The European Commission is polling if daylight savings should be abolished | Hacker News Reader

The European Commission is polling if daylight savings should be abolished

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54 pointsjaywink91 comments

Try to get 3 kids out of bed still in the middle of the night in December, and you will know why daylight savings should be abolished.

DST is very taxing to children (and to adults also), and completely unnecessary in this day and age where electricity is ubiquitous.

There is simply no valid reason for using DST, it should have been abolished a very long time ago, maybe 30 years or more.

There is no DST in December, so abolishing it wouldn't make a difference.

Which coincidentally is when Sweden adopted it (1980, to be strict.)

URL of the poll:

https://ec.europa.eu/eusurvey/runner/2018-summertime-arrange...

But it appears unexpected interest/traffic knocked it off the web.

As a lifelong resident of the state of Arizona (which is the one state that doesn’t do DST), I have never understood the practice. And I would say universally, my distributed co-workers complain about both shifts. When will we end this madness?

Well, Arizona is far south compared to Northern Germany or Scandinavia and the sun sets at approx. the same time in summer and winter. In my hometown it‘s bright till 11 pm in summer and dark at 3:30pm in winter. DST might make more sense in this case, though I‘m still in favour of abolishing it.

It makes sense to pick a timezone that aligns winter daylight with working hours. Daylight is abundant during summer though, so switching is pure stupidity.

Usually people only complain about one shift: the one that makes your night sleep shorter. The other one is nice :)

I see how a world with out DST would be simpler, but I have no strong feelings on the subject. Regardless, it would take decades before other countries outside the EU gets rid of DST.

So I have to ask, is this really a fight worth having?

“Other countries outside the EU” means USA and a handful of other countries. The vast majority of the world outside the EU never had DST or already got rid of it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time_by_coun...

It's annoying enough as it is within a single time zone. So yeah, getting rid of it has my vote.

Yes, this is definitely a fight worth fighting.

It is completely nonsensical, not to mention unhealthy, both physically and mentally, to suddenly hard-reset the body clock plus/minus one hour on a permanent basis, especially if one lives up north.

One day you sleep an hour less and it is just as dark and cold outside. What for?

Actually, what are the arguments FOR "daylight saving time"?

I personally hope they will fast-track this and get rid of DST as fast as possible!

The argument for DST is that it keeps sunrise approximately the same time throughout the year. Take a look at the chart here for an example: https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/san-francisco

Without DST, twilight would be about 430AM during the longest days of Summer, which harms sleep (at least it does for me).

Sunrise even with DST in Stockholm is now 0345 (AM). And the Sun sets at about 2200 (10 PM). DST is just an annoyance at best.

I don't know if people do that in US but around here one can buy light blocking curtains to make the room(s) completely dark. I have no trouble sleeping in general when it's brighter but do sleep much better with the curtains.

I could honestly care less :)

> ... not to mention unhealthy, both physically and mentally, to suddenly hard-reset the body clock plus/minus one hour...

I hope you're not planning to do any jet travel. Lots of people have 5-9 hours of jetlag multiple times a year, and they seem to living just fine :)

Hopefully my country handles this right. Since, we have DST in the winter, instead of the summer, our standard time is other countries' summer time (DST) and vice-versa.

Right now, everything syncs up with Europe, but it mightn't after this.

If your DST is in the winter, if you are say 1 hour ahead of Europe in your summer, won't you be 3 hours ahead in your winter? Assuming you are in the southern hemisphere. I don't see how everything can "sync up".

Clocks go backward for DST.

It lines up with London time.

Things like this should not be decided by referendum. I get it, this isn't an official vote. But still ... Waste of resources asking the populace. You'll only end up with Boaty McBoatface like outcomes...

I find if you treat people like adults they’ll act like adults.

Maybe... But not behind the anonymity of the internet. There's a lack of accountability that somehow brings the worst out of people

The consultation is not anonymous.

But that's exactly what Boaty McBoatface proved wrong. People are childish and want to waste your time for fun.

What's wrong about Boaty McBoatface? They should not have overruled that decision. People would probably be more engaged if their opinion was asked and respected more often, not like now where they sometimes get asked when it's convenient and often overruled anyway.

You also see that at the workplace. We often get asked by management how to do things better. Then people bring up proposals only to be ignored. No wonder people aren't engaged.

> What's wrong about Boaty McBoatface?

The other choices were about recognising people who had achieved something and contributed in order to inspire others. This name celebrates inanity and being stupid for the sake of it.

I think they missed a trick really, calling the ship Boaty McBoatface would have given the opportunity to keep people engaged with the work they're doing. Think of the children's animated series, books, duvet covers, so much marketing potential while reinforcing the value of scientists (think Captain Planet for the Antarctic). Whimsy isn't necessarily inane or stupid.

Very true. Personally I would have more fun working on Boaty McBoatface than on the RRS Sir David Attenborough.

What's wrong with silly from time to time?

With the very small number of opportunities like this you only recognize a very small number of people and ignore a lot of others who are as deserving.

What about inspiring people by showing their votes actually matter?

If the people prefers being silly over recognizing inspiring people, so be it.

Which is an out come of stem careers (except doctors) being treated with contempt in the UK.

Mmm indeed, shallow and pedantic.

I don't really think one poll about something inconsequential proves that "people are childish", which is a very heavy statement.

You'll likely get some funny results if you try to figure out who voted...

It's nice to have light until late in summer, I'd vote to keep DST.

The proposal allows for summertime to be the default[1]:

> Discontinuing the current bi-annual time changes for all Member States and prohibiting periodic switches; again this would not affect the choice of time zone, and it would ultimately remain each Member State's decision whether to go for permanent summer or wintertime (or a different time).

[1]: https://ec.europa.eu/info/consultations/2018-summertime-arra...

You can have that without changing the clocks twice a year.

Yep, permanently move to GMT+2.

trying to vote gives me 404 in 28 languages

I guess the EU isn't used to people taking an interest :)

Just great! I really hope it will happen.

nah the farming lobby will stop this dead

From the consultation page[1]:

> Agriculture: Previous concerns regarding disrupted biorhythm of animals and changing milking schedules due to the time switch appear to have largely disappeared due to the deployment of new equipment, artificial lighting and automated technologies. An extra daylight-hour during summer can also be an advantage allowing extended working hours for outdoor activities, such as working in fields and harvesting.

[1]: https://ec.europa.eu/info/consultations/2018-summertime-arra...

Daylight Savings being created by/for farmers is a myth. Most farmers don't support Daylight Savings, and farming groups have lobbied against it in the past.

Daylight savings is mostly about urban economics, not farming. The retail lobby would be more likely to oppose than the farming lobby.

Why does the farming lobby care? Is it because of wake up times tied to sunrise?

Yes and you really don't' know the power the farming lobby has in eu - Its not called the French and German garden for nothing.

That's garbage, a friend is a dairy farmer, the cows need milking when they need milking, they don't respect DST.

My only problem is that it means getting up earlier for work in winter. (I doubt work times will adjusted)

Why do you think work times wouldn't adjust? You mean people would work 10-6 instead of 9-5 during the summer? Why?

Currently people work an hour later in winter (because of daylight saving time). If that's gone I'll have to get up as early in winter as I do in summer (and in winter in the dark and cold).

.....but so what? It'll say the same thing on the clock. You can go to bed at the same time so you get the same sleep. What difference do you think it'll make?

darker and cooler

Work without flex-time should be abolished as well.

A store is open from 08:00. You have the first shift as a cashier. How would flex-time work in that situation?

Our group has flex time, and we have a fixed time window where we provide support. We just talk to one another so there is always someone when there should be someone. I presume the general idea is, if we stop acting like adults, management would step in and write our schedules for us.

Bit of an odd opinion on a forum inhabited 100% by professionals.

whats unprofessional about it?

We are used to consider time-zones due to the useful subdivision of the Longitude in 24 steps and with that we all (should) agree.

The disagree generally comes when we talk about DST based on our main location (and thus experience), but the problem is intrinsic in the elliptic, so it must be addressed from another point of view (IMO): the Latitude.

I think that we should consider a further subdivision of the coordinate space; not only Longitude by 24, but also Latitude by something reasonable (e.g. every ±30° from the Equator; maybe not even of equal size but based on regions of the climate system).

With "time", we may acquaintance with this new kind of grid-based time-zones (which are easy to memorize/map-to given a basic knowledge of the Earth).

Any (useful) opinion ? :)

Meh, the existing boundaries are so distorted and politicized at this point, and people barely understand the reason for the longitude division that accounting for axis, wobble and equatorial differences are trivia by comparison. I say this as I get ready to depart SFO for Oahu then Guam, and regularly have business ranging across the entire Pacific.

> We are used to consider time-zones due to the useful subdivision of the Longitude in 24 steps and with that we all (should) agree

Time zones don't actually form an even division of longitude into 24 zones, or even consistently follow lines of longitude at all.

Yeah and we got stuff like Newfoundland, which is in a half timezone. It's 30 minutes ahead of Eastern Time.

> all EU members must follow the same timetable to keep trade and travel running smoothly

Maybe that's what should be abolished. No country sovereignty on something like DST? I don't believe a country choosing not to follow DST interrupts trade any more than a US state. I'm naive towards EU policies, but the more I hear the more I understand those against super-country federalism.

> sovereignty

Sovereignty, like other types of freedom, is entirely abstract unless you're referring to freedom to (or from) something specific. The freedom to set timezones to inconvenient values isn't a particularly valuable one.

The European ideal involves pooling of sovereignty, with the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. Just as within a nation sovereignty is pooled from the individual people comprising it.

(Well, within a modern democratic nation. The UK is a constitutional monarchy in which sovereignty is delegated to parliament by the monarch, and explictly not a country of popular sovereignty).

It is probably also worth looking at how the history of time has been defined by state and private action, such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_time . We're already ending up as a global civilisation that uses either UTC or UNIX timestamps "behind the scenes" everywhere out of sheer programmer convenience. Open the "network" panel in your browser and see which timezone was used to serve you this page?

> The freedom to set timezones to inconvenient values isn't a particularly valuable one.

Says who? There are tens of thousands of signatures and presumably a majority of an entire country that disagree. I don't think you should get to decide something subjective like the value of this (or what's considered inconvenient) over an entire country.

Finland already agreed to subject itself to such EU rules when it joined. Nobody is keeping it in by force.

Of course. What does that have to do with the discussion at hand about this rule's value? Are you saying they aren't allowed to complain or that the EU should not consider delegating such decisions because they initially agreed not to? The EU would be wise to delegate DST authority to the countries themselves. Just because a country chooses to be part of this whole and it is primarily positive doesn't mean they can't complain of things that are negative.

Oh come on, that's such a stupid brute-force argument. Yes, they did, no that doesn't mean there is no value in discussing if it is good that this specific thing is regulated, or that people aren't allowed to be unhappy about it.

The point of joining a group is that all parties need to compromise. Not an expert in the issue, but article seems to imply that Finland is the only one in 28 member states which is really unhappy.

If everyone else doesn't mind removing DST, sure, whatever. But what if there are 8 countries which really don't?

BTW, Finland can just start ignoring this rule. Nothing will happen. Despite popular opinion, the EU can't impose shit on it's members if one truly doesn't want it.

Then we'll find out during the process, and discuss what that means (which I suspect would mean "nothing changes", since changing things is harder than maintaining the status quo, and I think it's unlikely Finnland will care enough to want to be the only exception).

Switching DST at the same moment keeps the delta time the same.

I'm from one EU country, live in another, I know that the delta between the two is always 2 hours.

Because EU and US switch DST at different times, in the multi-national software companies I worked there is this two week period when the delta changes, and there are mails and mis-scheduled things all around.

It's not a huge thing, but what is the benefit of each country randomly switching times, just for the sake of sovereignty. Next people will advocate using true solar time and getting rid of full hour based deltas.

> It's not a huge thing, but what is the benefit of each country randomly switching times, just for the sake of sovereignty.

It's not just for the sake of sovereignty. The article clearly gives a reason why Finland might want to but other countries might not. Your individual reasons may not apply to someone across the continent just as someone's US east coast reason may not apply to Arizona. That type of thinking ("why not", "just for the sake of sovereignty", "here's my anecdote", etc) is what causes this type of federalist mis-representation so far from the problems of locals.

Some people are from one US state and live in another. Despite your anecdote being only yours and ignoring the wishes of entire countries, I don't think it's even a valid point to centralize DST above the country level.

> I don't think it's even a valid point to centralize DST above the country level

What about:

- measurement systems (metric, ....)

- unicode

- electrical grid frequencies (50 Hz in all of EU)

- unified road driving rules (green/red lights, ...)

- the euro currency

- electrical wiring standards/colors

- paper sizes (A4, letter, ...)

You could argue the same thing for pretty much all standards.

Why not let each group of people pick it's own set of rules which perfectly suits them.

That is the point of standardization. It drives costs down, just like the invention of the shipping container massively improved transport efficiency.

> You could argue the same thing for pretty much all standards

Of course, and you can argue colors of the sky and everything else. Back to the subject at hand concerning DST, its value is affected by presence of daylight, and that is different for different people. Not sure why you are bringing up a bunch of non-daylight related items into the discussion for comparison. Maybe some standardized law about requiring air conditioning or some law mandating sunglasses at certain hours on the clock would be more apropos. Regardless, comparisons here do nothing but deviate from the DST discussion.

Obviously for some things commonality has value and for some things it doesn't, can't just say "let everyone choose everything then" as some form of counter or we cannot discuss productively.

I wish everyone would just use UTC for coordination. Then I wouldn't schedule my time around a meeting at "3PM GMT" only to discover that the Brit who scheduled it didn't know it was summertime.

This confusion is made more prevalent by Windows, which has consistently claimed the UK is in some variant of "GMT", or even "UTC", during summer, often with a timezone name like "GMT Summer Time" (the UK uses BST in summer). For example, right now, the Windows 10 timezone selector is claiming London is at UTC+00:00, even though it's at UTC+01:00 for summer, and earlier versions of Windows would claim it's in GMT.

This wouldn't fix anything, because people would still have to convert UTC to their local time before agreeing to anything, and they'd make the same mistakes in that process ("Shit, are we +7 or +8 right now?")

Not so much, because they'd be more aware of their UTC offset. I usually get people not even knowing that their timezone changes with DST.

The key here is the Brit said GMT aka UTC your the one that messed up here

No, the Brit thought he was scheduling it for 3pm on his wall clock, because he thought "GMT means the time we use here in London" but London was actually using BST that day. Source: have seen this from many many coworkers who should know better.

Yep. As well as a bunch of "10 AM PST" when they meant PDT. Nowadays I have to correct everyone as to their timezone.

If they use PST in the summer you can be pretty sure they mean PDT, at least, especially if you are somewhere where the abbreviation is unambiguously US Pacific Standard Time. With GMT/UTC there's some chance they were trying to express the time in a "standardized" way.

Yes, if you're already familiar with PDT... Not so much if someone says "X AM PST" and you just plug it into your calendar.

I use a world clock with the cities I communicate with frequently added.

But then again, being in Australia, and most business being done in the US, Europe and Asia, you’re not going to memorise all the time zones.

Switzerland tried to not adopt DST when the rest of Europe adopted it. It did not go well, they ended up freely choosing to follow. It's not sovereignty, it's just plain common sense. (European countries are generally much more tightly integrated than US states, even more so when you consider things like public transport - it's easy to live a life spanning 3 countries if you live near a border.)

At least they got to choose. I only argue for the choice, not the value of the choice. Finland would likely be wise to keep with the rest of their time zone wrt DST, but I think as an entire country they can make that determination (or fix it if they were wrong) just like the Swiss.

I understand what you say on an idealistic level, but of all things, we (as a species) really ought to be able to agree on what time it is. Time doesn't stop at the border and in this particular case, it would be silly to come up with even more convoluted systems just because somebody wants to be a snowflake.

We understand each other on an idealistic level because I agree with you. But leaving idealism behind and focusing on practicalities of today, while time zones exist and time is changed based on daylight, places with wildly different values that affect that change should have some say in it.

The whole point of a trade union is to standardize things so that you don't have to waste resources customizing your business to the requirements of a bunch of tiny edge-case countries.

Concur in the general sense. I think DST effects are different enough geographically to delegate to at least the country level though. That the point of a trade union is to standardize things does not mean it needs to standardize everything.

Of all the valid arguments for and against DST, I think "sovereignty" isn't one of them.

This is misinterpreting the argument. Sovereignty isn't used as an argument for or against DST. Wildly differing daylight hours is used to argue for or against DST, sovereignty just keeps those with these large differences from imposing on one another.

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