The move to turn the clocks forward by an hour on March 11 rather than the usual early April date was mandated by the U.S. government as an energy-saving effort. But other than forcing millions of drowsy American workers and school children into the dark, wintry weather three weeks early, the move appears to have had little impact on power usage.
"We haven't seen any measurable impact," said Jason Cuevas, spokesman for Southern Co., one of the nation's largest power companies, echoing comments from several large utilities.
Fuck Daylight Savings Time.
Early U.S. Daylight Savings a bust in power savings
Tags: conspiracies, doomed, time_t
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39 Responses:
Surprising no-one, legislation is passed with little empiricial support from research. GAH.
Actually, it was passed with evidence that it would not work: http://www.ucei.berkeley.edu/PDF/csemwp163.pdf
The story I heard was that it gave people more light in the evenings to drive around and use more of the the oil lobby's fine assortment of products. Imagine that.
since when do we need more light to drive around?!?!?!?!?
Since people are more likely to go "oh hey guyz, let's go do something!" if there's light out, as opposed to just going home to chill and get ready for bed cuz it's getting dark.
The point isn't really to make people go out and drive as much as it is to make them go out and shop, which they're less likely to do if they feel like the day's over.
So lets roll roll back to the original start and end dates.
Then we'd line back up with Mexico. And have another IT goat rodeo.
Do you think we can match European DST markers? Nah! Too easy.
I am in full agreement with the title of this blog entry. FDST, indeed.
The EU actually just got round to matching the US DST dates. Adopted by copying the rules, rather than saying "We'll do what the USA does". And now only a couple of years later, the USA changed their rules, hence being out of sync again.
This is the 21st century, most humans operate for all the hours the sun is up, and several when it's not, changing the clocks does only that. FDST.
the hatterThe EU actually just got round to matching the US DST dates. Adopted by copying the rules, rather than saying "We'll do what the USA does".
They did a pretty bad job then, since "last Sunday in March" (EU rules) != "first Sunday in April" (old US rules).
Mmm, goat rodeo.
Also, if you take into account the lost productivity because Microsoft didn't automatically recognize the change when calculating for aging of cookies vs. GMT, I would say it was a net loss.
Actually our schedule got fucked up when Exchange helpfully bumped everyone's meetings an hour forward.
That didn't happen here, but our poor support department was swamped with calls from people who had cookies expiring right after they logged in.
And your reason for not using one of the several patch solutions available for several months prior to the change was...?
the fact that I have no access to update the exchange server?
Patched all the servers. Patched all the desktops. Ran their little tool on Exchange, and it STILL randomly pushed around appointments for those few weeks. Not for everybody, only some. And not all of their appointments either, only some. Bleh.
Fortunately the people here are very nice and took it in stride.
So let's get rid of the fucker, then!
Golly, it turns out that you can't actually order the sun around.
That must be quite a blow for Bush and Co. I guess he didn't learn King Canute's lesson. Heck, he probably has no idea who King Canute even was.
Bush and Co.? I'm not entirely, but pretty sure the change was pushed for by (veeeery democratic) California caucus after the blackouts of 200x. Of course, Bush gets blamed for everything. Knee-jerk, anyone?
Crap! Sorry! I thought Bush was the President! I didn't realize some other guy was heading up the government now.
When was the election? Or was there just s coup?
I would be very surprised if any legislation passed during the "do-nothing" 109th congress did not have origins from or at least explicit permission of the BushCo camp. Does that make BushCo responsible? If not, then who?
Actually I thought it was great and I can't help but think that maybe you people live someplace where winter doesn't suck. I liked the extra hour on the end of the day. I was able to do more. I felt better. It was like getting an early start on spring. Personally, I don't give a crap if it didn't save energy - it didn't seem to use any extra.
So just make it DST all the time and never switch at all
I'd be up for that.
Me too.
I'd say so too, but there seem to be studies relating "DST all the time" and "whole lot of morning accidents, including school buses, in the winter months with that plan." i.e., tried, lots of accidents, repealed.
Split the difference: set Eastern time to be GMT-04:30, Central to be GMT-05:30, etc.
Now now, since when does logic make everyone happy?
Oh, yeah! I forgot there are places where winter isn't gloomy. I was wondering why nobody enjoyed having the sun up when they get home from work.
Heh. It mght not be so bad if the weather didn't practically restrict people to staying indoors for 3 months. Having just a few opportunities to have some sunlight while you are outside means a lot.
See, I took an entirely other approach, and left.
And I would do the same, but ya know, got this house thing, and this wife thing, and this career thing. Oh, and I'd also rather eat my own arms than live on the left coast. Maybe I'll move to Philly someday though.
Exactly. Another voice for making DST year-around.
Big surprise
I don't understand the obsession with DST in the US. They could, just as easily, lead by example and change the official government working hours and request that business do the same. It would achieve the exact same effect without forcing everyone to jump through hoops correcting every time piece in existence every time they want to fiddle with it.
Oh, and they are talking about rolling it back... time for another round of patches!
Damn that's practical! You have no place in our government.
I wish we'd taken Ben Franklin's idea of making the turkey the national bird, and left his Daylight Savings Time idea alone.
It was all a plot by the candy industry to get an extra hour of daylight for trick-or-treaters in the northern states.
We should just go with daylight savings time year-round. I hate it when it starts getting dark early at night and DST (and the Earth's rotation around the sun) manages to largely get around that problem.
Then again I've long had radical ideas about how we need to fix our time system that nobody will ever follow. Namely that noon and midnight are 6 AM and 6 PM respectively, 12 AM occurs at the end of the AM phase, not the beginning, and, perhaps most importantly, the day now begins at 1 AM which replaces the current 6 AM meaning the day and AM cycle begins roughly at dawn and ends roughly at dusk. While the reasons nobody would adopt this are many and sensible, it's still a more rational system than the one we currently use.
Now... if we want a really good system that'll just plain screw everyone up we need to finally move over to decimalized metric time!
I think the ultimate lessons from these all of this is that people don't want a rational, well-engineered system. They just want one that is familiar and good enough to get by. Thus systems that have evolved haphazardly over time.
I'd rather have the extra hour to sleep in each morning. Just think.. arriving at the office at 10AM? Well, in a sane reality, it would only be 9AM, and you'd be grabbing your coffee and liesurely wandering towards getting ready. Or what not.
Want an extra hour of light? Wait until late Spring! Summer time does this for us naturally, people. sheeeesh.