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Daylight Saving Change Saved No Power
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue Apr 03, 2007 04:03 PM
from the pay-me-now-or-pay-me-later dept.
from the pay-me-now-or-pay-me-later dept.
Brett writes "Results from energy companies are coming in, and the word is that moving Daylight Saving Time forward three weeks had no measurable impact on power consumption. The attempt by the US Congress to make it look like they were doing something about the energy crisis has been exposed as the waste it is. But the new DST is probably here to stay — letting the bill expire would mean re-patching a lot of systems again next year. So much for saving energy."
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Your Rights Online: Daylight Savings Time Puts Kid in Jail for 12 Days 881 comments
Jherek Carnelian writes "Cody Webb was jailed for calling in a bomb threat to his Hempstead Area high school (near Pittsburgh). He spent 12 days in lockup until the authorities realized that their caller-id log was off an hour because of the new Daylight Savings Time rules and that Cody had only called one hour prior to the actual bomb threat. Perhaps it took so long because of the principal's Catch-22 attitude about Cody's guilt — she said, 'Well, why should we believe you? You're a criminal. Criminals lie all the time.'"
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But...but.. (Score:5, Funny)
Not statistically significant (Score:5, Funny)
Re:No it wasn't. (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps it's not so much needing the government to trick you into getting up earlier, as it is needing the government to trick your boss into opening your place of work an hour earlier.
Fine by me... (Score:5, Interesting)
While I had no doubts in my mind that this wouldn't save a dime, I'm still pleased with the fact that because I work 9:30 to 6pm I see daylight on my drive home three weeks earlier than usual. For me, I'd prefer it's this way all year long but I don't have kids that ride a school bus (isn't that the main reason they claim we do this in the first place?)
Re:Fine by me... (Score:5, Informative)
alternatively... (Score:5, Insightful)
Keep it summer time year round if you ask me.
Throwing it out doesn't cost much at all. (Score:5, Interesting)
Getting rid of it altogether requires far less IT effort than moving it. Most systems can just be configured to run on standard rather than auto-daylight time. The rest you can just strip it out - much easier than putting it in or tweaking it every time the legislature gets another hive of bees in their bonnets.
Staying with DST means a major ongoing hassle for any new scheduling application. Do you have any IDEA what a pain it is to program those with DST changes? *I* do: I had to do it for a client. What do you do with the 25 hour day - especially the hour that happens twice? What do you do with the 23 hour day?
I hear the railroads handle it like this:
- In the spring all the trains are suddenly an hour late, and try to make up the time over the next day.
- In the fall they actually STOP them and let them SIT for an hour.
I hear the worst day for commuter traffic deaths is the first Monday of DST. (It's rush hour with ALL the drivers jet-lagged simultaneously.)
Never mind lost productivity... (Score:5, Informative)
I wish they change this stuff more often (Score:4, Funny)
Purpose of Government (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember, we don't elect representatives to actually fix things. We elect them to "Do Something(tm)."
Actually fixing problems requires understanding those problems. For that matter, it requires some agreement on what actually constitutes a problem (as opposed to what will appease the masses, or what will attract the most press). When your enfranchised populace is largely well-fed, entertained, and more or less free to do as they please, you don't address real problems, you invent illusory ones. Because fixing the real problems would threaten the the status quo.
The U.S. is in the grip of statism: we're too quick to say "there ought to be a law!" Our leaders oblige, usually without worrying about the consequences.
Fuel Usage (Score:5, Interesting)
In other news (Score:5, Funny)
It would mean REMOVING patches... (Score:4, Insightful)
This DST2007 thing has been a real pain in my ass. I know that the US government hates to admit failure, so we won't leave Iraq and we won't back off on DST2007... wish we would though. It has caused a lot of problems.
Carbon-offset (Score:4, Funny)
Prior experience (Score:5, Insightful)
Congress member names (Score:4, Informative)
Daylight Saving Mystery (Score:5, Funny)
It was mostly about peak shaving, I thought (Score:5, Insightful)
People use the most energy right after they get home from work, basically; TV, computers (like me right now), cooking and other household operations.
Removing added lighting needs AT THAT TIME reduces the maximum generating capacity you need available to meet the peak demand. Which means they build a new power plant for your area in 2014 instead of 2012, or whatever. The time-cost of money means real savings on your power bill - even at constant total kWh consumed.
Took this opportunity to change our clocks to GMT (Score:5, Interesting)
* Systems that dual-boot windows and linux no longer make oopses with DST transitions
* our company does more and more projects across different timezones across the country and internationally, and it gets real confusing real fast to have everything in Eastern, Pacific, Arizona (they don't observe DST), Melbourne, and the UK.
* we're an aviation company, so most of us are already used to it
* most of our computers are on closed networks anyway
So Congress is really doing us a favor by driving us towards a global economy with a common accessible timebase already established for maritime and aviation uses. Even if that's not what they intended
Re:Quit'cher Bitchin' (Score:5, Insightful)
1) A significant amount of manpower had to be expended in order to assure that the computer systems across the world supporting this change were ready for it.
2) A number of home and business computer systems alike failed to change, sometimes resulting in mischeduled meetings and moderate confusion.
3) Congress wasted time on this bill that could have been spent getting something important done, such as finally hammering out a definate government policy on Stem Cell research, abortions, or actually making a true impact on the energy issue we face.
Time and money were wasted, for an energy revenue of nil. It may not have increased energy costs, but costs in general were incurred.
Look on the bright side... (Score:5, Insightful)
See, that's the glass-half-empty talking. Just look on the bright side: When they were wasting their time turning out this ridiculous waste of time and paper, it meant that they weren't really screwing anything else up!
Please, Congress, do us all a favor: spend your time on things like creating new "National $FOO Week"s. What -- there aren't any free weeks left? Okay, I've got one: why don't you guys try to fix the date of Easter? I'm sure that won't take you too long.
The more idiotic, banal stuff that I know the Congresscritters are doing, the better it makes me feel, because at least I know they're staying out of trouble. It's when they go quiet for a while that I start to worry. The further away they stay from the "real issues," the happier I am. As absolutely fucked as the system we have is, don't you even think for a moment that with hard work and diligence, they couldn't make it at least ten times worse.
Congratulations, Congress, on your brilliant plan. By all means, keep up the great work.
Re:Quit'cher Bitchin' (Score:4, Funny)
Yeah, because Congress totally would have accomplished something on THOSE deadlock issues....
Re:Quit'cher Bitchin' (Score:5, Insightful)
What do you mean no manual alarm could cope? How did manual alarms cope before the change? Thats right you set it before you went to bed, This isn't rocket science. One more point. The Time change occurred on Sunday morning at or about 2am. You had a whole day to look at your clock and figure out it was a hour off before you went to be Sunday night. It's not DST fault you were late to work it was your fault. Nice try though
Oh and for the record my cell phone did change on it's own on time.
Re:Quit'cher Bitchin' (Score:5, Funny)
Modded funny? (Score:5, Informative)
Seriously, this "useful" change was nothing but a waste of time, AND clocks. All those clocks/devices that automatically change according to the standardized time? Useless. Software patches? Quite impossible for most.
Looks like the waste management facilities will see a rise in borked electronics because of this - and that does precisely 0 for the environment, too.
Useful to us! (Score:5, Funny)
Record profits this year, my friend, record profits. You should have invested in manufacturers of automatically changing clocks, watches and timepieces.
Re: (Score:4, Insightful)
Are you high? (Score:5, Insightful)
First of all, this is a move by congress, no one is bashing "The Administration"
No harm, no foul, huh? How about the time it took to patch my file transfer program. I'm sure my employers don't appreciate the extra money spent. Not to mention tying up our IT staff trying to get time clocks/etc. fixed when the Windows patch f#$%ed up the time then fixed it again two days later. There's two days of pay for the IT staff, not to mention lost time where other things didn't get fixed.
And it's us who look like giant douches for complaining?!!
Re:Quit'cher Bitchin' (Score:4, Informative)
A number of countries followed suit out of necessity to stay synchronized with U.S. businesses, rather than because of any particular support for the idea.
Re:Quit'cher Bitchin' (Score:5, Interesting)
I've checked Wikipedia [wikipedia.org], and I didn't see much of any countries that have followed the USA on this initiative other than Canada. Even Mexico didn't follow (assuming the ariticle is accurate).
I live in Canada, and I can tell you that we followed out of economic necessity, and no other reason. Our economy is so tied to America (in terms of cross-border business) that we realistically had no choice. But we certainly don't like it, especially those further north: with the pushing of the clock so much earlier this year, people were heading to work and kids were walking to school in pitch-black darkness again.
And, of course, we had the same PITA tech issues with the time change the Americans had. For Canadians in general, the negatives of this change outweighed the positive by a long shot.
Re:Quit'cher Bitchin' (Score:5, Insightful)
Some tiny number of people had to wrestle with Windows inanity (and that's a self-selected group of people who voluntarily took jobs that require wrestling with Windows inanity).
Meanwhile, a huge number of people get a quality-of-life boost from the extra daylight in the evening, which makes it more pleasant to walk home from work, to run late-afternoon errands, or just to enjoy some time outdoors on nice spring and autumn days.
In an ideal world they'd keep pushing it back until the start and end finally met, and then abolish it entirely, leaving the clocks on summer time all year round. But until that time, at least things are a bit better. And next time they change it, you Windows-wrestlers will know what to do.
Change your schedule, not my clock (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you people have any clue what the concept of "noon" is supposed to be? In case you've forgotten, it's supposed to be the time of day when the sun is highest in the sky. It's supposed to be the time when there is as much daylight behind us as is in front of us.
For practical purposes, this isn't exact, but we've done a pretty good job with splitting the world up into 24 time zones so that it's somewhat close.
But not any more! No, now noon is just some arbitrary point during the day when we find it convenient to be. We want more time at the end of the day, so let's just move noon an hour ahead, right?
WRONG! I have a better idea. Instead of dinking around with clocks and redefining what something means that has been around since the beginning of recorded time, why don't we just have businesses shift their hours around?
Imagine how nice this would be. We never change our clocks. Twice a year, government changes its hours. The Post Office, for example, doesn't open at 8:00am during the summer, it opens at 7:00am, and it closes an hour earlier, too. Businesses that choose to do so follow suit and make sure its employees know when to show up. I suspect that almost all of them would, and probably most companies would have a policy that says something like, "When the government shifts its hours, we're shifting ours also."
Everyone's happy. People get their extra hour at the end of the day. No one has to write stupid software patches to account for when DST is. Atlanta, Georgia is always GMT-5, never GMT-4 like it is now. People don't think Arizonans are weird because half the year they're on Mountain time and half the year they're on Pacific. If government wants to change its hours a few weeks earlier next year, there's no issue at all, they can just announce it a few months in advance, and when the time comes, do it.
I'm sorry, but people who think that DST is a good thing are idiots. If you want to change your schedule, change your schedule. But leave my freakin' clock alone.
Re:Quit'cher Bitchin' (Score:5, Insightful)
There are almost 400 million people in the USA. A tiny number of those are Windows sysadmins.
Re:Quit'cher Bitchin' (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Our patching is done as well. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:It's also been unseasonably warm (Score:5, Insightful)
You can with a change in DST that is supposed to save energy on both ends, and only affects one month on each end.
For other things, maybe not.
I don't. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I like the extra daylight though (Score:5, Funny)
Now if they would only legislate it so the sun didn't set at all.
I do not get this. My wife makes the same sort of comments. I tell her to put the baby to bed at 9pm if it's still too light at 8pm and she says the baby will be cranky because she is staying up too late.
I used to try to explain. Now I just nod.
Re:Amen (Score:5, Insightful)
I never understood school schedules. It has been shown that teenagers naturally wake up later in the day, and that elementary school students wake up earlier. Yet it is the elementary schools that start at 8:30 and the high schools that start at 7:30. Why not make school like work, where it runs 9-5, on a schedule more matching that of the parents? Some will counter that high school students have jobs in the evening, so let them start earlier. Why should jobs drive school schedules?
Re:Amen (Score:5, Interesting)
Then you haven't thought about it much.
Early to bed, early to rise. School schedules reflected our agricultural heritage, which is often why summers are off, still.
"It has been shown that teenagers naturally wake up later in the day, and that elementary school students wake up earlier."
These are more recent studies, like in the last 10 years or so. Once schedules are set, things are hard to change, as there is a certain expectation.
"Yet it is the elementary schools that start at 8:30 and the high schools that start at 7:30. Why not make school like work, where it runs 9-5, on a schedule more matching that of the parents?"
Obviously you haven't worked a hard day in your life. 9-5 is more white collar. Blue collar traditionally was 7-3 for 1st shift. 2nd shift was 3-11pm. For example, where I am, the white collar rush time in the morning is heaviest at about 8:30am. However, most of my neighbors are out the door before 7, and the dump trucks start their banging 10 minutes after 7.
"Some will counter that high school students have jobs in the evening, so let them start earlier. Why should jobs drive school schedules?"
Your older student can take care of themselves if they arrive home around 2.5-3pm. The 2nd grader can be met at 3:15-3:30 by the parent that got off work. Or if the elementary school student has an older sibling, watched by them since the latter got home first. Or, without an older sibling, something that used to be done was that you hired a short watch babysitter, usually a high schooler. Most parents are concerned with what happens after school.
A high schooler can drop off his elementary school sibling, or the white collar see the same off on the way to work. The blue collar with the elementary aged child usually had a stay at home wife, or she worked a more service or white collar job and could see the child off later.
As well, most elementary school students usually don't have after school activities, like theater, marching band, or sports. This gives high school students who want to do those activities time to do them, and still make it home for the family dinner. If they started later, you wouldn't have a nice family meal, since they, as you were earlier quoting studies, are a good thing according to most studies.
And yes, jobs do matter. A lot. High school usually lets out by 2:45. This allows high schoolers to hit the 2nd shift if blue collar (3-11), or the 2nd shift if they work in the service industry like fast food (depends, but usually 2.5-3.5pm to closing which is typically 9-10). Doesn't sound like a big deal to you, if mommy and daddy paid for your toys and food, but for a lot of on the edge students, if you can't have an afternoon job, they would drop out. At least this allows those interested in sports to partake, as well as those who need the jobs or the training to also get it while still in high school.
btw, those sleep studies I don't think accurately accounted for natural light variances, in which case daylight savings actually works against how the teen mind would prefer.
Re:there are other benifits to the new DST change. (Score:4, Funny)
Wrong web site...
We're struggling with sun glare on the screen while firing up Counter Strike...
Selfish Bastard (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Who cares about energy savings (Score:5, Insightful)
I _really_ dislike getting up before dawn. I mean deep viceral psychological bio-cycle "why am I getting up at night" kind of dislike. Just when dawn was arriving at a decent time, you "I want more light so I'll force everyone else to change their schedules" people make me get up at 5:00AM EST instead of 6AM (and now you're talking about pushing it back to 4:00AM?!?).
The clock reflects astronomical realities of earth/sun positioning. Noon is supposed to mean the sun is overhead, mid-day. Cocky people then decide they don't like that arrangement, and declare what _is_ shall be different from what they _want_ reality to be. A rose by any other name may smell as sweet, and calling dung a "rose" doesn't make it smell any better. Calling 5:00AM "6:00AM Daylight Saving Time" doesn't change the fact that it's really 5:00AM, and the combination of light and circadian rhythms means it's still time to sleep.
It's almost enough to make me move to Arizona where they ignore this nonsense.
Seriously, man - it really messes up my internal clock. Midnight to six is my time to _sleep_; mess with that, and you're messing with my ability to function.
You want more light? YOU get up earlier. Leave my clock alone; I'll be a lot more productive that way.
Re:Who cares about energy savings (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Extra sunshine isn't such a good thing. (Score:4, Funny)
Sure, I could put all of that daylight into a Daylight Savings Bank, but I don't trust those guys. I don't need some big corporation earning fat interest loaning my daylight out to other people and giving me a 0.4% APR on it.
Re:Eliminate DST ... and Time Zones too (Score:4, Insightful)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time [wikipedia.org]
Re:Eliminate DST ... and Time Zones too (Score:5, Insightful)
http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2261
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=15840
Re:Eliminate DST ... and Time Zones too (Score:5, Insightful)
If you don't have to deal with multiple timezones then what the bloody hell do you care about what time it is in a different timezone?!?
"what time do I wake up in the morning?" and that's not a calculation, but an answer you get handed to you when you get off the plane or ask a local.
Nonsense. "The store closes at 5." "The store closes at 9." You know the former means "early evening" and the latter means "late evening" because we use time zones. Replace that with "The store closes at 0300," and suddenly you haven't a clue. Sure, you can figure out that local "noon" is 1800, therefore it closes at the equivelant of 9PM, but is that really easier?
Yes, one of the side effects is that some locales border timezones and have to do a minor calculation to figure out what time the stores close in the adjacent timezone, but that wouldn't go away with everyone using UTC -- you'd still have to remember that it's an hour earlier/later.
Don't get me wrong, DST is a ridiculous "solution," but discarding local time is equally ridiculous.
Re:Eliminate DST ... and Time Zones too (Score:5, Insightful)
That's funny. Standard time and the resulting time zones came about because there were more interactions on a national and even global scale, thanks to railroads, telegraphs and radio. Keeping the time difference between two points an integer number of hours is far more preferable to what preceded it: everybody using local mean time for their own meridian. Would you like to keep track of the ~12 minute time difference between New Orleans and Chicago? The ~16 minute difference between San Francisco and Los Angeles? The ~12 minute difference between New York and Boston?
"They're just a PITA -- time is an arbitrary number anyway, so who cares if the clock says 6pm or 6am when you wake up?"
We're a diurnal species. If mechanical time did not approximate solar time to some degree, the former would be abandoned for the latter.
"Imagine having every computer (and every log, timestamp, calendar, etc.) in the world on GMT. Imagine scheduling conference calls and not having someone confuse which time zone it was scheduled for."
Imagine a world where not everybody's job involves timestamps, computer logs, or conference calls. Or, instead of imagining, experience reality a little instead.
At any rate, if it works so well, use your life as an example and set all your personal timepieces to UTC.
Re:This just in (Score:5, Insightful)
BZZZZT! You lose. Maybe you should wind back the clock and note who was in control of Congress when this bill was signed. Can you guess which party had control of both the House and the Senate at the time?