photo credit: √oхέƒx™

Even on a blog about inelegant solutions, Daylight Savings Time (DST) has a special place. Not only is it an inelegant solution, but it is a bad means to a solution that doesn’t solve its designated problem. It’s a bad answer to a very stupid question.

The idea is simple, in a bid to save energy, make people happier or whatever the logic is this year, we all, save those of us who don’t live in a DST zone, set our clocks back one hour in the fall and then set them ahead that same hour in the Spring. The idea is that, during the months where DST is in effect, we get more sunlight in the evening.

The problem is three-fold. A) For it to work it requires every county in every state in every nation to agree to go along with it, then requiring every person in those countries to successfully set every clock to the right time. B) It doesn’t do the job its advertised to do and may actually make things worse. C) Even if it DID work, there would be far more efficient ways to achieve the same effect.

So let’s take a moment to stop and think about DST for a bit and marvel at its stupidity. If you think it’s a good thing, give me a second and hear me out, you might like my competing solution better.

After all, the true marvel of DST isn’t that it doesn’t work, but that it’s such a horrible way to get to something that doesn’t work.

Does DST Work?

On the surface, even I have to admit that the theory of DST sounds pretty darn good. By giving people more daylight in the evening, they’ll use less lights, less heat and save energy. Seems like a dead ringer.

But in practice it’s not so simple. Does it save energy? Depends on who you ask. According to the Department of Energy, DST reduces only about .02% of our total national energy costs. Sadly, that’s the positive spin. A study in Indiana, which focused on individual household usage, found that DST actually increased energy use by about 1%.

So the best case scenario is that it reduces our energy use by barely enough to move the needle, on the other end, it actually increases it by a full percent. The problem is two fold. First, as the authors of the Indiana study pointed out, “Benjamin Franklin was right about candles… but he did not consider air-conditioners,” meaning that DST does reduce our use of lighting, but increases our use of climate control and other creature comforts.

However, the more obvious problem is that DST doesn’t actually change anything. Moving the clocks doesn’t give us more hours of sunlight, it just moves them from morning to night. Where once you might have woken up in sunshine and came home in darkness, with DST you do the reverse. While this might have been a gain in the age of candles, in the era of light switches, air conditioners and automobiles, there is little, if anything, gained.

But that isn’t the dumbest part about DST. Sure, it has failed in its stated goal of energy reduction, but it failed even more gloriously by being a worse answer to a bad question.

A Different Scenario

Lets slide into an alternate universe. In this one, the government has decided to do something about how much people drive by putting a per mile tax in a bid to reduce oil consumption, lessen CO2, etc. The tax is straightforward, you pay X cents per mile you drive, it’s a flat rate that’s reasonable but still discourages unneeded trips.

However, a few years after implementation, the government finds yet another problem. Despite the tax, people are still driving too much in the summer months. Winter is fine for the most part, but those summer road trips eat up too many miles. The government decides to raise the tax during six months of the year.

They can do this two ways:

1. Simply raise the tax during the summer months so that every mile now costs Y cents
2. Change the definition of a mile, making it shorter so that people will drive more miles at the same rate.

The second way is just plain stupid. It would require everyone to reconfigure their car’s odometer for summer travel, not to mention that it would require road signs and other markers to be altered for the summer months. Insane? Yes. But that’s what happens you start messing around with a unit of measure.

Granted, odometers and signs are harder to change than clocks, but the point remains. There are two solutions, one requires almost no work to implement and can be implemented piecemeal (not every state would need to pass such laws) while the other requires a concerted effort by everyone just to make it work. Why screw around with a unit of measure when there are ways to fix the problem within the current paradigm?

So what’s the solution for DST? It’s rather simple. If you want more daylight in the evenings, if you feel that is better for whatever reason, don’t reset your clocks, reset your schedule. Businesses can change their hours, people can wake up earlier and they can do those things without touching the clock on the wall.

It’s essentially what we’re doing now, the only difference is that we’re pretending it doesn’t exist by changing the clocks to match the change we think we want to see. The problem is that most people don’t want it, it isn’t implemented consistently, even across this country (go to Arizona or any of our islands), and it doesn’t achieve its stated goals.

It is a failure on every front and we are insane for keeping it up.

The Expanding DST

One thing that has changed over the past two years is that DST has grown. Where once standard time and DST enjoyed a roughly 6 month span apiece, now DST covers 8 of the four months, expanded beginning 2008.

This has created two major problems:

1. It sabotages the tools that we used to keep ourselves on top of the time changes. Long story short, we invent our system of time, we invent and implement time changes, many of us get confused by said time changes, we invent devices to automatically update clocks, we then changes times changes to ruin those devices. If there is life on other planets, no wonder they don’t want to come here.
2. It’s made it so that 2/3 the year is in DST, meaning that DST is now the clearly preferred time. If DST is so wonderful that we should have it for 8 out of every 12 months, why not just not bother setting the clocks back one fall and make it 12 for 12?

The simple truth is that we invented our system of time and it is our right to change it as we see fit. However, since it is a unit of measure, we shouldn’t be screwing with it for no reason. If DST is so much better, then it makes sense to set the clocks to it and walk away, rather than going back every few months to the old system. The more you screw with time, and screw with the way you’re screwing with time, the greater the probability for error.

We joke about being late for work after making a time change but the truth is that time is very important and and every time we change our clocks there are some mistakes. Most are trivial, but bigger mistakes can happen and are likely inevitable. Sure, it’s funny and fitting when would-be terrorists get hurt by their own bomb thanks to DST, but what about when something else goes wrong and good people, not bad guys, get hurt? Might be a different story.

Bottom Line

Just to recap. DST is a bad way to arrive at a solution that doesn’t even fix the problem at hand. Even if we assume that there are reasons to want more daylight in the evening, there are better ways to get it. The only time you need to adjust is your morning alarm.

The simple truth is that DST doesn’t work and, if it did, we could reach the same goal without having to play the “spring forward, fall back” game.

This is why I hope that one fall we can just not set the clocks back and finally be done with our long DST nightmare. It probably won’t happen soon, but I can dream.

In the meantime, I, along with most of the industrialized world, will be playing the DST game twice per year, once as we change to it, once as we move away.

However, I’m going to be swearing under my breath the whole time I do it.

photo credit: EDgAr H.

Last week, the The Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology announced that they were going to boycott the state of Louisiana due to recent laws passed in the state that has opened the door for creationism to be taught in the state’s schools.

As a result of this, they will not be holding their 2011 meeting in New Orleans, instead, they will be taking it to Utah.

No matter what you think of the politics of teaching creationism in schools, one can easily see why an organization like SICB would be opposed to it and why they might want to do something about it.

But boycotting Louisiana, in particular New Orleans, isn’t going to solve the problem and is only going to hurt good people who work hard and likely agree with them politically. After all, New Orleans is a very liberal city (a bright blue dot in the deep red south) and one of just four parishes to vote against Jindal in the 2007 gubernatorial election.

However, the problem with boycotts runs deeper than that. With only a few exceptions, they are just lazy, ineffective means of protest that do more harm than good. They are misused, especially in modern history, and almost never achieve the intended goal.

The reason is pretty simple when you look at the math.

A Closer Look

Let’s take a look at this proposed boycott of Louisiana.

The current state sales tax in Louisiana is four percent. That means that, by boycotting New Orleans, exactly 4% of the revenue you are not spending in the state actually hurts the state. The other 96% hurts New Orleans, both through city taxes, much needed to aid in the Katrina recovery, and through the businesses and people they would have supported.

Then look at the percentages. The current state budget of Louisiana is just a little over 9 billion dollars. The City of New Orleans, on the other hand, has an annual budget of about 128 million. In short, the City of New Orleans is about seventy times more dependent on SICB revenue even before you consider the fact that the city was going to get the lion’s share anyway.

Essentially what this boycott does is withhold thousands of dollars from New Orleans in hopes of withholding a few pennies from the state of Louisiana. All of this at a time when the City of New Orleans is still struggling to recover from the worst natural disaster in U.S. history and is sandbagged by a tough tourism economy due to economic downturn.

Governor Jindal nor most of the legislators that passed the bill you are protesting will not feel the effects of your boycott. They are too far removed, but the small business owners, many of whom lost everything in the storm, the hotel owners and the City of New Orleans itself may very well.

What this boycott does is fire a bullet at the intended target, knowing that it has to first pass through, employees, business owners, a city government, a parish government and then, maybe it will scratch the target enough to annoy him.

It hardly seems worth it when you consider that, for this boycott to work, countless business that had nothing to do with the bill would have to close, countless jobs, including many belonging to people that never voted for Jindal of the government, will be lost. How many innocent lives will be wrecked before the goal will be achieved?

Of course, the boycott will not work. Other, larger conventions are planned for New Orleans and, though Jindal’s hand may be forced by other means, it won’t be because the SICB decided not to show in 2011.

Instead, it’s going to take a very different and much more effective form of protest to bring about any real change.

The Problem with Boycotting Government

The problem with boycotting government is simple, you can’t withhold your taxes legally. If you could, most people wouldn’t wait for a political issue to not pay up.

The only legal way to boycott a government is by withholding money from the businesses within its borders. This means that you have to hurt the citizens, who may or may not support the government’s actions, in hopes of squeezing a small percent of the revenue out of the government’s coffers, money they likely would just make up with new or higher taxes.

In my life, have never seen a government boycott actually work, though I have seen many good businesses get closed and good people lose their jobs.

But what about boycotting companies when they are the ones doing what you feel is wrong? Take, for example, the marijuana community’s proposed boycott of Kellogg’s for dropping Michael Phelps as a spokesperson.

At least, in these cases, the boycott is direct. You’re withholding money directly from the entity that you feel is in the wrong. However, the question becomes, do you really have the dedication and the market share to make it work? Do you have enough people who are working in solidarity to make even a blip on the sales charts?

The answer is probably not, especially when you’re talking about multi-national corporations. Even if your boycott did make a dent in the revenue, they could just expand operations elsewhere and make most of it back up. Cigarette companies have been doing that for years as Americans have been “boycotting” in droves.

For a boycott to actually work, you need a pretty rare set of circumstances.

1. A strong, dedicated group to maintain the boycott.
2. Direct access to the entity’s revenue stream.
3. A large enough market share to make it hurt.

All of these things came together beautifully in the Montgomery bus boycott during the mid-50s. African-Americans, fed up with segregation on the buses, boycotted riding the bus for over a year in a bid to force them to change their policies. The boycotters made up a large percentage of the riders and the effects were indeed felt, even causing deficits in the system.

However, even then, it required a legal ruling to truly end the segregation on the buses. Even though it was hands-down one of the most successful boycotts in the last 100 years, it required other forms of protest and activism to help it bring about real change.

And that is what is the worst part about boycotting, by itself, it is almost meaningless.

Protesting By Doing Nothing

For all of the talk about “hitting where it hurts” or “striking the wallet” boycotting is a really easy form of protest. All you have to do is NOT buy something. For most boycotts, all you have to do is not buy whatever it is you’re boycotting. At worst that will mean buying another brand or, in the case of the SICB, going to another city.

It’s easy, anyone can do it and, outside of the aforementioned bus boycott, there’s no real sacrifice. For the most part, you can boycott from the comfort of your recliner, no actual protesting or work needed. It’s a way to feel like you’re doing something without actually doing anything.

In short, unless you need something and there are no viable alternatives, a boycott isn’t a sacrifice. With no sacrifice, there is no weight behind the protest.

Is this to say you should give money to companies you don’t support? Of course not. If you disagree with Kellogg’s decision to drop Phelps, by all means don’t buy their products. But whipping it up as some kind of protest is pointless. Also, don’t boycott through proxies, withholding purchases to prevent someone farther up the food chain from getting their cut only hurts the people lower down.

A lot of great and worthwhile causes have been protested by boycott, but real changes in modern history have required much more. Look at all of the great protests in modern times. They involved marches, sit-ins, demonstrations, chanting and a million other forms of active protest. These protests were passive only in their non-violence, they were active in the sacrifice and effort.

If the SICB wants to bring change to Louisiana and is truly concerned about our future, they won’t withhold money from a storm-ravaged city, they will have their conference here and stay an extra day, using that to get on a bus, go to Baton Rouge and protest this bill. They’ll send lawyers to fight in court. They’ll donate money to competing candidates. They’ll do anything other than simply ignore the state and hope it all works out for the better.

If the SICB cared about Louisiana, they would be willing to get their hands dirty and fight. Not just write a letter and take their conference elsewhere.

Bottom Line

I’m issuing a challenge to all of the idle boycotters. Do something. Don’t just sit on your wallet and think that makes everything better. If you believe in something strongly enough to protest it, then doing your part means a great deal more than just not buying its products.

I also challenge you to think long and hard about who a particular boycott hurts the most, which lives will be impacted first, before the ones that you desire to strike at. After all, no protest is worth launching if it is only going to hurt the innocent.

Is there a place for boycotts? Sure. But it is a limited and narrow one and it always comes with some other form of active protest. Take, for example, the recent boycott of the New York Post over a controversial cartoon. It has been coupled with loud and attention-grabbing protests. Whether you agree or disagree with the protesters, it is clear they’re having an impact.

You’re not going to beat anyone but the weakest of foes by boycott alone. If you’re going to bring about real change, you’re going to have to do something more. It is that simple.

If you don’t believe me, then we’ll see if Kellogg’s has added Phelp’s back or if has Jindal changed his mind in a year. Unless more active measures are taken, I don’t see either thing happening any time soon.

photo credit: Tracy O

I’m not a mathematician. I admit that I completely suck at math, a big part of why my childhood dreams of becoming a programmer were dashed and I switched to writing. However, I think I spot a number issue here.

You see, many of your banks and firms have received billions of dollars in government assistance over the past few months. You say your firms needed it to stay afloat and, looking at your staggering losses, I am definitely hard pressed to disagree.

But then comes the rub, you take that money and, out of the funds, you give yourselves and other executives multi-million dollar bonuses. While I grant that it was only a percent of a percent of the bailout money spent that way, it certainly shows a lack of care and concern for saving money at a time where your companies are, supposedly, so desperate to stay alive they need government help.

This, understandably, upset the public. After all, very few taxpayers earn anywhere near the amount of money you guys do on your worst years and we aren’t getting any serious government assistance. In large part, we’re the ones financing you. So we made some noise and the government heard. President Obama signed an executive order limiting executive pay to just $500,000 and adding some additional oversight.

How do you guys respond, by trying to give the money back.

This begs a simple question. What are you guys thinking? Sure, you don’t get to keep making your multi-million dollar salaries, but you get billions of dollars in cold hard cash and you get to keep your business afloat. What is there to decide?

I have a sneaking suspicion that even laypeople are better with money than you guys and I think I can prove it pretty easily.

Turning the Question Around

Let’s change the scenario a bit. Instead of a big major financial firm, we’re talking about a single family with a regular Joe the (insert occupation) as the dad and regular working mom. They don’t make millions of dollars, they don’t make $500,000 per year, combined they probably make just a little over $50,000.

But they do have one thing in common you CEO-types, they’ve made some bad financial decisions. Through a series of shoddy investments, bad debt management and unfortunate events they are buried in bills. They’re staring down bankruptcy and foreclosure. They’re behind on their payments and are expecting to get hit worse in the coming months, financial death is staring them in the face.

But then an investor of sorts decides he can’t stand to see the family go under. He looks at their books and decides to give them $100,000. It’s enough to pay off most of their debt and cover the house until things settle down. The only thing he asks in return is that the family curtail some of its unneeded expenses, such as eating out only a few times per week, and that he be allowed to check their financial statements to be sure that they are spending his money wisely.

Would they turn him down knowing that doing so would mean their kids being homeless and starving? No. They would be grateful for the money and, so long as the interference wasn’t unethical, harmful or illegal, they would be grateful for the help. They would make sacrifices to keep their family stable.

That’s what smart people who care about their future and the future of those around them do. They do what they must to survive. However, it seems that you don’t agree with that basic survival instinct and are willing to take the entire economy down with you.

Two Scenarios

As CEOs of major institutions, you don’t seem to be ready to make the same basic decision. Your lifestyle takes a hit and your company faces closer scrutiny, next thing you know, you guys are begging to return the money and chance it alone. This tells me one of two things:

1. You didn’t need the money in the first place and you were just trying to scam the government.
2. You would rather watch your company go bankrupt, watch everyone who works for it lose their jobs, lose your own job and take the world economy down with you than change your lifestyle and face some new regulations.

In the first scenario, you are just a con artists, the second you’re spoiled brats who would ruin countless lives to get their way.

When you signed the deals to take the money, you knew full well that the government had the right to change the agreement. You must have thought you had the government pretty well in your pocket to think that you could be so reckless in flaunting the government’s money and not expect at least some repercussions.

Well, even though they’ve started going a little easier on you, giving you some wiggle room in the caps, I can imagine it has to be a pretty big shock that you struck a nerve deep enough to cause such a strong reaction.

Some Quick Advice

Once again, I’m no mathematician, but I know that billions are worth 1000 times more than millions. I also know that your companies are in dire straits, largely thanks to your own short-sighted management, and you need the money.

So here’s my advice. Take the cash. You’d be stupid not to. Whether you agree or disagree with the idea of a bailout, you have to admit that a CEO with a company in the tank would be dumb not to accept it. It would be like refusing a lifeline when you’re drowning in the ocean.

If you’re crying about the salary caps, don’t forget that you’ll still be making ten times more than your average employee. You’ll still be rich by most people’s standards. Sure, you might have to sell a house or two, but you’ll live. You won’t go hungry, unlikely many of your employees who depend on you if the company closes.

If you’re worried that the regulation might make you less competitive later on, you’re asking the wrong question. Right now your company may not be around long enough to feel those pressures. The one time your job demands you think in the short term is not the time to finally get wise about long-term planning. If you’d been doing that well five years ago, you wouldn’t be in this mess.

Accept the money and its strings graciously, be glad it is there at all. Many smart people think it is unwise to give you the cash at all so now is not the time to get picky about the terms. You need it, it’s there, take it.

Things will be a lot worse for everyone, including you, if you don’t take it and your company sinks. Not only will you not be able to maintain any of your quality of life, but you’ll be likely running from mobs with pitchforks and torches.

But hey, I suppose its exercise.

Bottom Line

The bottom line is this, I don’t usually talk about politics as those discussions seem to go nowhere, but this isn’t a political issue to me. Turning down billions of dollars because it comes with a few million in strings is just stupid. Math doesn’t change based on your political party.

Equally stupid is worrying about your company’s competitiveness ten years down the road when it may not survive six months. It’s like ignoring a bullet wound because the treatment might cause a long-term cancer.

The dirty truth is that running a business is a bit like being a doctor. With medicine, every patient will die at some point, the goal is to give them as long and as healthy of a life as possible. With business, every company goes under at some point. Some last hundreds of years, most less, but everyone succumbs. Though it is theoretically possible to keep a business going forever, the reality is very different.

Right now you are a doctor staring at a very sick patient. Treat the disease that might kill it now and, if it survives, then you can worry about the long term. It’s the responsible thing to do.