Mar 08

Daylight Savings…

I have yet for someone to give me a reasonable explanation as to why we observe daylight savings time?

Jesse

I've worked in the storage arena for close to 20 years now, directly for EMC Corporation for a number of them, and indirectly for them (as a consultant) for the remainder.

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    • on March 9, 2007 at 4:35 pm
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    Energy conservation. The idea being if you’re awake for more of the daylight hours you’ll use less electricity for lighting 😉

    • on March 9, 2007 at 4:44 pm
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    btw, planning on implementing OpenID? 🙂

  3. 2 responses –

    I think it’s more than people are not as likely to stop and do their shopping after work in the wintertime when the daylight is gone.

    Like most decisions made by our beloved congress, money motivates 99% of the time.

    I also found this on the website http://www.standardtime.com

    “Further, a study of traffic accidents throughout Canada in 1991 and 1992 by Stanley Coren of the University of British Columbia before, during, and immediately after the so-called “spring forward” when DST begins in April. Alarmingly, he found an eight percent jump in traffic accidents on the Monday after clocks are moved ahead. He attributes the jump to the lost hour of sleep. In a letter to the New England Journal of Medicine, Coren explained, “These data show that small changes in the amount of sleep that people get can have major consequences in everyday activities.”

    It’s not really the different time that bugs me, it’s the actual switch. I say pick a point half way and set the clocks and be done with it. We keep trying to make biology fit our schedule, and it just doesn’t do it. A day is 23 hours, 59 minutes, and 56 and some-odd seconds long. Period. End of discussion. We should learn to live with it. 😉

    • on March 11, 2007 at 1:40 pm
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    I generally set all my servers / equipment to UTC. Since I manage stuff spread out all over the world, it makes figuring out what happened when much easier. Plus I don’t have to deal with stupid DST changes. If a user wants their time to show up as EST5EDT or PST then they can set the TZ variable and be happy. Personally, I think DST is totally stupid I don’t see a point to it.

  5. Same reason the government/military use “Zulu” as the only time they speak in. When you’re working across time zones, it only makes sense to only use local time superficially and coordinate everything using a centralized scheme.

    • on March 18, 2007 at 11:44 pm
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    … and I thought that Zulu time was like manana manana but without the sense of urgency used in some parts of Africa 😉

  7. FOFLMFAO. 🙂

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