Slashdot Mirror
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.
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+
...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..
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,
Give someone some LSD tonight and then change the clocks.
I do that every weekend, what makes this weekend any different?
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
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"
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.
*or* they could just change when school starts.
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.
The problem with Leap seconds is that they are really, really problematic under unix. Unixtime literally doesn't have leap seconds. There are hacks and workarounds, but only that.
There are only two real solutions:
1. Get rid of the concept of leap seconds. The earth's rotation will slowly drift out of sync with astronomical time - but only with about a minute per century. Let someone deal with a leap hour in 6000 years time. Having all of society deal with astronomers who don't want to keep track of this on their own is just silly.
2. Redefine unixtime to include leapseconds. Change the POSIX standard and all other relevant standards to have unix run on TAI instead of UTC. Keep an /etc/leapseconds where all leapseconds are inserted. Let the system time conversion libraries deal with the conversions authoratatively.
And don't get me started on the hackish fugliness of leap second smearing. Ye gods is that an ugly hack.
"Rune Kristian Viken" - http://www.nwo.no - arca
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).
Yeah, see, it's such a bad idea that even a /. headline doesn't get it right.
Also, go work for a company that starts work 1 hour sooner in the summertime. Somehow, Home Depot manages to change their hours twice a year, unrelated to the government calendar, and everybody gets by just fine.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
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.
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?
There is a very easy way to have avoided these problems with medical records:
Bringing it back to "News for nerds", I'm with you on that (except substitute "epoch seconds" for "GMT"). However, this generates the "Which timezone to use?" problem.
(Side note: who's using 32-bit time_t and who's using 64-bit? If you're not working on 30 year mortgages, I don't see why you need 64-bit yet. On the other hand, I'd just as soon get ahead of the Y2038 problem. But then again, I hope to be retired by then so maybe I don't care.)
For the last few years, I've generally been working on management software for storage systems. In a complicated scenario, there can be many timezones involved. There's the timezone of the source storage system, a destination (if we're replicating data), the timezone of the management server, and the timezone of a web browser which is displaying a GUI. Oh, and the timezone of Corporate Galactic Headquarters, which is where all the meetings happen. We constantly get into long, involved discussions about which timezone to use. I think two things turn out to be important. One, pick a timezone and use it consistently. Second, always make sure the user can see which timezone we're using!
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...