Everyone wants this and it’s taking decades…
Sure, but then the question is: Winter time or summer time?
I’m not sure if the European people are equally united in this question.
Summer time. Every time. I’d rather it not be pitch black at 4pm where I am. I’d rather take the extra bit of darkness in the morning.
I also love it being 9pm in June and still having near full daylight ❤️
You know why this sucks? The kids which have to go in the dark to school. I am ok if it’s a little bit dark early so the kids are safe.
Then… why… not just open the schools later in the day?
You could say the same to the people wanting summer time: just get up earlier
Because we don’t even get Summer Time or winter time forever. And Germany for example has a party in charge for old people. Or in general we don’t have parties at all for Kids which would say. Hey if we get rid of winter Time it’s dark for the kids. Let’s make school start 1h later. In Germany the States are making the School rules and not Germany itself.
Darkness making going to school unsafe sounds to me like a problem with infrastructure. Many people live in countries where during the winter kids go and leave school in darkness. Why does it make it unsafe?
My country has daylight savings and I still went to school at night, so that point is kinda mute.
I think we should stop calling it winter and summer time because it’s swaying people wrong. Because of course we hate short, dark and cold days and we love long, warm, bright evenings. We love the summer, therefore if we choose summer time it feels like it’ll be summer all year long.
But the reality is that (at least where I live) winter time is closer to the sun time and would be preferable in all aspects.
I often use normal time and offset time to prevent that framing
In France, normal time is UTC+1 (CET), and summer time is UTC+2 (CEST), when we actually belong in UTC+0 (and were, before being occupied by Germany). Permanently switching to the so-called “summer time” makes no sense if you’ve ever seen a map of time zones.
And by the way Spain is in the same situation. Spain, which is more western than Greenwich, is going to change time with us this night and we’re both going to spend six months in Egypt and Finland’s normal time zone. That is so wrong.
Split the difference. Done.
Yeah, there is no law or rule that UTC offsets need to be full hours.
Split the difference and move forward or backward by 30 minutes only to insure that absolutely no one is ever happy.
I’d be happy. I didn’t care which offset is used as long as we stick to it.
The hallmark of a truly great compromise
12 is at suns zenith, done.
If we want to adjust our working hours, we can do that, no need to change the clock itself.
Not only is Zenith at a different time every few kilometers but also during the year, that means you say goodbye to 24h days and to a unified time across multiple countries.
Sure, well just solve this problems how we have already solved it. Something along the lines of a mean or median value.
So it’s not “12 is at suns zenith”, it’s just normal time instead of offset time. Got it.
I don’t know if many people share my opinion, but I literally don’t care one bit. Let’s all do UTC across the world, the US needs to be taken down a peg anyway.
Surely UTC is just a newer name for GMT and 0 is Greenwich in England? Since I’m pretty sure the UK came up with the global time zone system in the first place.
There is a slight difference, UTC has leap seconds while GMT stretches seconds to compensate for the uneven spin of the Earth.
Personally I really don’t care which, though it would be nice if there was some kind of consistency throughout Europe and not having e.g. France and Germany in one time zone but Netherlands or Belgium in another.
If I was dictator I think it seems reasonable to draw lines west and east of Germany, maybe Poland can be included in Germany’s zone too.
A wild idea would be to have the lines cross through countries so they’re actually “correct” and the EU is seen as a whole entity rather than just individual countries, but that’s probably quite impossible/impractical. Beautiful in a way though, surely a man can dream.
I always say it’s pretty simple: scrap DST and shift timezone by 30 minutes. It may not be pretty if every observing country did not the same, but there are already countries using this system, like India.
Summer time of course.
I’ve never been bothered by the time changing twice a year, why do people want to abolish it so much?
It leads to statistically significant increases in human death, injury, and financial loss due to stress caused by disruptions to circadian rhythm. The question you should be asking is “why do we still do it despite this, when there is literally no benefit?”
The benefit is more sun. Permanent normal time would give us sunrise at 5 am in summer while permanent offset time would give us sunrise at 9 am in winter. By changing the time twice a year we get 6 am and 8 am.
So, completely unnecessary death and injury directly attributable to the time change is worth that?
YES! Get rid of that dumb shit!
Not sure what programmers have to say about this though. Ideally DST would’ve been scrapped like 30 years ago back when there were a lot fewer people using computers, so a lot of code wouldn’t need updating as soon as such a change is implemented, but waiting will only worsen it.
I think keeping summertime is the better option. Having a bit of sunlight when you come home from school or work in winter would be priceless. Even if it means darker mornings.If the EU abolishes DST in its member states, there won’t be any patches or updates necessary to software out there. The timezone database will simply be updated to reflect the change of policy and bam, once your system has the new tzdata, restart your apps and they will automatically understand it. This is not like the Y2K bug that needed actual patches.
Unless the software implemented timezones wrong, for example as tz column in the database with a signed integer. This breaks as soon as you have 30 min Timezone offsets, or try to compare north earth timezones vs south earth timezones where the change between summer and wintertime 2 months apart.
Ask me how I know 🫠
Holy shit that’s absolute software gore. Especially since we’ve had timestamp with tz since forever.
There are lots of systems (embedded, mostly offline, abandoned by its vendor) which are not easily upgradeable and their timezone database cannot be easily replaced. Not everything is a PC getting its regular software update.
Hi, I’m a software developer. DST is a nightmare because it makes the clock jump (skip an hour in one direction, meaning there are wall clock times which don’t exist, or backwards, meaning there are wall clock times that exist twice). I don’t care whether we will settle on summer or winter time but please, just don’t make it jump.
As a software dev myself: if time in your application’s internals jumps on DST, something has been implemented incorrectly. That’s what zone information is for, to make times uniquely identifiable and timers run the correct length. Getting the implementation right is hard, though. So, abolishing DST is very well worth it.
I know, but many of our colleagues don’t. I’ve seen so many systems storing and processing their local wall clock time it’s not even funny.
I think keeping summertime is the better option. Having a bit of sunlight when you come home from school or work in winter would be priceless. Even if it means darker mornings.
This is why I doubt we’ll get rid of it. A majority of people seem to dislike dst but not for the same reasons. I get up around 6. That already means about 3 hours of darkness during winter mornings as is. And in the afternoon I’m indoors anyway because it’s cold. It’d be more convenient for me to sacrifice an hour of daylight on summer evenings. Then again the sun rising around 4 would be kind of a waste.
Just do it like the chinese do it:
Width of 4 time zones all on Beijing time. (most eastern)
So companies in center/west just shift their business hours instead.
Nobody says your company has to open at 8h, starting at 10 is perfectly legal!
The laws for business hours in Germany are unfathomably strict.
Not sure what programmers have to say about this though.
DST is a major pain in the butt, getting rid of it simplifies a lot of things. Only problem is that everything still needs to take DST into account for all of history.
I like the switches, more sunlight is better!
It’s not like there’s more sunlight, it’s just offsetting where in the day you get the most sunlight. Turn the clock back and you get sunlight earlier in the day, and turn the clock forward you get more sunlight in the afternoon/evening.
As someone living just north enough in Denmark, winters are brutal depending on your job, and I’ve mostly had factory-like jobs where I spent most days inside without sunlight, so I’d drive to work in darkness, spend most of the day in artificial light, no windows, and then drive home in darkness.You do realize, the sun isn’t hanging in there for an hour longer, just because we on earth made a change to some kind of time keeping device? We will still have 24h hours a day and the sun will still shine the amount of time it shines.
Edit: I see a couple of downvotes. Could some one give some arguments?
But bossman says “be at work at 7”
I would argue, this is a bit of a different can of worms. What I am arguing for is to keep the clock in sync with science and have 12 o’clock be roughly at the time, when the sun is in it’s zenith. We shouldn’t just switch back and forth on the clock just because we feel like it, because then what is the point? The amount of sun we get in a day on any given longitude will not change just because we are dialing back and forth a time measurement device.
Last push ended because of COVID. What’s it going to be this time, Bird Flu or Texan Measels?
WWIII and no time to deprogram the military infrastructure aka MaaS to not adjust savings time.
Fingers crossed
YES! LET’S GO!
We want to stay in summer time though, right? Right?
We need to reach a consensus on that across EU. Allow for a few decades, then we can make an informed decision and start to plan how to proceed.
Either, just as long as we stop the switch twice a year
Meanwhile, Ohio wants to keep DST as their standard which is infuriating.
I understand wanting more light in the northern hemisphere early in the day. It adds safety for school children mostly in the winter months, but I don’t understand why we can’t just change the start and end times of school to coordinate more light at those crucial times of day.
Who gives a fuck about ohio?
DST would lead to less light in the morning, more in the afternoon, if they keep it year round. Winter is already standard time.
Personally, I prefer DST for the additional light in the afternoon. Maybe the start time of every school and employer could be changed to be an hour earlier with Standard Time, but sounds a lot easier to just keep DST year round.
Thankyou, I thought I was crazy because no one else sees this most obvious solution. Why do we need DST at all? If you are a farmer or a school or whatever then just change your start time as necessary. Changing the time itself for everyone twice a year is a daft approach.
Actually I quite like it. You get daylight in the morning in winter, and longer evenings in the summer.
Without DST you have to choose between: in winter you go to work in the dark and come home in the dark, meaning you don’t see any daylight apart from at weekends, which is especially depressing if you work in a place short on windows; OR you waste a bunch of daylight in the summer mornings and have shorter evenings when the weather is warmer and it’s nicer to be outside.
I am a programmer. Not sure why this would be a problem. Just fix the computers to GMT+X and for the most part it won’t matter. It’s not as if I have to rewrite DST code every few months.
in winter you go to work in the dark and come home in the dark, meaning you don’t see any daylight apart from at weekends,
That’s already my reality as it stands
Nordic detected
As a programmer, DST creates tons of bugs for anything using time and is annoying. But whatever, I guess I get paid either way.
As a parent, DST is miserable. It’s miserable as an adult, also, but multiplied misery when you have to get up early to ruin your kid’s sleep. And then that night they’re not ready to suddenly go to sleep an hour early so you lose an extra hour…
I hope Poland succeeds.
This is likely coming from PSL (farmer party, EPP) part of the government because they’ve been consistently interested in this matter over the years. I don’t think they have enough pull to achieve anything EU-wide but I believe Trump wanted to scrap DST in US too so maybe this is the time stars align finally.
YEEEES
Really don’t get the issue about keeping it? Its just a small adaptation, which should not bother anyone? A simple change every now and then keeps you flexible right, just go with the flow, and stop being bothered about such a small thing 😉
It causes a lot of unnecessary costs, it causes a lot of unnecessary stress (literally kills a bunch of people every year), …
Why keep it?
What are these costs? And how come shifting an hour kills people?? Stress?? Cant be just that??Having these discussions every year possibly causes more stress than just following the clock shifting? I don’t recall my parents ever having issues with dst or complain about dst more than the first morning when the clock shifted forward? Just trolling a bit, but for myself I really dont see the issue, except for the discussions every half year.
It’s basically subjecting the entire population to 1 hour jetlag twice a year. The problematic switch is to summer time (losing an hour), which causes many people to be tired for most of the week following the change.
Lots of tired people means more accidents on the road and at work. There is also a definite uptick in heart attacks.
Then there is the longer term impact of late evening light on people’s sleep. Whilst it is more social to have more light at night, it’s better for our sleep for darkness to come earlier and to have more light in the mornings. There are tons of studies on the health impacts of insufficient sleep and / or misaligned body circadian rhythms. Summer time is particularly problematic for night owls (which includes all teenagers), who already struggle to fall asleep at a reasonable time.
The economic costs arise from things like loss of productivity due to tiredness, accidents, and higher health costs.
What are these costs?
Why don’t you look it up?
And how come shifting an hour kills people?? Stress?? Cant be just that??
Ah, then we’re good. I mean, there’s many studies that show that heart attacks happen much more frequently when the time switches, but you say it can’t be just that, so it must be something else.
Your argumentation structure is similar to holocaust denier: ”I’m not personally affected by it so it must not have affected others.”
I spent months coding this shit into our programs and it still has issues. It makes it impossible to handle time without ambiguities.
Its annoying and easy to forget and ruins atleast 2 days a year. T. The one with 3 hour daylight in winter for whom dst was made for.
Let’s hope they keep the summer time
Why? You do realize, the summer time is the offset from the real timezone? And also it does not change the amount of hours we have in a day. It is still 24h :D
I’m well aware, but I prefer more light in the afternoon than in the early morning.
Having the middle of the day at 1 PM is nicer year-round
Your idea sounds like more heat when I try to sleep, and the alarm clock going off in the colder hours. I hate summer time so much.
No it’s not. DST makes it so summer afternoons and evenings are useless because it’s too hot in the direct sunlight. By the time the sun goes down and you can actually be outside it’s time for bed.
We should move the clock a hour back in summer so we can actually enjoy the summer evenings.
you do realize you can simply wake up earlier and it’ll have the same effect? :D
Edit: I see a couple of downvotes. Could some one give some arguments?
Why not every country can decide what time they want to keep?
Move the clock an hour back in summer instead.
You like going home from work in the dark?
Yes
Dark? It doesn’t get dark in summer at the end of the workday, even if you move the clock backwards.
What I do like in summer is being outside, which isn’t possible until after sundown because you’ll burn alive if you do. It doesn’t get comfortable outdoors until after the sun sets which in the middle of summer isn’t until 22:00, thanks to DST.
I’d like to BBQ, eat outdoors, have a few drinks with friends in my garden. All impossible during weekdays because there is not enough time after sunset before I need to go to bed.
