Swatch Internet Time feels to me like a prime example of adding another standard for no reason whatsoever, other than to attach a brand to a timezone for promotion of course. I don't know why people keep bringing it up.
It is a pretty nifty concept - having time in a day measured as divisions of 1000 (a "beat", a minute and some seconds) is aesthetically more pleasing and probably easier to deal with rather than divisions of 60, 24, and 12.
Kinda like how SI units are easier to reason about than imperal ones.
Unless you’re proposing everyone on earth work during the same hours, you’re still going to have to know the standard working hours in the region they’re in. Time zones are basically a standard version of that. Not to mention, a single solar day makes dealing with weekends/holidays way harder.
No, it just shifts the problem to needing to know which are the working hours at each location you want to interact with. Timezones and Daylight Saving are completely different issues that appear related. Both have flaws, but at least local timezones are a sensible abstraction for general societal behaviour in a given location.
If you want a fixed standard time, we already have UTC, - get used to it and the offset of the _local_ times you need to know.
I bet the Japanese would remember that pretty quick. If I visit Japan, I don't know customs and practices of local business and have to look things up or go with a local anyway. I certainly don't like people forgetting what timezone I'm in and scheduling important meetings for 6pm on the Friday before a long weekend, or having to stop and look stuff up because I can't remember whether or not I'm in sync with the next state of over during this time of year. The fact is time is different everywhere but we hide that in the way we represent it, making it harder to deal with it.
Do you often find it necessary to remember when stores open in other countries? Even within my town all the stores open/close at different times from each other.
You already have to do that - if you're in France and it's within a couple of hours of when the sun is highest in the sky the shops are probably shut. On a Sunday they probably don't even open at all.
I thought most French people did not want to work on Sundays, turns out the majority is not so big (60% according to [0] in 2014, 53% in 2015 [1]). My bad.
Also, just like you don't need to remember timezones today (you can just google them), you won't need to remember daylight hours (or whatever the terminology will end up being) in a single timezone future (because Google will know)!
Then think only in UTC! Global Infrastructure has been using this single timezone for over 40 years.
Also, once you know the easy-to-remember-or-lookup offsets of the locations you interact with you can even translate in your head to save others the effort.
Yes! Why have a single, standard system known as timezones when each and every calendaring app can have their own "not a timezone" timezone mappings. That way Apple, Google and Microsoft can have three incompatible mappings between UTC and local time.... er.... accepted local customs. It will be great!
Not only will all references to times in movies etc stop making sense. It will not even help to solve any of the perceived problems, like scheduling calls. You might be able to specify the time without a time zone, but you still have to look up if that time is within their daytime.
Literally the only people who would profit are those tasked with maintaining time-related functions in operating systems... who would lose their jobs.
Globally this would be too much, but why not in EU? It is +1 for some, and -1 for others, not that much. Just stretch to CET, just like Spain already does.
"The European commission will recommend that EU member states abandon the practice of changing the clocks in spring and autumn in favour of staying on summer time throughout the year."
Humans already don't plan their day strictly around sunlight. Otherwise we wouldn't go to bed at 10pm and get up at 6am (or even later) but rather go to bed at 8pm and get up at 4am.
> Humans already don't plan their day strictly around sunlight.
For maximum health & energy efficiency, though, we probably ought to (just like we probably ought to build our houses so that air conditioning is optional & heating is efficient).
I would argue they still plan according to the sun. Why have most westerner cultures slowly adapted to a 9 - 5 schedule when older generations used to work 8 - 4? Daylight savings slowly convinced society to start the work day 1 hour later.
How is the other one natural? It's all based on artificial boundaries and divisions anyway. Seems to me the sun is highest several hours after noon and midnight is closer to sunset than sunrise.
> Seems to me the sun is highest several hours after noon and midnight is closer to sunset than sunrise.
The definition of noon is when the sun is at its highest point. Yes, due to timezones real noon may be half an hour from clock noon — but that's all (modulo places which are on a neighbouring timezone for reasons; regardless, being more than 1½ hours from real time is political stupidity).
Are you in China? I understand the PRC believes that all Chinese should be on Beijing time — c.f. above, under political stupidity.
I know it would "feel" right to have the centre of daylight hours at 12PM on summer solstice... but it's much more useful to have lighter evenings that mornings in my opinion.
There's nothing that makes summer time more natural than winter time other than that winter time precedes summer time. Both essentially are societal constructs, though.
Russia tried switching to summer time permanently, it didn't work. If you need to pick, you need to go for winter time all year round. Otherwise you get really dark winters in Northern Europe, but people forget that, because they want sunlit evenings in the summer time.
This doesn't make any sense. I'm in semi-northern Europe and we get like 6-hours of light at the lowest point. How does it make the winter darker if that light is from 10-16 rather than 9-15 ?
Better to have the light even later in winter, instead of while inside during work, like 14-20.
None of the arguments against DST make sense (like the cow milking one, Jesus...). I heard that one too on the radio in France, I almost fell from my chair. I lived many years in Lapland, and nobody cared about the so-called 'problems' of DST: what does it matter when you have 24 hours of night or 24 hours of day, and the times of sunrise and sunset changes super fast and super strongly in between? It only matters for South- and Central-Europe countries.
-----------
The question itself was horrible. It was just 2-sentence long but yet full of EU propaganda. I mean, quite a performance, I had never seen anything before like that. I was so dishonest and wrong on so many levels.
Evidence suggests that common EU rules in this area are very important to ensure the proper functioning
of the internal market. In order to ensure such common rules also for the future, which of the following
alternatives would you favour:
* Keeping the current EU arrangements switching between summer and wintertime for all EU Member States
* Abolishing the switching for all EU Member States?
First, why the fuck should EU interfere with the States chosen time?
"Evidence suggests"... uh, what? Any sentence starting this way is probably bullshit.
Why the heck is such a minor detail point so important for the "proper functioning"? It has been functioning without troubles for decades.
Why on Earth should the "internal market" be the SINGLE reason stated for imposing such changes?
So, what's next : "In order to ensure such common rules also for the future". Er... what? We already jumped to the point where we agreed on everything said before. No we didn't!
Then the only choices are both "for all EU Member states". There is no "why should I tell the XXians how they should handle their time, let them use what they fancy, it is such a minor detail".
------------
Every single sentence, every single word in this question was politically loaded, yet falsely presented as taken for granted. EU propaganda in a nutshell, always presented as the only, obvious, natural, reasonable, choice.
It may seem like it would be better, but the russians actually tried it, and it turns out that's it's not. The argument in Russia was that permanent summer time cause stress and health issues (https://www.timeanddate.com/news/time/russia-abandons-perman...).
The part that's weird is that everyone have arguments as to why DST would be better, but the country that actually tried it switch to permanent winter time after few years.
Between 1948 and 1981 Denmark didn't even have summer time and Germany managed just fine without DST from 1949 to 1980, so why can't we go back to not having it?
And this is probably why Iceland doesn't have DST - no point in having it that far north. (Although they're on UTC year-round when they're "naturally" on the western edge of UTC-1, so you could say they have year-round DST.)
I think you might have it backwards. Permanent DST would result in more light in the evenings. (Unless there's a difference between EU and US daylight savings that I am misunderstanding).
As it is now, in November we will subtract one hour from the time on our clocks. This means that if it gets dark at 7pm on November 3, on November 4 it will instead get dark 6pm since an hour has been lost.
I am actually an advocate for going in the other extreme--make current DST the default (that is, +1 always), but in the winter set clocks forward another hour (+2 total), so it stays lighter in the evening. This way we get more daylight in the winter when we actually need it! I'd rather have daylight after work than before work so I can actually enjoy it.
Please no. Winters will be absolutely miserable for one. For another, my internal clock is most comfortable with waking up at 9AM. It doesn't understand numbers and clocks, so in the summer that means 10AM. Going to work at 10 is ok, but 11 starts getting a bit uncomfortable, though luckily I've so far picked jobs that let me do that. But the discrepancy between the clock showing nearly noon and my internal clock believing it's morning does cause me a bit of anxiety. You can always do whatever you want after dark, but I can't sleep when I'm driving to work.
Thrilled they're considering this, but my first thought was "I wonder how many time and date libraries will fail to adjust correctly?"
I'm sure that for the well designed ones it's just a matter of configuration somewhere ... But there will definitely be some fun and weird time bugs in the near future
Can you elaborate? Most of the date time libraries I've encountered support them, and it seems like knowing when something happened would be pretty important generally.
Nah, we will hang on to GMT on some sort of half-arsed "principle" and hang the inconvenience. Anything else would be admitting that the EU is right about something.
So e.g. London and Berlin always has a constant 1 hour difference (they both switch to summer time and back at the same moment). I used to live at GMT+7, I just realize now that this doesn't mean I was always 7 hours away from London, in summer I would've been 6 hours away.
Edit: I just realized you're replying to a comment about GMT, not about BST.
GMT is theoretically the old name anyway, it's UTC nowadays.
They switch at the same moment, they're both defined to switch at 0100 UTC. So in London it will go from 0059 to 0200 in the Spring, and from 0159 to 0100 in the Autumn
In Berlin it goes from 0159 to 0300 in Spring and from 0259 to 0200 in the Autumn.
Making the change at 0100 UTC is pretty convenient if your timezone is close to the zero line, because most people will be asleep or at least in bed and won't care. It's not so practical near the dateline where 0100 UTC is the middle of the day.
(Almost) Everybody's civil clocks are actually based around Universal Time, UT, which is a continuation of GMT for the modern era.
Universal Time assumes the Earth is basically a ball spinning at a nice smooth constant speed, which is wrong, and so we have to bodge things in practice which we do by having a bunch of different Universal Times managing the bodge in steps.
So, UT1 is basically we measure where some very distant quasars are in the sky, rather than the Sun - and, since we're assuming that something so far away is essentially fixed to our reference point, and we're spinning, you can use this to work out what the time is very accurately.
But when you measure UT1 it's a bit spiky, because, as mentioned earlier, the planet is not actually a ball, and it isn't actually spinning at a nice constant speed. Earth Rotation is uneven and varies over time.
Making cuckoo clocks that measure distant quasars would be a monumental pain in the arse, so we don't do that. Instead we made another Universal Time, the Co-ordinated Universal Time or UTC, which works like this:
1. Figure out what UT1 is, right now at the start of your co-ordinated system of time, UTC. But then for seconds passing use Atomic clocks and make an allowance for the fact that if you're further from the middle of the planet (e.g. up a hill rather than by the coast) time will pass differently for you. This measurement (of the atomic clocks, which ignores Earth Rotation entirely) is called TAI (International Atomic Time)
2. Continuously re-measure UT1 (the IERS does this work) and if it seems as though UTC and UT1 are going to be different by, like, a second soon, then either add or remove a second in UTC to put them closer together typically at midnight on New Years when everybody is too busy/ drunk to care. These are "leap seconds". So at any time UTC = TAI + n where "n" is some integer the IERS gets to increment or decrement as necessary.
We could just get rid of Universal Time, and switch to basing civil time on TAI, no more leap seconds, the IERS would exist only to help with astronomy - but nostalgia seems to have won for now, and so we're stuck with this complicated scheme.
Perhaps so, but on the South Coast of the UK it would be rather nice to have that extra hour of daylight at the end of the day to have the chance of emerging from work into something other than the perpetual dark.
I see that most people here (and people I know) would like to keep the "summer time" all year, because they like to get out early from work. But why not start working at 7am instead of 8am, while keeping the "true" solar horary, instead of our clocks be almost 1,5h away from the reality? Time is relative, I guess.. :)
In typical 9-17 jobs, 12 is definitely not the middle of the practical day. I don't know anyone whose sleep schedule puts 12 at the middle of their waking period either.
If your job requires no interaction with the rest of society, that would work. As it is, people's lives ironically revolve around the clock and not the sun, so you're expected to be available from a certain hour of the day to a certain hour of the day regardless of the position of the sun.
In general I suppose I'd prefer to get off work around 10 am or so (if we're adjusting work to fit daylight to our free time). But I suppose there's indeed a cultural bias towards dragging everyone (in offices anyway) to 8-16 rather than 7-15 or 9-17.
Indeed, but there's nothing in the institutions that should prevent anything from going fast when planets align, and that one looks like a no brainer.
They consulted at the request of the Parliament. Junker took note of the unusual popularity of the consultation and the strength of the consensus. Northern countries (Finland, Baltic countries) have been calling for it for years.
More cynically, it's unusual enough for the Commission to have a popular topic on their plate. So better get media attention for that, than for sulfurous topics like the migration crisis or boring ones like the EU's multi-annual budget.
It's not huge at all: it is less than 1% of the population. The fact that this is used to justify 'the people want it' is hilarious.
1) People who care about abolishing it are way more likely to vote.
2) It depended heavily on media broadcasting the fact that it exists. This is why 90% of the 4M people are German; their media picked it up.
Whether you want to get rid of it or not; both are fine. However, this poll isn't a reasonable argument in favour of it.
Respectfully disagree 1% of the population answering a public consultation by the EU is low. On the contrary, it strikes me as fairly large.
It wasn't a widely advertised referendum where everyone was asked for their opinion. It was a consultation that got picked up by a few media outlets (and HN if memory serves me well). Public interest was high enough that millions took note and answered. Plus, it's the EU - which nobody ever hears about in my neck of the woods.
Most of the time, nobody hears about these consultations [0] except the small circle of interest groups that lobby EU institutions. Much like on Capital Hill across the pond, their input, rather than that of the general public, is what makes or breaks legislation. In that context, getting 4.6M answers from the general public is a reasonable argument in favor.
> Hopefully t's will get crossed and i's will get dotted before winter time kicks in this year.
I agree, it would be great if the recommendation to abolish daylight saving gets passed within the next months.
actually abolishing it should be planned at least one year into the future, it would be a nightmare otherwise. There are so many systems in place that are automatically switching between time zones, and all of them need to be deprecated.
I answered the poll. I'm happy with the current system but I answered that if we have to change it I'd take permanent daylight savings, which is what they are proposing now. The rationale is that I like to have light late in summer. Early morning will be colder in winter but it's always too cold anyway so who cares.
As a reference, Spain has been in the wrong time zone for decades (GMT+1 instead of GMT) but they have no problems with that.
Of course. If there is a... misleading argument in this discussion is the one about the "wrong" time zone. What's "wrong" supposed to mean in this context? Time zones and legal hour is just a convention. Whole Europe uses only three time zones and the whole world could just use UTC and nothing would happen. The legal hour doesn't change when the sun raises or sets, just what we call it and people would adapt very quickly. Companies will also adapt changing hours once the government stops meddling.
In Spain the real problem is the brain dead broken hours with a huge gap in the middle for "lunch". That's a relic from the time after the war when most people had two jobs and some companies are very reluctant to change it because of the butt-time mindset or other idiotic reasons.
> What's "wrong" supposed to mean in this context?
The sun reaches its highest point at a time sufficiently far from 12:00.
> the whole world could just use UTC and nothing would happen.
That is not true. What would happen is that times would lose all intrinsic meaning. When you schedule an international call, people can say "that's 5 o'clock in the morning for us". If the whole word were to use UTC, you would loose that, and we would have to invent a new way to say that. You know – some kind of "localized time" :).
The sun reaches its highest point at a time sufficiently far from 12:00.
That's answering by reformulating the question. Now I would ask why is having the noon "sufficiently far" from 12:00 wrong.
What would happen is that times would lose all intrinsic meaning.
You did it again.
When you schedule an international call, people can say "that's 5 o'clock in the morning for us". If the whole word were to use UTC, you would loose that, and we would have to invent a new way to say that. You know – some kind of "localized time" :).
Is scheduling internation calls really the biggest problem that would arise? Good.
Anyway, you would say: "we are available from 22:00 to 4:00" and that is all. The way to say what time of the day is already exists: morning, afternoon...
>>> What's "wrong" supposed to mean in this context?
>> The sun reaches its highest point at a time sufficiently far from 12:00.
> That's answering by reformulating the question. Now I would ask why is having the noon "sufficiently far" from 12:00 wrong.
No, that's you moving the goalpost. I answered your question.
>>> nothing would happen.
>> What would happen is that times would lose all intrinsic meaning.
> You did it again.
I did what again? I explained how "nothing" is not what would happen.
> Is scheduling internation calls really the biggest problem that would arise? Good.
This might seem lazy, but I discovered in another answer here that somebody made this point already way better than I ever could: https://qntm.org/abolish.
Anything that is difficult right now due to time zones will stay difficult. It is difficult because of humans and their desire for daylight. You always need two time systems: One that represents local usage of time and one mostly for machines. We already have that.
i think it was actually 84% for abolishing change and majority for keeping summer time, 3mil of participants Germans, i was one of those outside Germany, found out about it last day of survey, dunno why this was not publicly announced for more representative results
i am not even sure it was anonymous, but you could provide them also reasoning, my was - good luck explaining small baby/child why it has to move its sleep by one hour, children need routine, otherwise have problem to sleep
never experienced this nonsense in eastern Asia, anyway everyone use artificial lightning, no matter what time you are following
as for swift change, i think it was already approved we will change hours until 2024 until they will also cancel agreed plan
About time! If people want to get up earlier or later, then they should do like the Iranians and go to work one hour earlier in the summer. Don't change the clocks.
In Spain something similar also happens: in August many companies let employees opt for "jornada intensiva" from 8am to 3pm instead of the usual 9am 6pm with an hour for lunch.
Given that its pretty easy to go for a few days without eating, once you let your body adjust to it, this sounds plausible to me. Besides, on days when I’m not working, I can easily go until 4 or 5pm before eating (and then only eat once more before bed).
I've been doing that for more than five years. Not five summers: five whole years. I only very rarely eat at the office. I guarantee that your body will adjust after a little. In fact, you'll probably be surprised about how little it takes to get accustomed.
In fact, I think this is why intermittent fasting is somewhat easy to adopt: it's surprisingly fast to adapt your body to a different meal schedule, as long as you're eating as much as you need.
It is not a regular practice. This year, because of high electricity consumption, working hours was changed to 6:30-13:30 for government organizations. It was in effect for two months in hot cities. DST shift was applied at the start of spring anyways.
Time zone are very useful for news, travelling, business, etc. Because if you know it's 3pm somewhere or 3am, you can make assumptions. If you know it's 3am everywhere, what does that mean that your plane land at 8 am in this countey or that the strike will start at 10 on that one ?
How often do you travel to another country compared to how often you phone someone in another country? Local timezones do indeed make a lot of sense for travelling in person, but global time is much better for scheduling conference calls etc., and these days that's the more common case.
It's terrible for scheduling conference calls. Instead of just converting timezones, you have to remember what a reasonable time of day is in each locality.
Or do you just expect Australia to adopt a nocturnal working pattern so they can use UTC?
Remembering what's a reasonable time of day in each locality is the same amount of information as remembering what their timezones are. Instead of asking what timezone, you'd just ask when are work hours, or when is noon.
Noon also means when the sun is highest in the sky. If everyone uses the same timezone, one of these two meanings must be broken. It makes more sense to keep the definition that doesn't have an alternative name (you can always call 12:00 12:00).
> Nine to five
No? If everyone's on the same time zone, the answer to this is different everywhere.
Except now you've taken what is basically a culturally accepted standard (9-5 work hours, lunch is around noon, it's dark at 1am) and make it very ambiguous. If you are an employer, what are the work hours for the east coast vs. west coast? What about two cities that are kinda-sorta close in terms of latitude like Houston vs. Austin? Should work start at 13:45 in the Houston office and 13:35 in the Austin office?
If you take away timezones and just say "everybody use UTC and somehow figure out how to adjust it to your local conditions", you've just pushed the cost of figuring out reasonable start & end times for different geographies onto every single member of society. All that will happen is people will come up with their own mappings between UTC and local conditions and guess what? They will look pretty close to what we have with timezones right now only it won't be standardized at all--making a huge mess of things. Outlook calendar will have its own mapping and Google Calendar will have a different one. Your company might have its own internal mapping that is different from your suppliers. Whoa be the person who tries to coordinate an event across these mappings ("your company does lunch at 17:49? Ours does it at 18:42 because that is closer to when the sun is overhead and people like to get in around 12:42")
This is all fun to entertain as a thought experiment but we will never get rid of timezones because, quite frankly, they are far to useful.
> Should work start at 13:45 in the Houston office and 13:35 in the Austin office?
Yes. (Or better, give employees flexibility to come in at a time that works for them).
> If you take away timezones and just say "everybody use UTC and somehow figure out how to adjust it to your local conditions", you've just pushed the cost of figuring out reasonable start & end times for different geographies onto every single member of society. All that will happen is people will come up with their own mappings between UTC and local conditions and guess what? They will look pretty close to what we have with timezones right now only it won't be standardized at all--making a huge mess of things. Outlook calendar will have its own mapping and Google Calendar will have a different one. Your company might have its own internal mapping that is different from your suppliers. Whoa be the person who tries to coordinate an event across these mappings ("your company does lunch at 17:49? Ours does it at 18:42 because that is closer to when the sun is overhead and people like to get in around 12:42")
"Mapping UTC onto local conditions" is not a problem that you ever have to solve. There are two kinds of problems you need to solve: coordinating events that happen in one location, and coordinating events that happen at a particular instant with people from multiple locations. For the first kind it doesn't matter if every office has its own solution - indeed it's better if every office has its own solution that fits their own conditions and the Norway office can start work at 8 and the Spain office can start at 11 if that suits the local climate, rather than deciding that both those countries are on CET so they'd both better start at 9AM CET. For coordinating a simultaneous event, UTC is the only thing that works (because if you try to use your local time and you get the offsets wrong, neither of you will notice).
> Whoa be the person who tries to coordinate an event across these mappings ("your company does lunch at 17:49? Ours does it at 18:42 because that is closer to when the sun is overhead and people like to get in around 12:42")
What problem does this create that doesn't already exist? If you're trying to arrange a lunch today, some people have lunch at 12, 1 or even 1:30 local time.
I suspect it’s easier to get the offsets right than to change the entire world to UTC. Unless you think the USA is going to voluntarily agree to reform around a French standard.
> It's terrible for scheduling conference calls. Instead of just converting timezones, you have to remember what a reasonable time of day is in each locality.
Sure, you still have to remember a time difference or negotiate back and forth. That part is the same amount of work. But you avoid a bunch of failure cases:
* Person from a large country with one official timezone (e.g. China) assumes that when the guy in New York says "10AM my time" that means the same as when the guy in San Francisco does.
* Weekly call at 10AM New York time, person from elsewhere in the world assumes it's going to be at the same time this week as last week, but it isn't because US DST changed on a different week from everyone else's.
* Both people misremember what the offset between their timezones is, think they've agreed on a time, neither notices until the call happens.
The solution to China making the crazy decision to have a single timezone or DST being an unnecessary complication isn't to get rid of timezones, it's for everyone to use them properly (i.e. no DST, everyone uses the correct geographical timezone (with adjustments if only a small part of a state or country is in a different timezones )).
But if you don't travel or have business abroad or whatever, what's the point of having the same hour everwhere ?
Besides, if you phone somebody on another country, you still have to figure out if 3am utc is ok. It's the same amount of work and as easy to memorise than an approximate time zone.
> But if you don't travel or have business abroad or whatever, what's the point of having the same hour everwhere ?
If you communicate with people abroad then you need to be able to agree times with them, even if you never physically meet up. (Apart from anything else, this can be a more human-friendly way to do 24-hour support: have people who live in different parts of the world work on your product and cover support at different times, even if they rarely meet in person).
> Besides, if you phone somebody on another country, you still have to figure out if 3am utc is ok. It's the same amount of work and as easy to memorise than an approximate time zone.
True, but at least you both agree on what time 3AM is, and if you e.g. reverse the sign of the offset then you'll notice this when arranging the call.
The author fails to mention that we could solve the problems that article brings up by making everyone work from 0800 to 1700, globally, once everyone is on UTC. I think people are just bull-headed enough to make this work, even if it means some people never see the Sun ever again. If China can spread one time zone over five, spreading one time zone over twenty four is just a matter of The Same, But Stupider.
Tragically, our legal system and business culture are so hidebound that the easiest way to make it acceptable for people to come into work earlier, shops to opening earlier and so on is to change what time shows on the clocks.
I agree, but I think companies could make it more palatable if they instead describe it as coming in to work one hour later in the winter.
That way, rather than sounding like they expect something extra in the summer, it sounds like they are making a helpful accommodation in the winter.
(Also, it's probably not even necessary for those with desk jobs. Arguably it's worse because you are less able to experience at least a little daylight after work.)
Fantastic!
Though I'm getting a vision of the future ~50 years from now where the US is one of the two countries in the world still practicing daylight savings.
Apparently it's easier for our collective society to agree that what was 9:00 yesterday is now 10:00, rather than allowing companies to start at 10:00 instead of 9:00.
I fully agree with you, but in many people do not agree with your argument.
Interestingly in my experience whether people agree with this is different depending on whether that person has a STEM/non-STEM study or job, STEM people tend to agree.
There are at least 4 or 5 hours in difference between dinner time in western societies. From 6 PM in some Anglosaxon countries to 8/10 PM in Italy (North / South) to 10/11 in Spain.
But remember that they are in the wrong time zone, so they always get one extra hour of light in the evening and one less in morning. This could account for the one hour of difference with comparable latitudes in Italy.
Humans have a sleep cycle driven by circadian rhythms, and most jobs in a country work similar clock hours in order to coordinate with other companies more easily.
So in fact, it's much easier to change what the clocks say than it is to change either of these.
Serious question: In other parts of the country or world, do "companies" all open at the same time? They certainly do not, anywhere I've ever lived. If that is the case, that must be an interesting lifestyle. How does anyone get anything done if there's never a non-overlapping interval of "the bank is open but my employer is closed" type of problem?
I've also lived almost all my life in a "recreational paradise" state far from the coasts where its totally normal for there to be at least one, often many, "in-season" work hours vs "out-season" work hour thru the year. Much like agonizing over average temperatures is heard but isn't an issue, its not a problem for the millions who live around here.
Yes they do. Plus nothing is open on Sundays. You get to work a bit later, or duck out for a bit to go to the bank, or go while you're doing outside work anyway.
Winter time is definitely crap for western europe, but I don't know how good or bad it is for eastern: CET is used from poland to france to spain so it covers a fair bit of territory, and the difference between solar and standard time is already negative: http://blog.poormansmath.net/images/SolarTimeVsStandardTimeV...
FWIW remaining on summer time is the recommendation.
It's the other way round. Implementing daylight savings time ("summer time") moves the effective timezone 1 hour to the East. It's worse for Western European countries. Even CET normal time is already very lopsided. France and Spain should really be part of GMT.
Up here in the Baltic states it gets dark at 4pm in winter. Sticking to summer time would make it slightly more bearable. It's dark to wake up and head to wherever one has to be one way or another.
"Outdoors" season pretty much starts at ends with DST switching.
Summer time year around is going to suck in the winter for Northern Europe. I continue to be surprised that no one is willing to learn from Russia. They tried permanent summer time, and had to switch to winter time one last time.
It's not that people in Scandinavia isn't used to having pitch black mornings in the winter, it's about the sun not rising until 10 - 10:30.
Sitting in an office from the morning I couldn't give a toss when the sun rises. But I would like the sun to be up when I leave, so I could actually enjoy the sunlight.
But this does seem to be a pretty polarizing issue.
But you don't want more light in the evening, you want it to be dark earlier. Especially with summers getting hotter due to global warming.
The past summer was a good example, you can't spend any time outside before the sun goes down because it's just too hot in direct sunlight. If anything we should move the clock back an hour in summer, not an hour forward. It doesn't start being nice to be outside until after dusk.
It's not even true of places like Florida, where the vast majority of us prefer daylight savings time.
>State Sen. Greg Steube, who sponsored the bill, said that the idea of year-round daylight time has enormous support among Floridians.
"I've heard from mayors across the state that it's going to save them money because they don't have to light their softball fields at night," Steube said, according to the Miami Herald. "I can't tell you how many people have come up to me who have said even my high school-age kid, it's hard to get him up in the morning when we fall back the clocks."
> It's not even true of places like Florida, where the vast majority of us prefer daylight savings time.
Except the sun goes down a LOT earlier in Florida which is much closer to the equator than northern Europe. In summer the sun doesn't go down until after 10PM here. If you want to have a BBQ and not burn alive while doing it, you have to start at 22:30 at the earliest. That's just not a realistic time if you have to work the next day.
edit: Also, in Florida the days get shorter during the summer, over here they get longer.
> edit: Also, in Florida the days get shorter during the summer, over here they get longer.
I'm not sure what do you mean, but it doesn't seem right.
Either the days in Florida get longer during the summer relative to the winter, as they do in Europe, or the days in Florida get shorter as the summer advances, as they do in Europe (the longest day everywhere in the Northern hemisphere is around June 21).
>In summer the sun doesn't go down until after 10PM here.
Ah, I was just thinking about the heat, but that's a good point.
>edit: Also, in Florida the days get shorter during the summer, over here they get longer.
No they don't. Like other places in the northern hemisphere, the summer solstice is the longest day of the year in Florida - and the winter solstice is the shortest.
I believe all of Florida is north of the tropics, so no you don't get the interesting effect of the sun swinging north of you in mid June. You might have a sense of earlier dusk during the part of the year that has frequent cloud cover and afternoon thunderstorms.
When you are in the real tropics, that adds a surprising twist to the experience of seasons, including disorientation when your shadow points towards the opposite pole for part of the year!
The hard to get up in the morning is the worst argument for DST ever. It's hard to get up because we are disputing the rhythm by changing the clock around. It's like saying "The Japanese time zone is terrible. Everytime I traveled there I get jet lag."
It most certainly was true in the summer here in NL, EU. The best times were somewhere between 3 and 11 in the morning. The other times, it was simply too hot. But that depends on factors such as the wind as whether you have sea climate or land climate (the third climate is the Mediterranean climate, though I'm unsure Scandinavia has a separate climate).
However whether the better solution is to just wake up earlier or officially shift the time, I do not know. That question is entirely up to what's easier for society to organise.
Not really. I'm too far north for DST to make a difference. Summer nights are light enough I can easily read outside without other illumination. December days are 4 hours or something. The only real reason to be on DST here is make international stuff easier.
Not quite true. It is one of the proposals but really all the article says is that lots of people are in favour, now how are we going to do it? In other words there isn't really any traction because it will depend on the detail and there won't be much agreement.
I don’t think that’s unworkable, as long as it is fairly limited. I expect the smaller countries to follow whatever their main trading parties do. The Netherlands would follow Germany, for example.
I also expect that, as in the USA, the dates to switch to DST and out of it would be uniform within the EU, just as they are in the USA (if you have DST, switch the second Sunday in March and the first Sunday in November in the USA, last Sunday’s of March and October in the EU)
It could get interesting at times, though. My personal record is four time changes in a day, on a trip from Minneapolis to LA with a stop in Phoenix.
1. Switch to DST the night before leaving Minneapolis (triple-checking alarm clock settings)
2. Switch to what I thought would be Phoenix time.
I understand, and understood, but, knowing that the EU didn’t historically require that (starting date was uniform from 1981 on, but the ending date was different between continental Europe and (the UK and Ireland) until 1995), wanted to indicate I don’t think this will become a free for all (if one hour is beneficial, wouldn’t moving 10 minutes each month, or 2-ish minutes each Sunday, be more natural? :-) )
The Netherlands, Belgium and France were actually switched to German time when they were occupied during WW2. They should really switch back[0] to WET/GMT, as their eastern borders coincide pretty well with 7.5° east. Not that they will, though; they'll follow Germany for sure.
[0] For the Netherlands that would only be a partial switch back, as they were on GMT+0.20' before that.
Which already is an issue because realistically there are over 2 timezones between western Spain and eastern Poland. While people are getting up in bright daylight in Poland, people in Spain won't see the sun for at least another hour.
The United States is spread across six time zones and has some areas that don't observe DST (Arizona, Hawaii, and most of the territories); we don't have too much chaos in regards to time.
I'm going to go against the grain and advocate in favor of daylight saving time, mostly because the alternatives are worse. Dr. Drang lays out the reasons nicely:
>If we stayed on Standard Time throughout the year, sunrise here in the Chicago area would be between 4:15 and 4:30 am from the middle of May through the middle of July. And if you check the times for civil twilight, which is when it’s bright enough to see without artificial light, you’ll find that that starts half an hour earlier. This is insane and a complete waste of sunlight.
>If, by the way, you think the solution is to stay on DST throughout the year, I can only tell you that we tried that back in the 70s and it didn’t turn out well. Sunrise here in Chicago was after 8:00 am, which put school children out on the street at bus stops before dawn in the dead of winter. And if you’re wondering why I’m not accounting for predawn light in this case, it’s because winter skies tend to be more overcast and don’t provide as much twilight as summer skies do.
Jokes aside, as a kid growing up in Germany I already went to school in the dark in winter even with DST. Having permanent summer time won't change that. It's also a total non-issue because Europe isn't as dangerous to pedestrians as the US and fears of "stranger danger" aren't nearly as widespread.
Daylight time or standard time -- I don't care. Just pick one and stop changing it twice a year. There's plenty of evidence that messing with the clock doesn't do any good.
As an Australian who lives in Berlin, I find this hilarious, remembering the (cretinous) debates about daylight saving back in Australia, particularly Queensland where I was born.
For 30 years, Queensland has been in a different time zone to NSW and Victoria during summer, because it has never adopted daylight savings. For this, such wonderful arguments were advanced such as "It will fade the curtains" (Wait, wat) and it will upset the cows to be milked at a different time.
And across the other side of Australia, Western Australia (always a, er, special place) has had FOUR referendums in the last 50 years on whether to adopt daylight savings. All were rejected.
So watching Europe deal with this pragmatically and quickly is quite pleasing to watch.
My experience in my family and with my friends is that “it will fade the curtains” is said flippantly (my mother particularly likes it). Does anyone have any documentation of people that have said it seriously, or is it unsubstantiated and potentially urban myth?
I'm pretty sure it was him in the 1970s sometime. I don't know who complained that "the men would get their morning erections while on the bus" though.
Edit: Another Queensland premier Peter Beattie claimed daylight savings would increase skin cancer rates.
Peter Beattie’s statement doesn’t seem unreasonable to me; if daylight savings time causes people to spend more time outdoors when the sun is up, or that for the time they spend the sun is up more—which is basically the whole purpose of DST—then increased skin cancer rates is what you would expect. How much increased, I wouldn’t care to comment, and it’s difficult to measure most such things unless you have parallel measurable universes.
I've seen several studies that conclude that cows don't care what time they are milked, as long as it is done consistently. In many farms, the milking operation is actually entirely automatic -- the cows walk up to the milking stations by themselves.
Cows aside, the referendum was mostly to abolish the switch. But it wasn't decided yet which time to fall back to although it was part of the questionnaire.
So basically you'll use the same time all year but it will probably be up to every country to decide whether or not it's summer time. Cows rejoice, they will be milked at a constant time which may or may not differ by 1h from present time.
As a human I actually care about that 1h, it's not enough that we stop switching back and forth, I would personally like more daylight in the evening.
Yeah, most problems that switching time twice a year is intended to solve could be solved much better by explicitly scheduling things relative to the available sunlight, and the circadian rhythm would cope better with the gradual change.
Want more sunlight in the evening? Find an employer who closes shop a fixed time before sunset.
Don't want to go to work in the dark? Find a job where you get to start a fixed time after sunrise.
Having both would lead to longer working days in summer and shorter ones in winter, but I think that would be acceptable in many cases.
The obvious reason why such a scheme wasn't implemented is that the calculations required would be annoying to do manually, but by now that can be taken care of by technology.
Where I work we must clock in 7h36m and a mandatory 30 minutes long lunchtime (and an additional 15 minutes break at 10:15) a day.
You can come in between 8:00 and 9:00 and leave between 16:00 and 18:00. The whole thing is beaned by an electronic box with a finger scanner.
Works pretty well. Tacit rule is overtime is used to extend an out-of-office lunch break but it gets converted into an obligatory off day when you hit the 8h bar.
You are not supposed to make more than 1 day and a half per month this way.
Where do you work? There is no way I could work under those conditions. I roll into work when I want, leave when I want, spend 1+ hours working out in the company gym, etc.
Eh, not me. I typically roll in somewhere between 9-10am. I work out in the gym between noon and 1:30. Then I head home around 5 or so. I almost never do any work in the evening.
Some people have this flexibility already and might even get over the clock change easier because of this.
But most jobs don't have it and switching jobs based on this is a tall order for the majority of people affected. It's more or less like saying "just find a job that pays a lot better". So whatever time is chosen some people will be left disappointed. One of them repeatedly downvoted me just for saying I'd rather have sunlight in the evening :).
That wouldn't solve the problem. Studies (random picks [0] [1]) showed that on that day when you wake up earlier than your body is used to there is a visible increase in road accidents, deaths in surgeries, etc. People are more likely to make mistakes. It also poses lots of logistical issues when an hour "repeated" itself or "disappeared".
The whole point is to not have to adjust your body's rhythm, and also to eliminate the planning glitches that occur around the moment of the switch, not just to save time on turning back a clock.
You're right, not a referendum, I used the wrong term.
But you're wrong to assume it's as representative as a newspaper poll. It might not be binding but this doesn't change the fact that it's representative of people's wishes. A newspaper poll is not representative simply because each publication has a very specific audience. This consultation did not (unless you count "having internet" as very specific).
I guess it's all about what's at stake. Does abolishing the switch feel like the kind of topic with such an importance to warrant hacking the system? Especially since it was a consultation.
Every person I know in multiple countries is either very indifferent towards this decision or would prefer to abolish the clock change. It may be anecdotal but it supports the fact that in this day and age you really don't need to shift the hour anymore because there's no benefit to it. Plenty of disbenefits though. You don't need a hack to prove this is true and that people feel those disbenefits.
When the work day begins and ends varies widely for a lot of people.
And regardless of whether there is more daylight in the morning or evening because of a one time change, people will drift back to the times that work for them. Just as they would if we arbitrarily moved the clock ahead by 6 hours.
IIRC the consistency is the issue: when DST kicks in they have to shift the milking time by an hour which apparently (based on a vague memory from a news article I read years ago) breaks the routine for the cows and can create issues.
The obvious solution would be not to shift the milking time with DST but then it means that the truck picking up the milk for the factory will arrive one hour later which creates issues with conserving the milk properly, so you basically have the problem at one point or an other.
> but then it means that the truck picking up the milk for the factory will arrive one hour later which creates issues with conserving the milk properly, so you basically have the problem at one point or an other.
Don't know where this comes from..!
The milk is (was at least when I grew up) supposed to ve cooled down to 4 degrees (Celcius, that is) ASAP. As long as that is done and you follow the recommendations for washing and disinfecting everything you should be fine even with half a day delay or more
Source: grew up on a dairy farm, went to farming school.
Yeah I was going to say. You know how easy it is to hit a one hour delay when driving a truck? If milk was ruined over an hour here or there then dairy farming would be incredibly fragile!
I've heard this before. I'm pretty sure it dates back to the days before refrigeration when the milk was transported from cow to consumer every morning.
Yup. Hence my former coworker's business, Promethean (coolectrica.com), which makes milk chillers designed for markets where there is grid power, but it's intermittent and you can't depend on it being up when you need it.
Almost all dairy farms have chilled bulk tanks. Depending on the size of the dairy, number of cows, etc the tank contents may be transferred to a truck daily or every few days. An hours difference is not likely to mess things up.
Unless the farmer is still milking and filling the tank when the milk truck comes. Which isn't permitted (at least not in my state) - the tank can't be filled while it's being pumped out, and it has to be cleaned after emptied. The larger farms probably have multiple tanks and it's not a problem, but smaller farms don't.
So if the milk truck driver follows DST, then you do too (or you need to pad your schedule by an hour to allow for a smooth transition to DST, which can be hard to do when you're first on the route and he comes at 7am)
Growing up the cows on our farm were quite a bit moodier when DST arrived. They would calm down after one or two weeks until the next DST happened and the cycle starts again.
Not enough of a reason to warrant saving DST, but enough that there was definitely a difference in most of them.
Growing up in Indiana, we never had daylight savings time. Standard time year-round. It was finally adopted after tireless arguing about how it was difficult for business to be an hour different from the rest of the country for half the year. Those against adopting it did use the "milking the cows" argument also.
I don't think at the time people could foresee the impact of online business, when it really doesn't matter where you are or what time it is.
When was the Lafayette (The purdue area) on central time? At least 23 years ago it was on eastern, though I think a couple counties to the west was central time, which was pretty common with cities dependent more on cities in Illinois than greater Indiana or Ohio. (Gary, for example, or Terre Haute might have been as well, though that memory is fuzzy).
Source: Graduated high school about an hour from there, then lived in different small towns outside of the area. Was pretty popular for folks to go party at purdue on the weekends if you knew someone there and had willing enough parents. This was both before the adopted DST and after.
Hmm... I may have been wrong. I guess the confusion is that some counties followed DST, and some didn't. And then some were on Central and some on Eastern.
Figuring out what time it was in other states was always a pain. I worked at a call center pre-DST: Our opening hours shifted during DST to allow for proper call time from the rest of the nation.
The problem was that the decision to adopt DST or not, or even what time zone to be on, was made at the county level, so you ended up with this patchwork. It was never a problem in Marion County, but the areas around Chicago and Evansville were pretty confusing.
My major problem is less about DST than the fact that all of Indiana should be on Chicago time all year. Mean solar noon is waaaaay off from clock noon, all year long. I got really f'ing sick of waiting at the school bus stop in the dark for 10 years.
The cow milking argument has always been pure idiocy. Let's make the "kids starting school before the cows even wake up" argument for once.
That's a terribly small part of the world (I'm sitting there). Yes, it was annoying when we did switch to DST. The arguments were all economic (We need to match Indy!). I've known some famers that called DST slave time, as it just ended up making them work more.
Yeah, living in Victoria (Australia) I’d love to push to scrap DST but I also know how incredibly useless Australian politicians are and that it’s just go nowhere and only end up wasting money.
> For 30 years, Queensland has been in a different time zone to NSW
Ridiculous! That sounds like Portugal and Spain. If one lives in Porto and travels just north of the border to Vigo (Galicia), it's an hour ahead. Apparently it was done by Franco who wanted to be on the same time as Hitler [1]
Well, not so ridiculous. Queensland extends for almost 3,000 km north to south, and they really don't need DST up in the tropics. (Although the vast bulk of the population is concentrated at the non-tropical end.)
That said, I live in NSW and run a team that needs to maintain a 24/7 rotation, and dearly wish they would nuke DST once and for all worldwide: Oct/Nov and Mar/Apr are a sequence of steady pain as various offices move by an hour in one direction or another, each on different weeks of course.
It's worth noting that Greece, Cyprus, Malta and in a lesser extent Italy were the only ones supporting the existing system. All the other countries are clearly in favor of abolishing the change. Strange that Spain and Portugal didn't vote like the remaining southern EU countries.
If it were truly random it would be more than enough even, the real problem here is bias which is hard to rule out.
Frankly if you could guarantee a truly random sample you wouldn't need much more than a few thousand people to give their vote on pretty much anything, but the reason we still have elections is because it's nigh impossible to rule out any kind of bias.
Sure. Which is, again, why this was not an election - the resulting proposal, if any, will need to be ratified by each of the member states. (Which is where elections, referenda etc. come in)
"How and when would these changes become effective?
The European Commission's proposal will now go to the European Parliament and the Council for their agreement.
To allow for a smooth transition, under the Commission's proposal each Member State would notify by April 2019 whether it intends to apply permanent summer- or wintertime. The last mandatory change to summertime would take place on Sunday 31 March 2019. After this, the Member States wishing to permanently switch back to wintertime would still be able to make one last seasonal clock change on Sunday 27 October 2019. Following that date, seasonal clock changes would no longer be possible.
Pretty sure they won't be changing tome zones differently from the rest of Europe. Or maybe I'm wrong and that's one of the freedoms Farage holds so dear.
Putting the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland in different time zones would be.. annoying, at the least.
Then again you said Britain, not the UK, but I can imagine the DUP protesting pretty loudly if NI were in a different timezone to GB.
It might just be wishful thinking on my part… but it looks like the people in charge of leaving are so mindbogglingly incompetent that Britain might have accidentally joined the Euro by then.
Indeed, and I do. Unfortunately my frustration is with gently telling people that if they set a meeting at 6 PM UTC it's at 7 PM for me, and that's not ideal, and them wondering why I'm telling them they did something wrong.
Problem is that there aren't any widely-accepted acronyms for time zones in the United States that don't include the current daylight savings time status. Eastern is way longer than EDT.
There is very little understanding in the US that "Daylight" time stops being "Standard" time. (because why should it? why have two/three time zones when you only need one?)
I'm an American on Eastern time and I work pretty routinely with people in other US time zones. I get this pretty much all the time. I think people think that putting the "Standard" in makes it sound more "official".
Ireland is unusual in that it doesn't have a "summer" time as during summer we use Irish Standard Time (UTC+1) and switch to Greenwich Mean Time (UTC+0) for winter.
It doesn't actually make a difference. We still switch at the same time that the rest of Europe does.
I wasn't even going to get in to the whole IST thing. I usually just say BST when pressed. Was that a result of not wanting "standard" to be the same as Britain's standard?
IMNSHO Always refer to _cities_ when talking about different civil time systems for a specific moment, e.g. "The call is at 14:30 Melbourne time" or "When you arrive it'll be 18:15 Montreal time".
The Olson TZ data works on cities (e.g. "Europe/London" or "America/Los_Angeles") but more importantly because a city has all these humans living in it there must actually be a real working answer, or it'd be chaos. Even if the person you're speaking to isn't _from_ or working/ living in the major named city, they will have a better idea what the time is in nearby major cities than how timezones work around the world. Nobody in, say, Nantes is confused as to what time it is in Paris but they may be unclear about PST vs PDT.
On that note, to this day I find it maddening that Microsoft insists on doing time zones differently than everybody else - I literally had to pull in a library in a recent project to map between "Windows Time" and IANA standards because we develop with .Net Core on Windows on deploy on Linux.
The company I work for uses Microsoft libraries, and we deal with timezones and DST all the time. In my opinion, Microsoft does a great job keeping track of the different changes instituted by politicians around the world.
It's unfortunate that the two systems aren't in sync, but they were developed in parallell and have different data structures.
On top of that DST is one of the nastiest things when dealing with time / date in CS.
I’m scared as well that there will be another edge case when the DST is being demolished from EU as the time calculation in the past and the future will have another “if” clause.
tzdata is a database about time and it has all this builtin. Even dates when countries switched from one system to another. So if your code uses the tzdata database through a library, you probably don't have to do anything.
Yeah, and as a database of time changes over the last 50 years, it's not going to go away, as you'll need it for historical dates, and for other time zone changes that occur anyways.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 313 ms ] threadI am 100% for getting rid of this dumb system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time
and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar
Single time zone earth please
Kinda like how SI units are easier to reason about than imperal ones.
Nowadays, you could have that easily as an app on your smart watch, but of course, there are far fewer people wearing smart watches.
Also don't forget the egalitarian approach of using a time format that's equally foreign to everybody.
Guillotine all who resists new scheme
If you want a fixed standard time, we already have UTC, - get used to it and the offset of the _local_ times you need to know.
https://qntm.org/abolish
Have you ever considered that people might be just assholes? :)
[0] http://www.lefigaro.fr/flash-actu/2014/12/04/97001-20141204F... [1] https://www.lesechos.fr/06/12/2015/lesechos.fr/021536423616_...
Also, just like you don't need to remember timezones today (you can just google them), you won't need to remember daylight hours (or whatever the terminology will end up being) in a single timezone future (because Google will know)!
Also, once you know the easy-to-remember-or-lookup offsets of the locations you interact with you can even translate in your head to save others the effort.
Yes! Why have a single, standard system known as timezones when each and every calendaring app can have their own "not a timezone" timezone mappings. That way Apple, Google and Microsoft can have three incompatible mappings between UTC and local time.... er.... accepted local customs. It will be great!
This is a weak argument for keeping timezones around imo.
Not only will all references to times in movies etc stop making sense. It will not even help to solve any of the perceived problems, like scheduling calls. You might be able to specify the time without a time zone, but you still have to look up if that time is within their daytime.
Literally the only people who would profit are those tasked with maintaining time-related functions in operating systems... who would lose their jobs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_units
but only when the Gravitational constant is measured with more precision.
"The European commission will recommend that EU member states abandon the practice of changing the clocks in spring and autumn in favour of staying on summer time throughout the year."
For maximum health & energy efficiency, though, we probably ought to (just like we probably ought to build our houses so that air conditioning is optional & heating is efficient).
The definition of noon is when the sun is at its highest point. Yes, due to timezones real noon may be half an hour from clock noon — but that's all (modulo places which are on a neighbouring timezone for reasons; regardless, being more than 1½ hours from real time is political stupidity).
Are you in China? I understand the PRC believes that all Chinese should be on Beijing time — c.f. above, under political stupidity.
A historically tenuous regional decision about naming, does not influence global reality beyond being contextually incompatible. So what?
+1 1PM middday.
Full disclosure : I am not a morning person.
Most people don't center their night around 00:00, it's usually centered around 03:00~04:00
For instance normal time is pretty close to solar time when you're around Berlin.
Rigth now (since 2014) we have only "winter" time for all regions except for a few (like Altai for example)
Better to have the light even later in winter, instead of while inside during work, like 14-20.
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The question itself was horrible. It was just 2-sentence long but yet full of EU propaganda. I mean, quite a performance, I had never seen anything before like that. I was so dishonest and wrong on so many levels.
Evidence suggests that common EU rules in this area are very important to ensure the proper functioning of the internal market. In order to ensure such common rules also for the future, which of the following alternatives would you favour:
* Keeping the current EU arrangements switching between summer and wintertime for all EU Member States * Abolishing the switching for all EU Member States?
First, why the fuck should EU interfere with the States chosen time?
"Evidence suggests"... uh, what? Any sentence starting this way is probably bullshit.
Why the heck is such a minor detail point so important for the "proper functioning"? It has been functioning without troubles for decades.
Why on Earth should the "internal market" be the SINGLE reason stated for imposing such changes?
So, what's next : "In order to ensure such common rules also for the future". Er... what? We already jumped to the point where we agreed on everything said before. No we didn't!
Then the only choices are both "for all EU Member states". There is no "why should I tell the XXians how they should handle their time, let them use what they fancy, it is such a minor detail".
------------
Every single sentence, every single word in this question was politically loaded, yet falsely presented as taken for granted. EU propaganda in a nutshell, always presented as the only, obvious, natural, reasonable, choice.
The part that's weird is that everyone have arguments as to why DST would be better, but the country that actually tried it switch to permanent winter time after few years.
Between 1948 and 1981 Denmark didn't even have summer time and Germany managed just fine without DST from 1949 to 1980, so why can't we go back to not having it?
As it is now, in November we will subtract one hour from the time on our clocks. This means that if it gets dark at 7pm on November 3, on November 4 it will instead get dark 6pm since an hour has been lost.
I am actually an advocate for going in the other extreme--make current DST the default (that is, +1 always), but in the winter set clocks forward another hour (+2 total), so it stays lighter in the evening. This way we get more daylight in the winter when we actually need it! I'd rather have daylight after work than before work so I can actually enjoy it.
The switch is only a brief adjustment. But having an extra hour of daylight in the early evening for half a year makes a huge difference.
I'm sure that for the well designed ones it's just a matter of configuration somewhere ... But there will definitely be some fun and weird time bugs in the near future
So e.g. London and Berlin always has a constant 1 hour difference (they both switch to summer time and back at the same moment). I used to live at GMT+7, I just realize now that this doesn't mean I was always 7 hours away from London, in summer I would've been 6 hours away.
Edit: I just realized you're replying to a comment about GMT, not about BST.
GMT is theoretically the old name anyway, it's UTC nowadays.
In Berlin it goes from 0159 to 0300 in Spring and from 0259 to 0200 in the Autumn.
Making the change at 0100 UTC is pretty convenient if your timezone is close to the zero line, because most people will be asleep or at least in bed and won't care. It's not so practical near the dateline where 0100 UTC is the middle of the day.
Universal Time assumes the Earth is basically a ball spinning at a nice smooth constant speed, which is wrong, and so we have to bodge things in practice which we do by having a bunch of different Universal Times managing the bodge in steps.
So, UT1 is basically we measure where some very distant quasars are in the sky, rather than the Sun - and, since we're assuming that something so far away is essentially fixed to our reference point, and we're spinning, you can use this to work out what the time is very accurately.
But when you measure UT1 it's a bit spiky, because, as mentioned earlier, the planet is not actually a ball, and it isn't actually spinning at a nice constant speed. Earth Rotation is uneven and varies over time.
Making cuckoo clocks that measure distant quasars would be a monumental pain in the arse, so we don't do that. Instead we made another Universal Time, the Co-ordinated Universal Time or UTC, which works like this:
1. Figure out what UT1 is, right now at the start of your co-ordinated system of time, UTC. But then for seconds passing use Atomic clocks and make an allowance for the fact that if you're further from the middle of the planet (e.g. up a hill rather than by the coast) time will pass differently for you. This measurement (of the atomic clocks, which ignores Earth Rotation entirely) is called TAI (International Atomic Time)
2. Continuously re-measure UT1 (the IERS does this work) and if it seems as though UTC and UT1 are going to be different by, like, a second soon, then either add or remove a second in UTC to put them closer together typically at midnight on New Years when everybody is too busy/ drunk to care. These are "leap seconds". So at any time UTC = TAI + n where "n" is some integer the IERS gets to increment or decrement as necessary.
We could just get rid of Universal Time, and switch to basing civil time on TAI, no more leap seconds, the IERS would exist only to help with astronomy - but nostalgia seems to have won for now, and so we're stuck with this complicated scheme.
Hopefully t's will get crossed and i's will get dotted before winter time kicks in this year.
[0]: https://www.lemonde.fr/europe/article/2018/08/31/la-commissi...
They consulted at the request of the Parliament. Junker took note of the unusual popularity of the consultation and the strength of the consensus. Northern countries (Finland, Baltic countries) have been calling for it for years.
More cynically, it's unusual enough for the Commission to have a popular topic on their plate. So better get media attention for that, than for sulfurous topics like the migration crisis or boring ones like the EU's multi-annual budget.
1) People who care about abolishing it are way more likely to vote. 2) It depended heavily on media broadcasting the fact that it exists. This is why 90% of the 4M people are German; their media picked it up.
Whether you want to get rid of it or not; both are fine. However, this poll isn't a reasonable argument in favour of it.
65 %.
It wasn't a widely advertised referendum where everyone was asked for their opinion. It was a consultation that got picked up by a few media outlets (and HN if memory serves me well). Public interest was high enough that millions took note and answered. Plus, it's the EU - which nobody ever hears about in my neck of the woods.
Most of the time, nobody hears about these consultations [0] except the small circle of interest groups that lobby EU institutions. Much like on Capital Hill across the pond, their input, rather than that of the general public, is what makes or breaks legislation. In that context, getting 4.6M answers from the general public is a reasonable argument in favor.
[0] https://ec.europa.eu/info/consultations_en
If "your" media didn't pick it up, blame them. What happens in the EU matters more than national squabbles.
I agree, it would be great if the recommendation to abolish daylight saving gets passed within the next months.
actually abolishing it should be planned at least one year into the future, it would be a nightmare otherwise. There are so many systems in place that are automatically switching between time zones, and all of them need to be deprecated.
such a change cant be done within ~2 month.
It was chaos.
As a reference, Spain has been in the wrong time zone for decades (GMT+1 instead of GMT) but they have no problems with that.
Only that their lifestyle is approximateley 1 hour shifted. Stuff like eating at 21:00 or 22:00.
It's also odd getting up at 7am here and it's still pretty darkish in August.
In Spain the real problem is the brain dead broken hours with a huge gap in the middle for "lunch". That's a relic from the time after the war when most people had two jobs and some companies are very reluctant to change it because of the butt-time mindset or other idiotic reasons.
The sun reaches its highest point at a time sufficiently far from 12:00.
> the whole world could just use UTC and nothing would happen.
That is not true. What would happen is that times would lose all intrinsic meaning. When you schedule an international call, people can say "that's 5 o'clock in the morning for us". If the whole word were to use UTC, you would loose that, and we would have to invent a new way to say that. You know – some kind of "localized time" :).
That's answering by reformulating the question. Now I would ask why is having the noon "sufficiently far" from 12:00 wrong.
What would happen is that times would lose all intrinsic meaning.
You did it again.
When you schedule an international call, people can say "that's 5 o'clock in the morning for us". If the whole word were to use UTC, you would loose that, and we would have to invent a new way to say that. You know – some kind of "localized time" :).
Is scheduling internation calls really the biggest problem that would arise? Good.
Anyway, you would say: "we are available from 22:00 to 4:00" and that is all. The way to say what time of the day is already exists: morning, afternoon...
>> The sun reaches its highest point at a time sufficiently far from 12:00.
> That's answering by reformulating the question. Now I would ask why is having the noon "sufficiently far" from 12:00 wrong.
No, that's you moving the goalpost. I answered your question.
>>> nothing would happen.
>> What would happen is that times would lose all intrinsic meaning.
> You did it again.
I did what again? I explained how "nothing" is not what would happen.
> Is scheduling internation calls really the biggest problem that would arise? Good.
This might seem lazy, but I discovered in another answer here that somebody made this point already way better than I ever could: https://qntm.org/abolish.
Anything that is difficult right now due to time zones will stay difficult. It is difficult because of humans and their desire for daylight. You always need two time systems: One that represents local usage of time and one mostly for machines. We already have that.
i am not even sure it was anonymous, but you could provide them also reasoning, my was - good luck explaining small baby/child why it has to move its sleep by one hour, children need routine, otherwise have problem to sleep
never experienced this nonsense in eastern Asia, anyway everyone use artificial lightning, no matter what time you are following
as for swift change, i think it was already approved we will change hours until 2024 until they will also cancel agreed plan
In fact, I think this is why intermittent fasting is somewhat easy to adopt: it's surprisingly fast to adapt your body to a different meal schedule, as long as you're eating as much as you need.
Also, I'm not sure if it was intentional, but I appreciate your pun. It is indeed about time.
Or do you just expect Australia to adopt a nocturnal working pattern so they can use UTC?
"Nine to five, what a way to make a living... "
> or when is noon.
12 PM. Noon means 12 PM. Changing this isn't really an option.
More to the point:
> Remembering what's a reasonable time of day in each locality is the same amount of information as remembering what their timezones are.
Hey, admitting your proposed change is a Bavarian Fire Drill is the first step towards recovery.
> Nine to five
No? If everyone's on the same time zone, the answer to this is different everywhere.
If you take away timezones and just say "everybody use UTC and somehow figure out how to adjust it to your local conditions", you've just pushed the cost of figuring out reasonable start & end times for different geographies onto every single member of society. All that will happen is people will come up with their own mappings between UTC and local conditions and guess what? They will look pretty close to what we have with timezones right now only it won't be standardized at all--making a huge mess of things. Outlook calendar will have its own mapping and Google Calendar will have a different one. Your company might have its own internal mapping that is different from your suppliers. Whoa be the person who tries to coordinate an event across these mappings ("your company does lunch at 17:49? Ours does it at 18:42 because that is closer to when the sun is overhead and people like to get in around 12:42")
This is all fun to entertain as a thought experiment but we will never get rid of timezones because, quite frankly, they are far to useful.
Yes. (Or better, give employees flexibility to come in at a time that works for them).
> If you take away timezones and just say "everybody use UTC and somehow figure out how to adjust it to your local conditions", you've just pushed the cost of figuring out reasonable start & end times for different geographies onto every single member of society. All that will happen is people will come up with their own mappings between UTC and local conditions and guess what? They will look pretty close to what we have with timezones right now only it won't be standardized at all--making a huge mess of things. Outlook calendar will have its own mapping and Google Calendar will have a different one. Your company might have its own internal mapping that is different from your suppliers. Whoa be the person who tries to coordinate an event across these mappings ("your company does lunch at 17:49? Ours does it at 18:42 because that is closer to when the sun is overhead and people like to get in around 12:42")
"Mapping UTC onto local conditions" is not a problem that you ever have to solve. There are two kinds of problems you need to solve: coordinating events that happen in one location, and coordinating events that happen at a particular instant with people from multiple locations. For the first kind it doesn't matter if every office has its own solution - indeed it's better if every office has its own solution that fits their own conditions and the Norway office can start work at 8 and the Spain office can start at 11 if that suits the local climate, rather than deciding that both those countries are on CET so they'd both better start at 9AM CET. For coordinating a simultaneous event, UTC is the only thing that works (because if you try to use your local time and you get the offsets wrong, neither of you will notice).
> Whoa be the person who tries to coordinate an event across these mappings ("your company does lunch at 17:49? Ours does it at 18:42 because that is closer to when the sun is overhead and people like to get in around 12:42")
What problem does this create that doesn't already exist? If you're trying to arrange a lunch today, some people have lunch at 12, 1 or even 1:30 local time.
EDIT: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/ng-interactive/2018...
Sure, you still have to remember a time difference or negotiate back and forth. That part is the same amount of work. But you avoid a bunch of failure cases:
* Person from a large country with one official timezone (e.g. China) assumes that when the guy in New York says "10AM my time" that means the same as when the guy in San Francisco does. * Weekly call at 10AM New York time, person from elsewhere in the world assumes it's going to be at the same time this week as last week, but it isn't because US DST changed on a different week from everyone else's. * Both people misremember what the offset between their timezones is, think they've agreed on a time, neither notices until the call happens.
Besides, if you phone somebody on another country, you still have to figure out if 3am utc is ok. It's the same amount of work and as easy to memorise than an approximate time zone.
If you communicate with people abroad then you need to be able to agree times with them, even if you never physically meet up. (Apart from anything else, this can be a more human-friendly way to do 24-hour support: have people who live in different parts of the world work on your product and cover support at different times, even if they rarely meet in person).
> Besides, if you phone somebody on another country, you still have to figure out if 3am utc is ok. It's the same amount of work and as easy to memorise than an approximate time zone.
True, but at least you both agree on what time 3AM is, and if you e.g. reverse the sign of the offset then you'll notice this when arranging the call.
The author fails to mention that we could solve the problems that article brings up by making everyone work from 0800 to 1700, globally, once everyone is on UTC. I think people are just bull-headed enough to make this work, even if it means some people never see the Sun ever again. If China can spread one time zone over five, spreading one time zone over twenty four is just a matter of The Same, But Stupider.
You can use it any time you want.
That way, rather than sounding like they expect something extra in the summer, it sounds like they are making a helpful accommodation in the winter.
(Also, it's probably not even necessary for those with desk jobs. Arguably it's worse because you are less able to experience at least a little daylight after work.)
Actually it would be more of a benefit if it were staggered in the winter since lots are on holiday in the summer.
So I propose scrapping summer time and bringing in winter time. That'll confuse the cows.
Florida is on its way to abolish switching, but it's not there yet.
[1]https://www.timeanddate.com/time/us/indiana-time.html
Imho the summertime should be abolished for all member states..
I mean, if it had a proven benefit for kids, schools could start at different hours depending on the seasons.
Companies can decide to start at 10 or 8 instead of 9, etc.
More light in the evening doesn’t seem to make sense to me as we are the ones deciding when is “evening”
I fully agree with you, but in many people do not agree with your argument. Interestingly in my experience whether people agree with this is different depending on whether that person has a STEM/non-STEM study or job, STEM people tend to agree.
Yes.
> More light in the evening doesn’t seem to make sense to me as we are the ones deciding when is “evening”
Western society has pretty much embedded the idea that the day is centered around 16:00 (4PM) and "night" around 03:00~04:00.
Lights out being when the vast majority of people are asleep with no light when they're actually up is stupid.
Where I'm from, 4PM is late in the day, just a few hours from bedtime, and 4AM is nearly time to wake up.
There are at least 4 or 5 hours in difference between dinner time in western societies. From 6 PM in some Anglosaxon countries to 8/10 PM in Italy (North / South) to 10/11 in Spain.
But remember that they are in the wrong time zone, so they always get one extra hour of light in the evening and one less in morning. This could account for the one hour of difference with comparable latitudes in Italy.
So in fact, it's much easier to change what the clocks say than it is to change either of these.
I've also lived almost all my life in a "recreational paradise" state far from the coasts where its totally normal for there to be at least one, often many, "in-season" work hours vs "out-season" work hour thru the year. Much like agonizing over average temperatures is heard but isn't an issue, its not a problem for the millions who live around here.
If one of the behemoth decides to start working at 11am -> 9pm, a lot of contractors and related services will move to the same time tables.
This is a fairly big problem in modern life, as far as I can see.
Traditionally, I assume what happened was that you worked at your employer, and your wife went to the bank.
FWIW remaining on summer time is the recommendation.
Summer time is equivalent of UTC+2 Winter time is equivalent of UTC+1
"Outdoors" season pretty much starts at ends with DST switching.
It's not that people in Scandinavia isn't used to having pitch black mornings in the winter, it's about the sun not rising until 10 - 10:30.
Permanent winter time is the way to go.
But this does seem to be a pretty polarizing issue.
The past summer was a good example, you can't spend any time outside before the sun goes down because it's just too hot in direct sunlight. If anything we should move the clock back an hour in summer, not an hour forward. It doesn't start being nice to be outside until after dusk.
>State Sen. Greg Steube, who sponsored the bill, said that the idea of year-round daylight time has enormous support among Floridians.
"I've heard from mayors across the state that it's going to save them money because they don't have to light their softball fields at night," Steube said, according to the Miami Herald. "I can't tell you how many people have come up to me who have said even my high school-age kid, it's hard to get him up in the morning when we fall back the clocks."
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/03/08/591925587...
Except the sun goes down a LOT earlier in Florida which is much closer to the equator than northern Europe. In summer the sun doesn't go down until after 10PM here. If you want to have a BBQ and not burn alive while doing it, you have to start at 22:30 at the earliest. That's just not a realistic time if you have to work the next day.
edit: Also, in Florida the days get shorter during the summer, over here they get longer.
I'm not sure what do you mean, but it doesn't seem right.
Either the days in Florida get longer during the summer relative to the winter, as they do in Europe, or the days in Florida get shorter as the summer advances, as they do in Europe (the longest day everywhere in the Northern hemisphere is around June 21).
Ah, I was just thinking about the heat, but that's a good point.
>edit: Also, in Florida the days get shorter during the summer, over here they get longer.
No they don't. Like other places in the northern hemisphere, the summer solstice is the longest day of the year in Florida - and the winter solstice is the shortest.
When you are in the real tropics, that adds a surprising twist to the experience of seasons, including disorientation when your shadow points towards the opposite pole for part of the year!
Live in a non-DST timezone, and nothings bad.
Live in a timezone observing DST and you get the time shift twice a year, without fail.
I'd say it's more like saying - "Travelling is terrible because I hate jet lag".
I agree that it's not a very good argument. I'd say a better one that it's a weaker version of is: DST kills people:
https://www.businessinsider.com/daylight-saving-time-is-dead...
However whether the better solution is to just wake up earlier or officially shift the time, I do not know. That question is entirely up to what's easier for society to organise.
It's probably true for most places in Europe except southern Italy. Remember that the farther north you go the more daylight you get.
At the cost of having the sun out at 3:30 AM? I'm not sure I like that idea.
Either way, Spain solves it by having siesta (at the peak). We don't have that in France or Belgium or The Netherlands.
Because when it is very warm, the best thing to do is not waste any energy and the best way to do that is rest/sleep instead of work.
You can keep the sun out of your house a lot easier than keeping it out of all of the outside world.
I also expect that, as in the USA, the dates to switch to DST and out of it would be uniform within the EU, just as they are in the USA (if you have DST, switch the second Sunday in March and the first Sunday in November in the USA, last Sunday’s of March and October in the EU)
It could get interesting at times, though. My personal record is four time changes in a day, on a trip from Minneapolis to LA with a stop in Phoenix.
1. Switch to DST the night before leaving Minneapolis (triple-checking alarm clock settings)
2. Switch to what I thought would be Phoenix time.
3. Upon learning that (most of; see https://www.timeanddate.com/time/us/arizona-no-dst.html) Arizona doesn’t do DST, switch to Phoenix’s non-DST time.
4. Switch to LA time.
You misunderstand, the twice-yearly variation is what happens now. The proposal is to do away with it.
[0] For the Netherlands that would only be a partial switch back, as they were on GMT+0.20' before that.
Given that we already have a bunch of timezones within the EU how is that any more chaotic than what we have today?
http://www.leancrew.com/all-this/2013/03/why-i-like-dst/
>If we stayed on Standard Time throughout the year, sunrise here in the Chicago area would be between 4:15 and 4:30 am from the middle of May through the middle of July. And if you check the times for civil twilight, which is when it’s bright enough to see without artificial light, you’ll find that that starts half an hour earlier. This is insane and a complete waste of sunlight.
>If, by the way, you think the solution is to stay on DST throughout the year, I can only tell you that we tried that back in the 70s and it didn’t turn out well. Sunrise here in Chicago was after 8:00 am, which put school children out on the street at bus stops before dawn in the dead of winter. And if you’re wondering why I’m not accounting for predawn light in this case, it’s because winter skies tend to be more overcast and don’t provide as much twilight as summer skies do.
Jokes aside, as a kid growing up in Germany I already went to school in the dark in winter even with DST. Having permanent summer time won't change that. It's also a total non-issue because Europe isn't as dangerous to pedestrians as the US and fears of "stranger danger" aren't nearly as widespread.
It’s around 4000km from the east of Poland to the west of Spain, but they are all in the same time zone. China has it even worse.
For 30 years, Queensland has been in a different time zone to NSW and Victoria during summer, because it has never adopted daylight savings. For this, such wonderful arguments were advanced such as "It will fade the curtains" (Wait, wat) and it will upset the cows to be milked at a different time.
And across the other side of Australia, Western Australia (always a, er, special place) has had FOUR referendums in the last 50 years on whether to adopt daylight savings. All were rejected.
So watching Europe deal with this pragmatically and quickly is quite pleasing to watch.
Edit: Another Queensland premier Peter Beattie claimed daylight savings would increase skin cancer rates.
https://www.theage.com.au/national/now-daylight-saving-cause...
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/23/nyregion/with-farm-roboti...
So basically you'll use the same time all year but it will probably be up to every country to decide whether or not it's summer time. Cows rejoice, they will be milked at a constant time which may or may not differ by 1h from present time.
As a human I actually care about that 1h, it's not enough that we stop switching back and forth, I would personally like more daylight in the evening.
Want more sunlight in the evening? Find an employer who closes shop a fixed time before sunset.
Don't want to go to work in the dark? Find a job where you get to start a fixed time after sunrise.
Having both would lead to longer working days in summer and shorter ones in winter, but I think that would be acceptable in many cases.
The obvious reason why such a scheme wasn't implemented is that the calculations required would be annoying to do manually, but by now that can be taken care of by technology.
You can come in between 8:00 and 9:00 and leave between 16:00 and 18:00. The whole thing is beaned by an electronic box with a finger scanner.
Works pretty well. Tacit rule is overtime is used to extend an out-of-office lunch break but it gets converted into an obligatory off day when you hit the 8h bar.
You are not supposed to make more than 1 day and a half per month this way.
Where do you work? Sounds great.
Invariably for me, this meant I’d start when I woke up (06:00) and work through the evening (past 21:00 was the usual minimum)
My new job has a guarantee about starting no earlier than 08:00 and leaving no later than 19:00.
It’s amazing.
But most jobs don't have it and switching jobs based on this is a tall order for the majority of people affected. It's more or less like saying "just find a job that pays a lot better". So whatever time is chosen some people will be left disappointed. One of them repeatedly downvoted me just for saying I'd rather have sunlight in the evening :).
The whole point is to not have to adjust your body's rhythm, and also to eliminate the planning glitches that occur around the moment of the switch, not just to save time on turning back a clock.
[0] https://journalistsresource.org/studies/environment/energy/d...
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2016/03/11/health/daylight-saving-ti...
Oh, and the EU server broke when I tried to validate my answer...
But you're wrong to assume it's as representative as a newspaper poll. It might not be binding but this doesn't change the fact that it's representative of people's wishes. A newspaper poll is not representative simply because each publication has a very specific audience. This consultation did not (unless you count "having internet" as very specific).
Is it?
I wouldn't trust an electronic poll any more than I'd trust an electronic voting machine.
Every person I know in multiple countries is either very indifferent towards this decision or would prefer to abolish the clock change. It may be anecdotal but it supports the fact that in this day and age you really don't need to shift the hour anymore because there's no benefit to it. Plenty of disbenefits though. You don't need a hack to prove this is true and that people feel those disbenefits.
When the work day begins and ends varies widely for a lot of people.
And regardless of whether there is more daylight in the morning or evening because of a one time change, people will drift back to the times that work for them. Just as they would if we arbitrarily moved the clock ahead by 6 hours.
The obvious solution would be not to shift the milking time with DST but then it means that the truck picking up the milk for the factory will arrive one hour later which creates issues with conserving the milk properly, so you basically have the problem at one point or an other.
Don't know where this comes from..!
The milk is (was at least when I grew up) supposed to ve cooled down to 4 degrees (Celcius, that is) ASAP. As long as that is done and you follow the recommendations for washing and disinfecting everything you should be fine even with half a day delay or more
Source: grew up on a dairy farm, went to farming school.
I've heard this before. I'm pretty sure it dates back to the days before refrigeration when the milk was transported from cow to consumer every morning.
So if the milk truck driver follows DST, then you do too (or you need to pad your schedule by an hour to allow for a smooth transition to DST, which can be hard to do when you're first on the route and he comes at 7am)
Not enough of a reason to warrant saving DST, but enough that there was definitely a difference in most of them.
I see what you did there. Nice!
I don't think at the time people could foresee the impact of online business, when it really doesn't matter where you are or what time it is.
Source: Graduated high school about an hour from there, then lived in different small towns outside of the area. Was pretty popular for folks to go party at purdue on the weekends if you knew someone there and had willing enough parents. This was both before the adopted DST and after.
Currently are
My major problem is less about DST than the fact that all of Indiana should be on Chicago time all year. Mean solar noon is waaaaay off from clock noon, all year long. I got really f'ing sick of waiting at the school bus stop in the dark for 10 years.
The cow milking argument has always been pure idiocy. Let's make the "kids starting school before the cows even wake up" argument for once.
Can you expand on this? Or is this an east vs west viewpoint?
Ridiculous! That sounds like Portugal and Spain. If one lives in Porto and travels just north of the border to Vigo (Galicia), it's an hour ahead. Apparently it was done by Franco who wanted to be on the same time as Hitler [1]
1 - https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=244995264
That said, I live in NSW and run a team that needs to maintain a 24/7 rotation, and dearly wish they would nuke DST once and for all worldwide: Oct/Nov and Mar/Apr are a sequence of steady pain as various offices move by an hour in one direction or another, each on different weeks of course.
By this logic, let's suppress week-ends, and holidays. And evenings out as well.
Here is the official link to the preliminary results: http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-18-5302_en.htm
Not a lot of people participated, less than 1%, so the results should be taken with a grain of salt.
Frankly if you could guarantee a truly random sample you wouldn't need much more than a few thousand people to give their vote on pretty much anything, but the reason we still have elections is because it's nigh impossible to rule out any kind of bias.
"How and when would these changes become effective?
The European Commission's proposal will now go to the European Parliament and the Council for their agreement.
To allow for a smooth transition, under the Commission's proposal each Member State would notify by April 2019 whether it intends to apply permanent summer- or wintertime. The last mandatory change to summertime would take place on Sunday 31 March 2019. After this, the Member States wishing to permanently switch back to wintertime would still be able to make one last seasonal clock change on Sunday 27 October 2019. Following that date, seasonal clock changes would no longer be possible.
This timeline is conditional on the European Parliament and the Council adopting the Commission's proposal by March 2019 at the latest." http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-18-5709_en.htm
"we'll meet at four your time"
"great!"
"why weren't you there?? I googled 'current time utc!!'"
"because we're on BST, aka IST, aka UTC+1 in the summer"
But this rando website says UK/Ireland is UTC!!
Someday, somehow, we'll teach people that if you're using PST in the summer, there's a 99% chance you're wrong.
Putting the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland in different time zones would be.. annoying, at the least.
Then again you said Britain, not the UK, but I can imagine the DUP protesting pretty loudly if NI were in a different timezone to GB.
Nomenclature is fun.
Accidentally.
6 PM CT
5 PM MT
4 PM PT
? :)
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=%227+pm+ET%22
It doesn't actually make a difference. We still switch at the same time that the rest of Europe does.
The Olson TZ data works on cities (e.g. "Europe/London" or "America/Los_Angeles") but more importantly because a city has all these humans living in it there must actually be a real working answer, or it'd be chaos. Even if the person you're speaking to isn't _from_ or working/ living in the major named city, they will have a better idea what the time is in nearby major cities than how timezones work around the world. Nobody in, say, Nantes is confused as to what time it is in Paris but they may be unclear about PST vs PDT.
It's unfortunate that the two systems aren't in sync, but they were developed in parallell and have different data structures.
In my experience, people in the UK refer to their time as "GMT" all the year round.
https://xkcd.com/673/
I’m scared as well that there will be another edge case when the DST is being demolished from EU as the time calculation in the past and the future will have another “if” clause.