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America Braces For Daylight Saving Time - And Missing Medical Records (usatoday.com)
"One hundred years after Congress passed the first daylight saving legislation, more and more people are doubting the wisdom of changing the clocks," writes PBS, noting that it actually makes Americans use more electricity and consume more gasoline.
"If you can find anyone who supports this, they're probably just trolling you," writes Inc magazine's contributor editor, adding "Literally everyone hates it... It's almost impossible to find anyone who still supports this insane, anachronistic idea, which is leftover from a German coal conservation idea during World War I, and our heck-we'll-try-anything panic during the energy crisis of the 1970s." In fact, one study found that while consumer spending increases a bit at the start of daylight savings, it drops a full 3.5 percent in the wrong direction when it ends. (Which will happen tonight in most U.S. states at 2:00 a.m.)
And now USA Today points out that hospital software "still can't handle daylight saving time: Epic Systems, one of the most popular electronic health records software systems used by hospitals, can delete records or require cumbersome workarounds when clocks are set back for an hour -- prompting many hospitals to opt for paper records for part of the night shift. And it happens every year... Dr. Steven Stack, a past president of the American Medical Association, called the glitches "perplexing" and "unacceptable," considering that hospitals spend millions of dollars on these systems, and Apple and Google seem to have dealt with seasonal time changes long ago...
Carol Hawthorne-Johnson, an intensive care unit nurse in California, said her hospital doesn't shut down the Epic system during the fall time change. But she's come to expect that the vital signs she enters into the system from 1 a.m. to 2 a.m. Sunday will be deleted when the clock falls back to 1 a.m. One hour's worth of electronic record-keeping "is gone," she said. Hospital staff have learned to deal with it by taking extra chart notes by hand... Many hospitals use Cerner, another major electronic medical records company. Those hospitals plan for Cerner to be down during the time change, too.
"If you can find anyone who supports this, they're probably just trolling you," writes Inc magazine's contributor editor, adding "Literally everyone hates it... It's almost impossible to find anyone who still supports this insane, anachronistic idea, which is leftover from a German coal conservation idea during World War I, and our heck-we'll-try-anything panic during the energy crisis of the 1970s." In fact, one study found that while consumer spending increases a bit at the start of daylight savings, it drops a full 3.5 percent in the wrong direction when it ends. (Which will happen tonight in most U.S. states at 2:00 a.m.)
And now USA Today points out that hospital software "still can't handle daylight saving time: Epic Systems, one of the most popular electronic health records software systems used by hospitals, can delete records or require cumbersome workarounds when clocks are set back for an hour -- prompting many hospitals to opt for paper records for part of the night shift. And it happens every year... Dr. Steven Stack, a past president of the American Medical Association, called the glitches "perplexing" and "unacceptable," considering that hospitals spend millions of dollars on these systems, and Apple and Google seem to have dealt with seasonal time changes long ago...
Carol Hawthorne-Johnson, an intensive care unit nurse in California, said her hospital doesn't shut down the Epic system during the fall time change. But she's come to expect that the vital signs she enters into the system from 1 a.m. to 2 a.m. Sunday will be deleted when the clock falls back to 1 a.m. One hour's worth of electronic record-keeping "is gone," she said. Hospital staff have learned to deal with it by taking extra chart notes by hand... Many hospitals use Cerner, another major electronic medical records company. Those hospitals plan for Cerner to be down during the time change, too.
The absolute worst part of DST is the stupid semiannual bitchfest on Slashdot.
Anything with Epic in its name is complete festering garbage:
Epic Systems
Epicor
Epipen
And... since you're still reading, Epic Systems gave us a supreme court ruling that will go on to literally kill people:
Epic Systems Corp. v. Lewis
I don't know how many times as a programmer, QA, team lead, sysadmin, and manager I had to pound the concept of Universal Time Coordinates into programmers heads. As well as ntp. Both are critical in real life applications. This is one of many reasons I have come to look upon most programmers with disdain and disgust.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Apples watch whose sole purpose is telling time managed to brick for 24-hours recently when Australia changed time.
...and that my friend is what we call acceptable losses by a government who fails to do anything about something so easy to fix. while they talk about it for years and decades, we as programmers have the power to do something... stop it from happening... turn off the DST feature and go to either UTC or just turn the damn feature off on servers and applications. I vote yes, turn off daylight savings time. I am tired of everyone using it as excuse to be late as well, and credit card systems integration encryption hiccuping..
Give someone some LSD tonight and then change the clocks.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
I have no data cap, because the tzdata updates come hot and fast every time some state, or random country decides to change their participation in how they manage time.
I just check my phone/computer to set all my dumb appliances (or mechanical clocks) time displays,
But it's going to Standard Time that's the problem, no ? Daylight Saving Time ends today, Standard Time begins.
That can't properly handle the unfortunate, antiquated reality of daylight savings time is written by idiots. The same goes for leap time.
I love the later sunsets at the evenings. ;)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
the Russian Federation stopped changing clocks. And the EU follows this example in 2019.
In fact, it is not complicated, - a government makes a decision and publishes it. This is it, the sanity is back.
And every year we have the vociferous few who will defend their supposed god given right to force everyone into being a nation of clock fiddlers.
Sadly, almost every year about a couple of weeks before DST ends there is some news story about kids being killed walking to school in the dark - because the car driver could not see them on the dark road.
I am quite sure that there are hundreds of people who have died as a result of supposed daylight savings time. This story mentions just one of the problems that could lead to delays with acessing much needed medical records in a timely manner.
Imagine if there would need to be an airline full of people that would be rammed into the ground when the law was written so we all could be forced to fiddle with our clocks. Do you think that the law instituting it would pass then?? Because we've probably lost more lives than that to the ignoble DST since it was passed back in the '70s. It's time to stop listening to the loudmouths and stop
having to put up with their forced stupidity.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Oh look. I don't even have to read the article to know it's shit because I'm a person and I don't hate it.
Like many, I'd prefer having permanent daylight savings time (an hour more light in the evenings), but having grown up in the north, I know that would've meant waiting for the school bus in darkness each morning, and many parents might not support that. That said, once people get used to it and quit their bitching, they'll probably be fine with it - in the same way there was a huge uproar from smokers when public smoking bans went into effect, which died out rather quickly when they realized it wasn't such a big deal.
www.gaiageek.com
I'm against DST and all but any programmer that relies on human friendly displayed time (eg 1:30) for storing data for mission critical applications like medical records messed up. The data should be stored with timestamps that are unaffected by things like DST and only convert to more human friendly formats when the data is displayed somewhere.
We shouldn't do Daylight Saving Time because.....some hospitals use shitty software written by developers who still can't figure out clock-related bugs after years of trying?
I honestly don't give a damn whether we change the clocks or not but I do like having usable light at 9 PM, however briefly. I'd rather shift time in the Winter so the sun doesn't go down at 5 PM though. I just need to move much farther South so my winters aren't so cold and dark, and everybody can do whatever the F they want with the clocks. Unless you're the aliens from Slaughterhouse V - please don't "play with the clocks" and alter how I experience the passing of time.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
americans: we need to get rid of DST
commerce: jesus christ are you crazy? we use DST for all sorts of marketing voodoo, especially cinemas and evening activities! you might buy less stuff!
americans: not likely. we buy everything online anyway.
commerce: b-but! think of the farmers! they need more time to harvest crops and this time switch gives them more daylight! without DST youll starve the whole country!
farmer: [casually turns the headlights on in the tractor]
Good people go to bed earlier.
All the same problems happen if you change timezones when you move.
Um, no. When you move, you're in a different place. I know that's a challenging notion for someone who lives in Mom's basement, but please do try.
When we we go off DST here, you go from sunset at 5PM one day to sunset at 4PM the next. It is quite unsettling.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
UTC is certainly the right time zone to use where you, for some reason, need to store a human-readable string that represents a time. Most of the time relared problems and bugs aren't solved by storing times as UTC, though.
The thing is, you can't get your time calculations right when using year-month-day hour-minute-second format. Almost every professional implementation has had bad bugs. Even if you DID get it bug free, we'd break it after you ship it because we change the rules from time to time.
How many seconds are in a minute?
It's not always sixty seconds.
What time comes after 23:59 59, in UTC.
If you said midnight, as a programmer, you're wrong (sometimes it's 23:59:60 UTC, such as on December 31, 2016).
The way to store times as as an integer since the epoch. Unix, Linux etc set the epoch at January 1, 1970. The current Unix epoch time is therefore 1541311061. (That's how many seconds have elapsed since the epoch). Any recent choice of epoch is fine, unless your concerned about times centuries ago.
When you try to store an manipulate times as strings, you end up with crap like time going backwards, which breaks all kinds of things.
The only sort-of exception is I wouldn't yell at you for using the temporal types in a well-established relational database like MySQL and MS SQL. They do have bugs, and storing it as a number is more accurate, but the Mysql date handling isn't atrocious.
No, the fall change is worse—at my latitude, this makes it start getting dark in the middle of the freaking afternoon, due to sunset suddenly being one clock hour earlier.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Just make every day 9.85 seconds shorter, so we can get that hour 'rebate' every spring still.
every fall I mean =P
I am sure that you are correct that lives are lost from the switching back and forth. I do think that it is kind of stupid adjusting the time twice an year.
But, as someone who enjoys the time after work more than the time before work, I far prefer being on Daylight Saving Time. So, as far as I am concerned, we should just do away with high noon at 12pm. I am perfectly fine with the Sun's zenith being at 1:30pm, as it is during the Summer where I live.
No good deed goes unpunished...
Am I the only one who finds it amusing that America can defend the use of Imperial measurements and yet is it daylights savings that is too hard?
Yea, sorry, mark down as flame bait if you must, but I still find this funny.
In 2018 EU decided to end daylight saving time. Or rather let all nation decide for themselves if they want it or not and thus themselves decide which time zone to be in. https://www.bbc.com/news/world...
Just saying it like it are.
This story mentions just one of the problems that could lead to delays with acessing much needed medical records in a timely manner.
That's caused by sloppy programming.
Why should they? Where's the profit motive? They're on lowest bid, they're paying the code monkeys in peanuts, there's no meaningful penalty for getting it wrong - only for getting it late.
Patients can't use the vendors and hospitals have no incentive. It only kills a few people each year, far fewer than the synthetic opium they hand out.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Is it never dark in winter when kids go to school where you live?
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
In countries south of the 49th parallel, DST is just a PITA. In countries north thereof, it's a way to enjoy the little winter daylight while not being woken by the dawn chorus (that's birdsong for you city-dwellers - birds are pesky things that fly but aren't jets). As for saying programmers don't understand DST, that's about as true as programmers not understanding leap years and the millenium. Programmers get this stuff; it's management who say it's too hard. E.g. MS DOS got it wrong 'cos they were afraid it would spook end users if their system clock wasn't in local time. Unix got it right 'cos it was written by programmers. I hope that when Bill Gates dies, it's in the hour that the clocks go back :-)
Why don't you just leave the clocks alone and work 8-4 instead of 9-5 then? (And please don't reply that that means getting up an hour earlier, because that's precisely the kind of irrational BS that keeps DST alive).
There's no reason why it needs to be light out at 9:00 on a Summer night.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
No America is about to COME OFF daylight saving time and return to normal time.
Although normal time is "correct" dst is more fun to live in (getting home with some light left)
I see these articles every year here and hatred from Americans about DST when you're infact LEAVING DST right now.
Solar noon, or geographically close to it(time zones), is all that matters.
Everything else is asinine.
I instigated this for environmental models two decades ago, and it makes life lots easier. And more error-free.
Of course, there are those DB idiots who won't learn from history, and keep trying to reverse that decision... ;-(
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
Daylight Saving Time, The Movie
Doing things in UTC is the way to go.
The complication is deciding when to convert it to local time, and what that local time should be. For example, you're monitoring someone's activity. Should activity be shown in the person's current local time, at the local time of when the activity took place, or in the local time of the person viewing the activity?
You have to make it clear who's time you're talking about.
Why? UTC does not change.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I agree there is a reason it's called calendar time.
Because it's what people use for calendars.
That's its appropriate use. If we set an appointment for 9:00 AM November 1, 2023, we mean when the clock reads those values - whatever time that happens to be. We don't yet know what time that will actually be (how many seconds away it is) because we don't know whether DST will be in effect.
You're slightly mistaken about epoch time and leap seconds.
Epoch time is how long it has been since the epoch. Epoch time doesn't CARE if calendar time had a leap second or not. Epoch time can't get leap seconds or DST or leap years wrong because there is no school thing in epoch time. What you may havr seen is that someone trying to convert calendar time to epoch time got it wrong. People normally get it wrong in several different ways.
So why still call it "pm" then? If 1pm is going to be the actual middle of the day, then noon should technically be called 12am.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
The "word on the street" is that Epic Systems has a high level of employee turnover, in part because of burnout of the persons involved, in part because the company's approach to firing people being that of the Queen of Hearts from Alice in Wonderland ("Off with his head!").
I have been told by people who have been out to their Verona, WI campus that there is a wall, where employees reaching their 2-year employment anniversary record their hand prints in plaster. I guess a 2 year anniversary is a big milestone if you work there.
My question is, are those hand prints on the outside pushing in, or are do they appear from the inside of the wall pushing out?
You really have to reach sub-microsecond for anyone to notice.
Though UNIX timestamps avoid DST trouble, using UNIX timestamps for anything sub-second is vulnerable to problems around leap seconds. UNIX timestamps represent UTC imperfectly: they treat instants during the leap second as part of the preceding or following second. The same is true of subtracting UTC times to form an interval, unless your UTC library uses an up-to-date table of historical and announced leap seconds.
I don't have a good answer for you. I'll give you my opinion and that's that.
Given that we only drift a tiny amount (about an hour per 5000-6000 years), and given that we keep redefining calendars, time, timezones and so forth way more often than this .. I'm fine with a system that slowly drifts away. We can readjust it later. Either when we get really good at calculating all future leap seconds, or whatever.
We've got the second defined by physical properties. Which is great. It's even exportable if we conquer the universe. Days will be measured in different amount of seconds than 86400. That's the approximate unit for earth. A mars-day would be different. Days on various moons would yet again be different. If we were to conquer other solar systems it would be different.
We could still keep a well defined second.
I personally am not worried about whether a 'day' drifts a bit. Especially since a day at the east end of a timezone is different from the 'west' end of a timezone. And of course, timezones typically follows various human made borders - which means the change from date to date doesn't match up with 'astronomical midnight'.
"Rune Kristian Viken" - http://www.nwo.no - arca
As usual, Slashdot is six months behind.
Have gnu, will travel.
No one cares about this, at all. I've never heard anyone, ever, complain. Never.
You don't think anyone cares about DST? You're delusional.
Every goddamn year we have to go through this bullshit twice. At least in CA we're gonna vote on it in a few days. The solution is stupid as hell, as we aren't really voting on it.. The Proposal is for permanent summer time, which I highly doubt the Feds will approve. And since it's contingent on Federal approval, it's probably not going to happen. But, I'd be willing to bet it passes by a landslide. People are sick and tired of this stupid fucking system. And if you don't think it results in a lot of wasted work hours....
These are just the latest changes regarding DST:
- Morocco switched to permanent +01 on 2018-10-27.
- Volgograd moved from +03 to +04 on 2018-10-28.
- Most of Chile changes DST dates, effective 2019-04-06.
Constant fucking with clocks...... For ABSOLUTELY NO BENEFIT.
No technical reason to care about DST??? WHAT THE FUCK? Have your factory or supplier in a different part of the world? How the hell are you supposed to know what time it is there if the goddamn clocks are always changing..
Not to mention the fact that there are probably millions of clocks in use that have no auto-update mechanism and have to be adjusted by hand. I have two in my house (stove and alarm clock). And no, I'm not interested in IoT clocks.. Thanks.. I'd rather not have my alarm clock end up as part of a botnet.
All of this fucking effort for nothing...
The absolute worst part of DST is the stupid semiannual bitchfest on Slashdot.
Thanks to George Dabelyua Bush the DST changes in the USA and Europe are not out of sync and we get to enjoy this deep, meaningful and eye-opening discussion that has successfully changed the opinions and minds of millions not twice, but four times a year.
It is quite unsettling.
Why? Like I'm really struggling to understand why some people have a mental affinity to linking a certain arbitrary time to the location of the sun.
Also the GP is was perfectly right. If you live anywhere near the edge of a timezone, then you will literally be unsettled just by walking across a border. How would you cope?
You're an idiot. Lots of people get up BEFORE dawn to go to work. Asshole.
Humans, like many animals, do much much better when we have consistent sleep/wake times. Our bodies function on rhythms. Sure, in an ideal world you'd wake up when the sun comes up.. That time would only change by a minute or two each day as we progress through the seasons. Nice and gradual.
Instead, in our modern world, we get slammed with an hour change to that schedule twice a year. That change is 30x greater than what nature/evolution has programmed us for..
Oh, so you're just an entitled but powerless asshole, who is doing shift work on the best shift but still wants to bump swing shift and graveyard around so that you can squat on the entire range of "business hours" at non-shift businesses. Got it.
The main problem with your thesis is that the word "technically" does not mean "makes pedantic sense according to me."
Semantics doesn't work that way. The meaning has been fixed on account of being given a technical definition.
Philosophical interpretations of the semantics of the etymology are entirely non-technical.
It is related to these things called "schedules" that are an externally shared resource.
You're welcome.
Oh, and yes, in the case of having borders bisect your area of concern, you would simply specific which side of the line the schedule was reporting. When you walk across the line, nothing changed, the schedule didn't change, and the time on your clock didn't change. As long as you know which side of the line you clock is programmed for, and which side of the line the schedule references, then nothing at all changes by wandering back and forth across it.
In the Northern US, there's a bit more than 9 hours of daylight at the winter solstice. Centering it around 1PM would make it light from 8:30AM to 5:30PM, which would make morning commutes a slog.
7:30AM to 4:30PM seems better in that regards.
It is related to these things called "schedules" that are an externally shared resource.
No it's not. The sun determines no one's schedule. The clock does.
you would simply specific which side of the line the schedule was reporting. When you walk across the line, nothing changed
So you agree the position of the sun relative to time is not unsettling at all. So what was your original complaint? You're not unsettled, schedules are preserved, and even your alarm clock automatically compensates for the problem so you don't even wake up late / early. Sounds like you're actually completely indifferent to DST.
that a system costing millions of dollars hasn't been fixed after all these years.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
Under DST, not only are you waking up an hour earlier, you are also forcing everyone else to wake up an hour earlier. If getting up earlier in summer was so great, everyone would automatically do it. DST just tricks people into accepting something they normally wouldn't want.
DST makes mornings darker. So by all means abolish it. The extra accidents in the mornings are every year right after the start of DST, when everyone is forced to wake up an hour earlier. And having DST all year long, as some people would prefer, means the sun only comes up after 9am during the winter in many areas. Of course you could then say: "Let's let school start at 10am" but you could also just leave the frigging clocks alone.
Weird how changing business hours during the summer is an insurmountable problem, while changing everyone's actual clocks is considered a perfectly normal and acceptable solution.
"Get up an hour earlier" - "No way, I need my sleep!"
"Set your clock to one hour later and get up at the same time" - "Oh, sure, great, now we get an extra hour in the everning!"
People are weird. The same people who like DST, would probably vehemently refuse a works schedule that starts an hour earlier without changing the clocks.
I wonder if the institutions using these systems have reported these problems to the FDA? From my experience working for a medical product software company it seems like this is an issue that the FDA should be looking into. Maybe not quite on the level of x-ray exposure time issues but certainly a software quality issue that should have been addressed within the context of data integrity. And yes medical information systems are within the purview of the FDA.
It's actually pretty disturbing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
No it's not. The sun determines no one's schedule. The clock does.
They have these things called "farmers." True story.
Maybe in the 1800s they did, though you'll find that modern farmers work by a clock.
Oh snap, good one!
What happens if I don't even live in a megalopolis, and live in a place that has farmers?
Careful there making such wild guesses.
Probably none of the animals will notice either, right? I mean, they can't tell time, so they just do stuff whenever anyways, right?
And I mean, if you think somebody is going to go out and check equipment before dawn, naw, this is the future we're living in, who cares if you water at the wrong time and the plants get moldy or sunburnt.
I doubt you even believe food comes from the supermarket; you probably think food comes from mcdonalds!
What happens if I don't even live in a megalopolis, and live in a place that has farmers?
Clocks exist in the country too.
Probably none of the animals will notice either, right?
Yep indeed. Animals on large farms are worked with in ways to suit the schedule of the farmer. The Animals may notice and start their own little slashdot rants about how it's dinner / milking time an hour early today, and then proceed to go do that activity at that time anyway. The fact you think that there's a specific and exact time that animals do something and that this time is unchanging or fixed directly to sunlight rather than to availability of food or general requirements just shows you have no idea about animals, much less about farming if you think that animals are all treated the same way at the same time of day.
And I mean, if you think somebody is going to go out and check equipment before dawn
Err. yeah farming doesn't start at dawn...
Sorry but I have to ask have you ever seen a farm or is your entire knowledge based on a nursery rhyme?
who cares if you water at the wrong time and the plants get moldy or sunburnt.
Sunburnt. Mouldy. The first things you said that make sense. Unfortunately not relevant since that's not the sun determining someone's schedule, that's the plant itself. Just because the clocks change doesn't mean the automated watering system has to.
I doubt you even believe food comes from the supermarket; you probably think food comes from mcdonalds!
LOL it is funny getting insults from someone who has shown to be an expert exclusively in a field of personal ignorance. May I suggest a trip into the country. It may enlighten you to actually see a farm sometime.
Go to a farm and ask them, dummy.
Farmers literally talk about this shit all the time.
I'm not presenting you with ideas or theories.