Live from Austin!

From the Wall St Journal:

 Up until two years ago, only 15 of Indiana’s 92 counties set their clocks an hour ahead in the spring and an hour back in the fall. The rest stayed on standard time all year, in part because farmers resisted the prospect of having to work an extra hour in the morning dark. But many residents came to hate falling in and out of sync with businesses and residents in neighboring states and prevailed upon the Indiana Legislature to put the entire state on daylight-saving time beginning in the spring of 2006.

Indiana’s change of heart gave University of California-Santa Barbara economics professor Matthew Kotchen and Ph.D. student Laura Grant a unique way to see how the time shift affects energy use. Using more than seven million monthly meter readings from Duke Energy Corp., covering nearly all the households in southern Indiana for three years, they were able to compare energy consumption before and after counties began observing daylight-saving time. Readings from counties that had already adopted daylight-saving time provided a control group that helped them to adjust for changes in weather from one year to the next.

Their finding: Having the entire state switch to daylight-saving time each year, rather than stay on standard time, costs Indiana households an additional $8.6 million in electricity bills. They conclude that the reduced cost of lighting in afternoons during daylight-saving time is more than offset by the higher air-conditioning costs on hot afternoons and increased heating costs on cool mornings.

“I’ve never had a paper with such a clear and unambiguous finding as this,” says Mr. Kotchen, who presented the paper at a National Bureau of Economic Research conference this month.

A 2007 study by economists Hendrik Wolff and Ryan Kellogg of the temporary extension of daylight-saving in two Australian territories for the 2000 Summer Olympics also suggested the clock change increases energy use.

So there we have it. Dicking around with the clocks twice a year and making life awkward for software developers is not only a waste of time, it’s also a waste of energy and money, at least in places where people have air conditioning in summer.

Once I succeed in becoming supreme dictator, the following rules will be enforced on pain of imprisonment:

• All measurements will be in SI units or derived metric quantities.

• All dates and times will be written in ISO8601 formats, and measured in UTC. A special exemption will be made for astronomers, who will be allowed to continue to use Astronomical Time.

• All times will be in UTC, and hence “daylight savings” will be illegal.

• All paper sizes will follow the DIN A and B series.

and the rule I’m adding today:

• E-mail clients will be prohibited from deleting non-spam e-mail.

Disk space is cheap, really cheap. I got a silent 200GB Seagate hard drive for $99. That’s big enough to hold an entire lifetime’s e-mail, and then some. You do not need to delete e-mail. At most, you need to move it from your regular inbox to some kind of archive.

In particular—and here we see the motivation for the prohibition—you should never ask anyone to re-send you an e-mail on the grounds that you deleted it. Deleting e-mail because you’re too lazy to file it, and then whining to the sender that you need another copy, merely proves that you are a rude and insensitive clod. We all have enough crap in our inboxes without having to deal with e-mail from you asking for the same information over and over again. If your e-mail client doesn’t have a search option and multiple folders, get one that does. Even web mail has search and folders these days.

Also, if the company you work for has a policy that your e-mail be deleted periodically, then the pain of that policy falls on you, not me. It’s up to you to make sure you copy out all useful information from your e-mail and file it somewhere permanent. I will not waste my time putting up with your corporate bureaucracy; believe me, I have more than enough to deal with already.