EU to recommend that member states abolish daylight saving time
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
For 30 years, Queensland has been in a different time zone to NSW and Victoria during summer, because it has never adopted daylight savings. For this, such wonderful arguments were advanced such as "It will fade the curtains" (Wait, wat) and it will upset the cows to be milked at a different time.
And across the other side of Australia, Western Australia (always a, er, special place) has had FOUR referendums in the last 50 years on whether to adopt daylight savings. All were rejected.
So watching Europe deal with this pragmatically and quickly is quite pleasing to watch.
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/23/nyregion/with-farm-roboti...
The obvious solution would be not to shift the milking time with DST but then it means that the truck picking up the milk for the factory will arrive one hour later which creates issues with conserving the milk properly, so you basically have the problem at one point or an other.
Don't know where this comes from..!
The milk is (was at least when I grew up) supposed to ve cooled down to 4 degrees (Celcius, that is) ASAP. As long as that is done and you follow the recommendations for washing and disinfecting everything you should be fine even with half a day delay or more
Source: grew up on a dairy farm, went to farming school.
I've heard this before. I'm pretty sure it dates back to the days before refrigeration when the milk was transported from cow to consumer every morning.
So if the milk truck driver follows DST, then you do too (or you need to pad your schedule by an hour to allow for a smooth transition to DST, which can be hard to do when you're first on the route and he comes at 7am)
So basically you'll use the same time all year but it will probably be up to every country to decide whether or not it's summer time. Cows rejoice, they will be milked at a constant time which may or may not differ by 1h from present time.
As a human I actually care about that 1h, it's not enough that we stop switching back and forth, I would personally like more daylight in the evening.
Want more sunlight in the evening? Find an employer who closes shop a fixed time before sunset.
Don't want to go to work in the dark? Find a job where you get to start a fixed time after sunrise.
Having both would lead to longer working days in summer and shorter ones in winter, but I think that would be acceptable in many cases.
The obvious reason why such a scheme wasn't implemented is that the calculations required would be annoying to do manually, but by now that can be taken care of by technology.
You can come in between 8:00 and 9:00 and leave between 16:00 and 18:00. The whole thing is beaned by an electronic box with a finger scanner.
Works pretty well. Tacit rule is overtime is used to extend an out-of-office lunch break but it gets converted into an obligatory off day when you hit the 8h bar.
You are not supposed to make more than 1 day and a half per month this way.
But most jobs don't have it and switching jobs based on this is a tall order for the majority of people affected. It's more or less like saying "just find a job that pays a lot better". So whatever time is chosen some people will be left disappointed. One of them repeatedly downvoted me just for saying I'd rather have sunlight in the evening :).
The whole point is to not have to adjust your body's rhythm, and also to eliminate the planning glitches that occur around the moment of the switch, not just to save time on turning back a clock.
[0] https://journalistsresource.org/studies/environment/energy/d...
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2016/03/11/health/daylight-saving-ti...
When the work day begins and ends varies widely for a lot of people.
And regardless of whether there is more daylight in the morning or evening because of a one time change, people will drift back to the times that work for them. Just as they would if we arbitrarily moved the clock ahead by 6 hours.
Oh, and the EU server broke when I tried to validate my answer...
But you're wrong to assume it's as representative as a newspaper poll. It might not be binding but this doesn't change the fact that it's representative of people's wishes. A newspaper poll is not representative simply because each publication has a very specific audience. This consultation did not (unless you count "having internet" as very specific).
Is it?
I wouldn't trust an electronic poll any more than I'd trust an electronic voting machine.
Every person I know in multiple countries is either very indifferent towards this decision or would prefer to abolish the clock change. It may be anecdotal but it supports the fact that in this day and age you really don't need to shift the hour anymore because there's no benefit to it. Plenty of disbenefits though. You don't need a hack to prove this is true and that people feel those disbenefits.
Not enough of a reason to warrant saving DST, but enough that there was definitely a difference in most of them.
I see what you did there. Nice!
I don't think at the time people could foresee the impact of online business, when it really doesn't matter where you are or what time it is.
My major problem is less about DST than the fact that all of Indiana should be on Chicago time all year. Mean solar noon is waaaaay off from clock noon, all year long. I got really f'ing sick of waiting at the school bus stop in the dark for 10 years.
The cow milking argument has always been pure idiocy. Let's make the "kids starting school before the cows even wake up" argument for once.
Source: Graduated high school about an hour from there, then lived in different small towns outside of the area. Was pretty popular for folks to go party at purdue on the weekends if you knew someone there and had willing enough parents. This was both before the adopted DST and after.
Currently are
Edit: Another Queensland premier Peter Beattie claimed daylight savings would increase skin cancer rates.
https://www.theage.com.au/national/now-daylight-saving-cause...
Can you expand on this? Or is this an east vs west viewpoint?
Ridiculous! That sounds like Portugal and Spain. If one lives in Porto and travels just north of the border to Vigo (Galicia), it's an hour ahead. Apparently it was done by Franco who wanted to be on the same time as Hitler [1]
That said, I live in NSW and run a team that needs to maintain a 24/7 rotation, and dearly wish they would nuke DST once and for all worldwide: Oct/Nov and Mar/Apr are a sequence of steady pain as various offices move by an hour in one direction or another, each on different weeks of course.
That way, rather than sounding like they expect something extra in the summer, it sounds like they are making a helpful accommodation in the winter.
(Also, it's probably not even necessary for those with desk jobs. Arguably it's worse because you are less able to experience at least a little daylight after work.)
In fact, I think this is why intermittent fasting is somewhat easy to adopt: it's surprisingly fast to adapt your body to a different meal schedule, as long as you're eating as much as you need.
Also, I'm not sure if it was intentional, but I appreciate your pun. It is indeed about time.
Or do you just expect Australia to adopt a nocturnal working pattern so they can use UTC?
If you take away timezones and just say "everybody use UTC and somehow figure out how to adjust it to your local conditions", you've just pushed the cost of figuring out reasonable start & end times for different geographies onto every single member of society. All that will happen is people will come up with their own mappings between UTC and local conditions and guess what? They will look pretty close to what we have with timezones right now only it won't be standardized at all--making a huge mess of things. Outlook calendar will have its own mapping and Google Calendar will have a different one. Your company might have its own internal mapping that is different from your suppliers. Whoa be the person who tries to coordinate an event across these mappings ("your company does lunch at 17:49? Ours does it at 18:42 because that is closer to when the sun is overhead and people like to get in around 12:42")
This is all fun to entertain as a thought experiment but we will never get rid of timezones because, quite frankly, they are far to useful.
"Nine to five, what a way to make a living... "
> or when is noon.
12 PM. Noon means 12 PM. Changing this isn't really an option.
More to the point:
> Remembering what's a reasonable time of day in each locality is the same amount of information as remembering what their timezones are.
Hey, admitting your proposed change is a Bavarian Fire Drill is the first step towards recovery.
Sure, you still have to remember a time difference or negotiate back and forth. That part is the same amount of work. But you avoid a bunch of failure cases:
* Person from a large country with one official timezone (e.g. China) assumes that when the guy in New York says "10AM my time" that means the same as when the guy in San Francisco does. * Weekly call at 10AM New York time, person from elsewhere in the world assumes it's going to be at the same time this week as last week, but it isn't because US DST changed on a different week from everyone else's. * Both people misremember what the offset between their timezones is, think they've agreed on a time, neither notices until the call happens.
Besides, if you phone somebody on another country, you still have to figure out if 3am utc is ok. It's the same amount of work and as easy to memorise than an approximate time zone.
If you communicate with people abroad then you need to be able to agree times with them, even if you never physically meet up. (Apart from anything else, this can be a more human-friendly way to do 24-hour support: have people who live in different parts of the world work on your product and cover support at different times, even if they rarely meet in person).
> Besides, if you phone somebody on another country, you still have to figure out if 3am utc is ok. It's the same amount of work and as easy to memorise than an approximate time zone.
True, but at least you both agree on what time 3AM is, and if you e.g. reverse the sign of the offset then you'll notice this when arranging the call.
The author fails to mention that we could solve the problems that article brings up by making everyone work from 0800 to 1700, globally, once everyone is on UTC. I think people are just bull-headed enough to make this work, even if it means some people never see the Sun ever again. If China can spread one time zone over five, spreading one time zone over twenty four is just a matter of The Same, But Stupider.
You can use it any time you want.
Actually it would be more of a benefit if it were staggered in the winter since lots are on holiday in the summer.
So I propose scrapping summer time and bringing in winter time. That'll confuse the cows.
If an activity depends on the sunrise, and not the position of the hands on the clock, then maybe they should, I dunno, schedule around the sun instead of the clock. I know, seems like crazy talk. Farmers should have farming clocks, not break everybody else's clock to align with the sun.
Growing up on a farm, nobody hates DST MORE than farmers. DST was not setup for farmers, it was an energy saving device from WW1. Please stop spreading that DST is for Farmers, its plain wrong.
The entire concept is only kept alive today thanks to the golf industry, imho. The upper crust- politicians, bankers, the wealthy generally- like golfing. Poor people don't golf and often are unable to pay whatever fees are needed to even enter golf clubs or buy the needed equipment.
What does that have to do with golf? If the sun sets later, relative to the time you get off work, you can get more rounds of golf in. Now, you might ask "why not just leave work earlier?". Because then you look like a slacker who leaves work early to go golfing! But if all of society is told to get to and leave work early by an hour (relative to the sun's actual rise and set) then you're leaving at the same time as everyone else.
Because most people aren't a SV engineer living in a bubble. They are shift workers (nurse, cashier, police officer, etc) and your hours are 8am -> 4pm. I have no stats to back this up, but a hell of a lot of people are shift workers and can't just roll in an hour later because they wanted to optimize around the sunrise. They get in when they are scheduled. You think an employer is gonna implement DST?
Much better to just level the playing field and shift the whole clock an hour forward or backwards so everybody can get the benefits of additional daylight. There are winners and losers to doing this, but on a whole society has determined it to be beneficial to shift the clock back and forward based on time-of-year.
PS: If it were me, I'd perma-shift the clock towards DST. Durning the winter months in the northern latitudes it gets pretty fscking dark and nothing is worse than leaving work and having no daylight.
You are mistaken if you think that society decided this. At least in Europe there wasn't a special referendum for it. It was just decided by politicians because of the oil crisis in the 70s and lingered around. The EU only standardized the date of the switches in 1996.
But the more important point is, there are a lot of shift workers, and some like the extra light in the evening, some hate the dark in the morning, and some just hate the clock adjusting around the house more than the dark-light issue.
For me, DST is more like a too simple solution for a much complex problem and too inflexible.
I've never figured out how an extra hour of artificial light in the morning is more than offset by one less hour of artificial light in the afternoon.
Extra daylight in the morning helps my commute, which doesn't care about artificial light. Extra daylight in the evening can be spent biking, at the pool, etc.
I'm no farmer, but I'm pretty sure that they have a general idea of what time it is.
All you need to do is change your schedule.
Easy for you to say. Not so easy when you work in an industry with shifts (nursing, doctors, retail, manufacturing, etc). Not everybody gets the luxury of a flex schedule.
I think changing the time is probably a lot easier.
I personally don't think that is enough to make it better.
We have accurate clocks - have had for a long time. If you need to shift football practice or construction work or something... Just start at nine in the darkest period, eight in between and seven when there's light at seven. Or vice-versa for the evenings.
"we'll meet at four your time"
"great!"
"why weren't you there?? I googled 'current time utc!!'"
"because we're on BST, aka IST, aka UTC+1 in the summer"
But this rando website says UK/Ireland is UTC!!
Someday, somehow, we'll teach people that if you're using PST in the summer, there's a 99% chance you're wrong.
The Olson TZ data works on cities (e.g. "Europe/London" or "America/Los_Angeles") but more importantly because a city has all these humans living in it there must actually be a real working answer, or it'd be chaos. Even if the person you're speaking to isn't _from_ or working/ living in the major named city, they will have a better idea what the time is in nearby major cities than how timezones work around the world. Nobody in, say, Nantes is confused as to what time it is in Paris but they may be unclear about PST vs PDT.
It's unfortunate that the two systems aren't in sync, but they were developed in parallell and have different data structures.
It doesn't actually make a difference. We still switch at the same time that the rest of Europe does.
In my experience, people in the UK refer to their time as "GMT" all the year round.
Accidentally.
Putting the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland in different time zones would be.. annoying, at the least.
Then again you said Britain, not the UK, but I can imagine the DUP protesting pretty loudly if NI were in a different timezone to GB.
Nomenclature is fun.
Hopefully t's will get crossed and i's will get dotted before winter time kicks in this year.
[0]: https://www.lemonde.fr/europe/article/2018/08/31/la-commissi...
As a reference, Spain has been in the wrong time zone for decades (GMT+1 instead of GMT) but they have no problems with that.
In Spain the real problem is the brain dead broken hours with a huge gap in the middle for "lunch". That's a relic from the time after the war when most people had two jobs and some companies are very reluctant to change it because of the butt-time mindset or other idiotic reasons.
The sun reaches its highest point at a time sufficiently far from 12:00.
> the whole world could just use UTC and nothing would happen.
That is not true. What would happen is that times would lose all intrinsic meaning. When you schedule an international call, people can say "that's 5 o'clock in the morning for us". If the whole word were to use UTC, you would loose that, and we would have to invent a new way to say that. You know – some kind of "localized time" :).
That's answering by reformulating the question. Now I would ask why is having the noon "sufficiently far" from 12:00 wrong.
What would happen is that times would lose all intrinsic meaning.
You did it again.
When you schedule an international call, people can say "that's 5 o'clock in the morning for us". If the whole word were to use UTC, you would loose that, and we would have to invent a new way to say that. You know – some kind of "localized time" :).
Is scheduling internation calls really the biggest problem that would arise? Good.
Anyway, you would say: "we are available from 22:00 to 4:00" and that is all. The way to say what time of the day is already exists: morning, afternoon...
>> The sun reaches its highest point at a time sufficiently far from 12:00.
> That's answering by reformulating the question. Now I would ask why is having the noon "sufficiently far" from 12:00 wrong.
No, that's you moving the goalpost. I answered your question.
>>> nothing would happen.
>> What would happen is that times would lose all intrinsic meaning.
> You did it again.
I did what again? I explained how "nothing" is not what would happen.
> Is scheduling internation calls really the biggest problem that would arise? Good.
This might seem lazy, but I discovered in another answer here that somebody made this point already way better than I ever could: https://qntm.org/abolish.
Anything that is difficult right now due to time zones will stay difficult. It is difficult because of humans and their desire for daylight. You always need two time systems: One that represents local usage of time and one mostly for machines. We already have that.
It's also odd getting up at 7am here and it's still pretty darkish in August.
Only that their lifestyle is approximateley 1 hour shifted. Stuff like eating at 21:00 or 22:00.
I agree, it would be great if the recommendation to abolish daylight saving gets passed within the next months.
actually abolishing it should be planned at least one year into the future, it would be a nightmare otherwise. There are so many systems in place that are automatically switching between time zones, and all of them need to be deprecated.
such a change cant be done within ~2 month.
It was chaos.
1) People who care about abolishing it are way more likely to vote. 2) It depended heavily on media broadcasting the fact that it exists. This is why 90% of the 4M people are German; their media picked it up.
Whether you want to get rid of it or not; both are fine. However, this poll isn't a reasonable argument in favour of it.
It wasn't a widely advertised referendum where everyone was asked for their opinion. It was a consultation that got picked up by a few media outlets (and HN if memory serves me well). Public interest was high enough that millions took note and answered. Plus, it's the EU - which nobody ever hears about in my neck of the woods.
Most of the time, nobody hears about these consultations [0] except the small circle of interest groups that lobby EU institutions. Much like on Capital Hill across the pond, their input, rather than that of the general public, is what makes or breaks legislation. In that context, getting 4.6M answers from the general public is a reasonable argument in favor.
If "your" media didn't pick it up, blame them. What happens in the EU matters more than national squabbles.
65 %.
They consulted at the request of the Parliament. Junker took note of the unusual popularity of the consultation and the strength of the consensus. Northern countries (Finland, Baltic countries) have been calling for it for years.
More cynically, it's unusual enough for the Commission to have a popular topic on their plate. So better get media attention for that, than for sulfurous topics like the migration crisis or boring ones like the EU's multi-annual budget.
i am not even sure it was anonymous, but you could provide them also reasoning, my was - good luck explaining small baby/child why it has to move its sleep by one hour, children need routine, otherwise have problem to sleep
never experienced this nonsense in eastern Asia, anyway everyone use artificial lightning, no matter what time you are following
as for swift change, i think it was already approved we will change hours until 2024 until they will also cancel agreed plan
Imho the summertime should be abolished for all member states..
Given that we already have a bunch of timezones within the EU how is that any more chaotic than what we have today?
I also expect that, as in the USA, the dates to switch to DST and out of it would be uniform within the EU, just as they are in the USA (if you have DST, switch the second Sunday in March and the first Sunday in November in the USA, last Sunday’s of March and October in the EU)
It could get interesting at times, though. My personal record is four time changes in a day, on a trip from Minneapolis to LA with a stop in Phoenix.
1. Switch to DST the night before leaving Minneapolis (triple-checking alarm clock settings)
2. Switch to what I thought would be Phoenix time.
3. Upon learning that (most of; see https://www.timeanddate.com/time/us/arizona-no-dst.html) Arizona doesn’t do DST, switch to Phoenix’s non-DST time.
4. Switch to LA time.
You misunderstand, the twice-yearly variation is what happens now. The proposal is to do away with it.
[0] For the Netherlands that would only be a partial switch back, as they were on GMT+0.20' before that.
FWIW remaining on summer time is the recommendation.
"Outdoors" season pretty much starts at ends with DST switching.
It's not that people in Scandinavia isn't used to having pitch black mornings in the winter, it's about the sun not rising until 10 - 10:30.
But this does seem to be a pretty polarizing issue.
Permanent winter time is the way to go.
I mean, if it had a proven benefit for kids, schools could start at different hours depending on the seasons.
Companies can decide to start at 10 or 8 instead of 9, etc.
More light in the evening doesn’t seem to make sense to me as we are the ones deciding when is “evening”
I've also lived almost all my life in a "recreational paradise" state far from the coasts where its totally normal for there to be at least one, often many, "in-season" work hours vs "out-season" work hour thru the year. Much like agonizing over average temperatures is heard but isn't an issue, its not a problem for the millions who live around here.
This is a fairly big problem in modern life, as far as I can see.
Traditionally, I assume what happened was that you worked at your employer, and your wife went to the bank.
If one of the behemoth decides to start working at 11am -> 9pm, a lot of contractors and related services will move to the same time tables.
I fully agree with you, but in many people do not agree with your argument. Interestingly in my experience whether people agree with this is different depending on whether that person has a STEM/non-STEM study or job, STEM people tend to agree.
So in fact, it's much easier to change what the clocks say than it is to change either of these.
Yes.
> More light in the evening doesn’t seem to make sense to me as we are the ones deciding when is “evening”
Western society has pretty much embedded the idea that the day is centered around 16:00 (4PM) and "night" around 03:00~04:00.
Lights out being when the vast majority of people are asleep with no light when they're actually up is stupid.
Where I'm from, 4PM is late in the day, just a few hours from bedtime, and 4AM is nearly time to wake up.
The past summer was a good example, you can't spend any time outside before the sun goes down because it's just too hot in direct sunlight. If anything we should move the clock back an hour in summer, not an hour forward. It doesn't start being nice to be outside until after dusk.
At the cost of having the sun out at 3:30 AM? I'm not sure I like that idea.
Either way, Spain solves it by having siesta (at the peak). We don't have that in France or Belgium or The Netherlands.
Because when it is very warm, the best thing to do is not waste any energy and the best way to do that is rest/sleep instead of work.
You can keep the sun out of your house a lot easier than keeping it out of all of the outside world.
>State Sen. Greg Steube, who sponsored the bill, said that the idea of year-round daylight time has enormous support among Floridians.
"I've heard from mayors across the state that it's going to save them money because they don't have to light their softball fields at night," Steube said, according to the Miami Herald. "I can't tell you how many people have come up to me who have said even my high school-age kid, it's hard to get him up in the morning when we fall back the clocks."
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/03/08/591925587...
However whether the better solution is to just wake up earlier or officially shift the time, I do not know. That question is entirely up to what's easier for society to organise.
It's probably true for most places in Europe except southern Italy. Remember that the farther north you go the more daylight you get.
I am 100% for getting rid of this dumb system.
"The European commission will recommend that EU member states abandon the practice of changing the clocks in spring and autumn in favour of staying on summer time throughout the year."
Better to have the light even later in winter, instead of while inside during work, like 14-20.
The part that's weird is that everyone have arguments as to why DST would be better, but the country that actually tried it switch to permanent winter time after few years.
Between 1948 and 1981 Denmark didn't even have summer time and Germany managed just fine without DST from 1949 to 1980, so why can't we go back to not having it?
As it is now, in November we will subtract one hour from the time on our clocks. This means that if it gets dark at 7pm on November 3, on November 4 it will instead get dark 6pm since an hour has been lost.
I am actually an advocate for going in the other extreme--make current DST the default (that is, +1 always), but in the winter set clocks forward another hour (+2 total), so it stays lighter in the evening. This way we get more daylight in the winter when we actually need it! I'd rather have daylight after work than before work so I can actually enjoy it.
Rigth now (since 2014) we have only "winter" time for all regions except for a few (like Altai for example)
Single time zone earth please
I'm sure that for the well designed ones it's just a matter of configuration somewhere ... But there will definitely be some fun and weird time bugs in the near future
I’m scared as well that there will be another edge case when the DST is being demolished from EU as the time calculation in the past and the future will have another “if” clause.
Florida is on its way to abolish switching, but it's not there yet.
Here is the official link to the preliminary results: http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-18-5302_en.htm
Not a lot of people participated, less than 1%, so the results should be taken with a grain of salt.
Frankly if you could guarantee a truly random sample you wouldn't need much more than a few thousand people to give their vote on pretty much anything, but the reason we still have elections is because it's nigh impossible to rule out any kind of bias.
The switch is only a brief adjustment. But having an extra hour of daylight in the early evening for half a year makes a huge difference.
By this logic, let's suppress week-ends, and holidays. And evenings out as well.
__
¹ The Problem with Time & Timezones https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5wpm-gesOY
Even with the entire world on board there's probably a conditional branch per region where you do things differently based on whether the date is before or after the change went into effect. Maybe this is just a problem for the authors of Date/Time libraries though :)
The day I am made God Emperor of Earth I will institute a single time standard for the entire planet. No timezones, no AM/PM nonsense, no daylight savings time, nothing. If it means you're getting up at 14:00 and going to bed when the sun sets at 06:00 then that's just how it is. I would also not worry about leap seconds until you get 60 of them and need to do a full minute change. This would be about a once a century thing. Leap years sadly still need to be a thing to prevent the calendar from wandering off.
http://www.leancrew.com/all-this/2013/03/why-i-like-dst/
>If we stayed on Standard Time throughout the year, sunrise here in the Chicago area would be between 4:15 and 4:30 am from the middle of May through the middle of July. And if you check the times for civil twilight, which is when it’s bright enough to see without artificial light, you’ll find that that starts half an hour earlier. This is insane and a complete waste of sunlight.
>If, by the way, you think the solution is to stay on DST throughout the year, I can only tell you that we tried that back in the 70s and it didn’t turn out well. Sunrise here in Chicago was after 8:00 am, which put school children out on the street at bus stops before dawn in the dead of winter. And if you’re wondering why I’m not accounting for predawn light in this case, it’s because winter skies tend to be more overcast and don’t provide as much twilight as summer skies do.
Jokes aside, as a kid growing up in Germany I already went to school in the dark in winter even with DST. Having permanent summer time won't change that. It's also a total non-issue because Europe isn't as dangerous to pedestrians as the US and fears of "stranger danger" aren't nearly as widespread.
It’s around 4000km from the east of Poland to the west of Spain, but they are all in the same time zone. China has it even worse.
I hope that it can be abolished in the US too.
it's annoying but bearable for adults, but it's torture for children who need routine
* [San Francisco Chronicle] California voters will get a say on year-round daylight-saving time: https://www.sfchronicle.com/news/amp/California-voters-will-...
* [Ballotpedia] California Proposition 7, Permanent Daylight Saving Time Measure (2018): https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_7,_Permanent_...
Even if this passes, two conditions must apply first:
1. The US Federal Government has to change the law to allow States to make DST permanent. You can choose to not have DST at all, or you can apply DST on an annual basis, but presently Federal law makes no provisions for making DST permanent.
2. A Bill would have to be drafted and passed through the California legislature with a two-thirds majority after the Federal law changes.
All this does is give the legislature the option, to maybe change to permanent DST, if Federal law ever changes to make it legally possible.
Personally I will still vote for it, I enjoy long Summer evenings with sunsets at 9pm and walks along Ocean Beach, but if you are planning to vote for or against it, just want everyone reading this to know what you are really voting on. By itself, this ballot measure does nothing.
The advantage of DST is that all the times of other shops changes in a way that makes the summer time ideal for me in Spain and France
To be fair, if I had a choice, I would prefer DST to also apply in winter so to switch the timezone of France by one hour.
"The European commission will recommend that EU member states abandon the practice of changing the clocks in spring and autumn, with many people in favour of staying on summer time throughout the year."
I'm in Canada at about 46 degrees latitude and it's quite dark here in the morning in winter once DST ends in November (it used to end in October). London and Glasgow are 51 and 55 respectively so their much worse than my region.
1) People don't like switching twice a year.
2) People have a preference for summer time or winter time based on the perceived benefits of the existing system in the summer or winter.
I wonder if there is a certain wisdom to time shifting that people are ignoring. For those of you who would prefer permanent summer time would you rather get permanent winter time or the existing system?
Summer time only: great, less dark winter evenings!
Daylight saving: meh... why do they make the already dark winters even darker?
Winter time only: nooooooooooo!
In the morning, half the population loses that lightness, so they should shift it to where most people can benefit from it.
And as an engineer, it is just so arbitrarily decoupled from anything natural, like the sun. Sure, standard time was already based on mean time which was based on solar time … it's already quite removed. But the reasons for those steps were much more sound, IMO.
I look forward to the day in the far future when the malcontents, dissatisfied with waking up at night, create a system to shift an hour from the evening to the morning in the winter, and establish Winter Saving Time, or WST…
Eliminating the annual time change makes huge amounts of sense, but why stay on incorrect time all year? Why not just be on the real time year-round?
Time is arbitrary anyway.
So basically, it creates a bunch of additional time zones that will activate depending on the current year.
I mean, isn't this why stuff such as tzdata exist? Countries already do this. Not every country in the world is already following DST, so you must know which country the time calculation being performed on, because the result may vary. In fact, it's interesting to navigate through the public tz mailing list [1] because it turns out that countries or regions along the world still like to change whether DST is being enforced or not, and if they enforce it, at which point of the year the clock shifts forward or backward.
Any local time calculation that doesn't already take into account the region and the current year could be wrong, that's why getting timezones right in software is difficult.
If we want to change the starting time of schools, the opening time of businesses, etc., twice a year to accommodate the changing daylight patterns of the seasons--and apparently we do want to because most proposals to get rid of DST seem to include proposals to seasonally change the clock time when those events occur--there are two obvious ways to do it.
1. Change the clock time at which things start twice a year.
2. Change the clocks twice a year.
Start times are printed on signs and in documents, which are a pain to update. They are also on web sites with are not as hard to update, but still often require manual intervention.
Clocks, on the other hand, are designed to be easy to update. For an already large and ever growing subset of the population who get all their time from their computers, mobile devices, and other internet-connect devices that sync with time servers, updates are automatic.
Changing clocks twice a year, therefore, is probably a lot easier than changing start times twice a year, unless something is done about the difficulty of updating signs and the rest.
At the cost of one annoying update year, we could address the sign problem by replacing them with signs that print both the summer hours and winter hours. That would probably cause problems around the transition dates as many people do get confused for a few days then over whether or not things have switched.
That brings us to TZS Time.
1. We define a new time of day called "DAY START" (D).
2. In places that do not want to do seasonal changes of starting times, D is 6:00 clock time. In places that do want to do seasonal changes, D changes between 6:00 and 5:00.
3. Clocks would be enhanced to display both regular time, which does not change seasonally, and to show the difference between the current time and D [1]. E.g., if you are in PST on the day before the seasonal change and it is 11:34, your clock would tell you it is 11:34 and it is D+5:34. 24 hours later, after the seasonal change, your clock would again say the time is 11:34, but now it would say that is D+6:34.
4. Signs would have to be updated once to include D times. E.g., a sign that under the present system where the clocks change says:
Open: 9:00 AM
Close: 8:00 PM
Winter Summer
Open: 9:00 AM 8:00 AM D+ 3:00
Close: 8:00 PM 7:00 PM D+14:00
5. D times would be more convenient than clock time when talking about local events. E.g., instead of asking for a lunch with someone at 12:00 PM or 11:00 AM, depending on the time of year, you'd say D+6 all year.
6. Over time, people would end up using D times for most of their daily time keeping. Direct clock times would be mostly used when dealing with things outside your time zone or things that should NOT change seasonally. At that point it might become easier to have your clock show UTC instead of your time zone's clock time. For example, if you are in UTC-8, your clock would show UTC, and D+0 would be at 14:00 in the winter and 13:00 in the summer.
7. (Optional) None of the above addresses the DST problem of the one hour sudden change in start times twice a year messing up sleep schedules and other biological rhythms. At some point almost everyone will be getting their times (clock and D) from devices that have decent computing power and internet connections to time servers. At that point, we might want to consider changing from a one hour jump twice a year to smaller jumps more often.
If it is handled automatically by all the clocks, I don't see any reason that the offset between D and UTC in a given time zone should not change frequently, even daily. This should eliminate all disruption of sleep schedules and other biological rhythms.
[1] For 7 segment displays, or other displays that don't have room for an extra symbol, we could reserve 3 special 7 segment patterns, such as 1, 2, or 3 horizontal bars, to indicate that the display is showing D time. The display could be Hx:MM where x is one of the special patterns. x = 1 bar could mean it is D+0H:MM, 2 bars could mean D+1H:MM, and 3 bars could mean D+2H:MM.
Universal Time assumes the Earth is basically a ball spinning at a nice smooth constant speed, which is wrong, and so we have to bodge things in practice which we do by having a bunch of different Universal Times managing the bodge in steps.
So, UT1 is basically we measure where some very distant quasars are in the sky, rather than the Sun - and, since we're assuming that something so far away is essentially fixed to our reference point, and we're spinning, you can use this to work out what the time is very accurately.
But when you measure UT1 it's a bit spiky, because, as mentioned earlier, the planet is not actually a ball, and it isn't actually spinning at a nice constant speed. Earth Rotation is uneven and varies over time.
Making cuckoo clocks that measure distant quasars would be a monumental pain in the arse, so we don't do that. Instead we made another Universal Time, the Co-ordinated Universal Time or UTC, which works like this:
1. Figure out what UT1 is, right now at the start of your co-ordinated system of time, UTC. But then for seconds passing use Atomic clocks and make an allowance for the fact that if you're further from the middle of the planet (e.g. up a hill rather than by the coast) time will pass differently for you. This measurement (of the atomic clocks, which ignores Earth Rotation entirely) is called TAI (International Atomic Time)
2. Continuously re-measure UT1 (the IERS does this work) and if it seems as though UTC and UT1 are going to be different by, like, a second soon, then either add or remove a second in UTC to put them closer together typically at midnight on New Years when everybody is too busy/ drunk to care. These are "leap seconds". So at any time UTC = TAI + n where "n" is some integer the IERS gets to increment or decrement as necessary.
We could just get rid of Universal Time, and switch to basing civil time on TAI, no more leap seconds, the IERS would exist only to help with astronomy - but nostalgia seems to have won for now, and so we're stuck with this complicated scheme.
So e.g. London and Berlin always has a constant 1 hour difference (they both switch to summer time and back at the same moment). I used to live at GMT+7, I just realize now that this doesn't mean I was always 7 hours away from London, in summer I would've been 6 hours away.
Edit: I just realized you're replying to a comment about GMT, not about BST.
GMT is theoretically the old name anyway, it's UTC nowadays.