Malice or stupidity?

I'm normally extremely skeptical of conspiracy theories, but when I think about the Daylight Savings Time I have a hard time resisting the temptation of thinking about it as a grand experiment of governments to see how far they could go in pushing harebrained schemes on their subjects without eliciting massive protests. I'm sorry, but I just can't see any other benefits to this massive disruption of all things that depend on time as measureb by clocks. Energy savings? There might be some, but they probably pale in comparison to time, money, and energy wasted in preparation and response to the time shift.

This year provides an especially egregious example of that waste. A small handful of countries including USA and Canada, decided to extend the DST by several weeks at the beginning and end of that period. Since almost all aspects of our lives are now heavily dependent on computers, and those in turn depend on their clocks, the impact of that decision is enormous. I run a small IT shop in a relatively small part of a large university, but our group already spent many hours dealing with the change in DST: learning about the implications and steps we needed to take; obtaining, testing and applying patches; informing users; dealing with computer problems that arouse due to the patches, etc... I'm sure there will be more disruption and time wasted when the DST rolls in this weekend... I just pray that at least a few congressmen will miss a few very important events due to the havoc they unleashed, but I'm afraid that the diligence and hard work of their IT people will shield them from the consequences of their stupidity.

I'm not an economist and don't have hard data, but if someone were to calculate the economic cost of the change in the DST, I suspect it would be staggering, even in the IT-related costs alone. It may well be more costly and disruptive than the infamous "Y2K bug", because that one affected mostly older, large-scale systems, while the current problem will impact all kinds of devices, including personal PCs, PDAs, phones, etc. So why isn't it getting the same level of media attention as Y2K? Why is the IT industry swallowing this bitter and costly pill without so much as a whine? I think that this is at least in part due to the out-of-proportion frenzy that was whipped up the last time around. The Y2K bug, which was supposed to bring the post-industrial nations to their knees (remember the stories about seemingly intelligent people stacking up supplies and moving out of cities and into primitive cabins so as to avoid the mayhem that was to follow?), fizzled, and so both the media and the IT people are now afraid to even bring up the subject of DST, so as not to be seen as Chicken Littles yet again. That's why the US Congress will get away with making the stupidest and costliest mistake since the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. The real tragedy is: that'll only encourage them.