Fear of changes (the DST)

Remember Y2K?

Of course you do. You filled your storage spaces with food, drinking water, and so on because the end of the world was near. Oh, you didn't? So you're not from the USA?

There's a new bug in town. It's not Y2K, Y2K is now far behind us, the new name is DST. From what I understand, the DST is now updated in the US, reason for wide-spread panic and new business opportunity.

I have nothing against making good money over other people's lack of knowledge. What I have is a tooth against the panic spread from minor changes. I never thought that changing my clocks from time to time (twice each year) would become a reason of panic for some...

I am a programmer. I know how hard is to handle all the localization problems that may occur. And speaking of software, I'll let the more knowledgeable to talk about these issues. I especially appreciated this article of Mr. Ulrich Drepper (one of the brains that keep one of the most sensitive parts of some UNIX-based OSs (glibc) working). Perhaps the most valuable in my eyes is the 'offtopic' part:

Having lived here in the US now for quite a few years I think the root of the problem is the same that keeps the US from making progress on other fronts: fear of change and trying to prevent change through denial. Another example? Take the measurement system. When knowing the metric and the imperial system equally well, who would argue the latter is better? And it's not that people don't know the metric system at all. There are large numbers of people who serves/d in the military and all these people had to use it in their job. Every food container also shows grams.

I think that the problem is that the more civilized we become, the less human we become. We don't adapt anymore. We adapt the environment. And that is the most important problem of them all. We forgot to look out for the changes, we lost the ability to be, after all, natural.

Is that going to give us anything good? Maybe on the short term, as we don't see the impact we have on the world we live in. Definitely nothing good on the long term. It's funny that we define intelligence as the capacity to adapt to new situations and new environments. We're then definitely heading towards a numbed down and stupid society.