- cross-posted to:
- Europe@europe.pub
- cross-posted to:
- Europe@europe.pub
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Everyone wants this and it’s taking decades…
Sure, but then the question is: Winter time or summer time?
I’m not sure if the European people are equally united in this question.
Summer time. Every time. I’d rather it not be pitch black at 4pm where I am. I’d rather take the extra bit of darkness in the morning.
I also love it being 9pm in June and still having near full daylight ❤️
You know why this sucks? The kids which have to go in the dark to school. I am ok if it’s a little bit dark early so the kids are safe.
Then… why… not just open the schools later in the day?
You could say the same to the people wanting summer time: just get up earlier
Getting up earlier doesn’t give you the opportunity to enjoy all the free-time outdoor activities that are possible in the afternoon after school or work. It’s good enough for things like going for a short walk or run by yourself. But it’s not good for any organized team activities, activities dependent on other people being at work, activities that need more time - like when you need to drive somewhere, you don’t mind to return later when it’s dark in the evening, but you don’t have enough time in the morning, because you need to get to work or school in time, so it all becomes kind of stressful…
I understand. I guess what really annoys me about this suggestion is that it imposes the preference of one group upon the other.
Because we don’t even get Summer Time or winter time forever. And Germany for example has a party in charge for old people. Or in general we don’t have parties at all for Kids which would say. Hey if we get rid of winter Time it’s dark for the kids. Let’s make school start 1h later. In Germany the States are making the School rules and not Germany itself.
Because the parents need to be able to transport the younger kids to school before they go to work. The changes would have to be much larger.
If there truly is a need* for parents to drive their children to school then that is a huge problem that needs to be adressed first.
*I mean need, not just the attitude that their particular Kevin is the most special to grace this earth and can’t possibly walk 200m
Most young children do need to be walked to school, or pre-school, if you will, and not just that - parents need to make sure that they had a proper breakfest, that they got dressed well, that they brushed their teeth, that door must be locked properly, the lights turned off… Young children are still learning basic things each in their own pace, and although they can often do a lot by themselves, they cannot be relied on completely - the parents are the ones with the responsibility. They cannot just leave and let their pre-shool or young school child take care of everything.
Darkness making going to school unsafe sounds to me like a problem with infrastructure. Many people live in countries where during the winter kids go and leave school in darkness. Why does it make it unsafe?
My country has daylight savings and I still went to school at night, so that point is kinda mute.
Kids in many countries go back home after it gets dark. It’s being safe in the morning of being safe in the afternoon and also enjoying some outdoors activities that they couldn’t in the dark.
I think we should stop calling it winter and summer time because it’s swaying people wrong. Because of course we hate short, dark and cold days and we love long, warm, bright evenings. We love the summer, therefore if we choose summer time it feels like it’ll be summer all year long.
But the reality is that (at least where I live) winter time is closer to the sun time and would be preferable in all aspects.
In France, normal time is UTC+1 (CET), and summer time is UTC+2 (CEST), when we actually belong in UTC+0 (and were, before being occupied by Germany). Permanently switching to the so-called “summer time” makes no sense if you’ve ever seen a map of time zones.
And by the way Spain is in the same situation. Spain, which is more western than Greenwich, is going to change time with us this night and we’re both going to spend six months in Egypt and Finland’s normal time zone. That is so wrong.
I often use normal time and offset time to prevent that framing
I think people who prefer summer time do so because it causes the sun to set later. Most people start work in the morning and work inside. They are free to enjoy the sun late in the afternoon, so it means more sun to be enjoyed. The same goes for school children - winter in many countries means going from school after it gets dark, so outdoor activities are limited. Summer time makes it all 1 hour better.
12 is at suns zenith, done.
If we want to adjust our working hours, we can do that, no need to change the clock itself.
Not only is Zenith at a different time every few kilometers but also during the year, that means you say goodbye to 24h days and to a unified time across multiple countries.
Sure, well just solve this problems how we have already solved it. Something along the lines of a mean or median value.
So it’s not “12 is at suns zenith”, it’s just normal time instead of offset time. Got it.
oh come on, thats a nitpick if I ever saw one.
We’re generally discussing two alternatives: noon att zenith(ish) vs noon at zenith(ish) - 1hour
In France and Spain, it’s closer to noon at z-1 or z-2
Yep, people have very strict opinions on this. All sides are like - it’s simple, no need for discussions, just do it the way I see it. The possibility of not changing the time twice a year is not enough for most people to be ok with ending up with a time system they don’t like. The emotions are too intensive. That’s why previous attempts failed and we’re stuck with this nonsense.
Split the difference. Done.
Yeah, there is no law or rule that UTC offsets need to be full hours.
I like this.
Split the difference and move forward or backward by 30 minutes only to insure that absolutely no one is ever happy.
I’d be happy. I didn’t care which offset is used as long as we stick to it.
The hallmark of a truly great compromise
Science says winter. If you want to wake up earlier to compensate you can just do that.
I can’t just finish work an hour early though. I’m looking forward to summer time because it means an extra hour of daylight after work. I don’t want to give that up.
I don’t know if many people share my opinion, but I literally don’t care one bit. Let’s all do UTC across the world, the US needs to be taken down a peg anyway.
Surely UTC is just a newer name for GMT and 0 is Greenwich in England? Since I’m pretty sure the UK came up with the global time zone system in the first place.
There is a slight difference, UTC has leap seconds while GMT stretches seconds to compensate for the uneven spin of the Earth.
And computers will get UTC from an ntp server and, in the presence of leap seconds, stretch seconds to not confuse any programs running on it.
Summer time of course.
Personally I really don’t care which, though it would be nice if there was some kind of consistency throughout Europe and not having e.g. France and Germany in one time zone but Netherlands or Belgium in another.
If I was dictator I think it seems reasonable to draw lines west and east of Germany, maybe Poland can be included in Germany’s zone too.
A wild idea would be to have the lines cross through countries so they’re actually “correct” and the EU is seen as a whole entity rather than just individual countries, but that’s probably quite impossible/impractical. Beautiful in a way though, surely a man can dream.
They’re not. Not at all. That’s why all the previous attempts to abolish time changes failed.
There’s no such thing as “Summer time”. What we have during winter is the astronomical time. Otherwise, I don’t know whether I have a preference. I guess we could switch them up every other year or so, in order to sunset any confusion in the morning.
Doesn’t matter. If the difference of 12:00 to natural noon is small just don’t care, if it’s large then a 9 to 5 can be an 11 to 7 where’s the fucking problem, we can all switch to one zone and be fine.
I always say it’s pretty simple: scrap DST and shift timezone by 30 minutes. It may not be pretty if every observing country did not the same, but there are already countries using this system, like India.
I’ve never been bothered by the time changing twice a year, why do people want to abolish it so much?
It leads to statistically significant increases in human death, injury, and financial loss due to stress caused by disruptions to circadian rhythm. The question you should be asking is “why do we still do it despite this, when there is literally no benefit?”
The benefit is more sun. Permanent normal time would give us sunrise at 5 am in summer while permanent offset time would give us sunrise at 9 am in winter. By changing the time twice a year we get 6 am and 8 am.
So, completely unnecessary death and injury directly attributable to the time change is worth that?
No, I’m also in favour of abolishing daylight saving time. But it’s not true that there are no upsides of the current system.
What’s so special about sunrise though? The sunset influences our lives greatly as well. I understand 8am is better than 9am for outdoor workers, because they can start working at the same time as other people.
Getting up when the sun rises feels much better than getting up in darkness
I don’t care as much about sunset, I’m still awake after sunset anyway
That probably depends on where you live and what’s your job. For many people it’s impossible to get up after the sun rises anyway, if they want to be at work on time. I can imagine it could be locally advantageous though.
I also much prefer the sun rising 1h after I got up than 2h after I got up. Or just seeing the first signs of dawn as Im driving to work
Yes, I suffer greatly every time. My inner clock is very strong and is not willing to adapt.
I very never heard anyone discussing this in real life outside of maybe 6 days a year. Much less so since smartphones became people’s primary clocks since they auto adjust.
People also don’t agree on which time should be kept.
6 days a year is quite a bit, but also the frequency at which it comes up in conversation is not really relevant to whether people want/don’t want?
As a programmer, DST creates tons of bugs for anything using time and is annoying. But whatever, I guess I get paid either way.
As a parent, DST is miserable. It’s miserable as an adult, also, but multiplied misery when you have to get up early to ruin your kid’s sleep. And then that night they’re not ready to suddenly go to sleep an hour early so you lose an extra hour…
I hope Poland succeeds.
the act of changing clocks twice a year is profoundly fucked up to people’s circadian rhythms .
as well as the government deciding for you, what time it is, is kind of orwellian when i think about it.
i want my body to adapt naturally to the sync of the sun, i think we all could use a little bit more nature.
As a programmer, I would never put anything except UTC or Unix time into a computer program or database. The front end can show the user whatever localized bullshit they want to see.
But if you consume data from something not in utc and need to get it there, there is still room for bugs.
I changed our systems a previous job to store all in utc and got made to put it back to jst (Japan). That was … Fun
Most of the time, yes, but not always. Sometimes you actually need local time stored rather than UTC. Simple example: alarm clock. User wants to be waken up at 7:00. No matter if it is summer time or winter time. Even if they travels to a different time zone - still will want to be waken up in the morning. If we store this time as UTC much more unnecessary and error-prone conversions will be needed. Similar issues may arise with other calendar events. Of course, at some point this will be converted to UTC for comparison with actual point in time.
Yea people don’t realize there are several different start/ends to it all over the world, not just 1 “everyone change it” and tons of special cases too. Terrible
Programmer as well and fuck that shit.
My cats are used to a very specific schedule… now they’re gonna wake me up 1 hour early for the next many weeks. Great!
I wonder if the sleep-change fucks up our brains and that’s why more people aren’t upset about it.
Until this comment, I’d completely forgotten about how the most recent time-change messed up me and the puppy I’ve been training, because of course she needs to pee as soon as she wakes up at 6am every day…
Ain’t that right. Going through it with our first this week and I get it. Of course the little guy is ticked off. He’s feeling all of the confusion and tiredness we are without knowing or enjoying any of the benefits.
YES! Get rid of that dumb shit!
Not sure what programmers have to say about this though. Ideally DST would’ve been scrapped like 30 years ago back when there were a lot fewer people using computers, so a lot of code wouldn’t need updating as soon as such a change is implemented, but waiting will only worsen it.
I think keeping summertime is the better option. Having a bit of sunlight when you come home from school or work in winter would be priceless. Even if it means darker mornings.If the EU abolishes DST in its member states, there won’t be any patches or updates necessary to software out there. The timezone database will simply be updated to reflect the change of policy and bam, once your system has the new tzdata, restart your apps and they will automatically understand it. This is not like the Y2K bug that needed actual patches.
Unless the software implemented timezones wrong, for example as tz column in the database with a signed integer. This breaks as soon as you have 30 min Timezone offsets, or try to compare north earth timezones vs south earth timezones where the change between summer and wintertime 2 months apart.
Ask me how I know 🫠
Holy shit that’s absolute software gore. Especially since we’ve had timestamp with tz since forever.
There are lots of systems (embedded, mostly offline, abandoned by its vendor) which are not easily upgradeable and their timezone database cannot be easily replaced. Not everything is a PC getting its regular software update.
Hi, I’m a software developer. DST is a nightmare because it makes the clock jump (skip an hour in one direction, meaning there are wall clock times which don’t exist, or backwards, meaning there are wall clock times that exist twice). I don’t care whether we will settle on summer or winter time but please, just don’t make it jump.
As a software dev myself: if time in your application’s internals jumps on DST, something has been implemented incorrectly. That’s what zone information is for, to make times uniquely identifiable and timers run the correct length. Getting the implementation right is hard, though. So, abolishing DST is very well worth it.
I know, but many of our colleagues don’t. I’ve seen so many systems storing and processing their local wall clock time it’s not even funny.
I think keeping summertime is the better option. Having a bit of sunlight when you come home from school or work in winter would be priceless. Even if it means darker mornings.
This is why I doubt we’ll get rid of it. A majority of people seem to dislike dst but not for the same reasons. I get up around 6. That already means about 3 hours of darkness during winter mornings as is. And in the afternoon I’m indoors anyway because it’s cold. It’d be more convenient for me to sacrifice an hour of daylight on summer evenings. Then again the sun rising around 4 would be kind of a waste.
Just do it like the chinese do it:
Width of 4 time zones all on Beijing time. (most eastern)
So companies in center/west just shift their business hours instead.
Nobody says your company has to open at 8h, starting at 10 is perfectly legal!
The laws for business hours in Germany are unfathomably strict.
Laws can be changed.
Good luck with this one
As a fellow German, could you please tell me, which limits there are to business hours that would be problematic with an hour more or less?
Because most businesses start between 6:00 and 9:00 in the morning and afaik. there is no regulatory limit (e.g. late shift surcharges) before 22:00. Still people working in grocery stores often start at 5 to unload before opening at 6 and in cities stores run until 22:00 some until midnight.
Most people work from 8:00-17:00. That is perfectly cover able without any legal changes.
Not sure what programmers have to say about this though.
DST is a major pain in the butt, getting rid of it simplifies a lot of things. Only problem is that everything still needs to take DST into account for all of history.
Last push ended because of COVID. What’s it going to be this time, Bird Flu or Texan Measels?
WWIII and no time to deprogram the military infrastructure aka MaaS to not adjust savings time.
Fingers crossed
Instead of DST, why didn’t we just shift working hours one hour earlier in winter? (I am in favor of getting rid of DST. I’m just asking why we decided to shift the clock instead of shifting working hours)
We want to stay in summer time though, right? Right?
We need to reach a consensus on that across EU. Allow for a few decades, then we can make an informed decision and start to plan how to proceed.
Either, just as long as we stop the switch twice a year
I we were in true democracies that thing would have been scrapped long ago. Not a single person like it or see any actual purpose on it.
That’s true, no-one likes it. But the attempts to end it got stuck on democracy, unfortunately. People were inable to get behind one solution. Some countries prefered to keep the natural time, some wanted the summer time. There are reasons for both approaches and lots and lots of emotions. It was unreasonable to let different EU countries addopt different time systems, so the whole idea to get rid of the time changes was scrapped.
Weirdly, I’ve heard people here in Iceland (where we never had DST) who want to adopt it. It never made sense to me. If we want to shift our day around the sun, let’s just agree as a society to shift business opening hours during the summer.
I don’t really see the issue. Many different countries already have different timezones. Spain for instance have different timezone than Portugal.
Spain has the same timezone as Poland, despite most of Spain being west of Greenwhich, which is one hour later already.
It is evident that the choice was made politically, with the message being that easy compatibility with the economies of France, Germany and Italy was more important, than the clock reflecting the course of the sun.
Spain is the very example of the difficulties of timezone politics.
France actually was in the same timezone as the UK before WWII and the German occupation. My grandma remembers switching to “German time”. Franco’s Spain similarly changed timezones in 1942 to match their German allies. So, yes, the change was made politically. :-) I’m guessing France is also responsible for Algeria
and Moroccobeing in UTC+1, not sure if they’ve ever discussed changing zones.Edit: I just checked and I was wrong about the Moroccan time zone. Algeria is in UTC+1 though (all year long, they don’t use DST), not sure why it’s in yellow on your map.
You’re right.
Let’s hope they keep the summer time
Edit: I meant all year round. I hate that it gets dark so soon in the winter
Why? You do realize, the summer time is the offset from the real timezone? And also it does not change the amount of hours we have in a day. It is still 24h :D
I’m well aware, but I prefer more light in the afternoon than in the early morning.
Having the middle of the day at 1 PM is nicer year-round
Your idea sounds like more heat when I try to sleep, and the alarm clock going off in the colder hours. I hate summer time so much.
No it’s not. DST makes it so summer afternoons and evenings are useless because it’s too hot in the direct sunlight. By the time the sun goes down and you can actually be outside it’s time for bed.
We should move the clock a hour back in summer so we can actually enjoy the summer evenings.
you do realize you can simply wake up earlier and it’ll have the same effect? :D
Edit: I see a couple of downvotes. Could some one give some arguments?
Most people work or go to school in the morning. They can get up an hour earlier, but then they have just this one hour that they can enjoy before going to work. It’s not enought to meet friends, go for a longer walk or trip, or anything really. If the enjoyable hoir moves to the afternoon, it can be merged with the rest of the evening spare time and enjoyed better.
But if this is the consensus, that things should start earlier, then why not start them earlier, and leave the clock alone? Let the clock be a device that says, when the sun is roughly in its zenith.
Work begin time or school begin time are fairly superstitious and can be changed. I don’t see a reason to change the clock.
I think that would be as hard to achive as the abolition of time changes, maybe harder. I can already see all the emotions that would stir, the irrational fears of being more tired, the hatred of change in general… It could happen, but I don’t think it’s the easier way.
I don’t get people like you. Since your instance is feddit you’re probably from Germany where people have particularly strong opinions on arbitrary things. There’s like 45 minutes difference between sunrise / sunset / zenith between eastern and western parts of Germany so this argument kinda makes no sense. There’s also no “real” time zones because time zones are a human invention.
Good guess, but I am not from Germany. I just like the feddit instance.
Nonetheless you are right. The clock, the time zones - all of it are arbitrary and purely human inventions. However, I would argue there is an inherit value of keeping the timezones as accurate as possible.
My argument stems from seagoing. It makes much more sense from navigational and travel stand point to have the time zones roughly correlate to the zenith of the sun. I presume in aviation it could be similar, but not sure about that one.
This would make the navigation easier, travel easier and we would have some kind of concrete, unified system.
Of course dropping the DST are just baby steps. There are so many things wrong with our time system, but one can start somewhere.
In essence I guess I just want the time zones to mean something instead of this madness, that we have.
Why not every country can decide what time they want to keep?
I believe this was the original EU plan. Scrap it, countries decide which timezone they want to stick with.
Extremely impractical internationally?
DST seems to be such a mess. We should start doing it state by state if EU doesn’t want to do it all at the same time. Poland should lead the way and be the first
Actually I quite like it. You get daylight in the morning in winter, and longer evenings in the summer.
Without DST you have to choose between: in winter you go to work in the dark and come home in the dark, meaning you don’t see any daylight apart from at weekends, which is especially depressing if you work in a place short on windows; OR you waste a bunch of daylight in the summer mornings and have shorter evenings when the weather is warmer and it’s nicer to be outside.
I am a programmer. Not sure why this would be a problem. Just fix the computers to GMT+X and for the most part it won’t matter. It’s not as if I have to rewrite DST code every few months.
in winter you go to work in the dark and come home in the dark, meaning you don’t see any daylight apart from at weekends,
That’s already my reality as it stands
Nordic detected
The issue is more with embedded systems which have been hard coded to European DST.
Most sane software will use the OS timezone and not care about DST. Most sane embedded systems will have some config for DST. I bet there are lots of cranky unsupported things which are horribly broken though.
YES! LET’S GO!
I had such high hopes back in 2018, I think France was pushing for it. Now 7 years later with still no progress I think the best bet is to move to China, India, Russia or Hawaii, or any African country except Egypt. Or South America except Chile. You see the overwhelming majority of people in the world don’t have the DST bullshit.
India? You mean the “+05:30” timezone? I’d rather not deal with that :30 tbh. I like having my timezone arithmetics quite simple, just adding and subtracting hours. A half hour offset is worse to me than having to switch which offsets to use when. (Still better than Australia Central Western with its +08:45, but that’s a low bar to clear.)
Meanwhile, Ohio wants to keep DST as their standard which is infuriating.
I understand wanting more light in the northern hemisphere early in the day. It adds safety for school children mostly in the winter months, but I don’t understand why we can’t just change the start and end times of school to coordinate more light at those crucial times of day.
Who gives a fuck about ohio?
Who the fuck cares about DST? My bad for sharing an opinion on the internet, but go ahead and keep hating from across the pond.
I mean, we are in c/Europe
Thankyou, I thought I was crazy because no one else sees this most obvious solution. Why do we need DST at all? If you are a farmer or a school or whatever then just change your start time as necessary. Changing the time itself for everyone twice a year is a daft approach.
DST would lead to less light in the morning, more in the afternoon, if they keep it year round. Winter is already standard time.
Personally, I prefer DST for the additional light in the afternoon. Maybe the start time of every school and employer could be changed to be an hour earlier with Standard Time, but sounds a lot easier to just keep DST year round.
It could be considered easier on a social level but makes it an I technological nightmare considering everything is based on standard time in IT systems.
Last time there was a vote and most people wanted to remain in DST permanently. Somehow then the whole thing just died out. I don’t think it’s ever gonna happen
