It happened again today. I lost 4% of a day of sleep due to Daylight Saving Time. We didn't have it when I was growing up in Indiana; it just meant that all our TV shows shifted in their schedules. My mom also grew up in Indiana, which now has DST, but now she lives in Arizona, which doesn't; coincidence? Nobody I know seems to like it. So why do we have Daylight Saving Time?
The usual answer given is that it saves energy. However, this seems to be BS. While it may have been true in the past, recent studies show either a net wash, or that it even uses more energy. We also hear that it's for the farmers, but I never heard any farmers in Indiana asking for it; just the opposite.
For the real reason, we have to follow the money. DST is regulated by governments, which are run by politicians, who are lobbied by special interests. The special interest paying for DST is the retail industry, which makes more money when daylight ends later. They lobbied a decade ago for DST to be extended by a month nationally in the US, with extra help from the sugar industry to include Halloween, and Indiana adopted DST at the same time.
Since the opposition to DST is not organized, it has no paid lobby, so we are stuck with it for the foreseeable future.
11:04 DST
MJD 57460.752
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John, do you have a favorite decimal time system? I mostly refer to SWATCH, but that is also somewhat embarrassing.
ReplyDeleteAs you can see on my posts, I mainly use Modified Julian Dates. For one thing, they combine the date and time, they are also synced to UT, are shorter than Julian dates, are commonly used by astronomers, and look like stardates. 馃槉
DeleteMJD 57471.988
DST is a complete disaster from programmer's point of view; as more and more countries experiment with turning it on and off (say, Russia, which tried to stick in the summer time, hated it (some shops worked 11 to 22!) and went to abolishing summer time and getting permanently stuck in winter (real) time)
ReplyDeleteI don't see a reason why can't an energy conscious enterprise just move the working shift hours -- say 9-5 winter, 8-4 summer? That at least would be honest to the people, who are with DST just forcefully moved out of their comfort sleeping zones, whilst pretending that nothing has happened... you still go to work 9-5, right... RIGHT?