{"id":2348,"date":"2011-10-28T18:14:53","date_gmt":"2011-10-28T17:14:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.mentor.com\/colinwalls\/?p=2348"},"modified":"2026-03-26T16:36:08","modified_gmt":"2026-03-26T20:36:08","slug":"becoming-a-millionaire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/2011\/10\/28\/becoming-a-millionaire\/","title":{"rendered":"Becoming a millionaire"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have talked about the stupidity of daylight savings time adjustments before<\/a>, but I am inspired to address the subject again. The reason for this inspiration is that I am visiting the US this week and I will not get home until next Monday. While I am away, on Saturday night, the clocks in Europe will be changed, but they will not be messed with in the US until a week later. So I will be going home, confusingly, against a 7 hour time change and have a week of confusion thereafter. If we really must carry out this senseless procedure, why can’t we come to some agreement over the date?<\/p>\n

This aside, I recently came across a new angle on the senselessness …<\/p>\n

I was discussing the lack of logic of daylight savings with a friend, who tried very hard to sell me on the benefits. I was, of course, unconvinced. So, I tried a new tack: what about all the effort involved in making the change twice a year. How much time is wasted? Around the world, there might be, say, a billion people adjusting their clocks. Maybe it takes them 5 minutes twice a year. That adds up to 10 billion minutes – 167 million hours. There is a lot that could usefully be achieved, given that number of man-hours.<\/p>\n

My friend rejected this argument, saying that since it was only a tiny bit of time for each person, so it was insignificant really. Taking that angle, I had a idea, which could make me rich. I am going to ask every resident of the United States to give me a penny. That is not much. Nobody is going to miss it. But, when the collection is complete, I will have over $3m, which would be very nice. But it ain’t going to happen …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have talked about the stupidity of daylight savings time adjustments before, but I am inspired to address the subject…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":71677,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spanish_translation":"","french_translation":"","german_translation":"","italian_translation":"","polish_translation":"","japanese_translation":"","chinese_translation":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[431,302],"industry":[],"product":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-2348","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-daylight-savings","tag-off-topic"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2348","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/71677"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2348"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2348\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10010,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2348\/revisions\/10010"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2348"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2348"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2348"},{"taxonomy":"industry","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/industry?post=2348"},{"taxonomy":"product","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product?post=2348"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=2348"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}