More cell phoniness

[unixronin]

As I've previously alluded to more than once, a large proportion of the calls I get on my cell phone that are not from cymrullewes are wrong numbers.  Most of them are attempts to reach a William Brown, who operates a business called Precision Networking, but who moved from New Hampshire to San Antonio, Texas a few years ago, and never bothered to update many of his business listings in this part of the country.  (Sudden side thought:  it'd be amusing if it was to turn out that this was the same William Brown I once worked with at a former employer in California.)

So anyway, I've received two such wrong-number calls this morning.  The second one, when told about Mr. Brown moving to San Antonio and not updating his listings, replied "I can beat that!  He's shipping his boat to my boatyard, and didn't even bother to tell us!"

Speaking of the intersection of phoniness and annoyances, dafydd points to a GeoTimes report which confirms something I've long asserted — in our modern technological society, "Daylight Savings Time" may "save" daylight, but not only does it not save energy, it actually increases overall energy usage.  Although DST saves on lighting power consumption, the saving is outweighed by increases in power consumed by heating and cooling, by a sufficient margin that overall electrical power consumption increases by 1% to 4% when DST is implemented.  (I predict that this disparity will become more pronounced as incandescent lights are replaced by more energy-efficient lighting systems using as much as six times less power.)  Overall, residents of the State of Indiana paid a total of $8.6 million more for energy after Indiana adopted DST in 2006 — and $1.6 million to $5.3 million more to clean up damage from related increases in pollution.

The Department of Energy (DOE) is currently conducting its own study of the effect of the 2005 extension of DST on energy use.  Although Congress passed the 2005 law, it also required that DOE study the extension’s impact, and retained the right to repeal the extension pending the results.  The study, begun in late 2007 after DOE finished compiling data on hourly electricity use from utility companies, will be completed at the end of June, according to DOE spokesperson Chris Kielich.

Tell you what.  How about instead of repealing the extension, we just repeal DST all together?  Then we can all just set our clocks once AND QUIT SCREWING AROUND WITH THEM.  The fact is, we are in very large measure no longer a strictly daylight-driven society.

Comments

[otherbill.livejournal.com]

DST makes me glad I live in AZ.

Granted, I'm not too fond of these 0520h sunrises we've been having, but it helps me wake up (I work 0700-1600).

(Apropos of your cell phone story: another "Bill <Lastname>" was the marketing director for the recently-retired "<Company> Inside" program. Now that he's left the company, I'm getting bits and pieces of his misdirected mail. Interesting stuff, that.)

[fatcook.livejournal.com]

Seconded!
I shudder to think about a 9:30 or 10pm sunset.

[micheinnz.livejournal.com]

Happens all the time where I live. Then again I'm closer to the South Pole than the Equator.

[fatcook.livejournal.com]

We would probably be 5-10 degrees hotter. Makes the average daytime temp 115-120 with 130-135 spikes. And no nighttime cool off.

[tabbifli.livejournal.com]

Happens all summer. :)

Then again, I'm in Seattle, so this isn't much of a surprise, either. 4th of July fireworks don't start until nearly quarter of 10 PM because it's not dark enough to see them until then. From mid-May until mid-September, kids go to bed in the daylight.

[msa.livejournal.com]

Last March, amongst the DST patching hullabo, I was already planning my move.

So I did the only logical thing when the change hit. Disregarded the patch, set my machines from Pacific Daylight into Mountain Standard, and proceeded to move to Arizona before we'd have to revert back.

I haven't touched it since. I also haven't seen Windows or any other OS freak out, haven't missed any appointments, haven't been an hour early to anything, and likewise, the people I work with all get to work at the right time.

I'd actually take it one step further, and take the opportunity to completely divorce civil time from daylight. Punt everyone onto UTC, and end the time zone mess too.

That said, living solely in ST is very refreshing.

The only annoying problem I have now is that everyone from outside Arizona or Indiana insists on using abbreviations like CST and EST when they mean CDT or EDT. They don't seem to understand that they are on daylight, not standard time, and just because they're not using it doesn't mean the offset changes.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I'd actually take it one step further, and take the opportunity to completely divorce civil time from daylight. Punt everyone onto UTC, and end the time zone mess too.

Yeah, it wouldn't be the first time I've made that suggestion myself. So local dawn is at 1731 today? You'll get used to it. But when your colleague in Tokyo leaves you hurried voicemail on the way to the airport asking you to call him at 0845 after he lands, you won't have to wonder "0845 in which timezone?"

[rbos.livejournal.com]

I'd like to see time measurement removed entirely from the day-night cycle.

Unix time!

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

A little unwieldy for everyday use though. "I'll meet you by the fountain at 1211925000."

[rbos.livejournal.com]

Realistically we'd chop off the first six digits for day to day use, I think. You wouldn't specify "march 11 2009" either, you'd either guess it by context or specify a weekday.

It's hard to imagine it being used that way, though, for sure. Mainly because of the lack of correspondence to imagination.

Now, if we could set the day to 100 kiloseconds, THEN we could get somewhere. You could say "meet you at 52k tomorrow by the fountain".

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Freehold of Grainne :)

(day a little over 28 hours, decimal clock, 10 divs of 100 segs of 100 seconds, one Grainne second about 1.018 Earth second)

[rbos.livejournal.com]

gah, 1.018 seconds?

yay let's redo the entirety of physics and engineering

[luke-jaywalker.livejournal.com]

And *God* was that a pain in the ass to figure out. Sure, it's the time *they* used... but almost all the dialog in James Clavell's Shogun would have been in Japanese, Clavell was just courteous enough to give it to us in English so we could make sense of it.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I found I picked Grainne time up right away without any problem. The interesting thing about Shogun — or the miniseries thereof — was how much Japanese I picked up from watching it, without being consciously aware that I was doing so. Even now, I frequently find myself watching something in Japanese with English subtitles and suddenly thinking, "No, that's not what he said."

[sierra-nevada.livejournal.com]

It is definitely time to dispense with "daylight saving time"

Write your congresscritters (housie, and senators).

[ithildae.livejournal.com]

The main reason to have DST is that it increases traffic to retail institutions while it is in effect. What that means is, you are fighting the Chamber of Commerce if you want less of it. More retail taxes are also a strong incentive for governments to maintain DST. Savings on your energy bill does not effect government budgets or spending in the slightest.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Breaking civil time free of daylight altogether and establishing a single world-wide time zone, as msa advocates above, would eliminate that issue too. Any store is always quite free to stay open an hour later any time of year they choose.

[ithildae.livejournal.com]

The issue is human behavior. People tend to go out and shop when it is light out in the evening. If it is dark, they stay home.

[novel-tharkun.livejournal.com]

I do hope you mean any store not selling alcohol, or other proscribed items. At least here in the land of parental government.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Point. I was for the purposes of the exercise disregarding edge cases.

[ilcylic.livejournal.com]

The main reason to have DST is that it increases traffic to retail institutions while it is in effect.

How?

[ithildae.livejournal.com]

People tend to go out in the evening when it is light out. Some part of that 'going out' is shopping. It seriously does make a difference.

[jilara.livejournal.com]

Some pundit rightfully stated that they should just move all the time zones up an hour permanently and have done with it.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Trouble with that idea is getting the rest of the world to sign onto the silliness.

[ilcylic.livejournal.com]

Fuck 'em.

We can just move us, and the rest of the world can deal with it.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

But if we can get them to sign on too, they don't get to point and laugh.

[luke-jaywalker.livejournal.com]

We have nukes. Let them point and laugh. Then let their mutant descendants point and laugh many generations later. ;)