Slashdot Mirror
Why Earth Hour Is a Waste of Time and Energy
An anonymous reader writes "Next Saturday from 8:30PM to 9:30PM EST is 'Earth Hour' (0:30 to 1:30 UTC on Sunday). Millions of people will be participating by shutting off their lights for an hour to show they care about the environment. However, according to this article in Slate, Earth Hour is simply 'vain symbolism,' and it won't actually save any energy — quite the opposite. Quoting: 'Notice that you have not been asked to switch off anything really inconvenient, like your heating or air-conditioning, television, computer, mobile phone, or any of the myriad technologies that depend on affordable, plentiful energy electricity and make modern life possible. If switching off the lights for one hour per year really were beneficial, why would we not do it for the other 8,759? Hypothetically, switching off the lights for an hour would cut CO2 emissions from power plants around the world. But, even if everyone in the entire world cut all residential lighting, and this translated entirely into CO2 reduction, it would be the equivalent of China pausing its CO2 emissions for less than four minutes. In fact, Earth Hour will cause emissions to increase. As the United Kingdom's National Grid operators have found, a small decline in electricity consumption does not translate into less energy being pumped into the grid, and therefore will not reduce emissions. Moreover, during Earth Hour, any significant drop in electricity demand will entail a reduction in CO2 emissions during the hour, but it will be offset by the surge from firing up coal or gas stations to restore electricity supplies afterward.'"
But I couldnt find my keyboard in the dark
Then I'm going to cut down 6 trees and key 4 people's cars.
is exactly this. Now I dont know anyone who in their right mind wants to "destroy the environment" yet for the most part, environmentalists work on a knee jerk reaction style of attack. "green" energy is too expensive to compete with proven yet "dirty" tech? well instead of developing the green tech to compete we must artificially increase the cost of the dirty fuel! we cant use plain old light bulbs anymore, that use more power (and give off heat, thus meaning one could in theory keep their heater lower) and now we are stuck with CFLs that are worse for the environment than the old bulbs!
The idea of "saving the earth" is a good one, but on the other hand, the earth will be fine long after humans inhabit it.
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
I thought Earth Hour was about reducing light pollution?
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
It's environmentalism theater, just like we have security theater. If I turn out the lights for an hour I can say I've done "my part" to help the environment and raise awareness then go back to ignoring it the rest of the year.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Like most, if not all other enviromental efforts, it's all about talk and symbolism, and very nearly nothing about actually doing the math...
The point of Earth Hour is public awareness, to get people talking, thinking, discussing solutions. To experience one solitary hour without electricity exposes westerners to the daily hardship that billions around the world face due to lack of electricity. I'm here in Egypt, they currently have a 20% electricity generation deficit. This means that even though I may live in one of the best neighborhoods in Cairo, I experience low-shedding 1 hour every second day. My Earth Hour is every second day! So, can the hipster who doesn't have a clue who submitted this story, pull his head out of his self-important ass? You're either part of the problem, or part of the solution. Bitching about awareness of the inequality in the world as being a waste of time is being part of the problem.
If it was truly pointless and wasteful, as an American I'm pretty sure I would have heard of it before now.
Yes, Earth Hour does nothing in itself; I thought this was something that pretty well understood and didn't require *another* article written about it. The point of Earth Hour, however, is to build awareness of living in -- and contributing to -- a changing climate. That said, the feel good factor itself might be detrimental as people will feel that they have done their duty for the year. But this is currently, as far as I am aware, unsubstantiated and probably warrants actual research.
Likely as not, it would save more energy, and certainly help with human internal clocks.
From what I understand, they actually observer statistically distinct spikes in heart attacks and suicides with the time changes each year.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
So how about we listen to this post and just stop caring at all. If turning your lights off wont help then why even try, lets turn everything on full blast and leave it on.
Us feeling better, the environment doesn't actually better. But being able to say you did something for 1 hour out of almost 9 thousand in a year, somehow makes people feel like they're taking strides towards saving the environment... Or maybe it's the symbolism involved.
Fuck your "Earth Hour", I will spend it standing in front of my fridge wasting energy.
That's a long time to rearrange the magnets on your fridge.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
Like most, if not all other environmental efforts, it's all about talk and symbolism, and very nearly nothing about actually doing the math...
Math is hard.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Only a politician would think you could cut a foot from one end of a blanket, sew it to the other end, and have a bigger blanket.
This article and the one a couple below it remind me of those tedious debates in freshman dorms where everyone is trying to prove how smart they are by taking contrary positions.
Look, this wasn't my idea but evidently people want to show that they can act as a community and do something very, very small together, too small to make any difference in itself, but the idea is that at least we can all come together and focus on the problem for a moment. And so maybe we can eventually cooperate more effectively at some point. Isn't that totally obvious? Yes, but not for the sorts of people I mentioned above.
a small decline in electricity consumption does not translate into less energy being pumped into the grid, and therefore will not reduce emissions. Moreover, during Earth Hour, any significant drop in electricity demand will entail a reduction in CO2 emissions during the hour, but it will be offset by the surge from firing up coal or gas stations to restore electricity supplies afterward.'"
So the drop in energy demand won't reduce the amount of electricity pumped into the grid, but after the hour is over, there will be enough extra demand to require new coal plants to be brought online even though they were still producing the same amount of power as before?
Sounds kind of like the logic my power company uses to explain high costs "The high demand for electricity means we need more money to build power plants and our increasing costs mean we need to charge more for electricity. The large number of home solar installations with net metering means that our expensive power plants are running under capacity, thus we need to charge more for electricity"
First, I can't believe anyone takes Lomborg seriously anymore. His rantings are not based on science, and the only reason anyone noticed him in the first place was because he styled himself an "environmentalist", which he clearly isn't. Second, as other posters have pointed out, Earth Hour isn't meant to actually save any energy, it's to build public awareness. He's erected a strawman and is trying to knock it down without regard to what is real.
No sig? Sigh...
Crap like this is feel good meaningless junk science that does absolutely nothing to solve anything. This is no better than saying were going to boycott the gas stations on Sunday (and fill up on Monday). People need to get real about the environment and as long as we've got crap like this and lunatics at places like greenpeace getting the headlines were going to continue shooting ourselves in the foot. We don't need the Haliburton's of the world do the damage when we keep deluding ourselves by pulling crap like this.
Let's go shopping!
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Forget CO2 levels. This is a helpful excuse to rendezvous with your lady/fellow and figure out *some* way to amuse yourselves for an hour in the dark. "Hey, it's for the good of the planet. Or whatever."
Nothing more than feelings.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q3CZNKgnNE
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
As a kid, I remember scenes of people cheering and celebrating as the lights of a newly completed skyscraper were turned ON for the first time. Nowadays (thanks to a couple generations of brain-washed kids unable to shake off their mindless conformism) people cheer when we turn these lights OFF.
That's a lot of built up dark they have to dispel after the hour is over, and that takes energy. Who the hell need physics when we can make unfounded guesses?
Even if you did shut off things of significance, it would not make a big difference.
Anyone that understands how the power grid is run and electricity distributed, and power generation is applied could tell you that.
1) The grid itself needs a certain amount of electrification simply to remain stable and on.
2) Because power use is not constant, and various types of generation mix is different, you will have to maintain a baseline of power anyway. That nuclear plant that generates 4GW doesn't just turn off because the need no longer exists. It generates 4GW all day/night all the time regardless. One of the benefits of nuclear.
It would prevent say the usage of say quick spin up generation such as gas or coal to meet specific needs during peek generation. Or the use of potential storage like hydro during peek hours. But again, turning off the lights won't make much difference there either. If everyone turned off the AC during a heatwave, during peek usage, yeah that might make a small difference.
Anyway as pointed out, it is simply a PR campaign and an awareness thing. Anyone who believes they are actually doing something significant should be looked at with an arched eyebrow.
Studies have proven that having DST at all does save energy - artificial lights used fewer hours per day. I don't know if staying on that time all year would negate that savings or not.
My area was hit by Hurricane Sandy in November and my electricity was out for a week! I think I've given my hour for quite a few years!
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Well DUH! Earth hour IS symbolic. So what. In doing this, we are reminding ourselves that the world will not end if we reduce our energy consumption. We remind ourselves of how wasteful our energy use is. It encourages people to make long term adjustments to their energy consumption habits. When I see posts themed "fuck Earth Week", I am reminded of a 10 year old boy having a temper tantrum and holding his breath. That or a paid poster. The simple fact is that an economy cannot thrive long if it is based on a culture of waste. It is deeply irrational to think that waste is a positive practice. Waste of energy. Waste of financial resources. Waste of labor resources. Waste of physical resources. Wasting scarce resources makes us all poorer in the end.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
I looked into it a few years ago after staying at an "earth friendly" surf resort that didn't have elctrical power in Nicaragua. They gave everyone two candles a night and insisted it was eco-friendly.
The amount of soot, CO^2 and other bad stuff from a single candle is worse for the environment, not to mention your health, than running a 60W light bulb off electricity generated at a coal power plant in the USA. In all likelyhood a coal plant in Nicaragua is worse than the USA but I thought it was interesting...
A popular "green" ritual is just an act of empty symbolism designed to make people feel morally superior while actually doing nothing and causing no real inconvenience? No! I refuse to accept that!
It's still near freezing point where I live, but I think I'll follow your lead and start my air conditioning system as a symbolic statement too.
And then I'll crank up the heat to compensate.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
If switching off the lights for one hour per year really were beneficial, why would we not do it for the other 8,759?
The stupidity of the question aside, why are you implying that we all have our lights on 365/24/7?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
And other studies done when DST was increased a few years ago showed increased energy use due to more home AC use. AC uses a lot more power than artificial lighting, and home AC is generally a lot less efficient than commercial AC.
But that's all moot, because you can achieve the same thing as DST simply by having places of business open and close an hour earlier. Except, of course, without the downside of stupidly forcing everyone to change their clocks and adjust to a different time twice a year.
So how about this: just switch to DST year-round. Maybe then people will realize how stupid it is to set clocks off by an hour. I mean really, if we're going to do this it makes more sense to simply use GMT everywhere and forget about time zones all together. After all, we're already not using the best time for our time zones so having clocks for any purpose other than keeping track of time is already gone.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
While writing a story about Hannukah and other lighting miracles, I found that modern LEDs can run for 6 months on the equivalent of 1 day's supply of menorah oil. So if you were to attempt to illuminate your house with candles for Earth Hour, you'd consume 4000 times as much oil. Thankfully we don't do that.
Beyond Earth Hour's temporary abatement of light pollution in participating cities, earth hour is symbolic. It is also a talking point. "Wow, look at that comet, I wouldn't have seen that if we hadn't turned off the barn light." "The building's landscaping is a bit too bright, I think it looks better against a natural sky.", "Hi neighbor, would you like me to show you Jupiter and the Pleiades through this telescope." , "Hey this is fun, why don't we do it once a week?"
No, is expected to take him about 1 hour to write the above message on his fridge using magnets.
That is because the average person cannot in any way dent trans oceanic shipping burning bunker oil, or stop the americans and chinese from burning tonnes of coal per second. Of course its symbolic. Symbols are the only way for the average person to focus in on these earth sized problems. Christmas does not bring "good will to all mankind", however it may be enough to focus in on goodwill in your own life. Thus symbolism can bring a certain focus on the individual level to get people thinking about all the energy we use every day and what it would be like if it one day shut off / became unaffordable and we really did have to go without.
Symbolism is very important here precisely because we cannot do anything meaningful on an individual level to combat global climate change. It's all we have. I have never believed that one person giving up their car, or consuming no boxed foods makes a difference globally. I do not think that actual reduction in emissions is the idea behind earth hour. I think people that make that judgement are missing the point of it. Same as "buy nothing" day. Stuff will still get bought by someone, that's not the point, its symbolic.
*flame hat on*
As a potential lottery winner, I totally support tax cuts for the wealthy
But that's all moot, because you can achieve the same thing as DST simply by having places of business open and close an hour earlier. Except, of course, without the downside of stupidly forcing everyone to change their clocks and adjust to a different time twice a year.
Don't I have to adjust to a different time twice a year if my work shift changes by an hour twice a year? I mean don't get me wrong, I hate DST, and I work from home most of the time, so it doesn't really matter to me, but it seems like its practically the same thing for 90% of the population.
> 'Notice that you have not been asked to switch off anything really inconvenient, like your heating or air-conditioning, television, computer, mobile phone, or any of the myriad technologies that depend on affordable, plentiful energy electricity and make modern life possible.
I can't address all of these, but computer? I read back in the late nineties that computers dissipate a power level less than a 75 watt bulb, probably less now with power conservation and "green" designs. And cell phones? Miniscule, compared to generating light or heat. Televisions? Maybe old tube type, or really humongous sets now, but in general, I'm under the impression that they don't use that much power. He has a point about air conditioning (in most cases) and heat, but those, plus light, are gross uses of power.
I'm not convinced that a given individual's electronics would be a substantial percentage of their personal, total power footprint. (There are probably alpha nerds out there who heat their rooms with i-products and only use them in the dark, but I'm thinking not many.)
The contention seems to be that what you should switch off is measured by convenience rather than actual power usage. This seems an conceptual error.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
All of the "studies" I have seen "proving" that DST saves energy are thought "experiments" rather than actual real life studies of what happens when some locale changes from not having DST to having DST. All of the studies of actual occurrences of changing from never changing the clocks to implementing DST have shown an increase use of energy after the change (although in at least one of those cases the change was small and could potentially be attributed to other causes). In other words, all real-world studies of energy use and DST indicate that best case scenario is that DST makes NO difference in energy use and quite possibly increases it.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Except in this case, for some people, it does.
If the blanket is "daylight hours", then tweaking the clocks so that less of those hours occur when I am sleeping means I see more daylight hours. Of course people who get up and go to bed earlier than me could see less daylight hours or just see the timing of them moved a little. Still in the country I happen those who see more daylight hours outnumber those that see less for a net win.
My thermostat doesn't have a clock. I don't adjust it most days at all. Maybe I'm not the "average" person, but I thought that was pretty common.
Turning off air conditioning or heat for one hour will accomplish absolutely nothing. As soon as it is turned back on it still has to move or generate all the heat energy over that hour it would have otherwise. Simply put, it will have to work a little harder to catch up what it would have been doing over that hour anyway. Same with hot water heaters, dehumidifiers, refrigerators, etc. Merely putting off washing clothes, cooking, etc obviously accomplishes nothing either.
Better known as 318230.
After all, we're already not using the best time for our time zones so having clocks for any purpose other than keeping track of time is already gone.
Amen, I once tried to use a clock as a skateboard, and the goddamn thing just crumbled into a million little shards of plastic. I guess the old saying is true, "a broken clock is right as long as you don't give a shit what time it is."
Oh, you meant clocks serve no purpose other than measuring time relative to itself, and especially are not for determining the optimal moment for any given activity that relates to the position of the sun... Right...
It may do absolutely nothing for energy consumption, but as a bonus people that live in cities/large towns will have less light pollution for shots of the stars.
Hell even the hour without light does save some. I know I'm not the most conservative about energy but it was proven that it takes less energy to turn off and on a light even for minutes then leaving the light on even CFLs. I think it was on mythbusters. I leave a computer on at home 24/7 as a DVR and as a complete home server. This waists a lot of energy. If I could afford it I'd put more efficient stuff in it. I consider it a necessity. Unplugging all devices would increase the electricity saving. All smart home stuff like x10 and others uses a small amount of power to be able to turn items on and off. Computers that can be turned on via ethernet use power to watch for the magic packet. There are no modern convinces that don't waist some amount of power. Maybe get solar powered outside lights to read a book for a few hours and flip the main breaker to the house would save the most electricity. If your family does it enough you can lower your electric bill to.
The Canadian Broadcast Corporation (CBC) radio show 'This is That' did a piece a while ago about a group proposing an Innovation Hour as an alternative to Earth Hour... in short, "If it has a switch, click it!" They're asking people of the world to turn everything in their houses and businesses on, or "run it hot," for one hour to celebrate in ingenuity behind innovation.
Here's a link to the 'story': http://www.cbc.ca/thisisthat/news/2012/09/18/innovation-hour-calgarian-asks-canadians-to-run-it-hot-for-an-hour-each-year/
Err...what?
Why would the sun all of a sudden start coming up at 3-4am?? With or without DST sun comes up here about 6am +/-
I don't live at the north pole after all.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Ask someone who does shift work on a sem-permament basis about this and you'll get a completely different answer.
"it is a bit less confusing ... for you" - so the rest of the world, having realised that consistency and accuracy is more important than the light from nearby star? How do people cope in Binary or other types of star system? Answer: They just do.
"your sundial won't work" - well my analogue TV doesn't work, along with lots of other old tech I've thrown away or re-purposed because the rest of the world moved on. I'm still better off with what I have now instead, it's called "progress". Despite governments and wars holding us back in other ways, progress still happens, and it's still a good thing. (fictional example)Your sundial probably wouldn't work that well in my Firefly-class transport, either, but I'd rather be on board exploring than not... (fictional example).
This tagline was transcoded to result in at least one smirk. If you experience failure to smirk, please consult your Gen
I've always wanted to hit the EPO switch in the datacenter. This will be the perfect time to test.
To maximize my effectiveness, I could turn on all the lights in my home the day before, so when Earth hour comes, I can turn them all off at once, for greater savings.
I honestly have no idea what you mean.
A vast majority of people, the whole concept is a huge waste of time. If someone wants to have more daylight hours in their work day, wakeup just before daylight. Why move the freaking clocks? It doesn't make any sense, and it never has. Hours are just a measurement, there's nothing that says you have to be asleep at 7am. If you want to get up early because you'll get more daylight for things you're doing, get up early!
Instead we have this system where we jump the time forward or back an hour, and it serves no prupuse. It's a waste of time and energy.
It's optional and voluntary, as opposed to being mandated by government. Besides - you mentioned "shift". I work third shift. It matters not one iota to me where the sun is when I wake up, or lay down. It matters just a little on the drive home, because in the spring and fall, the sun is in my eyes for part of the drive. And, it matters not at all where the sun is while I'm at work. Only when I step outside for a smoke do I see whether there is a moon and stars, or it's dark, dark, dark. Time changes mean nothing to a shift worker, except he loses or gains an hour of sleep when the time change occurs.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
If someone wants to have more daylight hours in their work day, wakeup just before daylight. Why move the freaking clocks? It doesn't make any sense, and it never has. Hours are just a measurement, there's nothing that says you have to be asleep at 7am. If you want to get up early because you'll get more daylight for things you're doing, get up early!
Sure, and if you could convince a few hundred million people to do that, you probably wouldn't be commenting on Slashdot, you'd be President of the whole planet. People are not rational, and they do not behave rationally. A person is, sure, but people as a group are not, and they never have been. You can make all the theories you want about how daylight savings was always a stupid idea, but if you forget that large groups of people are involved, and that those people won't follow the logical path, you're just wasting energy typing.
Mind you, with how cheap electricity is now, and with how much interior lighting is used anyways, it doesn't matter anymore and hasn't for decades, but it made sense at one point.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
It's called symbolism people not everything in life has a 0 & 1 state.
Hey! I though this thread was going to be a reminder to stock up on whale oil and wicks for the lamps we will need in lieu of the electric lamps
Have some CO2, buddy.
Have gnu, will travel.
This article follows a fairly standard template: Make up some criteria for success that the event organizers don't use, then claim it's a failure because it doesn't do those things.
Earth Hour was never intended to save power. So yes, it doesn't save power. The point is simply awareness, and it's been pretty successful at doing that.
Now, that awareness hasn't translated into *results*, so you could claim it doesn't work on that regard. But this article doesn't do that.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Stop Political Statements, and work to reduce your own energy footprint as good as you can.
Turn off light you don't need, Adjust your thermostat to be a bit cooler in the Winter and a bit warmer in the summer.
Find excuses to walk or bike to some places you need to be. Or if you drive try to make it in one trip vs. a lot of different ones.
If you own a company, try to reduce you power needs.
For politics stop trying to push the citizens to abstain from dirty energy, you just a political response against you. You need to push for improvements in efficiency, and clean alternatives for different needs. There is no single bullet.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
So are you going to shift start times at arbitrary points during the year or by 30 to 90 seconds a day, depending on the time of year?
I don't want more daylight before work. I'd rather have 5 hours of light after work than 1 hour before and 4 hour after.
Larger blocks of time to do things means less time is wasted starting and stopping.
We used Zulu time when I was deployed. Took a little getting used to, but after a few weeks it was perfectly normal for the sun to rise around 0300 Z.
Also helped coordinate international business a LOT, which happens rather frequently in the military. "We'll call you at 1500 zulu." For us that meant evening time, for people on the West Coast USA it was early morning. Regardless, there was never a "oh, you meant 2:30 your time?? Or mine, or AM or PM or..."
The grid is not well-equipped to handle rapid transients in load. You can't change the heat output of a coal or nuclear-fired furnace instantly, and if you try, bad things happen.
If everyone on the grid suddenly opened their breakers at the same time, the resulting backlash would probably cause thousands of steam turbines to overspin and their emergency pressure valves to open, at which point the turbine has to spin down and resynchronize before it can begin producing power again. I guess that would be okay since there is no load, but it would take a long time to get things back in order.
A steam turbine generation system cannot respond instantly to enormous changes in load over a short time interval.
Oh come ON, now. Ever heard of the "toilet-flush" effect? Where everybody makes a pit stop at the same time during commercials of a major televised event? Unlike your average office, where everyone has to constantly "give 110%", utilities run with reserve capacity and mechanisms that allow them to respond rapidly to sudden fluctuations in demand.
We're not talking about DST, we're talking about "Hippie Hour" where you're supposed to shut off a bunch of stuff you don't need for an hour. You know, to show how much energy we can save, the article is making the point that this actually results in wasting more energy than is saved. Although to be fair, the point of the exercise is to get people aware of how much stuff they have leeching power which they don't really need turned on all the time.
From what I understand, they actually observer statistically distinct spikes in heart attacks and suicides with the time changes each year.
Snort. If shifting clocks for an hour is tipping your scale to that point, then I will risk being a completely douchebag and say that we're just weeding out the weak-minded, already mentally unstable people. But as I've never seen any credible evidence to support your claim, I'll just call bullshit.
No, no one will have to reset their clocks. They'll just need to remember when each business opens at what time of year. That's much better.
It would be super cool if shops opened when they felt like it and changed the time they opened at different times of the year, so all their customers would need to check online for today's opening hours. You'd get a lot more ad revenue from your website. The current method of having shops open and close at the same time every day is so last year.
And this is peer-reviewed where?
Changing the clocks is significantly simpler than having to work out just what time does school start and finish this week. And since my job doesn't follow the school schedule the entire timing is off and the simple tasks of organize for Johnny to get to school becomes complicated.
And if, as you say, people who work outdoors don't care very much what the clock says it makes even more sense to change what the clock says for the rest of us - since apparently the main group inconvenienced by it won't care anyway.
Symbolism and placebo effects can have some usefulness.
Earth Hour is a last desperate attempt at getting people to at least try to save something.
Just to see what it's like. After that, more people can start saving all-year round.
Hopefully people starts to realize that saving isn't that uncomfortable and that it's for their own good.
Why not move the clocks. Hours are just a measurement after all, we can change them to better suit our environment. I don't want to get up early for more daylight, I happen to want my daylight at the end of the day (heck I'm all for putting the clocks back 4 hours in winter...) and apparently enough people agree with me that large chunks of the world change their timezone in order to make that easier.
What time and energy is being wasted?
All my clocks (ok except the one the stove, which is wrong anyway) change automatically for daylight saving time and change automatically when it ends. I usually only realize we start daylight saving when I find myself getting tired a little early that first day because I got an hour less sleep without noticing.
Here's some math: my kids waste about 1KW 24/7 by not turning lights off. Our house stays lit up all the time. If there are 100M families like mine out of the 1.6B viewers who watched last year's event, there's about 100GW just waiting to be saved through turning off lights when you leave a room.
Even better, how about just replacing all the 60W bulbs in my house (about 100 of them) with $13 Cree LED bulbs? I'd cost me $1,300, but I'd save about $700/year (900W * 24hours/day * 356days/year * 0.08/KWH). Payback time: under 2 years. Sweet.
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
The other year the city politicians were all happy to announce that they turned off all of the unnecessary lights for earth hour. I felt like calling them up and asking them why the heck were the lights on in the first place if it wasn't necessary for them to be on! I'm in Ontario so on Saturday night it's probably base load of nuclear or hydroelectric so there's no CO2 anyways. But from a taxpayer perspective I want those lights off every night no matter what the source of the electricity is.
it's just habit... you're used to seeing a 12 at the top of a clock, and that traditionally means noon, but there is nothing natural about time (except that it seems to continue indefinitely in the forward direction only). how we measure time is entirely man made.
if you start work at 8am or 5pm or midnight, does it really matter if everything else (including where the sun is in the sky) is the same?
the problem with adoption of a universal time would be changing everything to suit it and it alone. there would obviously need to be a transition period, but it would be very costly for seemingly little benefit.
a decimal universal time might be a bit easier to teach our kids. the english language is hard enough with all its rules with exceptions and letters that could sound a bunch of different ways depending on the word or context, let alone trying to explain why there are 12 hours in a day and why the international date line isn't straight.
at the end of the day though, the way we keep track of time now seems to work, and if it ain't broke, don't fix it
bahahahaha "12 hours in a day".... apparently i haven't drunk enough coffee
But think of what would happen if enough people actually did this... All the power plants and substations that would blow up as a large part of the electrical load abruptly vanished... All of the consumer electrical equipment damaged from the spikes. All the house fires. Hmmm, this actually may not be such a great idea.
Sunrise tomorrow is 0606. The clocks jump forward on Saturday week in UK, so it will appear that sunrise now will happen 47 minutes later. In other words, dawn has broken before I go to work (something I appreciate after months of dark starts), until April, when I again have to start my journey in the dark.
I'll have to wait another three weeks before I'll be going to work after sunrise, so as far as I'm concerned, anybody who thinks this is a good idea is a fucking idiot.
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
You do realise that instead of everyone changing their schedule twice a year is less schedule changing that your idea. What if my work wants me to come in earlier, but the school doesn't want the kids that early? What if that prevents me from getting to my job on time?
Besides - you mentioned "shift". I work third shift. It matters not one iota to me where the sun is when I wake up, or lay down.
so what? most people don't work shifts, and hello, policies aren't meant to work for every single citizen, they are meant to accomodate the interest of society as a whole.
Of course, the whole idea got going as an attempt to keep the pubs open a bit longer during the War - they had to shutdown at dark as part of the blackout.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
I'll have to wait another three weeks before I'll be going to work after sunrise, so as far as I'm concerned, anybody who thinks this is a good idea is a fucking idiot.
translation: this doesn't work for me, so everyone that thinks this is a good idea is an idiot.
brilliant.
It was never about saving electricity - it was about keeping pubs open after people got off work during the blackouts imposed by the War....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Many people have an option to select who they purchase their electricity from and there are generally green options. The green option for me is only 2% more. If everyone consciously chose this instead of what's most profitable for their utility, I'm sure it would make a big difference. Check out https://power2switch.com/ if you are in Texas, New Jersey or Illinois.
Greed is the root of all evil.
There is an extra step of stupidity to DST. A lot of businesses change their hours during the summer on top of changing the clocks.
I'm not sure if I am missing your sarcasm, or if you really don't understand why that post is ridiculous. If you are being sarcastic, bravo for very clearly articulating the kind of thinking that makes so many things in the world are screwed up.
The problem is that the way we track time now really is broken. Way too many conversations are had over and over again trying to figure out what 3:00pm is being talked about. People show up late for work when the clocks change. Others show up early. In both cases people end up sitting around waiting for other people so that they can continue on with their day. How many lifetimes are lost every day to our broken time system. Sure we are not taking all the life from one individual, we are just sucking a little each away from of millions.
Northern Hemisphere Summer Solstice, ~50 degrees north latitude, daylight lasts about 16 hours. So 4AM to 8PM, sans DST, or 5AM to 9PM with DST.
That's just a bit north of the Canada/US border, south of the UK, northern France, southern Germany or Poland...
Northern Scotland will have pre-4AM sunrises for several months (and 3AM sunrise, 9PM sunset on the Solstice), much of Norway and the other Scandinavian countries, ditto. And Alaska, of course.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
It is pretty common. It is also pretty common to buy a $15 thermostat that automatically changes the temperatures multiple times a day. Given how cheap programmable thermostats are now, non-programmable thermostats just don't make sense anymore.
A lot of businesses already hold Summer/Winter hours that are different from each other. They also have a tendency to change their hours depending on the day of the week.
And, I've already made it pretty clear that the policy sucks. It does not accomplish what it was meant to accomplish. Others have posted links to studies that either show no energy savings, or minimal savings, overall.
And, it might be appropriate to point out that 2/3 or more of the population of the US has been "indoctrinated" to accept the idea. I was around before daylight savings. But, I'm getting old now. If you're not at least fifty years old, you've grown up with DLS, and just assume that it must be good, or right, or "the thing to do".
My opinion is, daylight savings time is petty, and stupid. Totally unnecessary. If an individual business sees the merit for changing their work hours to save on heating costs - fine, let them change. I'm not to worried about my work hours matching school hours - they never have!
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
I'm not sure if you are aware, but you are posting on the internet. Not everyone on the internet lives in the same city as you; some live in places where, yes, the sun DOES start to rise at 4am in the summer.
- Chuq
Neither daylight savings nor the absence of daylight savings is extremely difficult to manage. It is that daylight savings is more difficult to manage correctly than simply changing the times you do things.
We could for example change the size of a liter of water to double the amount in summer time. People need to drink more water in summer because it's hotter. If we double the amount of a liter in the summer then we can always drink 1 liter of water and be safe from heat stroke. We could even call them "summer liters", to avoid confusion.
This is completely doable. We already have a bunch of weird units. one more won't do too much harm. We could manage it. But the point is that it would ultimately make things more confusing and create more work than just keeping the units the same and acknowledging that most people need to drink more units of water in the summer.
Having common units of measurement that don't change makes things simpler. Converting between units requires effort and introduces a risk of making mistakes.
Runaway1956 didn't think it through very much.
DST has an advantage in that is applies to everyone in a particular region consistently. You don't need to check with who or what you're dealing with as to their current schedule that changes at arbitrary times.
If I didn't know anything about human culture, I would have no idea to expect the sun to be directly over me if a clock said 12:00. There is no reason people can't get used to a different set of numbers for when things normally happen. In Europe and the military they have a 24 hour clock.
For people who aren't concerned with other places (i.e. their whole world is their town, they could get used to using zulu time within one generation.
For people who travel, and participate in the global economy, I think it would be more valuable to have a sense of simultaneity. When someone says "The teleconference is on Wednesday at 17:00", everyone knows when that is. If you want to know what time of day it will be for someone else, then you have to do a timezone calculation.
I think this is a better system than someone saying (The teleconference is on Wednesday 17:00 Madrid time) and everyone who is not in Madrid needs to figure out what time it will be in their timezone. You get to know that in Mardid it will be early evening without any calculations, but that information is less useful in my opinion.
This doesn't work for millions of people. So, continuing your theme of "accommodate the interest of society" as mentioned in a previous post, how does an outmoded and irrelevant idea translate to society's benefit in this age of international 24/7 business?
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
I think Agent K said it better:
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it."
Except that people use size measures every day and they all relate to each other.
I would agree that changing the length of an hour in summer would be stupid. Changing the time we call X to be when the sun is in a different position doesn't have any knock on effect though. Other than for people who work with multiple timezones - and again they are the minority and their extra work is more than made up for by the benefit everyone else gets.
From what I understand, they actually observer statistically distinct spikes in heart attacks and suicides with the time changes each year.
I've heard similar about traffic accidents, at least in the vicinity of the one that leaves everyone sleep deprived on a Monday morning.
Yep.. I was being sarcastic, although I don't think many caught on to it.
You do know that this whole time zone thing was invented long before folks started wondering if the world was round or flat. Time was told by sundial and everybody lived in their own zone. With the advent of train schedules, it became pretty hard for conductors to keep track of the schedule (important in the days before electronic signals kept trains from running into each other) with the time changing at each stop slightly when running east and west.
It is not that necessary now days..
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
You must not live in the country. Typical farm and/or ranch days start at 5am and end at 8 or 9 evening. In most of the US, this means daylight savings really doesn't help anyone: the day is dark when they get up, and the sun is setting or already set when their day is done. Many of these people don't even operate by the clock, anyway: they're up an hour before dawn, and work late into the evening regardless (or work by the sun during the summer). It only really makes sense if we're talking about pre-industrial environments.
Even for commuters or people who get up around, say, 7am, there's no benefit to the "extra hour" of daylight in the morning: it's often still dark when you get to work. This is true for probably close to the entire northern half of the US.
Daylight Savings was an invention by the railroads and sold to government officials for political financial support for the purpose of simplifying train schedules around many disparate "local times" which were synchronized to the actual rising and setting of the sun. It's a ruse and serves little to no purpose beyond having distinct timezones.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
As an apartment-dweller with basically no-modifications lease terms, I have a thermostat from the 60's or 70's.
Yes, different hours on different days of the week are common, but consistent.
Most companies keep the same schedule all year round, with exceptions on public holidays.
China this and China that.
That is only diverting the discussion from the fact that there is nothing wrong with doing something yourself.
By the way: http://public.wsu.edu/~mreed/380American%20Consumption.htm
Americans constitute 5% of the world's population but consume 24% of the world's energy.
On average, one American consumes as much energy as
2 Japanese
6 Mexicans
13 Chinese
Privacy is terrorism.
Like I said, neither option is impossible to deal with. Both require some work. I am arguing that one requires less work.
"Everyone remember to set you clocks back an hour", is just as much work as "Everyone remember to set your alarm for 9am instead of 8am now". The difference is that a lot of infrastructure can be simplified, and a lot of little things become less error prone.
Losing an hour in the spring and getting an extra hour in the summer means that every time based log looks something like this twice a year:
11:58: A
11:59: B
12:00: C
11:01: D
11:02: E
When did the murder occur? 11:30pm. Was that the first time it was 11:30 that fall night or the second time? Oh that's a good question, I didn't think to write that down. I guess this trial is fucked.
Furthermore, the sunrise shifts by as much as 4 hours over the year, and we only shift by an hour for DST. Even with DST there is a 3 hour difference between sunrise in winter and in summer. If it was really so advantageous to have the sin rise at the same time everyday, why wouldn't we set our clock forward 3 times and back 3 times over the course of the year? Or at least set it forward 2 hours ahead and 2 hours back? The current implementation is inconsistent with the goal of keeping the sunrise at the same time.
It's not like you will need to light yourself up with twice the power to compensate for skin greening...
Not saying that I agree wih Earth Hour, just tryin' to stay on topic...
Don't buy gas on such and such a day! It'll send a message! (Yeah, that people think this sort of thing helps are dumbasses who don't understand that a one day cessation of demand, even on a worldwide scale, is pointless. As people simply buy the next day or stock up in the preceding days.)
Don't use electricity for an hour! *Snore* Basically it's a load test for your grid. And an expensive one too. Nothing more.
I've got one!
All you people who want to send a REAL message!
If you're SERIOUS about this. Do the following.
Don't breed. EVER.
If you can't do that, try the following.
Don't breath for an hour. You'll be doing the world a favor.
If that's still too much to ask, here's something more fun.
Go skydiving and experience freefall for 30 consecutive minutes.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Sure, and if you could convince a few hundred million people to do that, you probably wouldn't be commenting on Slashdot, you'd be President of the whole planet. People are not rational, and they do not behave rationally. A person is, sure, but people as a group are not, and they never have been. You can make all the theories you want about how daylight savings was always a stupid idea, but if you forget that large groups of people are involved, and that those people won't follow the logical path, you're just wasting energy typing.
How do you know that the reaction would be negative?
What if a good amount of those people would say "Good point, let's end this silliness."
Indeed.
The only purpose it served was that it gave a handful of politicians,
at the time it was implemented, a sense of power and control.
All of the arguments pro are dimwittery.
Disclaimer: I'm an astronomer.
Take your politically colored blinders off, Rose produced nothing but propaganda for the anti-science movement. His "official" graph is a fabrication, (see http://www.windows2universe.org/earth/climate/climate_today.html and http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/ and Rose cites no authorities. Referring back to the main thread - the hour of 'lights out' would be much better spent if everyone sought out ways and actually acted on them consistently to reduce their energy demand. Like cleaning out and turning off that 2nd refrigerator - turning the heat down, unplugging your device charges when you aren't using them, just use less energy, or we're all screwed. Especially future generations.
Please have respect for people with different abilities, especially children.
And the cows would be happier
Nos Morituri te salutamus
Even though I despise DST or whatever I live in a northern country. Yes, even at 49 degrees north, the daylight is significantly affected over the year.
2 times a year, I see the sun rise at 6 am and set at 6pm... one of them is in 3 days... but since we use DST, it will be 7am to 7pm... (roll eyes).
in December, rises 8 AM and sets 4 PM -- dim for about 1 hour on each end like from 8AM to 9AM and 3PM to 4PM
in June, rises 5 AM and sets 9 PM -- bright outside these times for 1-2 hours each way, so from 3AM to 5AM and 9PM to 11PM even though the sun is basically set.
For me, it takes me 3 weeks to adjust to a 1 hour change. It has to be the most horrible period in the spring dealing with it. If it were a 2 or 3 hour change, it would take a day or two to adjust.
DST is stupid - I'm not a child who needs to be told when to go work and when to go eat, but I barely follow these conventions for the convenience of others. It is obvious that businesses that live and die by these rules are mostly obsolete. Being at work when others are working is not a DST issue... having a common opening time is beyond moronic, for example, why would a bank only open from 10-3 during the week when everyone is working? That's convenient. Or worse, a clothing store? Who would go?
I love the fact that computers get updated timezone files all the time. It demonstrates how incredibly arbitrary and useless DST really is.
Zulu time would be UTC+2?
Gosh, ole Ben Franklin was *really* forward thinking . . . :)
hawk, still not certain he could finish his freon ice sculpture in just one hour . . .
And if, as you say, people who work outdoors don't care very much what the clock says it makes even more sense to change what the clock says for the rest of us
Sigh. The arbitrary selection of a group to inconvenience doesn't really constitute much of a reason to to anything. Throwing one more specious argument into a topic almost entirely dominated by specious arguments doesn't achieve anything. But all this is wildly off-topic. Some fool hijacks a thread about saving power and uses it to push his opinion about daylight saving, and the /. lemmings happily follow.
;)
So how about this, to derail the thread back on-topic:
If the aim is to save CO2 emissions by reducing power usage, why not just do it at the source? Shut the power stations down for an hour or so. Everybody can keep warm by jumping up and down yelling abuse at each other.
Let the flames begin...
Ok, but why bother to switch back in the winter? If we stayed on PST all winter, it would get dark at 5pm instead of 4.
You are forgetting the main intention and benefit of Earth Hour. It is supposed to make us *feel good*. The sacrifice of switching off our redundant lights gives us enough karma to not feel guilty the rest of the year when we splurge on fossil fuel. No other energy saving event would feel as good.
So I am all for Earth Hour, even if it wastes more energy in the process.
You are aware than less than 1.5% of the US lives on farms, right?
Daylight Savings was an invention by the railroads and sold to government officials for political financial support for the purpose of simplifying train schedules around many disparate "local times" which were synchronized to the actual rising and setting of the sun.
In the case of timetables changing the clocks twice a year is a complication. Though less so than having to deal with local time at every station. Indeed US railroad companies were against it. The concept of DST originates from around the turn of the 20th century. The event which caused it to actually happen being The "Great War".
Aie, you'da bloody well loved double DST during the Blitz, mate. Back when we'da shot whiners like you, except we needed the cannon fodder.
Well.. You can run your life on GMT or Zulu if you want, but it is a bit less confusing if the sun is overhead at noon at lunchtime for me.
In which case you'd want no DST and a timezone where local noon was close to 12:00 (pm). There are plenty of places where this is not true now. e.g. Iceland and West Africa which use Zulu rather than November. South Island New Zealand which uses Lima rather than Mike. Fiji which uses Mike rather than Kilo. Thus it's possible for "noon" to be anywhere between 9:00 and 15:00.
All of the "studies" I have seen "proving" that DST saves energy are thought "experiments" rather than actual real life studies of what happens when some locale changes from not having DST to having DST. All of the studies of actual occurrences of changing from never changing the clocks to implementing DST have shown an increase use of energy after the change (although in at least one of those cases the change was small and could potentially be attributed to other causes). In other words, all real-world studies of energy use and DST indicate that best case scenario is that DST makes NO difference in energy use and quite possibly increases it.
There also must be an economic cost to changing clocks which do not change automatically. As well as those which should change automatically, but in practice require human intervention.
From the VERY FIRST LINE of your own link:
Pakistan receives foreign aid from several different countries and the international community. Those fundings are meant for the civil projects within the country but unfortunately most of it never reaches the common public because of corrupt politicians.
Also, further on in the same first paragraph of your link:
-Why you pay us:
The bulk of international aid to Pakistan is from the Coalition Support Fund which is reimbursement "to Pakistan for expenses already incurred and compensation for facilities made available to the coalition forces such as the Shamsi Airfield and Dalbandin air bases by Pakistan as well as $4 billion has been billed to CSF for the training and services provided by American Military and contractors.
-Why you keep paying
The amount transferred to the Pakistani Treasury in cash over 10 years has been $8.647 billion.The misuse of funding by the authorities in Pakistani is often ignored from the US government as their main interest is to use the military base in Pakistan as a passage to Afghanistan in fight against Taliban.
TL;DR:
- Your government pays our government mostly for services rendered, not gratis.
- Your government KNOWS the money is going to crooks, but you still keep giving; i.e. your government is complicit.
Thank you for sharing the link and making it easy for me, parent! ;p
----
I wasn't asking for sympathy anyway, I was just sharing the realisation that things in Egypt are *still* better than Pakistan, despite the revolutionary chaos there. I know things are shitty here, but his comment just brought into perspective just *how* shitty they are.
I am an ACCA student. Got a query on Accountancy/Finance? Maybe I can help!
An even better way to save money is to go through the house and fix every leaky tap or toilette. Back before I finally got my first sysadmin job I worked with my father fixing/ installing sewage treatment systems and you would be amazed how many calls we got wondering why systems were 20 - 30 gallons a day above normal and ended up tracing the problem to a slow leak in a single toilette somewhere in the building.
Instead of just admitting "Humans are versatile and intelligent, we don't NEED to be trapped into routines dictated by the stellar routines in our tiny corner of the galaxy, technology enriches our lives, I agree" you choose to pick holes in all my little personal motivators from fiction (Which leads humanity forward, historically) and the fact that I don't care whether your sun is up and still lead a successful, social and fulfilling life, perhaps because you feel so uncomfortable with change that reinforces the fact that you are in fact, a useless troll who will never achieve anything but putting down others who do want to make positive change.
tl;dr: Troll bitten.
This tagline was transcoded to result in at least one smirk. If you experience failure to smirk, please consult your Gen
I already stated that it is zero work to change clocks. Disagreeing with my claim is one thing, just ignoring that is was stated makes for a pointless conversation.
For logs, sure I hadn't thought of that. I've never heard of that causing a single trial to be fucked though, and I really would expect that to make the news. Maybe there's always some sort of corroboration they can use to check what time was meant - people do sometimes make notational errors after all. Or the once a year window to have your crime go unpunished if someone happens to not note the time carefully isn't exploited enough for it to outweigh the benefits of making the change?
It's not advantageous to have the sunrise at the same time, and that isn't the goal. It's advantageous to get shift a daylight hour from morning to evening, for some people. I already stated I'd like the clocks moved 4 hours so your attempt at making it look absurd just supports my not popular at all view.
So the summary implies that a nominal drop in power requires power plants to be shut down? I don't think that's how it works.
Using our current system: sun's overhead - what time is it? Roughly noon, no matter where you are on the globe, it's roughly noon, local time.
No it's not. DST takes care of that. For example, right now, in Indiana, the sun will be at high noon when the clock shows somewhere between 1:30-1:45, depending on your exact location in the state. Clock time in California is closer to sun time in Indiana than Indiana's clock time is during DST. The same will be true for any areas on the far edges of time zones.
So again, why bother with time zones at all if your clocks are going to be off by as much as an hour and forty-five minutes? May as well go with GMT as 12:00 means nothing. It's not noon and not midnight, not even close.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
Well, considering that there are so few farmers that it isn't even listed as an occupation on the US Census anymore...I'd dare say that can't really be used as a reason for the DST changes any longer.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Ok, then leave it at DST year round...I really don't care which way the hour goes...just pick one and quit changing it.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Or you can teach your kids to turn off the fucking lights when they don't need them.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
It is *not* zero work to change clocks. For one thing, daylight savings time probably costs millions of dollars in plain programming time needed to manage DST changes properly in applications. You'd think you could just reference one library and you'd be done, but it doesn't work out that way.
Our Internet works based on time, and while UTC is always an option for some things, you can't use it for everything. I've had to literally do on-call time because I've supported stupid apps that get the DST change wrong or the code just doesn't like the fact that it's 2AM twice or there is no 2AM at two times during the year.
Yes, it could be done correctly.... but it wouldn't *have to be* if there was no DST. It all adds up and it is real money and lost productivity.
Then school starts when it is darker out. It's not like even with DST that it wasn't sort of twilight at 7AM for high school anyway during the winter. I don't see this fixation on "getting more daylight hours". There aren't more daylight hours to allocate.
Changing the clocks costs real time and money, and achieves almost nothing except maybe a little bit of convenience for a few people. For everyone else, it is a gigantic pain in the ass.
The world that doesn't use DST has somehow managed to figure out how to live without it, its time we stopped wasting money and time worrying about this BS.
Its a good thing people working construction or any job outside or or any job where electricity is not readily available can just turn on their interior lights so they can maximize their work day. I wonder why my landscapers never thought of that. Probably because they're not geniuses like what we have posting here on slashdot.
TBH the standardised times worked pretty well for the railway thing since before then you needed myriad clocks in stations showing times at current station and other stations and even other lines maintained by another firm in same place. Setting standard time for all to use in particular place was good thing for synchronicity but I wholly agree it is meaningless as far as amount of daylight workers get as oft doesn't work out that way.
I'm also opposed to the switching for the same reasons you mention (I come in to work at 7:30am for that reason), and even signed the White House petition online... but then a coworker presented one good point: when kids go out in the morning and stand outside waiting for their school bus, it would be safer for them to have some daylight. I'm still opposed to the switching, but I can also see her point of view as a good argument since it affects millions of children.
Was that the first time it was 11:30 that fall night or the second time? Oh that's a good question, I didn't think to write that down. I guess this trial is fucked.
If you write time down (especially if you suspect such confusion is possible) you better write the current timezone along with it, or you are a pretty sorry detective. This is how all computerized logs are already written. I guess, if you are a murderer, you can expect a little leeway right after 2am twice a year, but i would eat my hat if you could point out a single time this confusion actually caused a problem in a criminal trial.
1. I disagree with your ridiculous claim that changing clocks is zero work.
2. The trial thing was just 1 example. Every single thing which is based on time must correctly handle the fact that it becomes disrupted twice a year every year. It is bad enough that we have natural changes to our time system from leap year and small changes to the length of a day, without introducing more artificial changes needlessly.
3. If the goal was to have daylight hours in the evening rather than the morning, then we would be doing DST the other way around (i.e. Fall forward/spring back), because currently DST causes even less evening hours of daylight in the evening in the winter than we would get without it.
4. I didn't know you suggested moving clocks 4 hours, and I wasn't trying to make it look absurd. I was trying to show that current DST is not implemented in a way to achieve it's goals even if we assumed they were goals worth wanting.
5. If you want to preserve daylight hours in the evening, and If you want the clocks shifted by 4 hours, I hope you realize that that this will leave winter with 8 hours less daylight in the evening compared with summer (e.g. 4pm vs. midnight sunsets).
My point is that you can't just write down the timezone. You can assume local time, but if something happens in the hour that overlaps during DST, you must note whether it is the first time the clock struck 11:30 or the second time. "11:30pm PST" doesn't tell you what time something happened if it is the night DST starts because there were 2 "11:30pm PST"s that night, one hour apart.
You could also just mark the time in UTC. And in fact most computer logs do just that to greatly simplify things. And that is my point. It is so much simpler to use a time system that is consistent. It is not simple to change tradition, but if DST was not already our tradition keeping track of time would be simpler.
It might save money when starting after April. But DST should end BEFORE the Autumn equinox or else you save nothing. By today standards, we are turning back the clock by the end of October. That last month the sun is coming up at 8:00 or later. If we started DST a week after the Spring equinox (first week of april) and finish it a week before the Autumn equinox (second or third week of september) we might save some money, and headaches. As it stands now, it is just stupid.
"On a long enough timeline. The survival rate for everyone drops to zero." - Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club
i never said it wasn't outmoded. i said the fact that you and a vast, vast minority of others work odd hours isn't a good argument against it. argue that it doesn't make sense for society, not that it does't make sense for you and your vampire-like lifestyle.
sure "a lot" of people work shifts, but "a lot" of people can also handle driving 120mph, and "a lot" of people can safely bring their assault weapons on airplanes also. laws / rules are there for the convenience / safety of society as a whole, not the individual.
A few years ago, I saw an Earth Hour flyer urging me to shut off an electric light, and light a candle instead.
I guess the organizers weren't aware that for any given number of lumens, producing that much light with candles releases a lot more greenhouse gases than producing it with electric lights.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
You're right. I had a plumber fix all our leaks last year, and I think the savings already paid for the service. I'd guess we were losing $10-$30/month just on leaks. My point is basically that Earth Hour is about teaching people, kids in particular, about turning off the lights and generally being sensitive to wasting energy. I'm highly ADHD, as are my kids, and trying to remember to turn off the lights is likely a lost cause. These new high efficiency LEDs will save me a lot.
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
more harm than in the end like so many pointless ludicrous actions, i suppose it raises awareness but with general apathy as the norm i dont think it will make much of a difference. People really need to be brainwashed into new routines, social stigma and guilt always seems to help for long term campaings (eg the crusade against cigarettes a.o. now makes you some kind of irresponsible, stinking lowlife for just smoking one almost)
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?
If things don't improve, the next generation of kids have no idea that the sky is supposed to be blue.
Here in northern Germany, the default colour of the sky is white. Not because of pollution (light or otherwise) but because of these things we call "clouds".
It's fairly rare that a day is not 100% overcast. (Or at least it seems like that to me.)
Esli epei etot cumprenan, shris soa Sfaha.
It's too hard, so don't even try?