I belive this whole clock fliopity flip twice a year is a huge contributing factor to people's "unbalance", and worsening mental state... Especially the northern parts....
We humans are creatures of habit... Mess with the circadian rhythm of en entire population and expect no adverse effect.... Mhm checks out.
The EU again is all talk and no action on this topic. 84% said in a poll to get rid of it back in 2018, parliament voted to end it by 2021. But here we are at the end of 2026 turning the clocks back again. Next march same thing. Honestly at this point I don't think it will ever happen, they will still be "discussing"it in 2040.
Sure, but hasn’t that been the case for all the time since DST was introduced? The original comment to me sounded like DST is responsible for people being in a worse mental state now than a few years ago.
I remember reading somewhere that we see an increased incidence of heart related ailments around the clock change, hypothesized due to this change in sleep patterns.
Most of the world is the voice of reason actually.
This is a very European / North American problem for some reason. There are some exceptions, but in general Asia, Africa and South America don't do this.
If you mean "changing time in summer", Chile has been doing this for a while, and I think other countries in South America do to.
If you mean "changing the rules a few hours / days before they should be applied", Chile (again) did this a few years / decades ago, and it wreaked havoc: all scheduled meetings were off by one or two hours, you could not rely on your calendar, etc.
Plenty of stupidity going around in Chile / South America, rest assured.
> and I think other countries in South America do to
Nope, only Chile, and not even the whole Chile. Similarly, Egypt is the only exception in Africa, Lebanon/Palestine/Israel are the only exceptions in Asia, plus also New Zealand and like half of Australia.
The vast, vast majority of the world including China, India, Mexico, Russia, Iran, Turkey and so on don't move their clocks. In fact, out of 20 most populous countries in the world, only three do: United States, Egypt and Germany.
The thing is: everyone has an opinion, but the scientific evidence that one system is better than another is weak.
And it is weak because people are different. Some people tolerate clock change better than others, some people function better in summer time, others function better in winter time. Any decision you make (keep clock change, summer time only, winter time only) will benefit some people and will hurt others. And there is not even strong evidence that one solution is better on average.
For the disruption caused by clock change itself, it is indeed noticeable, like an increase in traffic accidents, but it is just one day, but the effect of being in summer time vs winter time lasts 6 months. So if the clock change makes even a small improvement for 6 months, it may be worth the disruption for 2 days a year. I am not saying there is, it is just that there is no real consensus.
So, by default, when a change may have negative consequence for some people and may not lead to an overall improvement, you don't change.
(Unfortunately, it always gets derailed by highly-polarized discussions about whether to stay on DST forever or get rid of it forever. They'll be showing up here again soon enough.)
Haha I know a skit from 1990, where the comedian makes this exact point.
He even takes it a step further:
“Why settle for turning back time just one hour? Think about how much we f*cked up the world in the past 30 years! Let’s turn time back 30 years and fix that mess!”
Not to mention they'll need far fewer candles cause it'll be light at night. Nobody burns candles during the day, sun's up at night so no need for them, profit.
This made me giggle. Living in Australia，being from a state where we do have DST, we loved to make the joke that Queenslanders (who do not have daylight savings) would enjoy the lack of daylight due to their curtains (drapes for those across the ditch) lasting longer.
> Every single time adjustment (or jet lag) is a drama for me
As a counter-point, I personally don't even notice it. Also, I live in Romania, so every trip West of the border, even just to Hungary, means a one-hour change, so, again, no big deal.
Yeah same here, I don't even noticed the time switch this time. I remember it was worse as teenager, so maybe it affects young people more than old farts ;)
> ...the problem is the consensus for what comes after.
When one can't decide between two roughly equivalent options, there's a really cool way to choose between them! Assign each option to a side of a fair coin, flip the coin, and select the one whose side is face up.
It's really neat how many thorny problems can be either eliminated or made substantially less thorny with the careful addition of some randomness.
The sun rises when it rises, it has nothing to do with the clock. How does what the clock say take an hour of sunlight away from you? It is surely your employer doing that not the clock.
They're not equal. Summer time is awful in summer and it would be even worse in winter. We as a species need daylight in the morning and darkness in the evening. Not the other way around.
This articles mentions that Cuba tried permanent DST in 2004-06. This makes me wonder, has anyone ever tried permanent DST and not given up? I know Russia attempted in 2011-2013[1] (before switching to permanent standard time), and the US did it in 1974[2] before going back. I know British Columbia did it this year, but I wonder how long that will last. BC is pretty North, and I wonder how local Canadians will feel about the very dark mornings in winter.
At the peak of the shift (usually when DST comes into or out of effect) we're either losing or gaining an hour of daylight per week.
Throwing an hour shift one way or the other does nothing for us. And in peak winter the sun isn't up for me until 10 anyway, and it's down by 3, so what are we even saving?
I'm very much the kind of person that prefers the sun extending in the afternoon than the downside waking up in the night. The current "normal" makes the days feel more easily as "lost".
There is likely a minority of people who are not significantly affected by a lack of morning light and therefore prefer having light in the afternoon. However, the way we set our clocks must work for society as a whole, and there is an abundance of medical research demonstrating the importance of morning light.
The best part of winter for me is waking up in the dark, going to work in the dark, and driving home in the dark. I don't get affected by SAD and it's much more pleasant to me when it's not sunny.
Glad to hear that the tyranny of majority works at a societal norms level. Hopefully at some point that will be the case with democracies as well, instead of serving the privilege of few very wealthy individuals :)
I'd like to imagine a parallel universe where society has decided that given shorter days, as law, working hours must be reduced during the winter period to allow people to wakeup and leave work while the sun is still up. And for those unfortunate ones that work during night shifts the bonuses are significant for their added Vitamin D deficiency and life disruption.
Then parents who do morning routine or drop off have to come in an hour later, and their partner also wants to wake an hour later so they can stay up with the family an hour later, which means they don’t want to open the coffee shop until an hour later, so now the random commuter wants to start later so their coffee shop is open, and pretty soon it’s just as easy to say “ah screw it, we’re just going to change the clocks twice a year…”
Or, we come up with a system that actually follows the rhythms of nature, rather than forcing a standard schedule year round. Like, I get up later and go to bed earlier in the winter like pretty much every other mammal on the planet, and the 9-5 can shove it. This has nothing to do with clocks changing. Just our patterns changing.
I’d like a single, consistent way to mark time, but that shouldn’t dictate my seasonal schedule and rhythms.
(assume when you say "permanent DST" you mean "permanent Summer Time" since "DST" is just a description of the overall switching convention, not any particular season)
Interestingly, in Ireland, the time definitions are reversed from most places - summer is standard, "Winter Time" is the deviation. This has the effect of aligning the "official" time with mainland Europe (Irish Standard Time = Central European Time) in theory, but never in practice.
Given that, if Ireland were to adopt the EU's plans to drop DST, there's a reasonable chance they could keep summer time.
I think daylight time refers to the winter because it's emphasizing daylight? Always struck me as terribly named and never learned to differentiate until now
Well, most of western Europe stayed on CET after World War II. Initially the Nazis forced this upon The Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and occupied France in May 1940, including DST. Double summer time! As The Netherlands was on Amsterdam time before the war, it went from +00:20 to 02:00 in one go. Spain followed as a gesture of political solidarity. DST remained year round until 1942.
After the war DST was abolished again, and then reintroduced in 1977 because of the energy crisis.
There has been talk about having permanent (double) summer time again, but the problem is that in winter, sunrise would be around 10 am.
Here in Argentina we are in permanent summer time GMT-3 since a long time, but we should be in GMT-4. For some time during summer we had double summer time GMT-2.
But 20% of the surface of Argentina should be at GMT-5. It's easier fot transport and communication to ignore it, instead of splinting the country in two time zones in particular because it includes there are only a few big cities there. Anyway, they usually have double summer time but during that period they had triple summer time! There were a lot of complains from Mendoza and other cities there, and for some time we had a few actives time zones.
It was a nightmare to configure the time in the computer, because we didn't have a timezone and Greenland was not making random funny changes. We also canceled one of the switches a week before the date, so whoever is in charge of that in each OS still hate us.
I'm not sure if it's related, but we had very popular TV shows at "midnight".
Well, actually not. What was voted on was the plan to end the DST shift. The reason it stalled on was, that there was no decision about how exactly to end the shift.
In my personal opinion, the only reasonable decision would be to permanently return to the standard time before the introduction of DST. Because otherwise the whole European timezone would have to be redesigned.
I don't understand the obsession with keeping the perfectly vertical sun at noon given we all work from dark to dark under winter time. What would actually help us experience daylight would NOT be moving the clocks or moving work an hour earlier or a few hours later
I'm curious how disruptive this would be from a database perspective ? For eg, All the flight bookings to/from Cuba needs to be updated because it would have originally accounted for DST.
If application engineers did their job correctly, they have nothing to update because you should store future events as a wall clock time + timezone, not an instant (ie something like `2026-09-01T09:00:00, America/Havana`, not `2026-09-01T09:00:00-05.00`).
Which means that flight booking systems are _probably_ fine (they're probably the domain that cares most about timezones and time changes so they've probably modelled it right), but many systems are not fine because it's such a common thing to get wrong.
Flights take x hours in the sky, and so would have left at `2026-10-01T09:00:00, America/Havana`, and arrives at Miami at `2026-10-01T10:25:00, America/Havana`.
Now, they have to choose, do they arrive at 10:25, and leave at 10:00? Or do they leave at 9:00, and arrive at 9:25, since only _one_ of those two timezones is changing. It is extraordinarily unlikely that they'll choose to just circle in the air for an hour so that they can just keep the same departure and arrival times.
I'd imagine the choice is driven by a whole lot of factors like which is the busier airport. It's probably easier to adjust the Cuba departure than the Miami arrival.
It's kind of like how some parts of the country should really be in a different time zone but they keep in sync with a nearby, bigger city. I'd imagine the smaller airports/airlines just say "yeah your Cuba flight is leaving an hour later so we stay in sync with Miami"
You haven't "solved" anything, as the position of the sun is not more relevant to the modern lifestyle than the phase of the moon. It's "good to know" I guess but solves no actual issue.
It is your lifestyle son. I don't care what-o-clock it is. I just try to stay awake when sun is up. In northern latitudes it is vitally important, they say. Or rather youtube-doctor Andrew Huberman says.
Does anybody what's the status with solar power there? Seems like the country would have plenty of sun to use. I know that some private people in the island are running almost 24x7 on solar and batteries, but most private people, companies and specially the government are still in blackout.
This makes sense given all of the power outages largely caused by U.S. sanctions. You would in this scenario want to have more daylight extending into the night time hours.
Note that DST doesn't change that. It makes the already long days feel longer, not the short ones. Or you could view it as your mornings being brighter in winter perhaps. But yeah, as such it never made much sense to me, though maybe my view is too much mid latitude driven.
I also live in Japan and I have yet to find a foreigner that likes the Japanese time zone. What is the purpose of having the sunrise a 4:00 in Summer if all the shops and businesses are closed until 9:00?
I hope the EU will follow soon. Or at least my home country. Since the EU already has different time zones, the stalling because "all should have the same time" doesn't make sense.
I wouldn't mind either. But I do see the point of different countries wanting to be in different time zones. I live in Berlin. My parents are in the Netherlands. We're in the same timezone but there's a good 30-40 minute difference between when we have our sunrise and sunset. Very noticeable when you do a video call around that time. I'll be sitting in the dark and it's still light on their side. The central European timezone spans from Spain in the west to Poland in the East. that's roughly 9 degrees west longitude to 24 east. A normal timezone should be about 15 degrees (360/24), not 33. That's more than two hours difference between when the sun sets/rises from east to west.
So, I can see that how some countries like Spain and Poland might want to make different choices when it comes to losing or keeping the hour permanently as Spain is basically in the wrong timezone. If you want to have noon occur when the sun is highest in the sky, you need to be close to 15 degrees east (roughly the Polish border with Germany).
Much of Spain is technically west of Greenwich (0 degrees longitude). Which means it should be GMT. You could make the same argument about France and the Netherlands being closer to Greenwich than the Polish border with Germany. I'm at 13 degrees east in Berlin, so pretty close.
Countries further north tend to care less about this because most of the year it's either too dark or too light most of the time. I used to live in Sweden and Finland. Daylight saving doesn't do anything useful there. There's not much to save when sunrise is just before noon in the winter and shortly after midnight in the summer. In Helsinki, the sun is already rising around 2am in the summer and it's still dark at 10am in the winter.
If we could just all stick to UTC in the world... DST is just a (North) American and European invention, nobody in the world follow that non sense. And whether DST or Winter time, it doesn't matter, just choose one or the other, it can only be better than the current situation
Time zones give a rough idea of where the sun is and whether people are more likely to be asleep or not.
Like I know if I schedule a meeting at 8am in New York, that's 5am in California so I'm unlikely get people from California to attend. Or at least it's pretty rude of me to expect people in California to attend
If I schedule a meeting at 12 UTC - that gives no indication of where the sun is in New York or California (or anywhere).
The fact is people tend to do things with the sun is up and sleep when it's down. Time zones are a compromise so your clock is still kind of in sync with the sun while still being able to synchronize with larger areas.
Not sure what the position of the sun has to do with when people work. If you schedule a meeting with me before 11am, I probably won't make it, since I'm still sleeping. You can schedule a meeting with me at 11pm if you want, though.
Why not first fix the clock back as it was before the DST, and then abolish it completely?
I personally am not a fan of playing around switching clock hours, it's annoying every single year and as a result of the clock change I always feel more sleepy during the winter.
Eh. Sudan has had a de-facto, _permenant_ DST from 2000 to 2017. Had absolutely no effect iirc save for the expected confusion in the first few months, especially considering that the change was made in winter.
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[ 233 ms ] story [ 235 ms ] thread3 days ago: https://github.com/eggert/tz/commit/5b5b39dae16f787740b8c0d4...
It's not even the latest change to the library!
Yehh Europe is loosing its mind..
I belive this whole clock fliopity flip twice a year is a huge contributing factor to people's "unbalance", and worsening mental state... Especially the northern parts....
We humans are creatures of habit... Mess with the circadian rhythm of en entire population and expect no adverse effect.... Mhm checks out.
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_18_...
I voted to permanently abolish daylight saving time/summer time and am very unhappy that it isn't gone already.
How would something that has been in effect for at least 60 years still lead to a worsening mental state over time?
https://aasm.org/advocacy/position-statements/daylight-savin...
The transition from daylight saving time to standard time leads to depressions https://clin.au.dk/display/artikel/the-transition-from-dayli...
This is a very European / North American problem for some reason. There are some exceptions, but in general Asia, Africa and South America don't do this.
If you mean "changing the rules a few hours / days before they should be applied", Chile (again) did this a few years / decades ago, and it wreaked havoc: all scheduled meetings were off by one or two hours, you could not rely on your calendar, etc.
Plenty of stupidity going around in Chile / South America, rest assured.
Nope, only Chile, and not even the whole Chile. Similarly, Egypt is the only exception in Africa, Lebanon/Palestine/Israel are the only exceptions in Asia, plus also New Zealand and like half of Australia.
The vast, vast majority of the world including China, India, Mexico, Russia, Iran, Turkey and so on don't move their clocks. In fact, out of 20 most populous countries in the world, only three do: United States, Egypt and Germany.
This is surely an exaggeration.
And it is weak because people are different. Some people tolerate clock change better than others, some people function better in summer time, others function better in winter time. Any decision you make (keep clock change, summer time only, winter time only) will benefit some people and will hurt others. And there is not even strong evidence that one solution is better on average.
For the disruption caused by clock change itself, it is indeed noticeable, like an increase in traffic accidents, but it is just one day, but the effect of being in summer time vs winter time lasts 6 months. So if the clock change makes even a small improvement for 6 months, it may be worth the disruption for 2 days a year. I am not saying there is, it is just that there is no real consensus.
So, by default, when a change may have negative consequence for some people and may not lead to an overall improvement, you don't change.
(Unfortunately, it always gets derailed by highly-polarized discussions about whether to stay on DST forever or get rid of it forever. They'll be showing up here again soon enough.)
Sunrise today was 07:31, sunset will be at 16:32 here.
On 22nd December it will be 09:17 and 15:16.
Rule Cuba 1969 1977 - Apr lastSun 0:00 1:00 D
Rule Cuba 1969 1971 - Oct lastSun 0:00 0 S
Rule Cuba 1972 1974 - Oct 8 0:00 0 S
Rule Cuba 1975 1977 - Oct lastSun 0:00 0 S
Rule Cuba 1978 only - May 7 0:00 1:00 D
If they keep doing it indefinitely, they're looking at some serious profits and boost to GDP.
He even takes it a step further:
“Why settle for turning back time just one hour? Think about how much we f*cked up the world in the past 30 years! Let’s turn time back 30 years and fix that mess!”
As a counter-point, I personally don't even notice it. Also, I live in Romania, so every trip West of the border, even just to Hungary, means a one-hour change, so, again, no big deal.
When one can't decide between two roughly equivalent options, there's a really cool way to choose between them! Assign each option to a side of a fair coin, flip the coin, and select the one whose side is face up.
It's really neat how many thorny problems can be either eliminated or made substantially less thorny with the careful addition of some randomness.
It is not roughly the same if the sun rises an hour earlier instead, at 04:30 instead of 05:30.
I don't get up before 08:30 and I will not somehow adjust my schedule by three hours to use the sunlight in the morning.
[1] https://timeinrussia.com/daylight-saving-russia/ [2] https://www.newsweek.com/the-us-tried-permanent-daylight-sav...
At the peak of the shift (usually when DST comes into or out of effect) we're either losing or gaining an hour of daylight per week.
Throwing an hour shift one way or the other does nothing for us. And in peak winter the sun isn't up for me until 10 anyway, and it's down by 3, so what are we even saving?
I'd like to imagine a parallel universe where society has decided that given shorter days, as law, working hours must be reduced during the winter period to allow people to wakeup and leave work while the sun is still up. And for those unfortunate ones that work during night shifts the bonuses are significant for their added Vitamin D deficiency and life disruption.
I’d like a single, consistent way to mark time, but that shouldn’t dictate my seasonal schedule and rhythms.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_zone#/media/File:Solar_ti...
Interestingly, in Ireland, the time definitions are reversed from most places - summer is standard, "Winter Time" is the deviation. This has the effect of aligning the "official" time with mainland Europe (Irish Standard Time = Central European Time) in theory, but never in practice.
Given that, if Ireland were to adopt the EU's plans to drop DST, there's a reasonable chance they could keep summer time.
So "permanent daylight saving time" makes sense to us since we use the term "daylight time" where Europeans tend to call it "summer time."
Still true that DST really just describes the overall time-changing process, just giving some insight into why the phrase makes sense to us.
After the war DST was abolished again, and then reintroduced in 1977 because of the energy crisis.
There has been talk about having permanent (double) summer time again, but the problem is that in winter, sunrise would be around 10 am.
But 20% of the surface of Argentina should be at GMT-5. It's easier fot transport and communication to ignore it, instead of splinting the country in two time zones in particular because it includes there are only a few big cities there. Anyway, they usually have double summer time but during that period they had triple summer time! There were a lot of complains from Mendoza and other cities there, and for some time we had a few actives time zones.
It was a nightmare to configure the time in the computer, because we didn't have a timezone and Greenland was not making random funny changes. We also canceled one of the switches a week before the date, so whoever is in charge of that in each OS still hate us.
I'm not sure if it's related, but we had very popular TV shows at "midnight".
https://jp.ibtimes.com/eu-clock-change-plan-stalled-104949
In my personal opinion, the only reasonable decision would be to permanently return to the standard time before the introduction of DST. Because otherwise the whole European timezone would have to be redesigned.
Which means that flight booking systems are _probably_ fine (they're probably the domain that cares most about timezones and time changes so they've probably modelled it right), but many systems are not fine because it's such a common thing to get wrong.
Flights take x hours in the sky, and so would have left at `2026-10-01T09:00:00, America/Havana`, and arrives at Miami at `2026-10-01T10:25:00, America/Havana`.
Now, they have to choose, do they arrive at 10:25, and leave at 10:00? Or do they leave at 9:00, and arrive at 9:25, since only _one_ of those two timezones is changing. It is extraordinarily unlikely that they'll choose to just circle in the air for an hour so that they can just keep the same departure and arrival times.
It's kind of like how some parts of the country should really be in a different time zone but they keep in sync with a nearby, bigger city. I'd imagine the smaller airports/airlines just say "yeah your Cuba flight is leaving an hour later so we stay in sync with Miami"
I need a watch because the kids start school at 8, so they need to be up at 7. This is true whether the sun is already up (June) or not (December.)
So, I can see that how some countries like Spain and Poland might want to make different choices when it comes to losing or keeping the hour permanently as Spain is basically in the wrong timezone. If you want to have noon occur when the sun is highest in the sky, you need to be close to 15 degrees east (roughly the Polish border with Germany).
Much of Spain is technically west of Greenwich (0 degrees longitude). Which means it should be GMT. You could make the same argument about France and the Netherlands being closer to Greenwich than the Polish border with Germany. I'm at 13 degrees east in Berlin, so pretty close.
Countries further north tend to care less about this because most of the year it's either too dark or too light most of the time. I used to live in Sweden and Finland. Daylight saving doesn't do anything useful there. There's not much to save when sunrise is just before noon in the winter and shortly after midnight in the summer. In Helsinki, the sun is already rising around 2am in the summer and it's still dark at 10am in the winter.
Time zones give a rough idea of where the sun is and whether people are more likely to be asleep or not.
Like I know if I schedule a meeting at 8am in New York, that's 5am in California so I'm unlikely get people from California to attend. Or at least it's pretty rude of me to expect people in California to attend
If I schedule a meeting at 12 UTC - that gives no indication of where the sun is in New York or California (or anywhere).
The fact is people tend to do things with the sun is up and sleep when it's down. Time zones are a compromise so your clock is still kind of in sync with the sun while still being able to synchronize with larger areas.
Or, we could skip the meeting. I won't mind.
I personally am not a fan of playing around switching clock hours, it's annoying every single year and as a result of the clock change I always feel more sleepy during the winter.