Finland to propose that EU abolish daylight savings time
helsinkitimes.fi
helsinkitimes.fi
In the south of Finland (like Helsinki), in the summer, the sun rises at 4am and sets at 11pm. The entire night is twilight, and it doesn't get completely dark at all.
In the winter, the sun rises at 9:15am and sets at 3:15pm. At it's height, the sun barely rises above the trees.
In the northern parts of Finland, things are even more extreme: for a long period of time in the summer, the sun doesn't set at all [1]. Similarly in the winter, the sun won't rise at all [2].
Therefore, for the Finnish people, DST is mostly useless. In the summer there is no shortage of daylight in the evening or in the morning. In the winter it's going to be dark in the morning, and dark in the afternoon anyway.
For most of the year, there's nothing be gained by moving the clocks around. Moving the clocks mostly throws your sleep cycles off for a few days. Especially families with small children seem to get hit especially hard by this.
That all said, perhaps Finland should not move to totally abolish DST, since some people in southern Europe appear to like it. At the very least, though, northern EU states should be allowed to opt out of DST.
But this is not the case for the vast majority of the Europe's population. Why would DST be mandatory anyway? We are already using different timezones, I doubt it would disrupt trade, airtrafic or anything if an EU country does not change timezones when others do.
For political reasons I don't fully understand, Finland adopted the same DST convention in 1981. Possibly there was a need to appear to be in line with other European countries. Maybe there was fear that international business might be disrupted if the time difference between Finland and a given European country wasn't always the same, no matter the date. Certainly the Finnish people didn't need or want DST any more than they need or want it today.
Later, DST was encoded as a (mandatory) EU directive in 2002. All relevant countries were already following the practice, so making it a directive probably seemed like a good idea at the time. Given the amount of international dealings with non-EU states with varying DST conventions, it doesn't seem that useful to force the same DST rules on all EU states.
Will switch back to daylight saving as nobody is happy(Maybe except for the Energy minister who is the son in law of Erdogan and also runs energy companies).
edit:
here is a source, it's form a Turkish factchecking website: http://www.dogrulukpayi.com/bulten/kalici-yaz-saati-uygulama...
according to the reports, the effect on increase in consumption is inconclusive(there's an increase but not necessarily due to this) but public opinion polls shows that people want to go back to the daylight saving schedule with %66 majority and only %22 of the people like the permanent summer time.
here is a news article reporting that Turkey is ending the permanent summer time and going back to the daylight saving time at the end of the 2018: http://www.milliyet.com.tr/surekli-yaz-saati-uygulamasi-2018...
I guess you can use Google Translate to verify. The factchecking website also links to the actual reports.
BTW, to all DST Haters, check http://momentjs.com and calm down. DST is your friend, let the computers do the bookkeeping and enjoy the sunlight.
EDIT: To clarify, I'm just disagreeing with the idea that it's necessary to change the meaning of our clocks. Imagine if we started changing the meaning of weeks so that all national holidays would fall on weekends (so if it's Wednesday and tomorrow is a national holiday, we skip straight to Saturday) - it seems insane, but in essence, it would be the same thing.
1) Have workdays begin at x o'clock in the morning most of the year, and x+1 o'clock in the summer 2) Change the whole meaning of x o'clock in the summer
To me, the overhead for option 1 seems way lower. Then again, the "benefits" of timezones don't make sense to me either. The exact same logic can be applied to those as well - if workdays in Europe begin at x o'clock, they could just begin at x+7 o'clock in the US east coast.
What if one school pick one time, a bank another and a business another? What if they do it at different dates? You used to take your kid to school at 9 but now for two weeks you have to go to work late because the school changed the working hours 2 weeks earlier than your workplace. Oh also the bank now closes earlier, good luck with that too.
It's much easier if the clock changes overnight. You usually have few people who oversleep or come to the office too early and you have a laugh but that's it. These days all the clocks are computers and they just take care of the change and you don't even notice it.
I too think that having a central authority do this would be easier, but I don't see why this means we need DST? To me, it seems far simpler to just have the central authority dictate (for example) a +1h start to work/schooldays in the summer. No need to turn clocks.
It's super easy with the clock, the TV says that now it's 7:45 instead of 6:45 and it is 6:45. You look at your iPhone, the iPhone agrees. No police involved.
I have no opinion about DST btw.
I lived and worked in few countries and non of them worked by the sunlight but by the clock.
Is there a country where people go to work when the sun rises and come back home just before it gets dark?
Since our modern society can't really function with sundials, DST is the compromise. If you don't accept that compromise then you will have less light during the summer evening or very dark winter mornings, pick one. Or variable winter / summer schedules, which are simply a much more expensive version of DST, with massive coordination issues.
BTW, using sundial is biologically optimal, it does away with the shocks and lets the body adjust throughout the year. Here is an instance where technology change the world for the worst.
Ahh...but what does it mean to match the sun? Imagine a society before we invented accurate clocks and powerful lights. Their point of reference for time would probably be would probably be when it gets light enough in the morning to start work.
Now imagine they discover some kind of material that they can make rope out of, and rope made out of this material if lit on fire on one end slowly burns through the rope at a consistent steady rate.
They invent their first clock using this. In the village some official every morning hangs one of these ropes in the town square a little before sunrise. Each day the rope is the same length. When the official sees sunrise he lights the bottom of the rope.
People then use the rope as a clock, naming times by how much rope is left at that time ("The blacksmith said my sword would be ready by 3 feet today").
It is hard not to say that these people's clock matches the sun, considering that they sync their clock to the sun every day. Sunrise is always the same time for them.
Now imagine a time traveler from our time. He goes back to observe the village. He has a modern clock, set for the modern time zone that the village location is in. The time traveler sees that every day when his clock says it is noon, the sun is in the same place in the sky, close to its culmination point.
So look at what we have. Villagers, with a clock that matches the sun (the sun is on the Eastern horizon at the same time every day on their clock), and a visitor with a clock that matches the sun (the sun is at the same near-culmination point at the same every day on his clock).
So we have two clocks, both clearly matching the sun...yet the villagers will see the time traveler's clock as drifting back and forth relative to the sun, and the time traveler will see villagers' clock as drifting back and forth relative to the sun!
The advantage of the villagers' way of matching the sun is that it lines up our time keeping with our natural activity schedule.
The advantage of the time traveler's way is that it is that the interval from a given clock time on one day to the same clock time on the next day is exactly 86400 seconds.
You can view DST as a way to combine both systems. We run an 86400 second day, but as the amount of daylight increases as summer approaches, the clock gets out of alignment with our natural schedule. So we throw in one day where we do a jump on the clock to align it better with our natural schedule. The as winter approaches, and daylight decreases, we reach a point where we are getting too far away from the natural schedule again, so we jump the clock back the other way.
Seen this way, you can view view the villagers' system as a kind of continuous daylight savings time. Instead of letting the clock get out of sync with our natural schedule and then having a big correction, they make a tiny correction every morning.
> why can't we just change the TIME of a workday, instead of changing our whole TIMEZONE?
Changing the time we do things means that everyplace that we list times for repeating events that could otherwise be static have to be dynamic, or we have to require people to mentally subtract an hour during DST.
Changing the clocks means that all we have to change are things that are already dynamic.
As DTS is in effect in summer (colloquially known as "summer time" in some countries), it has no effect on this "phenomenon".
Also smart: '“Member states should mull over together which time – summer or winter time – should be adopted on a permanent basis.”'
Let's keep it on summer time, having light at 4 pm is more valuable than at 4 am. (I know, exaggerating, but only a little)
The benefits of having a common time such as CET/MEZ for most of continental Europe outweigh the nicety of having 12 noon correspond to the high point of the sun's arc in the sky.
(they stayed on CET/CEST after changing timezone during WWII)
UTC makes sense for Spain and maybe France, UTC+1 is a perfect fit for Germany and Poland could be UTC+2.
Having grown in those hours I have to say it kind of sucks. You wake up in darkness most of the year. If you wake up at 7:00 local time, that means you wake up at 5:30 solar time.
There are loud voices (including psychologists and medical experts) that are advocating for moving Iceland back to Icelandic standard time (UTC-1). They claim the lack of sunshine can have detrimental effect on the sleeping cycle and therefor the general health of the population. Adding an extra hour of sun in the morning might be helpful for the general population.
The vast support for permanent summer-time makes me think that either a lot of people are early birds or people just don't understand that DST is simply a way of forcing everyone to get up an hour earlier to "magically" get more sunlight in the evening.
If you don't like getting up early you should hate summer time.
During the winter, there is limited light no matter what time you use. In a world without DST, social conventions evolve so that work hours, business opening and close times etc. find a compromise that allow most of the activity during the day - a clear preference of the human species that also maximizezes productivity and satisfaction for most people. It's irrelevant if that time is called 7 AM or 54 APM, you will tend to start working at the time the winter daylight starts. That's our baseline.
Since we are no longer use sundials and enjoy predictable schedules, that time and schedule is maintained for the whole year; however, as summer arrives, the days get longer and they stretch both in the morning and in the evening symmetrically. And since most people like to start their activity in a short time after waking up, and the wake time is now fixed by the wallclock to be the same as during the winter, a good part of the daylight that we enjoy happens before most people are awake, say 5AM to 6AM.
This is where DST idea comes into play: if the morning daylight is "wasted" since most people don't get up so early, why shouldn't we "move" that extra hour of light in the evening, so that most of us can enjoy a longer summer day and late twilight evenings by simply moving the clock ?
Incidentally, DST reduces electricity consumption, but the main benefit in my opinion is the increased quality of life during the summer, for a very modest price: you wake up an hour earlier one day a year, and then enjoy 183 days with 1h more of light each. The reverse, going back to winter time by sleeping 1h more is essentially free for most people. I love DST and would hate to see it gone for a misunderstanding, it's impact over the winter days, when in fact that's unavoidable and it's real purpose is to make summer better.
Since we now have artificial light and ample food, we prefer to stay up past sundown and get a consistent 7-8 hours of sleep per night. Still though, people like to wake up after sunrise -- the sunlight is a pleasant and natural alarm clock, and waking up with it is built into our biology.
In the modern world, most people have to go to work. Most people prefer to wake up, get ready, and then head to work. If work starts at 9:00 without DST, and you're far enough north, the time between sunrise and 9:00 changes a lot. Without DST, people either have to wake up later in the summer, or find something else to do in the morning before they go to work. Most people would rather go to work earlier and go home earlier while it's still light out.
Now, you could say, employers could understand this and have different summer and winter hours. That's true, but there's a coordination problem. Suppose a shop opens at 7 in the summer, but 8 in the winter. Maybe their bread delivery happens at 7:30, so now that has to be changed twice a year. That means that the delivery driver's route needs to change because not every shop changes their hours, or if they do, they don't change them at the same time. DST fixes the coordination problem by just relabelling time, so everyone starts doing everything one hour earlier on the same day across the whole country.
And if it was true, you can just extend it year round. Winter is when summer time is really needed anyway.
GMT as a time standard is defunct. The Mean Sun no longer traverses his notional sky.
GMT as a civil time zone is based on atomic measures[0]. It is not measured from the meridian. This is the phrase used to indicate this in UK legislation:
In these Regulations Co-ordinated Universal Time (UTC) is the same time as Greenwich Mean Time (GMT)
[0] Time scale UTC(NPL)