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.
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 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.
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.
Science says winter. If you want to wake up earlier to compensate you can just do that.
Split the difference and move forward or backward by 30 minutes only to insure that absolutely no one is ever happy.
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.
Personally I really don’t care which, though it would be nice if there was some kind of consistency throughout Europe and not having e.g. France and Germany in one time zone but Netherlands or Belgium in another.
If I was dictator I think it seems reasonable to draw lines west and east of Germany, maybe Poland can be included in Germany’s zone too.
A wild idea would be to have the lines cross through countries so they’re actually “correct” and the EU is seen as a whole entity rather than just individual countries, but that’s probably quite impossible/impractical. Beautiful in a way though, surely a man can dream.
I 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.
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.
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.
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.
Every year when the clocks change people are cranky and start demanding this kind of thing be eliminated. Politicians capitalize on it and say they will do something about it. In a couple of weeks everyone forgets about it.
In the end, the government can’t do anything about the tilt of the Earth and there is no time system that can be devised that will make everyone happy. Many people like having more light in the evening and wouldn’t be happy if DST were eliminated. People are going to be cranky for a couple of weeks in the year but it’s generally considered worth putting up with so people have more daylight in the evening rather than having it before they wake up.
We can get rid of DST while keeping that extra hour if we default to summer time, not winter. DST statistically causes many accidents twice a year, because our brains aren’t ready / thrown off their rhythm, so making away with it would have a positive impact outside of not being cranky anymore
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…
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 🫠
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!
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.
It’s not like there’s more sunlight, it’s just offsetting where in the day you get the most sunlight. Turn the clock back and you get sunlight earlier in the day, and turn the clock forward you get more sunlight in the afternoon/evening.
As someone living just north enough in Denmark, winters are brutal depending on your job, and I’ve mostly had factory-like jobs where I spent most days inside without sunlight, so I’d drive to work in darkness, spend most of the day in artificial light, no windows, and then drive home in darkness.
Yep, I am well aware of all of that, I am a Swede living north of Stockholm
I even worked 12h alternating day/night shifts.
And damn, summer time makes a huge difference when getting off work at 20:00…
You do realize, the sun isn’t hanging in there for an hour longer, just because we on earth made a change to some kind of time keeping device? We will still have 24h hours a day and the sun will still shine the amount of time it shines.
Edit: I see a couple of downvotes. Could some one give some arguments?
Last push ended because of COVID. What’s it going to be this time, Bird Flu or Texan Measels?
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)
Changing working hours would be decided by individual businesses and inconsistencies on this would be a logistical nightmare. Delivery of materials are suddenly an hour later and you have a bunch of people standing around with nothing to do. Or maybe it’s earlier than usual and it comes before your business is open.
Signage about business hours would have to be changed twice per year. A customer not aware of the change in business hours may show up too early or two late.
And it would be an insane amount of work to change all the schedules of automated systems to conform with business hour changes that happen twice per year.
So to avoid these kinds of problems you need the entire society to change their schedules consistently. It’s easier to change the clocks than to change everything other than the clocks.
