once again, destroying something in an effort to save it...

[acroyear]

The two primary modern justifications for Daylight Savings are that it saves energy and that it encourages more retail shopping since people tend to be out doing stuff later if the sun is later.

Neither of these justifications were party of Ben Franklin's original proposal, where he merely took the pragmatic issue of why waste having the sun out in the morning hours at 5am if nobody's awake to do anything with it.  His view was much more oriented towards its obvious advantage for farmers.  Energy had nothing to do with it though it would indeed save candle consumption.  His proposal was actually more in humor than seriousness and he didn't actually suggest changing the clocks themselves.  The first clock-changing proposal was from a golfer wanting that little extra time to play before dusk hit.  And while Franklin suggested it might be better for farmers as well as merchants, it was the farmers that first led the repeal of DST in 1919, with enough support in congress to override a Wilson veto.  Farmers hours are set by the sun and nature itself, no clock will ever change that.

Taking advantage of light was the exact reason the Germans adopted it during WW1, which then (like all WW1 innovations) was immediately adopted by the allies merely for their own survival.

The trouble with the modern justifications is that they are, in fact, completely bunk.

In the 50s, yes, it was more likely that a company had fewer lights on in the office building or factory floor and would take advantage of daylight as much as possible.  This is no longer true today.  All offices are flooded with florescent bulbs, on across the entire floor even if only one worker is there.  No "energy" is saved by changing light bulb usage because light bulb usage simply is never changed.  We're in, its on, that's that.  Indeed union safety rules have also led to factory floor lights being on practically 24/7.

In fact, more energy is would be used because the modern A/C systems (which also didn't exist in the 50s) have to work harder when the sun is out than they would if darkness started to kick in.

A study in 1975 found that DST saved a whole 1% of electricity costs.  In terms of nuclear power output, contrasted with trying to reduce coal plant production and emissions back then, 1% is negligible.  Mexico's DST introduction only reduced energy by 0.7%.

So much for saving energy.  It doesn't, and really it never has.

Now what about businesses getting more business?

Or really, the question is "so what if its true"?

Because the reality is that while retail may be having a better time at it, all of the support structures that retail depends on are having a *really* crappy time of it.  Estimates are that the stock market losses the Monday after the switch, due to the lack of sleep of investors and floor traders, can run into the billions.

This current change has caused the major software makers to have to rush patches to their systems without adequate time to test them, and certainly there is much software in use that is not being properly maintained and will never be right and have to be hand-managed.  One of the really insane difficulties of this one is that many small localities chose not to adapt the DST change, which now means that software that has to know about the many time zones has had the number of time zones to track *triple* to account for all of the little variations that have popped up as local legislatures have voted to not adopt the federal proposal.  This has naturally led to a large number of bugs in the patches themselves that are trying to fix the problem.

Microsoft has put out 3 separate patches to its Exchange email/calendar system and still hasn't got it right.  Meeting schedules have bounced back and forth to an hour off in both directions as a results of each patch, many of which assume that the prior patch had NOT been applied and so overcompensated.  If my own company has had this disruption causing every worker to have to correct their calendars, how about a large Fortune 500?

Microsoft also formally did not support fixing Windows 2000, trying to use that as the final straw to get people to upgrade to XP or Vista.  Trouble is, otherwise Windows 2K *still works* (as far as "works" means to Microsoft, of course).  Most people don't need to, and in fact their fully functioning hardware would not handle the upgrade well since the minimum requirements for XP are higher than a 2K box.  They did eventually give in and sell a patch to fix 2K, but at $4000 a site (apparently a little cost and price fiddling to have the 2K patch, which is no bigger than the XP one, cover the expense of fixing XP as well).

Sun has also had to fix Java implementations that, because of compatibility issues, can't be upgraded to more recent versions.  Even then, they didn't get it right the first time, now causing 10 people in my company to waste another 2-4 hours each (napkin guess: $100/hr * 10 * 4 = $4000 we'll lose, minimum, all because Sun screwed up - and that's not counting the amount of work our customers will have to do, with a requisite downtime necessitating after-hours work, to apply the patch from Sun that we forward to them, added onto the amount of work we did figuring out and running the first patch we've already sent). I am, of course, one of those 10.  My total time has already been 16 hours arguing with and testing this problem, and I'm about to throw another 4 onto that.  20 hours of my time wasted.

And so you know I have now even less respect for the asshole that made me waste 20 hours of my time better spent doing real work.

I hated this administration before for general reasons.

But this time, its personal.

That's just 1 small company, out of thousands.  If we have had to waste $100 * 10 * 20 = $20,000 over this issue (and that's being generous), multiply that by the 500,000 companies using Java and you have $10,000,000,000, yes $10 BILLION, wasted.

No amount of "increased retail sales" will ever make up for that.

Ever.

And that's just in dealing with Sun's Java problem.  Now figure in Oracle/Sybase/MS SQL/MySQL, MANY Linux versions, often different and rarely upgraded (again, don't knock a system that's working), Solaris and HPUX, the tons of software and libraries used by IBM customers, and it *really* adds up.  I wouldn't be surprised if total estimates on this problem actually exceed spending on the Y2K problem 10 years ago.  Much of this problem is because the software now can no longer assume that the underlying operating system has been upgraded - Java and Oracle and all of that has to run on Windows 2K  or Unix even if the box hasn't been patched, so it has to recognize whether or not the OS is right and adapt accordingly.  This is not an easy task, nor is testing it by the end consumer.

To be perfectly honest, we've spent $20,000 and we actually honestly have no idea if any of it worked.  We really don't.

And that uncertainty is more costly than any piece of software we've ever written.

It should have been obvious when this was proposed that any time this administration is certain of something, we should all be certain that the only thing that will result is more uncertainty.

You want to know why the economy has *never* really rebounded since 2001?  Uncertainty.  Wall Street hates it and always will, but unless you're Halliburton or Exxon/Mobile, uncertainty is all this administration has ever given you.

Comments

[thatwasjen]

PREACH.

I hate Daylight Saving Time, and I especially hate the fact that it now lasts for 2/3 of the year. Don't be calling something "standard" when it's not, and don't be claiming that this saves energy when it's the oil companies (and candy retailers) that are happiest about the extension.

End Daylight Saving Time

[skreidle.livejournal.com]

I'd rather end Standard Time and call DST "Standard"--I want my sunlight later in the day, year-round.

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

two things.

1) for every night person that wants a little more sun at the end of the day is a morning person who would rather keep standard standard and have more sun when they're up. sometimes they're married.

2) they tried that in 1973, and repealed it the next year. the number of morning car accidents, many involving *school busses* tripled the week it went into implementation. school busses and bus drivers are not trained nor optimized for driving in the dark which is what it will be, well past 7am, in the wintertime.

[blueeowyn.livejournal.com]

*IF* the congress were to make the decision now to NOT change the time again (or do a 1/2 hour change in July and leave it that way ... sort of split the proverbial difference); the school districts would (in theory) have enough lead time to schedule the school days to avoid the 6:30 or 7:00am bus pick-ups.

Some of the accidents were the change to darkness, some were probably the tiredness that will occur do to messing with the circadian rhythm.

Having the schools open at 9:30 or 10:30 am instead of 8 or 8:30 am will decrease the number of lost hours due to delayed openings due to ice; will decrease the number of kids out in the early morning hours when it is MUCH colder; will decrease the energy needed to heat the schools enough (due to not opening until the sun is up); etc. ; so the schools is NOT a reason to put a kabash on the whole stupid time change.

[jude.livejournal.com]

but what do parents do with their children when the school opens at 10:30 and they still have to be at work at 8 or 9am? Not everyone can afford extra child carein the mornings in addition to evenings... And that's still a whole bunch of people scurrying around in the dark trying to get places on time. Not in school buses, maybe, but in cars, or even walking, which would probably result in more fatalities.

This has long been the problem with starting schools later. Even without time changes, people want to do it, but no one has yet figured out a practical way to get it done.

[blueeowyn.livejournal.com]

What do they do when there is a 1/2 day for Teacher's conferences? What do they do when the school changes time anyway? What do they do with a delayed opening?

They deal (or they should deal). If a parent needs to be at work at 8am and school for the kid starts at 8:30, what do they do? Heck, even if the parent needed to be at work at 9 and school started at 8:30 it would be cutting it close (using my house and where the nearest elementary school is and my regular commute).

Some schools have early opening even when the school opens late for just such situations. Some child-care are "Before and After school" care (and amazingly enough cover the child during holidays, school breaks, etc.).

And there are even more people running errands (grocery shopping for example) at night. So that argument falls flat on its face. I would hope than an adult who is running errands in the morning is paying attention and acting intelligently. You obviously cannot assume that of children (pity really, I knew by kindergarten about staying out of the road ... by 2nd grade I was crossing a semi-major (numbered) highway SAFELY by myself ... something that some middle school kids today probably can't do).

[jude.livejournal.com]

It's one thing to have a half day once in a while, but every single day would be a hardship for a lot of parents in my school district (Urban Philadelphia). Paying extra for one or two days of child care is a lot different from paying for it every day. And the schools who offer special "early opening" can afford to do it once in a while, but not every day, again -- if you're adding all those extra kids who are not already receiving early care, you'll have to add more caregivers. Maybe if schools were adequately funded... but that's a whole different discussion.

[comeseptember.livejournal.com]

I'm totally with acroyear70. It was rather disconcerting yesterday morning, after weeks of feeling much safer on my way to work due to the sun rising around the time I start walking at 6am, to be plunged into full-fledged darkness and lessened safety again.

The less time I spend in darkness walking to work in the morning, the better. If the DST change hadn't been made, it's possible we'd have enough daylight time that it would've still been reasonably light when I was on my way to work when DST would've started in, what, April.

And if it's going to be dark past 7am in the wintertime, even trying to find ways to leave work later--either by jogging to work instead of walking or finding ways to cut down on my pre-opening prep time once I get to the bakery--it would be impossible to see daylight on my way in, since the latest I can possibly get there is 6:55am, we open at 7.

I have nothing against people having more daylight in the evening--I can get to sleep when it's still light out. But a lot goes on between the hours of 6am and 7am around the country that the natural daylight is useful and important.

[blueeowyn.livejournal.com]

And those of us who work later in the day would like to not be driving home in the dark every day.

People with seasonal affective disorder NEED that evening light at least some of the time to remain sane. I'm lucky in that I work near a window. Otherwise for a lot of the winter, the only time I would see the light is my morning commute and weekends. It is dark when I leave work most nights for several months. This makes my primary recreation activity harder to do (I have a horse that I visit at night, when the sun goes down, the temps go down and in January/February; it can rapidly get too cold to work her after about or 6:00 at night.

It does work both ways. Personally, I would love to see a change where we once have a 1/2 hour time change then never change again.

[comeseptember.livejournal.com]

I wasn't arguing for something in reverse--even without Daylight Saving Time, I'd be walking in the pitch-black dark of the winter months, and I'm not happy about it, but I'm okay to deal with it. When nature only provides 8 hours of daylight, there's little that can be done for anyone to have both commutes a day in sun without shortening the workday, which just isn't feasible.

And even with the changes in DST, you still have wintertime commutes home in the dark, so I'm not quite sure I understand the point of your argument...

I suppose I would somewhat support a 1/2 hour permanent change, but only if it was worldwide. Really, I'm just in support of never having DST at all again. It's always been silly to me that sometimes we're x hours earlier or later than elsewhere, and other times we're y. I honestly don't see any benefit to DST and never have, and even moreso now. That was more my point than anything else.

[skreidle.livejournal.com]

I'd most likely be bicycling. And armed, were that allowed in NY state. :P

[comeseptember.livejournal.com]

Well, with the massive hills around here that make even walking difficult, I wouldn't bicycle even if I had a bike. Taking a route that I wouldn't roll backwards due to the steepness would make my commute even longer than if I were to just walk. ;P And arming is an option: my sister carries a perfectly legal knife with her at all times. I just don't trust myself with a weapon--I'd probably injure myself before I could injure a potential attacker.

[skreidle.livejournal.com]

Well, yes, you can carry a knife on you in NY--you just can't declare that it's in any way intended for self-defense. (Riss and I had a talk with a couple of cops about this very topic while in NY.) Also, everyone gets cut in knife fights--you just hope that the attacker is unarmed and intimidated by your confidence wielding a knife. Or something. :) (Also, training would help, though only as part of a martial arts regime, etc.)

[dawntreader]

at the risk of sounding completely archaic, why can't people adjust their OWN damn clocks forward and back an hour? why rely on some computer program to do it for them, and hope and pray it doesn't screw it all up? wouldn't it make more sense for me to go around to my computer clock, just like i do to all the other clocks in my house, and my DVD and VCR, and fix my little clocky myself? what the hell? shall the government come around and set my alarm clock at night for me, too? so that i wake up on time? shall they press the snooze once for me at 6:10 a.m.? i just want to tell people to get over themselves. but then, they'd probably just ask me if i will send someone 'round to come help them do it.

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

uh, sorry if i'm not entirely sure if you're being sarcastic or naive, but i'm briefly going to have to assume the latter.

software does EVERYTHING for you, and it does it based on time. and it can't just be "right" when someone gets around to changing the clock. it has to be right all the time, every time, or money is lost and people get fired for that sort of thing.

suppose you were on your cellphone during the switch. should you be charged an extra hour for the time used on your phone between 1 and 2am (the hour that didn't exist) because nobody switched the clock on the accounting box over until after you hung up? (yes, i know, most people have free weekends, work with me).

should you have to pay for electricity during that hour that wasn't? suppose the clock that covered the power wasn't changed but the clock that did the accounting was? what happens when the electricity used from 1 to 2 (on the clock not changed) was sent for accounting to send you your bill (where that hour didn't exist).

i'll give you a hint: anything used divided by zero time spent using it rapidly approaches a very large number. no, its larger than that. no, wait, its larger than that, too. get the idea? a number that large, a divide-by-zero error, *breaks computers*, and the downtime from trying to fix that is even more expensive than fixing the daylight savings problem.

accounting systems simply have to be right or there ain't enough personnel in the world to deal with all of the customer complaints. and for every business-to-consumer issue, there's 10 business to business relationships that are also affected by those clocks.

this is a HUGE issue and clocks just need to all be in sync and all be accurate or money is lost.

and trust me, money is being lost, to the tune of billions.

[dawntreader]

okay okay. i get the point. in my house, i can do it myself. in the finance and computery world at large where bills are calculated, someone has to program things. *sigh*

BUT STILL. daylight savings time is an absolute joke. it's completely lost it's usefulness.

[skreidle.livejournal.com]

That's fine if you aren't dealing with networked equipment and servers, as just about every single computer-user in the world is. In that rare occurrence, it doesn't matter what time your computer is set to--but for the other 99% of the world, it does.

[dglenn.livejournal.com]

I don't expect a computer to set my clock for me (though someone on a mailing list I read apparently does). I can set my clocks.

I can set my VCRs, too. Er ... except that I have to remember which one already does that automatically. It makes recording wee-hours shows very interesting if I'm not at home the night the time changes -- and this year I'll have to remember to set that one back in a couple weeks.

I could set the clock on my cell phone myself -- it's the cell provider's computers that have to get the time right for billing, not the clock in my phone -- but this provider sends a clock-set signal every minute or so anyhow so I don't have to (as long as the machine that sends that gets it right).

Having my PDA automagically set itself for DST would be useful since I use it a) for recordkeeping with timestamps, and b) to sound reminders of scheduled things. But okay, I can deal with just having to remember to do it myself before I go to bed or after I wake up on the day in question. So at this point we're still in "would be nice if" territory, but inching a little closer to "need".

Having to set my computer manually means that some of my cron scripts may run at the wrong times twice a year -- annoying, but not catastrophic for me; a Really %$^#ing Big Deal for some people, seriously. It also means that a bunch of my log files will be wrong (I guess I can live with that as long as I'm not trying to ferret out details of a crash or break-in that happened while the clocks were wrong; for some people it'd be a Major Problem). And while I don't mind setting two clocks, one PDA, three VCRs, one television, and my iPod, once you add eight computers to the mix it really does start to get kind of annoying.

Now if my cron scripts really must absolutely run at the correct times, I do have the option of staying awake until the moment of the change and doing it manually right then. But doing all eight computers at once might be tricky ... and some businesses have a significantly higher computer:operator ratio than my house does.

Note also that my ISP's computer had better get set correctly without my intervention, since I don't have the root password and thus can't set the clock there myself.


I'll set my own damn clocks forward and back just fine. My computers (plural) really ought to set themselves, given that, well, they're computers and already rely on software to Do Stuff, and (like my VCRs) they may well be doing stuff on my behalf while I'm asleep during the time-change.

Note that I haven't even gotten into the category of timekeeping issues acroyear70 described in his reply, where the stakes are much higher, but I will fill in a bit of middle ground: Let's say an office is okay with having everybody set their desktop computer's clock when they get in on the first Monday after DST starts or ends, and their sysadmins plan to come in over the weekend to set the servers. No problems, right? Uh, unless some scheduling software -- for coordinating conference calls, or for allocating meeting rooms -- gets told "postpone this meeting four days" and just adds 96 hours to the meeting's start time and 'forgets' to account for the extra or missing hour in the middle of those 96 hours. Reread the 13th paragraph of the original entry we're commenting under.

And then we have airline, railroad, and trucking schedules to deal with. Stuff is moving during the time change, and if you need to know when it'll arrive, especially if you're scheduling gate use at a busy terminal, your systems had better know which morning has a missing hour (and whether it's the origin, the destination, or both that observes DST) and which morning has an extra one. Even if your computers don't set themselves, they have to know ahead of time when it'll be.

So yeah, it matters. And not because I can't be bothered to set my own damn clock.

[dawntreader]

i get it now. i blame my not thinking clearly on having 4 hours of sleep. (and that had nothing to do with daylight savings. that was me being up talking all night long. *g*)

P.S.

[dawntreader]

i love the word "automagically." :)

from the Hacker's Dictionary

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

automagically /aw-toh-maj'i-klee/ /adv./

Automatically, but in a way that, for some reason (typically because it is too complicated, or too ugly, or perhaps even too trivial), the speaker doesn't feel like explaining to you. See magic. "The C-INTERCAL compiler generates C, then automagically invokes cc(1) to produce an executable."

This term is quite old, going back at least to the mid-70s and probably much earlier. The word `automagic' occurred in advertising (for a shirt-ironing gadget) as far back as the late 1940s.

-- http://www.ccil.org/jargon/

[eideteker.livejournal.com]

Ben Franklin didn't propose it.

Saving daylight was first mentioned in 1784 by Benjamin Franklin in a humorous letter (http://webexhibits.org/daylightsaving/franklin3.html) urging Parisians to save money by getting up earlier to use morning sunlight, thereby burning fewer candles in the evening. Franklin did not mention daylight saving time—he did not propose that clock time be changed. His letter was in the spirit of his earlier proverb "Early to bed and early to rise / Makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise."

Farmers hate DST. They don't use it because their chores, particularly those dealing with animals, follow the sun's schedule.

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

I said both of those in my post:

His proposal was actually more in humor than seriousness and he didn't actually suggest changing the clocks themselves.

and

it was the farmers that first led the repeal of DST in 1919, with enough support in congress to override a Wilson veto. Farmers hours are set by the sun and nature itself, no clock will ever change that.

[blueeowyn.livejournal.com]

The problem for the farmers is that some of the rest of the world will change time come hades or high water and the farmers MUST change to accommodate them. A dairy (for example) will have its milk pick-up scheduled from the farms for say 5:00am. When we change in the spring it isn't a huge deal for the farmer, the cows will grumble about being milked an hour early but they will deal. However, getting them into the milking stations will be harder because the get into a routine of "milked at such and such a time" and like the rest of us; it will take a few weeks to reset the clocks on the cows.

However in the fall, when they get milked an hour LATE and production (which is usually lower in the fall anyway) goes to hell in the proverbial handbasket. What causes milk production to drop? Lack of removal of the milk. The more the baby drinks, the more is produced, the less the baby drinks, the less milk is produced and excessive pressure of milk in the udders is the trigger for decrease in production. The increase response in lactation is harder to achieve later in lactation. You also have the pain on the cows, and the stress on the cows (from the pain, from the disrupted schedule, and from the hunger due to the late feeding). All of this stuff affects productivity.

Even the meat producing animals will get stressed at the time changes though those farmers have the option of doing a 5 minute switch each day for a few weeks to gradually change them over. However, if the feed is delivered automatically...

I seem to recall when the time changed last year, Tai Shan had some comments about it (and wouldn't come down to go inside).

And I fail.

[eideteker.livejournal.com]

Holy crap, DST strikes my reading comprehension.

Re: And I fail.

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

been there, done that, slept on the t-shirt. or in it. I can't recall, Senator.

[dasphios.livejournal.com]

Preach on, brother. Preach on.