launch or a nuclear meltdown or some really bad accident directly linked to DST.
One of the real lessons we should have learned from Y2K was that dealing with our insanely complex conventions for time and date are vastly expensive and the cause of chronic errors. New errors are still being created every day because the author deals incorrectly with time. DST just heaps on even more crap and returns no benefit.
The thing is, the DST adjustment is performed when the average montly temperature drops rather fast. That drop reaches the double digits at my home town. So if someone notices an increase in energy consumption in the range of 1%, why do people jump to the conclusion that the increase was due to the DST and don't even stop to think that when the weather cools down people do enjoy staying warm?
Correlation doesn't imply causality, not even when you are looking into your pet peeve.
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
People seem to forget the effects industrialization have had on us as a society. Not even a hundred years ago, time was something only the wealthy cared about. The rest of us got up with the sun, and went inside when it went down. Until the industrial revolution, this worked fine -- there was less work to do in the winter anyway. This is how nature in general has worked for thousands of years -- by the motions of the sun.
Daylight Saving Time might have been implimented to save some money, but the truth is that it's more valuable psychologically because it keeps us all closer to the natural rhythm of the Earth. But even now drugs are being rolled out so that humans can go without sleep for days or weeks at a time, work at night and sleep during the day, and many other ways of keeping the machinery rolling. At this rate, in another 30 years, I doubt daylight savings time will mean anything at all... Because we'll work around the clock, slaves to the machinery.
And we'll call it progress.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Down with DST!
1) Any good developer knows you don't redefine time. If a business wants to start work early, just say start at 7AM.
2) What about all the wasted time spent dealing with the change?
We need the extra hour of daylight for growing our Fall crops, so leave DST alone.
Pretending this is my office full of bitter coworkers..
What do you mean by you like? Didn't you hear? We're all supposed to conserve energy for The Earth. It's not about what anyone likes, it's about sacrificing our comfort, our prosperity, and our way of life to benefit The Earth. The Earth demands sacrifice!
Now, start listening to your Leaders. They know what choices you should make. They say you should conserve energy. For The Earth. Any choice that uses more energy is Bad. Any choice that uses less is Good. There are no exceptions for productivity and no consideration for humanity. Just use less. Obey.
(The Leaders are exempt and may use all the energy they wish.)
contrary to the policy's intent
That's something that we've been hearing a lot lately.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
The Bush administration, with
its fine misunderestimated mathematical minds,
who also calculated that if Osama Bin Laden
was hiding on the Afghanistan/Pakistan border,
we should go defeat him in Baghdad.
Oh and the same minds who calculated that
even though co2 lets in visible-light and ultraviolet
energy from the Sun and reflects and traps in infra-red
energy that radiates back off the Earth, it won't cause
global warming, because that would reduce oil
sale revenues.
It's honestly quite a shocker that this cunningly
devised plan didn't work.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
as is behavior. I'd like to see this study done in major cities.
So a 1% change in anything is far too close to random to be worth considering.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Well, it is nice that in the afternoon I can take my kids to the park, work in the garden, or commute with some day light... All in all, I can actually live my life a lot more because there is daylight when the day is over, and I can enjoy 7 days a week, not 2... But, if we need to use 1% more energy, well let's panic. The energy savings of DST has obviously been silly since light became a small portion of energy usage, but if it's only 1% more, I'd say that's pretty cheap.
I think that I can 50% - more recreational time each week during DST, so if I can do that for 1% more energy, terrific. OTOH, I spent less time watching TV on on the computer because there is more useful daylight, another bonus. Daylight before I get up in the morning doesn't do me any good, but having daylight for my commute in and for my evenings with my family are precious.
I'm always saddened when DST comes to an end. Why the whiners on Slashdot complain about DST, I'll never understand. The transition week is annoying, and my two year old has been struggling with his rhythm being off, but as a trade off for all those summer afternoons in the park with him, it's a bargain.
Could it be possible that without DST, the power usage would actually be higher? I notice that they don't have pre-DST data for the same seasons. I know that my power usage goes up after DST because it's cold and dark out in general. DST doesn't really change anything about my own power usage. And most things that relate to the dark (street lights, spotlights, garage lights, etc) are either on timers or use light sensors. Those are independent of DST as well, but will show an increase in power consumption due to the decreased daylight.
-b
No offense, but I've stopped responding to AC's.
I don't care what anyone says, what any statistics say, I wish we'd do away with standard time all together.
It gets dark WAY too damn early, and it gets light in the morning WAY too damn early.
I'd rather it be on "Daylight Savings Time" year round. Despense with the setting of the clocks twice a year, and all the headaches that result from it. Just let us go to Daylight Savings Time next year, and then STAY THERE. Forever.
I can't imagine any valid reasonable reason not to.
- Spryguy
There are three kinds of people in this world: those that can count and those that can't
This study seems to verify the obvious: you will use more power no mater what, if you have less daylight per day.
But does this mean that DST is useless? I don't know, but I'd say that one can not judge that based on a simple comparison of power consumption during DST and non-DST periods.
To see if DST does save power (and how much), you must compare it with what we would have consumed if DST were not in effect.
For example, in Greece (where I live), during mid-summer, it gets dark after 20:00. During the winter, even with DST, it gets dark as soon as 18:00. That's a whole 2 hours of more dark per day! Even with DST, I think it's normal we'd consume more power.
Now, had we not used DST, it'd get dark as soon as 17:00. That would be 3 hours less daylight per day. I bet we'd use even more power had DST not been in effect.
Also, how does the study compensate for the increased power demand for heating (spaces, water, etc)?
In short, make sure they're not comparing apples to oranges...
To err is human, but to forgive is beyond the scope of the Operating System...
an evidence that my country, Japan, shouldn't introduce DST. Japan is again considering to introduce DST even though we already concluded it won't work in Japan for cultural/geometrical reasons decades ago. Pro claims that it's good for environment, but I haven't seen a single scientific evidence to support it. Con, like me, complains that DST will definitely confuse people and IT systems!
Burma-Shave
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
And it has nothing to do with the fact that it's becoming winter?
That just can't be.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
If I have to wake up for work, I'd rather do so only after the sun is up. Something about getting up before sunrise just makes me hate it all the more.
Go get a regular, 8-to-5 job like the rest of us, and you, too can get out of work while the sun is still shining.
Mitch said it would be different. He wouldn't lie to us would he?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
the population doubles every ten years, so it is likey, the energy consumed,is in league w/the population too.
happy trials
Here (in the UK), electricity is generated in GMT/UTC, but sold to customers in DST.
Thus, your bill for the last sunday in November is for 25 hours of electricity supply.
He is a genius!
I wish that guy in our R&D team (I would watch the results from a far away bunker, though).
We're told it was to save energy, which is bull, what it really is about is increasing the amount of time kids can trick-or-treat on Oct 31 by one hour and thus increase demand for candy.
The major lobby groups for the candy industry have spent the last 20 years trying to make everyone think it'll save some power.
you know, back when farmers where around, then it made sense to change it. Now it just messes up everything. First of all, all of a sudden it gets light an hour early, I wake up with the sun so at what used to be 8, it's now 7 so I have to do something for that extra hour (use electricity to post on /. for example) then I come home at night and where I used to make dinner in the sunlight before plopping down in the couch or doing something, now I need electricity to light up my kitchen for the rest of winter until the sun (and my body) has caught up with the time. Next to that because my body clock is all screwed up for the rest of the month, I have one hour less sleep and one hour more activity whether it be computer, tv or something else, I live at night and I have to use electricity to light my house.
And then when summer comes around, the same thing goes the backward way. All of a sudden it's dark in the morning and I need lights in my home and office for the whole morning (because once it gets light enough, I don't notice them being on).
And there is no excuse for farmers anymore, one of my family members is an 'agricultural engineer'. These days farms are industrialized and literally work 24/7 to work their huge lands with as little (very expensive) machinery as possible (having 3-shifts of work on 1 machine). And the "biological" farmers (the smaller ones that sell their food at premium price to health stores) work at night now too since it's suppositively healthier for their crops and the environment to be cultivated (plowed etc.) at night. Even the 'classic' farmers have huge spotlights on their machines, I don't know any farmer that still has his horses pull a plow.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
We consume more electricity in the winter.
I remember my Mom telling me that when they first implemented DST when she was young, one woman in town said that she would not change because she was going to "stay on God's time." Uh, huh. About as logical as any other argument in favor of DST.
Do you hate getting out of bed 1 hour earlier at the start of daylight savings. Try this:
1 week before daylight savings starts, set your alarm 10 minutes earlier each day. That is it.
Your body adjusts a lot better to the 10 minute differences than it does to one 1 hour difference.
That is all.
it is only after a long journey that you know the strength of the horse.
It's very far west in its timezone already, and DST simply enhances that effect. It would be interesting to run the same experiment in, say, Massachusetts or Illinois (which are in the eastern part of their respective timezones) or New York (which is centrally located in its timezone).
As an Indiana Resident I predicted this and complained about the change. Since I now get home at the hottest hour of the day I want my house cool. There is a big difference between the hottest hour of the day and when I used to get home an hour after the hottest hour. It was a bad move to change most folks I talk to think so.
Most of Indiana doesn't observe daylight savings time. I lived there working third shift, and I would go out at 3:00 or so for a smoke and see the sunrise getting ready to happen. Sure, Gary is on Central time and that little city near Cincinnati observes DST, but most of the state pays no mind to the rest of the fools who think they can gain something by springing forward and falling back.
The Tea Party is just the GOP with a bag over its head.
So, according to TFA:
"This paper takes advantage of a natural experiment in the state of Indiana to provide the first empirical estimates of D.S.T. effects on electricity consumption in the United States since the mid-1970's"
And:
"The dataset consists of more than 7 million observations on monthly billing data for the vast majority of households in southern Indiana for three years."
What the hell is that supposed to mean?
It would seem like they are trying to draw conclusions about the last thirty years from three years of data!
Even if their data is good TFA makes no effort to put the stats into anything resembling a context!
For example, did they mean:
1. We use 1% more energy during DST than the rest of the year.
3. During the changeover from normal time to DST we use 1% more energy.
4. Overall, over the last thirty (or is it three?) years, we now use 1% more energy during DST than our data suggests we might have used otherwise
5. etc
If I could be bothered to read past TFA and look at the original paper I might be able to answer my own questions, maybe, somewhere in between the cool sounding terms like "micro-data", they mention how they took seasonal variation into account, but why ruin a good statistic when we could just emulate our good pseudo scientific friends?
Most excellent. Pedantry is becoming a lost art. You can almost never find a grammar nazi when you need one.
Let's not confuse pedantry with grammar nazism; they are not the same, though they often appear so to the layman.
A pedant is concerned with picayune details of correctness. Such a person has problems with bad science in science fiction movies, for instance.
A grammar nazi is often a very confused person who believes that is 'one true grammar.' Such a person is especially confused when we're talking about corrections to the use of the English language, as there IS no central authority for the language, and what some people assume to be hard and fast 'rules' are actually specific styles that vary from region to region, and publication to publication. The 'AP Style Guide' (AP is for Associated Press), and the Chicago Manual of Style are great examples of the latter. Neither of these are more correct than the other, unless you're writing for a publication that mandates that particular style. A grammar nazi will latch onto one of these things and never let go, not realizing that 'rules' like 'no dangling participles' and whatnot, are no more 'rules' in English than whether you put a comma or not before the last item in a list in a sentence. Many of the AP 'rules' are what they are to save space and/or ink in printed publications, and have little to no bearing (at best) in the modern world, or are unnecessary or deleterious with regard to electronic publishing. You can always tell the English majors and print geeks are involved when you see paragraphs with no blank lines between them, and a 'half-inch' indentation starting each paragraph. The Web is not the same as print (nor is it the same as TV). You'll also notice these people tend to put two spaces after a period, etc., and insist on curly apostrophes and quotation marks. They also love the phrase, 'below the fold,' as if that was a specific measurement on the Web. These people believe that all computer screens use 72 'dpi', and don't understand that CRTs, at least, can vary their 'dpi,' simply by changing resolution. I belive I've strayed from my point here - sorry.
I prefer clarity and ease of understanding before any perceived 'rules' of English grammar, which certainly proves, at least in my case, that pedantry and Grammar Nazism are not the same.
Though I really hate it when people put in unnecessary apostrophes. "CD's" for instance. Gack.
both em-dash and hyphen are available on your keyboard btw
What you linked to does not prove what you said. Putting in codes to output the characters you want is not, in my mind, the same as 'available on your keyboard,' and Pedantic-Man isn't especially interested in such nonsense as outputting different types of dashes/hyphens when the 'minus key' on the keyboard will do for the sake of clarity. Pedantic-Man is also pretty lazy. :)
Pedantic-Man says, "Stay out of trouble!"
The people who lobbied for DST to be extended were retailers and candy makers(think halloween) because if it is light out after people eat dinner they go and shop.DST benefits retailers.And since our economy runs on people shopping DST is good for the economy.
Good advice. I checked out those en- and em-dash inputs on this Mac Powerbook, and sure enough, I get three different-length dashes. But a hex dump showed me that the en-dash and em-dash are both UTF-8 encoded. So I'll predict that if I enter them here, they won't show up correctly on many readers' screens. Let's try:
- hyphen
- en-dash
-- em-dash
Now is there a way to find out what fraction of readers see all of those as the proper-length dashes on their screens? Hmmm ... Let's try the Preview button and see if it even works on my own screen ... Nope; the first two came back as hyphens, and the em-dash came back as a double hyphen. So the claim that I can input them from my keyboard failed spectacularly in this simple case.
The problem, of course, is that there is no universally-accepted encoding for the en-dash or the em-dash. Only the ASCII hyphen works reliably everywhere. If /. accepted UTF-8-encoded input and didn't damage it, AND if /. correctly labelled the text as charset="UTF-8", AND if everyone's browser correctly displayed UTF-8 text, it would have worked. But it's been more than 15 years since Ken T gave us the UTF-8 encoding, and most of the computer world (especially inside the US and Europe) has quietly ignored it.
(Yes, I know that by "most of the computer world" I meant Microsoft. But in this case, MS probably isn't involved; the damage was done by slashdot's software. MS isn't to blame for all of our communication problems. Both Apple and the linux crowd have made snafus out of their attempts to move to UTF-8 and Unicode, and much of the web runs software that damages UTF-8 text with malice aforethought, as /. did to my above test. ;-)
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
"contrary to the policy's intent"
I don't know where they got the idea that DST was intended to save energy. That must be a more modern excuse for it.
It was sold decades ago as being about later hours in the growing season for farmers, early hours in the winter (so the schoolkids had more light).
DST doesn't affect residential usage all that much; major usage is for water heating, refrigeration. There'll be more use of lighting in the spring, which probably accounts for the 1 percent rise.
"You must try to forget all you have learned. You must begin to dream." -- Sherwood Anderson
Just when the deer are going crazy, they make us drive in the dark. The things are hard enough to see in daylight.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
kinda like the old insult of saying someone has "an eighty-column mind" to indicate they were still in the punch-card mindset, we need something for dumbasses who hit enter at the end of a line like they're typing on a goddamn IBM Selectric. Hey 'tards! We have fully automated WORDWRAP now!
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
it can be two words as in Spider Man
Ouch.
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but it's Spider-Man.
People from the punch card era don't have a monopoly on that. A lot of people who had never seen a punch card, but who had used a typewriter before, would do that. I hated trying to help those people, and don't get me started on people who put extra blank columns or used two rows of cells for column headings in spreadsheets.
It's a very dark ride.
I'll try this on and see who bites.
Daylight saving time affects me in zero negative ways. Zero.
Attention deficit disorder is a complicated issue, spanning several major... HEY LET'S GO RIDE BIKES!
It's all air-conditioning's fault. To get to sleep in the summer under EDT, people need to run the A/C more later in the evening than they would under EST. With a set-back thermostat, A/C runs fewer hours in the day under EST.
...not long after the clocks changed, I strung up Christmas lights indoors. I do this, Not to celebrate Christmas early, but to combat Seasonal Affective Disorder. I'm not formally diagnosed or anything, but the lights certainly help make up for the depressing onset of evening in what ought to be late afternoon.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Greece might be significantly different to the US, because most countries use DST during summer (Summer Time and Daylight Saving Time are typically synonyms). Which means the presence or absence of DST has no effect during winter, because winter isn't summer.
As for your other concerns, the paper outlines the data source. Indiana makes an interesting case study because of the various timezones used in different counties and changes that have occurred over the years, allowing them to make the claims they're making about the effect of DST based on a "difference-in-differences estimate ... before and after the [DST] policy change" of counties that are in a similar region of the planet but which used different DST rules.
I don't know much (anything) about US geography, but others have suggested that Indiana is a bit of an "extreme state" and is probably using the wrong timezone to begin with, so just how applicable this data is to other states and other countries is of course questionable.
You, sir, are my hero!
as there IS no central authority for the language,
I would dare say that the Queens English would be the standard, seeming as it was England where English originally came from. That and of all the colonies that originated from there, apart from slang terms of course, all of them except the united states seem to have the same spelling and grammar, coincidence?
It still perplexes me why the United States intentionally misspelled words and then decided that the misspelling was the new way to spell it. (I am not British but am from a country that was one of the former colonies :P)
It's "Daylight Saving Time," not "Daylight Savings Time."
We should institute a certain range of weeks, where you are required to use instant coffee and lukewarm tap water in an effort to save electricity. The savings would be tremendous compared to this daylight savings time nonsense.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/03/04/0241218
Say out loud: I'm an Aspie and I'm somewhat proud, I guess. Uh. Can I write an email in all caps instead? Hm...
If I could be bothered to read past TFA and look at the original paper
You could try reading for content.
There were some studies in the '70s. There have not been any other studies since then until now.
That doesn't mean they're extrapolating 3 years of data over 30 years, it means they're doing the first studies on the subject in 30 years.
Sheesh.
If it increases energy bills by 9 million dollars - who cares why!
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
hehe youre funny ;)
This is the sig that says NI (again)
An extra hour of light in the evening == higher retail sales. By extending DST, the feds have effectively increased foot traffic in retail districts by a significant amount. Don't believe me? Look at the groups that lobbied for the new federal rules. Various associations of retailers led the charge.
Though I really hate it when people put in unnecessary apostrophes. "CD's" for instance. Gack.
The use of an apostrophe after an abbreviation or acronym like "CD" to make a plural is borderline in terms of "correctness." Formerly, this use of an apostrophe was commonplace. Even as recently as 20 years ago I was taught to use the apostrophe that way in elementary school (as well as its other uses). Now it's considered unnecessary by most, but still acceptable by many people in the United States. (I don't know how this use is viewed in other parts of the English-speaking world).
Now using an apostrophe followed by an "s" to make a common noun plural is a different issue. I've only seen this online, where a sentence like "Lots of tree's and animal's live in the forest" can fit in well with the content of many sites. This usage makes me want to scream and I could imagine makes you nauseous. Then again, who could have imagined before the Internet and SMS the numeral "2" being ever used as a preposition?
Only a white man would believe that cutting a foot off the top of a blanket and sewing on to the bottom would make a longer blanket.
A grammar nazi is often a very confused person who believes that is 'one true grammar.'
A grammar nazi is often a very confused person who believes that there is 'one true grammar.'
There, fixed that for you.
DST
- 1 week of terrible pre-lunch productivity at work due to being shorted an hour of sleep for a day.
- Awake later since the sun doesn't go down until 9pm, so things like TV/Xbox/PS3, A/C etc run longer.
- First week or so, 4 hours of alarm clock snoozing
STD time
-Lights ON from 4pm until 12am, Since its pitch black by 5pm.
-Depressed since I never see the sun.
-Waking up an hour early naturally for about a week... and using things like TV/XBox/PS3, to piss away the time before I have to go to work.
Personally, I think we should stop messing about with our clocks, and just stick to one time.
Even the Queen's English changes. And I'm guessing the country you're from still is a former colony. ;-)
My servers's time is set to UTC. My PDA reports time in UTC. Even my GNOME clock is set to UTC. I also have clocks for the local time and other timezones, but I find that it is mostly the UTC that I need. In fact, I could function perfectly well by using only UTC. When I want to know whether it's day or night, I either look around me if I am outside, or I look out of the window if I am inside, or use a world clock software which shows me a photo of the Earth with a shade wherever it's night. In fact, even while the local time clock is next to that software's icon, I find it much easier to just click there and see on my screen exactly where on earth it's night or day. Lately I am thinking of setting all of my clocks to UTC and getting rid of the local and other timezone clocks, as the same software can also tell me the exact time anywhere in the world, so I don't see much need for the non-UTC clocks.
I really cannot comprehend why people use local time and not UTC. We live on the Internet, and the only meaningful time for the Internet is the UTC. I would love to see everyone else using UTC and getting rid of timezones and DST. These are byproducts of the pre-networking era, but now in the age of globalisation and of the Internet we must work and communicate using a common language (English), a common time (UTC), and common units (metric system).
Almost everything I read about DST is from a person who lives in a particular place, describing their experience in that place. They then extend their experiences to what would be best for the whole country, and studies like this suggest that what's valid for southern Indiana (or wherever) is more generally applicable.
In fact, sun time varies dramatically, even without changing the clock. Near a time zone border, on an equinox, the sun might come up at 5:30 and 6:30 simultaneously, depending on which side of the border the observer is on. Introduce DST, and the variation is 6:30 to 7:30 (if I'm figuring it right). Moreover, the day and night lengths more or less around solstices vary rather widely from, say, Louisiana to Minnesota.
This means that the effects of DST will vary widely with location in the contiguous 48 states. A change that will have one person getting up at sunrise will cause another person to travel to work in the dark, or finish sleeping in full daylight.
This study is valid for only fairly small areas of the US, and any individual experiences you have are irrelevant to the vast majority of people out there. Remember this when you discuss DST.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
for farmers
My plants don't give a fsck over what a fscking clock says. They only care about the sun. All this "DST is for farmers" thing is pure propaganda.
First I do find one positive with the current changes, with Halloween being part of DST now, it's easier for younger kids to go out with daylight. Parents could get their kids out and back, when it's still relatively light.
But either way up north DST doesn't always make a lot of difference, except that it does mean that we don't have sunrise at 4:30am and sunset at 8:30pm. Compared to the 5:30am to 9:30pm.
Where I live, during DST in the fall it is dark in the morning when I get up. I turn one or more lights on. By the time I leave for work it is full daylight. It is easy to not notice that lights I turned on earlier are still on. If I miss one or more they stay on all day.
A grammar nazi is often a very confused person who believes that there is 'one true grammar.'
There, fixed that for you.
Much thanks, Herr Jonnyt. Pedantic-Man caught several other mistakes like that after posting. Bonus points for finding them all!
I would dare say that the Queens English would be the standard, seeming as it was England where English originally came from.
You can kiss Pedantic-Man's American arse. :)
I have no intention of sounding like a queen, much less The Queen. There is debate even in England over the rules of English. As I said, there is no central linguistic authority for English, unlike French or German.
It still perplexes me why the United States intentionally misspelled words and then decided that the misspelling was the new way to spell it.
It hardly matters - the English can't even pronounce words like Lieutenant correctly, so they're hardly an authority on the matter. And when you consider some English people have an accent so thick their movies come with subtitles, I can't consider them an authority on modern English, anyway.
The most interesting deviation, to me, is 'aluminum.' If I recall correctly, the British term 'aluminium' IS actually correct, and 'Aluminum' used to be a brand OF aluminium, and won out in America due to popular usage. Kinda like 'Kleenex' and 'Xerox' have mostly done. Let's hope 'nukyular' doesn't do the same thing. Pedantic-Man would hate to have to move to another country.
And by 'all', I mean both daylight savings AND timezones. I mean seriously... is there some rule that business the world over must open up in the AM and close in the PM? Seriously... it's a very interconnected world we're in, and there's a dozen different "times" one has to look at to connect with someone somewhere else in the world.
I say we scrap all that and just have the entire planet set to GMT. That way, when someone in say... the USA needs to speak with someone in Japan, or even elsewhere in the USA... they can say "I'll call you at 3:00am", and guess what... no confusion, everyone knows exactly when that is.
So our social norms will have to adjust slightly. So I change my clock, and it now says I wake up at 2:00pm and work from 3:00pm to 11:30pm. Boo hoo... doesn't matter, since the stores are open from 1:00am to 1:00pm or whatever. Hell, I'm sure society would adjust in the span of a few months.
So seriously... do we even NEED timezones? I think not.
Ok... I'm done ranting. Now I can go back to knowing that this will never, ever happen.
Planet Zebeth - Metroid with a twist
This usage makes me want to scream and I could imagine makes you nauseous.
In fact, Pedantic-Man is having some trouble seeing right now. Thanks a lot.
The only reason Bush wanted this was to save money for businesses here in the US, because of the calculated extra light, less energy will be used for a longer period of time...on this side of the globe, who is on the other side??? people already too poor, that we should even get them to pay more for their economic growth. Thanks Bush....nice way to finish your term.
Maybe the additional electricity usage is because most of Indiana is in the wrong time zone in the first place. Of all the states that are at least partially using Eastern time, Indiana is the only one that does not have one square inch of its soil in the theoretical/geographic zone: 75 degrees west plus/minus 7.5 degrees. It's almost 2 PM when the sun is straight overhead in the summers.
The most interesting deviation, to me, is 'aluminum.' If I recall correctly, the British term 'aluminium' IS actually correct, and 'Aluminum' used to be a brand OF aluminium, and won out in America due to popular usage.
Almost. But I imagine almost isn't good enough for Pedantic-Man.