Extra Daylight Savings May Confuse the Gadgets 933
CrimeDoggy writes "In the energy bill to be signed by the President today (August 8), changes are to be made that extend daylight savings time. The bill would start daylight time three weeks earlier and end it a week later as an energy-saving measure. Many devices such as VCRs, cell phones, and watches would still operate on the previous schedule, potentially causing problems."
Time for a change... (Score:3, Insightful)
Super. It's about time we monkey with the way we reckon time again...after all, we had almost gotten used to the current insane standard.
I would propose a rather radically different option...eliminate time zones in the U.S. altogether. That's right, no time zones at all...everyone can just use GMT. I'm not advocating that everyone go to work at 09:00 GMT...business can determine what hours they want their employees to work, based on the amount of daylight available at that particular time of year, but the time standard would be the same everywhere. That way, there would be none of this bullshit confusion about 'what time is that here', or 'what is the time there'. It's GMT. The same damned time everywhere.
We're already a global community...it only makes sense to adopt a global time. Of course, asking the country that still uses Imperial measurement units to spearhead this change might be asking a bit much...
Moral travesty (Score:5, Insightful)
(Yes, that's an opinion. Feel free to disagree.)
Comment removed (Score:1, Insightful)
Raise your hand! (Score:1, Insightful)
Of all the things in the Energy Bill (Score:4, Insightful)
Alright, so I'm going off on this. I understand that
What I'm trying to say is that somehow this is the BIG idea in the energy bill as it is being reported and it doesn't deserve that status.
The Energy bill is a mess the likes of which haven't been seen since the Patriot Act. That's where the focus needs to be.
Oh well.
Politicians? (Score:1, Insightful)
Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
Furthermore, what the hell does this have to do with energy conservation? I'm still going to turn the fracking lights on when it gets dark; I don't look at the clock and go "hey, it's 7, time to turn on all the lights."
A great big DUH (Score:5, Insightful)
I wish the president would have had the gumption to just extend Daylight Savings Time to all year long and ditch the date changes entirely. Nearly every device can be configured to ignore DST changes and it would have saved the world a lot of confusion each year.
Re:Time for a change... (Score:4, Insightful)
We already use a global time in a sense; time zones make GMT into a format that's easier to understand. Knowing that it's 05:00 GMT doesn't necessarily tell you whether you're going to be calling a person in the middle of the night or not.
There is no problem... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Please just drop it. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Time for a change... (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course, this also creates a similar problem, it just shifts it to a different area.
Instead of "what is it there"? The question becomes "What time do you start work over there?" "What time do you wake up over there?"
So you still have to remember the same information, except there's less standardization aside from being able to say "Meet me at 10:00" and everyone can look at their watch and understand it to mean the same thing no matter where they are.
So we'll all have the same time on our watches, but we'll be doing whatever we want whenever we want and coordination would become even more confusing.
Re:Of all the things in the Energy Bill (Score:3, Insightful)
People only care about the here and now (I'm one of them although I don't care about how this might screw up my computer automatically correcting for CDT and CST).
Global Warming is something that cooks and liberals care about and it doesn't affect anyone in the next two days so it doesn't matter. What's on TV is what matters to people right now.
As long as the media and the Government can divert people's attention with stupid bullshit like their mobile phones and VCRs (remember anything that interferes with Survivor, The Bachelor/ette, and/or any other stupid reality TV show is far more important than anything else).
Re:Please just drop it. (Score:5, Insightful)
In short, I think this is a bad idea. I think DST is a bad idea in general, and I wish that more states would do what Arizona has done (but not the Navajo Nation), and dispense with DST altogether.
Re:Time for a change... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Time for a change... (Score:5, Insightful)
I think you're missing the basic purpose of telling time. Which is to say that no matter what it says on the clock, it's the "same damned time everywhere", so your solution accomplishes nothing. Time is linear - you don't actually go back in time if you take a flight that lands in one place "earlier" than when it left (I know you know this, but your premise suggests otherwise). The purpose of having a time standard that we can all read is as a frame of reference. Your solution is to eliminate that frame of reference. I don't see how this makes things simpler.
If it's morning where I am in NYC, it's still going to be night in Hawaii regardless of what the clock says. I still need to remember that if I want to call somebody there, or otherwise communicate. Just because my watch says it's 4 AM (GMT) doesn't mean all those Hawaiians are going to be awake.
You're looking at things backwards. Time zones make it easier to deal with this issue, because we can easily say "oh, it's six hours earlier in Hawaii - that means people must still be asleep." Take away the time zones and you're stuck doing calculations about distance and solar cycles for every single place on the planet you've got to deal with. Is it really easier to say "well, Hawaii is 5,500 miles east, and the earth rotates at X miles an hour; therefore, Hawaii will have sunlight in 6 hours" than it is to just know that Hawaii's 6 hours behind us?
Re:Time for a change... (Score:3, Insightful)
You have to ask that anyway. Just because I start work at 8am in Denver doesn't mean I can assume that everyone everywhere starts work at 8am. I can't even assume that in the *same* timezone.
Why is it so easy? (Score:4, Insightful)
OT: sig... (Score:3, Insightful)
And it's equally possible to extinguish both...
The only other solution... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Time for a change... (Score:3, Insightful)
You know his hours of operation.
You work from 12:00-20:00, he works from 15:00-23:00. You keep that in your contact information from him. He publishes it in his
Your PIM tells you when you bring up his record if he's working now so you don't have to burn any neurotransmitters figuring it out.
This is the same as figuring out if the Target down the street is open yet.
It's also great in that it would let people work closer to their natural circadian rhythms. Here in New Hampshire people assume everybody works 8-5, but in New Jersey, people start work at 9. So, already the current system is broken.
Re:Moral travesty (Score:4, Insightful)
8:30 is a fine time for the sun to set. It sets by six in the winter (Virginia) and there doens't seem to be outcry.
7am and the sun is "high overhead"? I'm still trying to figure out why that would be a problem. I work a relatively normal 8-5 day, and I have a sunrise simulator that I use - even in the summer - to get up at 6 so I have time to have breakfast and get my kid out of bed / dressed / fed / off to school. If it were light out at 5am, that'd be great.
Of course, I have TiVo, so I don't have to worry about all that "but I can't watch Jay Leno and get up at 5am" shit. (No, I don't watch late night tv anyway). I don't play evening (insert sport here), where light is a problem. I can't get in 18 holes of golf after work regardless of the sunset time, so evening play is a moot point.
Now that I come to think about it, if it got cooler an hour earlier in the evening, it would probably be much nicer. Young kids could spend more evenings chasing fireflys insead of having to go to bed while its still light out. The fireworks on the 4th could start at a reasonable time.
Tell you what...I'm still looking for a down side. Even my wife would have one less day to be in a bitchy mood 'cause she lost an hour of sleep each spring. (Yes, she seems to treat the extra hour of sleep the fall change offers as a holiday akin to Christmas)
Re:Moral travesty (Score:3, Insightful)
This is exactly how people should adapt to the increased sunlight hours during the summer - get up earlier and go to the gym, do gardening, whatever, during the copious hours before work if your work hours are static throughout the year. Alternately if you're an employer then adapt your hours (or even better adapt flexible hours for the majority of workplaces where it isn't detrimental to do so).
The idea of changing the clock to force it on everyone is ludicrous, and it's imperfect anyways as there remains tremendous sunlight "waste" during the height of summer (in my area the sun rises just before 8am in the height of winter, and at 5am in the summer). In the past, when life was much more synchronous and people needed direct and immediate contact with others to a vastly greater degree, it was necessary for this mass coordination, but today we live largely asynchronous, queued and disconnected lives, and everyone clogging the streets at 8am and 5pm is insanity.
Re:Of all the things in the Energy Bill (Score:5, Insightful)
The same is true for recycling programs.
Also don't forget that many projects have long-term effects and take some time for the true effect to be realized. Your recycling example, for instance. While recycling processes are different from raw manufacturing, there's more to it than just that. Consider, for instance, the long-term effect of cutting down mature forests in terms of oxygen production, erosion, destruction of natural beauty, the effects on the biosphere as a whole, the destruction of habitat for animals that live in those forests, and so on.
We can specifically point to the short-sighted actions of a logging company that destroyed the then-last-known habitat of the ivory-billed woodpecker -- in full knowledge of what they were doing as a result of information given to them by scientists. And look at how long it has taken to find out that the damage may not have been permanent after all -- but undoing their mess may not be possible if it turns out the birds have been wiped out to the point where the ones that have been sighted can no longer reproduce.
You fall into the trap that so many others do of failing to think of the long term and thinking only in the short.
Again, let's see some sources to prove those ridiculous accusations.
Re:Time for a change... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Please just drop it. (Score:3, Insightful)
Conservation is stupid (Score:1, Insightful)
That's not true. The president talks about conservation a lot. But...
Conservation is stupid. Conservation is simply artificially impoverishing yourself. There's no benefit.
You're saying:
Why? For future generations? So they can grow up and not be able to accomplish their goals because they have to conserve too?
What's the conservation endgame?
Re:Moral travesty (Score:3, Insightful)
Ah, but you've pointed out one of the problems: Go to the gym? But it's 5am, the gym isn't open yet. Neither is anything else, unless everyone gets together and agrees to start earlier. You can do this by asking every business to change schedules, or you can do it all at once by changing the clocks.
Not so ludicrous, I think. No, for ludicrousness, wait until someone reasons that if extending it by another month is supposed to save energy, just think how much we'd save by extending it to the whole year! Wait for it.
People unclear on the concept... (Score:3, Insightful)
There isn't one. That's the point. As opposed to the endgame for not conserving, which is resource exhaustion.
I find your question so absolutely hilarious that I just had to reply.
(Note that "conservation", in sane circles, does not mean "abandoning everything but solar power", the way some nut-jobs (on both ends of the spectrum) seem to think. It means intelligent management of your resources. "Sustainable resource consumption" would be a better term, but that's doesn't roll of the tongue as well.)
How surreal! (Score:2, Insightful)
Daylight Savings was originally implemented by Ben Franklin (simplified version: "to get farmers out of bed and milking the cows"). When was the last time Daylight Savings had an impact on your life, except twice a year when you change stuff or check it? Or give you an annual convenient excuse to roll into work an hour late?
And it's just plain Dadaism to think it has anything at all to do with energy consumption. Do y'suppose Bush actually believes he controls the seasons by moving the clocks and calandar pages around? Wouldn't surprise me in the least.
Re:Conservation is stupid (Score:3, Insightful)
It would improve my life to get from point A to point B. I can do so in an SUV, or I can do so in a car that uses half as much gasoline. Conservation is to use the least amount of resources to accomplish the same goal. Conservation is not the opposite of need, but the opposite of waste.
Re:Time for a change... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:People unclear on the concept... (Score:2, Insightful)
As resources become scarce, the price increases to balance their scarcity. At some level, substitutes become more economically attactive and use of the now-expensive, scare resource declines.
Geology doesn't adhere to economic principles I'm afraid, but I digress...
The point isn't that we'll use up every drop of oil---you are correct that economics will turn price/supply into an asymptotic curve. The problem is the steepness of the curve and what kind of alternative fuel capacity will be online, at what time, and at what cost. The catastrophic scenario is that fossil fuels could very well spike in price decades before alternative fuels are practical. Or even worse, the scarcity of fossil fuels means that developing the alternative fuel infrastructure is infeasible. We should be developing the technologies and building the infrastructure now while we can afford to do so.
Or to put it another way---imagine that fossil fuels become completely unaffordable (say, $30/gal), and there is no alternative energy in sufficient supply to fill the gap. How, exactly, is that different to the consumer than the scenario where we've hit resource exhaustion? In either case, the consumer ain't going see no oil coming his way...
Re:There is no problem... (Score:3, Insightful)
the windows user interface in particular pushes the idea that local time is all important and the timezone is just some internationalisation setting.
if you have local time right and timezone wrong your computer gets the wrong idea of UTC which is a bad thing for any protocol that bases things like caching on UTC.