Down with the Daylight Savings!

[pphaneuf]

Two PhD students in economics at Berkeley are studying the effect of daylight savings observance in Australia (which had a partially extended DST during the Olympics of 2000, thus providing useful data on the subject) and are making such shocking discoveries such as "the extra hour of light in the evening is at the cost of an extra hour of darkness in the morning"! No, really? Wow!

More seriously, it would seem that instead of saving anything, it could actually even have had a slight increase in power use. There are also some reports of increased car usage, but I'm finding that a bit sketchy (are people really that crazy? maybe I'm just too much of an optimist).

In any case, at worst, it generated this hilarious comment on good old Slashdot. Heh.

Comments

[dcoombs.livejournal.com]

http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20070311

[morethanreal.livejournal.com]

I agree with this post...

Since I'm living in a state that decided to muck around with DST, I now have some machines that has the wrong time (e.g. my Windows box, and my "self-adjusting" alarm clock). And, why is the DST software update for OSX 9.1 MB?

[pphaneuf.livejournal.com]

Hmm, I don't know, it probably the little map applet thing for the system configuration? On my Linux box, I have more than 5 MB of zoneinfo stuff, but the Mac doesn't have nearly as much, for some reason.

[bareftinthesnow.livejournal.com]

I remember hearing that traffic incidents go up every year on this day. The speaker attributed it to everyone getting an hour less speak. He may have said the reverse was true in the fall?