Latest article I could find is this one: https://www.thejournal.ie/eu-plans-to-abolish-clock-changes-6024800-Mar2023/
I know the EU can be a bit slow, but the vote was held in 2019, seems like enough time elapsed since then.
The medical/biology side is pretty clear, standard time is better than summer time if we keep our current workday schedule. Getting up in the dark is much more detrimental than going to bed a long time after sunset.
You can always make arguments based on the extreme summer/winter solstice daylight time. If you have four hours of daylight, the time zone doesn’t really matter, it will suck either way. I consider such arguments to be in bad faith.
I don’t understand what you consider as bad faith here. You presented and east-west perspective over a single time zone and I presented the northern situation as well (since the phenomenon in question - length of day vs time of day - gets amplified the higher north you go), and not sure where you saw any disagreement.
I find dismissing it as ‘four hours of daylight would suck either way’ to be in bad faith.
Now, had I wanted to nitpick your argument, I could have said that Spain should not be counted because they should probably be on the same time zone as the UK and Ireland by their actual geographic location, so the issue there would stem more from the fact that they chose the wrong time zone to begin with. The sun rose in Madrid today at 8.13. In Rome it was at 7.09. Same time zone.
Notice the subtle difference?
I consider it bad faith, because it’s a few months in the year which suck either way. Yes, having the sun rise at 2am is bad. But is 3am a noticeable difference? Or alternatively is it really that much better or worse to have the sun set at 11pm instead of 10pm?
It is much more honest to talk about the timings around equinox, because there we have 12h days and when to get up in relation to daily life (mostly in relation to when work starts) is a much more relevant question then.
Someone else also mentioned the “wrong time zone” problem. Yes that is true. I believe the current state was preferred, because it makes interaction with France and Germany easier. Changing the time zone would be a reasonable improvement as well,at the cost of a bit more complexity in trading and daily international cooperation.
(Not sure what you mean with the “subtle difference”, maybe it was to subtle for me. I would disagree with the “Spain should not be counted”, because they are obviously affected. But yes, changing time zones would be a valid solution to the sunrise/sunset problem and I do not consider that line of reasoning to be in bad faith because it is a valid solution to the problem with its own tradeoffs that can be discussed.)
