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United States Government Politics

Daylight Saving Change Saved No Power 766

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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Daylight Saving Change Saved No Power

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  • Quit'cher Bitchin' (Score:3, Insightful)

    by duerra ( 684053 ) * on Tuesday April 03, 2007 @05:04PM (#18594407) Homepage
    Look, I understand people that want to take a stab at the administration - Bush's administration has done far more harm than good, but come on - bashing like this summary is just not necessary. This was a widely supported idea beyond just the US - a number of countries followed suit in the idea. At the very least, it didn't HURT anything - so why bitch about it so much? Oh well, you had to patch your systems. It's over and done with. No need to try and make this into a "prime opportunity" to bash the administration for at least trying. There's plenty of other things to gripe about when it comes to this administration - learn to pick your fights, otherwise you just end up looking like a giant douche.... or a turd sandwich.
  • alternatively... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by boarder ( 41071 ) on Tuesday April 03, 2007 @05:07PM (#18594451) Homepage
    ... we can just get rid of DST altogether, since it has been shown to not do dick except annoy people and cost companies money in IT time.

    Keep it summer time year round if you ask me.
  • by qwijibo ( 101731 ) on Tuesday April 03, 2007 @05:09PM (#18594513)
    You must work for a small company that takes part in reality if you already did the patching. There was no compelling business justification for patching the systems, so failing to get rid of the change means it remains on the eternal todo list, right next to backups. The joys of administering systems for a large bank.
  • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday April 03, 2007 @05:09PM (#18594519)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • by MeanderingMind ( 884641 ) on Tuesday April 03, 2007 @05:10PM (#18594537) Homepage Journal
    Actually, it's arguable it did hurt a number of things.

    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.
  • Are you high? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ObiWanStevobi ( 1030352 ) on Tuesday April 03, 2007 @05:11PM (#18594555) Journal

    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?!!

  • by erroneus ( 253617 ) on Tuesday April 03, 2007 @05:14PM (#18594629) Homepage
    ...and I'm all for it!

    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.
  • by Darlantan ( 130471 ) on Tuesday April 03, 2007 @05:17PM (#18594691)
    Damn straight. DST is one of the dumbest things I've ever encountered. It's shocking how many people think that there's an hour of extra light automagically generated by a time change.

    Personally, I'm setting all my clocks to GMT.
  • by DragonWriter ( 970822 ) on Tuesday April 03, 2007 @05:21PM (#18594799)

    You cant extrapolate "it doesnt help" from one months worth of data.


    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.
  • Re:Are you high? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by GrayCalx ( 597428 ) on Tuesday April 03, 2007 @05:21PM (#18594805)
    And it's us who look like giant douches for complaining?!!

    No, you don't look like a giant douche for complaining. I think the original poster was responding more to the tone of the summary which seemed... angry that they even attempted something to conserve energy.

    I don't think its a liberal/conservative thing, but I do think its a great example of you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't for the government. Had they not changed DST after it was proposed the environmentalists (or rather those wanting to conserve energy) would be complaining, "The government never does anything to even TRY to conserve power!"

    Someone had this idea. It didn't work (surprise, surprise) and now you have people complaining, "I can't believe you even TRIED this?!?"

    So I'm very sorry that you had so much additional work to do and your company lost so much money, but if it helps there is probably an environmentalist somewhere who is smiling... or at least frowning less.

    /damned if you do damned if you don't.
    //can't please all of the people all of the time.

  • by sh00z ( 206503 ) <sh00z.yahoo@com> on Tuesday April 03, 2007 @05:23PM (#18594845) Journal
    or, alternatively: three more weeks with LESS sunlight BEFORE work actually do something (run, bike, ...) is all that matters. And I've been robbed. Who cares if it's sunny after work? Daylight when I wake up is a lot more important.
  • Selfish Bastard (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Marxist Hacker 42 ( 638312 ) * <seebert42@gmail.com> on Tuesday April 03, 2007 @05:26PM (#18594921) Homepage Journal
    Not for those of us who have visual overstimulation induced migraines. This just means that they've stolen several hours of my precious DARKNESS in return for no monetary advantage.
  • by Kadin2048 ( 468275 ) <.ten.yxox. .ta. .nidak.todhsals.> on Tuesday April 03, 2007 @05:30PM (#18594997) Homepage Journal
    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.

    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:Amen (Score:5, Insightful)

    by nebaz ( 453974 ) on Tuesday April 03, 2007 @05:30PM (#18595011)
    some schoolkids have to wait for the bus in the dark

    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?
  • by dazedNconfuzed ( 154242 ) on Tuesday April 03, 2007 @05:30PM (#18595015)
    Fine. You like more light. GET UP EARLIER. And leave my clock alone.

    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.
  • Prior experience (Score:5, Insightful)

    by asackett ( 161377 ) on Tuesday April 03, 2007 @05:31PM (#18595037) Homepage
    What amazes me about the whole thing is that nobody bothered to look back to 1973 when Nixon did essentially the same thing. No energy was saved then, either.
  • by Moridineas ( 213502 ) on Tuesday April 03, 2007 @05:33PM (#18595079) Journal
    Oh, one other thing I was going to ask...

    If you don't approve of DST, do you also not approve of time zones? Both are an attempt to "standardize" day/night conditions to the hours of the day. Some countries--huge ones like China--don't have timezones, so it's obviously possible.

    Are you advocating that the US gets rid of timezones too? As you say, it WOULD be easier (for programmers primarily!) to standardize on GMT/UTC.
  • by raju1kabir ( 251972 ) on Tuesday April 03, 2007 @05:40PM (#18595185) Homepage

    So yeah, it hurt a lot.

    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.

  • by DragonWriter ( 970822 ) on Tuesday April 03, 2007 @05:48PM (#18595339)

    We only have one data element right now.


    We have quite a few; first, its supposed to reduce it by reducing daily demand, and its supposed to do it generally across the nation. You don't need multiple years of data to get a decent idea of what is going on with that; you can look at the data from one month daily and by region, and see to what degree it appears to be true. Or you could look at the overall average over all regions and days, and see that the number is not different that what would have been expected without the change.

    Of course, one might posit that there is some reason to expect that this month was systematically atypical in a way which would distort the results, but those making that claim ought to have something to point to to justify it.

    Can you prove to me that the power we saved wasnt offset by the power used to deal with an unseasonably warm spring?


    First, "unseasonably warm spring" is somewhat irrelevant (and not established) as its not even 2 weeks into the 13 weeks of Spring, yet, and a significant portion of the new DST time is in winter.

    Secondly, even considering the right time period, where is the evidence that an unseasonably warm March increases energy demand? Certainly, in the hottest areas it may increase cooling demand, but in much of the country a warm late-winter-to-early-spring is going to save energy by reducing cooling demand.

  • Time in general (Score:2, Insightful)

    by smith6174 ( 986645 ) on Tuesday April 03, 2007 @05:49PM (#18595351)
    I think all of us can agree that in a perfect world, the rest of the goofballs out there would pay as much attention to this as we Slashdot readers have. I turn my lights on when I need to see in the dark. I go to my appointments on time, no matter what numbers the government or anyone else tells me that time is called. Also, what is the deal with time zones? I think this is the same issue. I feel the same when I wake up at 8am eastern time as when I wake up at 5am pacific time. Seriously, this is all stupid and old fashioned. I suggest that anyone who cares about this start using GMT exclusively in their dealings, especially if those dealings are as meaningless as mine.
  • by guanxi ( 216397 ) on Tuesday April 03, 2007 @05:49PM (#18595371)
    Back in the day, when people's interactions were mostly local, time zones might have been harmless. But now, a large part of our population interacts across time zones every day. 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?

    It would take a little getting used to, but I bet everyone would adjust quickly and never go back. 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.
  • DST all the time? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by DebbieM ( 1083761 ) on Tuesday April 03, 2007 @05:52PM (#18595397)
    What if we just gave up standard time? Everyone likes the light. Few like the clock change hassle. Let's just stay in DST.
  • Get up earlier. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Myria ( 562655 ) on Tuesday April 03, 2007 @05:52PM (#18595405)
    If you life depends on the sun, get up earlier.

    The government's laws should be about encouraging businesses to set working hours to match the sun, not changing fundamental measurement systems to trick people into getting up earlier.
  • by Maxo-Texas ( 864189 ) on Tuesday April 03, 2007 @05:55PM (#18595459)
    Companies used to mostly work 9-5 (or 8-5).

    Now, our company works from 7am to 7pm (9 hour shifts w/ hour lunches).

    Basically, if you get up early, you take a 7am shift- if you get up late, you take a 10am shift.

    I don't see why they can't leave the clocks alone and places will just shift their hours if it matters.
  • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 03, 2007 @05:56PM (#18595467)
    If they start shifting the time zone boundries around for arbitrary reasons seasonally then I'll have an issue with timezones.

    Timezones, unlike DST, actually served and still serves a purpose. Instead of a continuous change in local time the change is broken up into discrete chunks. Sorta handy for things like not having trains end up smashing into each other because each had their own version of "noon".
  • by KingSkippus ( 799657 ) * on Tuesday April 03, 2007 @06:14PM (#18595779) Homepage Journal

    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.

  • by raju1kabir ( 251972 ) on Tuesday April 03, 2007 @06:23PM (#18595927) Homepage

    Tiny number?!? Where in hell have you been?

    There are almost 400 million people in the USA. A tiny number of those are Windows sysadmins.

  • Re: (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Antony-Kyre ( 807195 ) on Tuesday April 03, 2007 @06:23PM (#18595941)
    It would be better to switch back. Why? Because there are unfixed errors in a lot of software that are still causing problems. For the fixed bugs, well, those can be "unfixed" if they were fixed in the first place. It isn't too late to switch back.
  • by cpeterso ( 19082 ) on Tuesday April 03, 2007 @06:25PM (#18595981) Homepage
    Swatch Beats are the solution to time zones!

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time [wikipedia.org]
  • by StikyPad ( 445176 ) on Tuesday April 03, 2007 @06:27PM (#18596019) Homepage
    Basically because you'd still have to do the calculations, but you'd lost the convenience of having the same frame of reference in all locales, as 1200 would cease to be relevant. It would probably just make things more difficult.

    http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=22613 3&cid=18316935 [slashdot.org]
    http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=158401 &cid=13272080 [slashdot.org]
  • by TeknoHog ( 164938 ) on Tuesday April 03, 2007 @06:31PM (#18596103) Homepage Journal

    time is an arbitrary number anyway, so who cares if the clock says 6pm or 6am when you wake up?

    I do care if a number contains alphabetical suffixes. If we rationalize on something like GMT, might as well use a proper 24-hour time.

  • by shawn(at)fsu ( 447153 ) on Tuesday April 03, 2007 @06:41PM (#18596273) Homepage
    I was late to work that day because no alarm clock whether it be cell phone or manual alarm could cope with the automatic change.

    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.
  • by Guppy06 ( 410832 ) on Tuesday April 03, 2007 @06:44PM (#18596313)
    "Fine. You like more light. GET UP EARLIER. And leave my clock alone."

    No, you should get up later instead.

    "The clock reflects astronomical realities of earth/sun positioning."

    Nope, it reflects oscillations of a cesium atom. Far more regular and periodic than, say, the time between two consecutive noons.

    "Noon is supposed to mean the sun is overhead, mid-day."

    If I recall, there are only four days a year when local solar noon and local mean noon are the same thing, and neither have anything to do with standard time, unless you're standing on a meridian that's a multiple of 15.

    "Cocky people then decide they don't like that arrangement, and declare what _is_ shall be different from what they _want_ reality to be."

    If we're getting paid by the hour, we want our hours to be of a consistent length.

    "doesn't change the fact that it's really 5:00AM,"

    Is that standard time, local solar time or local mean time?

    "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."

    Then maybe it's time for you to find a job that lets you sleep later.

    "You want more light? YOU get up earlier. Leave my clock alone; I'll be a lot more productive that way."

    No thanks, I prefer coming home before sunset.

  • by Guppy06 ( 410832 ) on Tuesday April 03, 2007 @06:56PM (#18596445)
    "Back in the day, when people's interactions were mostly local, time zones might have been harmless."

    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)

    by 47Ronin ( 39566 ) <glennNO@SPAM47ronin.com> on Tuesday April 03, 2007 @06:57PM (#18596461) Homepage
    I don't see how this is saying Bush sucks. It blamed congress for the change in Daylight savings time, and last I checked, congress is run by the Democrats.

    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?
  • by codemachine ( 245871 ) on Tuesday April 03, 2007 @07:12PM (#18596629)
    Yet most people in Saskatchewan would bitch about how behind the times the province is for not going along with the idiocy that is DST.

    Any oil companies based in Alberta (which observes DST) just have their Saskatchewan employees go to work an hour earlier in the summer. Which proves it really isn't that hard to change your business hours to accomodate the season.

    I think this is a case where Saskatchewan is so far "behind the times" that they may be more "modern" than everyone else. With the 9-5 workday losing significance all the time, DST is already becoming less and less relevant anyhow. It will likely continue to be less relevant until it is finally abolished. Hopefully Saskatchewan doesn't decide to adopt it right before it becomes totally obsolete.

    As you said, I think Saskatchewan has it right, and I hope that they don't change it just to be like everyone else. Because in this instance, what everyone else is doing doesn't make sense anymore.
  • by ElectricRook ( 264648 ) on Tuesday April 03, 2007 @07:14PM (#18596659)

    They convened for fewer days than any Congress in a hundred years.

    You say that like it's a bad thing...

    Congress _not_ imposing their personal culture (lawyer culture at that) on folks living 3K miles away is a much better thing.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 03, 2007 @07:20PM (#18596735)
    Except, if I'm doing business with somebody at a significantly different longitude from my own, I still need to know the difference. Sure, I can say let's schedule the conference call for 2100 GMT - conveniently 16:00 MDT for me. But my collegue in Amsterdam will be a bit annoyed. So I would need a look-up table to see what his work hours typically are - I wonder what we'd call it? I got it - Time Zones!

    Most people will keep their work days roughly corrosponding to daylight hours whereever they are. Time zones are just a convenient way to keep track of what those hours are from place to place.
  • by AK Marc ( 707885 ) on Tuesday April 03, 2007 @07:23PM (#18596775)
    Basically because you'd still have to do the calculations, but you'd lost the convenience of having the same frame of reference in all locales, as 1200 would cease to be relevant. It would probably just make things more difficult.

    You don't have to do any calculations. Why would you ever deal with two time zones? I presume because you are in one and talking to someone in another, or you are traveling from one to another. If you are talking to someone, you ask them what their hours of operation are, and call between them. No calculations needed. It's really quite convenient. Hours of operation are different for every company, and they have them posted on websites and such, again, no calculations ever needed. If you are traveling, you never need to worry about a dateline or such. You never need to worry about setting a watch. You never need to worry about calculations to figure out what time back home people are sleeping. You do one and only one calculation, "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. If you have business meetings, they are given to you, no calculations. If you are hungry, you eat. You try to go to bed 8 hours before the time to wake up.

    One clock eliminates almost all calculations. It is by far the most convenient way of handling time (except for the fact that almost nobody does it).
  • by Peter Mork ( 951443 ) <Peter.Mork@gmail.com> on Tuesday April 03, 2007 @07:39PM (#18596941) Homepage

    Oh and for the record my cell phone did change on it's own on time.

    So did mine ... 2 weeks after the new and improved DST. In fact, math would be much easier if pi were to equal 3. Why don't we just frak around with other constants. While we're at it, e is pretty close to 3.

    In short, why should I have to reset my alarm so that you can stay up an extra hour. When you go to bed is your business, not mine. Let's keep the Congress out of it!

  • by krbvroc1 ( 725200 ) on Tuesday April 03, 2007 @07:45PM (#18597015)

    Yes, but it will remain that way for largely practical reasons
    I think you meant to say largely economic reasons. We are forcing people into an educational situation when their brain is not ready for it. Apparently the money is more important then the learning experience.
  • No it wasn't. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by mrchaotica ( 681592 ) * on Tuesday April 03, 2007 @07:50PM (#18597077)

    You got exactly the same amount of light that you would have gotten anyway. You just think there was more because you didn't sleep in as late as you usually would have.

    Personally, I think anybody who needs the government to trick them into getting up early is a moron, but morons' opinions may differ...

  • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 03, 2007 @08:01PM (#18597215)
    "Now that I moved to California, I should call my buddy in India. Hmm, what time can I call him so I don't wake him up in the middle of the night?"
  • by Chmcginn ( 201645 ) on Tuesday April 03, 2007 @08:04PM (#18597263) Journal
    The fact that there's more "funny" than "insightful" mods on this comment worries me.
  • by firewrought ( 36952 ) on Tuesday April 03, 2007 @08:12PM (#18597357)

    One clock eliminates almost all calculations. It is by far the most convenient way of handling time.
    Spoken like a true programmer! The "day"--the period of waking up, being active, going to sleep--is our one real biologically-rooted construct of time. You can't park midnight during the middle of lunch... the official calendar would not agree with people's conceptual calendars, and people would respond by developing new conventions that you'd then have to develop and re-gear your apps for and the calculations would be even messier and then you'd be back to square one.

    Eliminating DST alltogether now--that's a good idea.

  • Last Congress.... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by The Monster ( 227884 ) on Tuesday April 03, 2007 @08:12PM (#18597365) Homepage

    It blamed congress for the change in Daylight savings time, and last I checked, congress is run by the Democrats.
    But it wasn't a year and a half ago when they passed the bill, and Bush signed it into law.

    People who oppose DST don't realize that it's just an attempt to recapture what people used to do automatically: Get up when the sun rises. The greater your latitude, the more variation there is in sunrise times between the solstices. We've settled on an hour as a good compromise that works for most people.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 03, 2007 @08:18PM (#18597427)
    Your Unix admins most be total idiots or you are just full of shit. I lean more toward the you are full of shit.
  • by xzqx ( 866110 ) on Tuesday April 03, 2007 @08:20PM (#18597449)
    You think this would save stupid software patches? Think again. Lots of industries need software to know when the workday starts. How about the stock market, for example? Your scheme wouldn't have saved any more headache than moving DST. In fact, it might have caused some headaches, because now companies would need proprietary software instead of relying on libraries (granted, that isn't always the easiest option either).
  • by PasteEater ( 590893 ) on Tuesday April 03, 2007 @08:23PM (#18597487)
    why don't we just have businesses shift their hours around?

    Because it would be a much larger pain in the ass. So, some businesses follow government time, and some don't. Some shift their schedules, and some don't. How utterly ridiculous. Which option would your business take when half of the other businesses change their hours, and the others don't?

    DST is about simplicity: Ok everyone, change your clocks!

    The measurement of time is arbitrary in and of itself. By your rationale, we should adjust time daily so that noon is always the point in time when there is *exactly* half a day of sunlight left.

    I'm sorry, but people who think that DST is a good thing are idiots.

    Possibly, but anyone who endorses your plan doesn't exactly have both oars in the water either.
  • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 03, 2007 @08:26PM (#18597541)
    ... completely ignoring the "functioning in society" bit.

    People who complain about the gubmint are often just complaining about having to deal with other people.

    Sure, if I never had to talk to anyone or do anything, I'd get up at dawn and go to bed at sunset too.

    But I'd also be living in a cave, and be dead by now.
  • by StikyPad ( 445176 ) on Tuesday April 03, 2007 @08:35PM (#18597641) Homepage
    You don't have to do any calculations. Why would you ever deal with two time zones?

    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.
  • by rbrander ( 73222 ) on Tuesday April 03, 2007 @08:52PM (#18597807) Homepage
    I couldn't handle reading 300 posts, but I did search the whole topic for the word "peak" and nobody at 2+ used it. So here it is: we had a local news article in Calgary about the lack of change in TOTAL consumption,( just as many lights on in the AM as off in PM) but that it was good because it shaved the PEAK CONSUMPTION.

    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.
  • Re:No it wasn't. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Jeremi ( 14640 ) on Tuesday April 03, 2007 @09:15PM (#18598031) Homepage
    Personally, I think anybody who needs the government to trick them into getting up early is a moron, but morons' opinions may differ...


    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.

  • Arizona (Score:2, Insightful)

    by bradray ( 524725 ) on Tuesday April 03, 2007 @09:55PM (#18598375)
    The rest of the world should follow Arizona's example. Don't touch your clocks. I grew up here in AZ, and for the life of me I can't understand why people want to mess with their clocks. If you want more daylight, get up earlier, or stay up later, whatever floats your boat. I'm usually a fan of the Founding Fathers, but Ben Franklin was off his rocker when he dreamed this one up.
  • by TheDormouse ( 614641 ) on Tuesday April 03, 2007 @11:03PM (#18598833)
    Wow. I really don't think I could disagree with you more.

    Your world:
    1. Having to investigate when every business opens "this" time of the year. Since there's no standard, each business can decide when or if they want to change their schedule.
    2. Having to deal with public transportation schedules that may or may not change the same time that your place of business decides to change its schedule.
    3. Businesses having to maintain signage that says "Open 9am-11pm November-March, Open 8am-10pm April-October."
    4. Someone having to answer the phone constantly at your place of business asking "When are you open?" since they are less likely to memorize your business's flexible hours. (And don't think that an automated attendant that answers the phone with this information is going to prevent this question getting through to a human; it won't.)
    5. Getting to have noon magically when the sun is at the highest point in the sky. You know, if you happen to live on the meridian of your time zone where this actually occurs.

    Or the real world:
    1. Businesses keep reliable and memorizable hours.
    2. Public transportation schedules vacillate rarely.
    3. Businesses can keep their easy "Open 9am-11pm Every Day" signage.
    4. Still have to answer the phone at work explaining your hours, but probably to fewer people since your hours aren't confusing and are a tad easier to memorize.
    5. Noon is when it is. Doesn't matter since you can't reliably measure the time by looking at the sun most places in the world anyway.
    6. Throw around a frisbee an extra hour after work in the summer when the weather is nice.
    7. Change a dozen clocks and watches twice a year at a predetermined time that's widely publicized in the media, probably pre-marked on your calendar, and even changes automatically on machines with well-designed software.

    So, um, are all your clocks especially difficult to change or something? Or do you have like 40 thousand of them? Oh, you're a sysadmin who got bit by the DST change? Refer to the end of #7.
  • by NuGeo ( 824600 ) on Tuesday April 03, 2007 @11:15PM (#18598911)

    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
    What about the people who enjoy having daylight in the morning hours? Just as spring gets closer and my first waking moment of the day is greeted with natural light shining through the window, DST comes and puts my morning into darkness for another month. I find that to be rather depressing. Ever consider how it may negatively affect the quality of life for others?
  • by totally bogus dude ( 1040246 ) on Wednesday April 04, 2007 @12:31AM (#18599427)

    And if they did "just change it" like their clocks on their microwave and VCR, then they've probably actually set their computer's clock forward one hour, rather than setting the timezone correctly.

    This has the nice affect that any time their computer tries to communicate with another device, it's now announcing it has the wrong time. The most obvious effect will be in the Date: header in emails which will be an hour out; it could also have some affect on things like HTTP caching (the Last-Modified and Expires headers specify a time in UTC).

    Computers and other network-connected devices are not "just another clock", and most people don't realise you need to adjust the timezone, not just the time shown by the clock in system tray.

    I'm in Western Australia which last summer* had DST for the first time in ages, and this was a significant problem -- made worse by the fact that Microsoft apparently didn't give a shit. We had problems with Exchange appointments for a long time because MSFT couldn't be bothered updating part of the system (it seems Exchange uses some other way of determining timezones other than the system timezone database..?).

    * - our summer being Dec-Feb, and our first DST trial period just ended.

  • Re:Amen (Score:3, Insightful)

    by porcupine8 ( 816071 ) on Wednesday April 04, 2007 @12:36AM (#18599475) Journal
    Magically? No. But I think it would happen a lot sooner than most people would expect.

    I think that you vastly underestimate the power of institutional memory. Why do kids go to school September-May? Why, so they can go out and help with the crops in the summer, of course. Look at the amount of headway year-round schooling (go to school 2 months, off 3 weeks) has made - little to none! Even though many things point to it being superior in various ways. But damn it, kids get the summer off, that's how the world works. The original reasoning behind it has long been abandoned and forgotten.

  • by Guppy06 ( 410832 ) on Wednesday April 04, 2007 @01:04AM (#18599643)
    "yes, you should be getting up and scheduling your day so that you are able to "use" the daylight in the way you wish."

    Well, in order to do that, I'd have to get everybody I do business with to alter their schedules as well, and they'd have to do the same with everybody they do business with, and everybody they do business with, and everybody they do business with and... gee, maybe we should have an agreed-upon standard for this whole "adjust our schedule to follow daylight hours" thing. We could call it... Daylight Saving Time!

    OP is bitching about being in the slim minority that doesn't want to change. It's his right to bitch, but he's going to have to do some serious legwork to convince everybody between him and Kevin Bacon to abandon it.
  • by walt-sjc ( 145127 ) on Wednesday April 04, 2007 @08:31AM (#18602761)
    It is estimated that it cost US businesses about a Billion dollars to implement this DST change. If congress would have instead mandated a billion dollars worth of conservation efforts (such as more energy efficient lighting, better building insulation, etc.,) it would have saved 10 times the energy that the bill was supposed to save as conservation helps ALL the time, not just for an hour a day, 3 weeks of the year. It really doesn't take a whole lot of intelligence to figure this one out...

  • by Phisbut ( 761268 ) on Wednesday April 04, 2007 @09:28AM (#18603665)
    We don't seem to be living in the same "real world". What you described is an ideal real-world, not the real-real-world.

    1
    GP's world: Having to investigate when every business opens "this" time of the year. Since there's no standard, each business can decide when or if they want to change their schedule.
    Your real world: Businesses keep reliable and memorizable hours.
    My real world: Even with DST, businesses have no global standard. Some open at 7am, some at 8am, some at 9am, some at 10am. Some stores close at 5pm, some at 6pm, some at 9pm. Some of them are even open 24 hours a day. Heck, stores in the same mall can have different hours.

    2
    GP's world: Having to deal with public transportation schedules that may or may not change the same time that your place of business decides to change its schedule.
    Your real world: Public transportation schedules vacillate rarely.
    My real world: Even with DST, fewer people work in the summer time. A lot of people are on vacation. Many public transportation schedules reflect this by having a different "summer schedule".

    3
    GP's world: Businesses having to maintain signage that says "Open 9am-11pm November-March, Open 8am-10pm April-October."
    Your real world: Businesses can keep their easy "Open 9am-11pm Every Day" signage.
    My real world: Even with DST, businesses already maintain signage that says "Open 10am-5pm Monday-Wednesday, Open 10am-9pm Thursday-Friday, Open 9am-5pm Saturday, Open 11am-5pm Sunday.

    4
    GP's world: Someone having to answer the phone constantly at your place of business asking "When are you open?" since they are less likely to memorize your business's flexible hours. (And don't think that an automated attendant that answers the phone with this information is going to prevent this question getting through to a human; it won't.)
    Your real world: Still have to answer the phone at work explaining your hours, but probably to fewer people since your hours aren't confusing and are a tad easier to memorize.
    My real world: (See 1 and 3)

  • by MobileTatsu-NJG ( 946591 ) on Wednesday April 04, 2007 @11:13AM (#18605623)
    "Ah, but I need the government to trick my boss into thinking the time for me to come in to work has changed. That's how I get my extra daylight. :)"

    One man's 'funny' is another man's 'insightful'. Every business I've worked at had its start/end times set to work with the start/end times of the businesses it worked with. You'd think reality would prevent somebody with mod points from +1'ing somebody for loudly proclaiming that DST doesn't actually cause more sunlight to hit this side of the planet.
  • Re:No it wasn't. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Orange Crush ( 934731 ) * on Wednesday April 04, 2007 @11:18AM (#18605721)

    You got exactly the same amount of light that you would have gotten anyway.

    Correct, but some of us get an extra daylight hour after work that otherwise would've been wasted while we're cooped up in a building.

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