EU to stop changing the clocks in 2019 | Hacker News Reader

EU to stop changing the clocks in 2019

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1,367 pointsjoshdance708 comments

I seriously considered taking time off a few years ago to lead a multi-state referendum to get the whole Pacific time zone to join Arizona in opting out of time changes. While researching it, I learned that you can legally either switch to PDT in the summer or remain on PST year-round, but the federal government doesn't allow a state to permanently be in PDT.

So, if the western states opted out of daylight savings time changes, they'd be an hour behind Arizona year-round, which would mean earlier sunsets year-round too. I gave up when I realized the choices were either lobby the federal government to change the regulation or change the entire culture of the western US to start and end its business day earlier.

California is actually voting on it this fall. Although like you mentioned it is dependent on the federal gov allowing it:

https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_7,_Permanent_...

People here in Southern California exercise and prefer extra sunshine. Farmers here are against the repeal as well. Even popular mechanic endorses DST as a good thing: https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/a18011/...

Do you have a source for farmers liking it?

Every reference that I have seen agrees with https://agamerica.com/myth-vs-fact-daylight-saving-time-farm... that farmers don't like DST. In fact the original reason to introduce it was to save energy, and it doesn't do that either.

I know that I will vote for the repeal.

I concede that I cannot fine a solid study regarding farmers opposing, only anecdotal. I am curios and if I may ask, do you engage in any outdoor activities? I do and the people I exercise with do too.

But I did find that crime rates drop: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brookings-now/2015/10/29/figh...

I will not be voting for the repeal.

If you read your article, being on DST permanently should be even better than the current switching.

The California bill is for permanently being on DST. Which is equivalent to the present for most of the year, in my opinion is better in the winter, and avoids the disruption twice a year.

And to answer your question, I do engage in outdoor activities. Mostly hiking and the beach. My preference for hiking is for later in the day because I want to sleep in, and wait for the heat to break.

I think you might be confused. The repeal will switch us to DST year-round, which seems to be what you'd prefer.

I grew up in Saskatchewan, which is the most farmer-focused province in Canada, and is probably more farmer-focused than almost all US states.

Saskatchewan has never had DST.

Technically Sask is always on DST, right? That is, its solar noon is at 1pm, not noon, which compared to time-changing areas is DST (summer hours).

Yeah, late night sun in summer, and watch the sun rise at work in Winter. I want permanent DST.

From Nebraska, not California, but grew up working on a farm and am married into a 5th generation farm family. None of us want DST.

"Farmers, contrary to the strange and completely false belief that DST was created for them, actually despise it: Their schedules are entirely run by sunlight rather than the clock..."

Seriously, arguments for DST are absolutely ridiculous. In the summer when the days are longest it kicks in, which is pointless. In the winter when days are shorter it's not active.

Throw DST into the trash where it belongs.

Let's keep DST year round and ditch "standard time"

Russia said "sure" years ago.

But said "nope" a couple of years after. They are now on standard time year round.

That's what Saskatchewan does.

If their schedules are entirely run by daylight then why care at all what the clock says?

You must agree that the timezone you choose has no effect whatsoever on the amount of sunshine there is in a day.

If you want to be outside in the sunshine, you can go outside while it's sunny, whatever time of day that happens to be.

Yes but many if not most people work at certain hours and don't have the flexibility to change those hours. So people can't necessarily just go outside when it's sunny.

Cows can't tell time. Corn can't tell time. I grew up in a farming community. I never understand the "farmers" argument.

Why is permanent DST being considered instead of an absolute abolition of DST?

No DST means that solar noon is always at 12:00. While useful for figuring out what time it is without a watch that's a less common occurrence nowadays.

DST, on the other hand, pushes daytime later, so if you wake up at say 8 (after sunrise for most of the year) and go to sleep at midnight (after sunset), you see more daylight.

Just fix your schedule...

Edit: downvoted for asking people to go up at another clock time in order to match the daylight, instead of going up at the same clock time and changing the clock to follow daylight.

Really? What's so important about the number on the clock? Why not just be consistent with daylight, and let the clocks be normal?

> What's so important about the number on the clock?

Because jobs, business hours, travel schedules?

Yes, those places can fix their schedules to follow the daylight. Problem solved. Now you don't need to have permanent DST anymore.

Why again does people want clock time not to match solar time? It's far more sane to change the numbers on the schedule than to change the clock.

If DST was abolished instead of made permanent, what is your plan to make everyone (including businesses, events, transport time tables...) move their hours by one hour earlier?

Making DST permanent "just" requires a singular change of legislation, and basically never switching the clocks back to "normal" time.

As has already been stated twice in a sibling discussion here, "changing an entire culture is hard", but I'm honestly interested in hearing your approach.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18011554

How could having every business and school change their hours twice a year as they please be easier than just agreeing on couple of dates and switching everything? Instead of one time zone every thousand miles or so, you're talking about effectively having several time zones per block. That doesn't sound sane to me.

Doesn't everybody already have different schedules? Aren't seasonal schedules already a thing? Just communicate better. You can already find things like updated opening times in Google maps, etc.

"Just communicate better" puts an enormous burden on people. I already know the opening times for places I go regularly. Seasonal schedules are not a thing here, presumably because of DST.

It's ridiculous to suggest that it's easider for every business update Google (and Yelp and everything else) twice yearly, and that everybody check that before they go anywhere. That is way more human labor than daylight savings.

Google could also have the entire year's schedule listed.

Did you notice that you picked the one point you thought you could snipe at, but ignored the rest? Because I sure did. That's the sign of a bad interlocutor.

No, because that point pretty much proves it's possible to solve. You haven't heard of Google Now / Assistant, etc? Your phone can notify you of schedule changes pretty easily.

In fact even my regular calendar app can support this but itself, it can notify me of changes in booked appointments automatically.

And even that's assuming you didn't already know the change in schedule because it was listed right there on the website.

You are not effectively making the case that your approach is simpler or easier.

Currently, clocks automatically change twice a year.

In your proposal, all schedules for businesses, schools, transport, etc need to be entered into multiple online services. Plus each person needs to use one of those services and tell it about all of their plans. Then they need to be notified by that service whenever anything changes, and when hours change in a way that's conflicting, they need to manually resolve that.

As an example, I was just talking with someone who has to pick up kids from two different schools; the route involves two different transit systems. All work meetings must be carefully scheduled to match, and there are inevitably errands that will involve zero, one, or two kids and getting to some place before they close. This is hard enough when hours are stable. Now imagine it with schools, transit systems, stores, work clients, and work vendors all potentially adjusting operating schedules 2 or more times per year.

Google Now can't do that, and probably won't before the Singularity.

> What's so important about the number on the clock?

Convention.

You may not like it, you may not understand it, but other people like their conventions, and you're simply in a tiny, tiny minority if you don't get that.

The sunlight is the convention I follow.

Right, I'll explain that to my kids school then:

"Hi, our family's switched from observing the clock, like everyone else in school, to operating on a schedule that is in rhythm with the ebb and flow of sunrise through the year. From now on, we'd like our kids' school attendance and lesson times to start and finish on a solar timescale. Perhaps a separate buzzer tone could be set up to convenience any kids who will be running their day according to the sun. We do understand the challenge to teachers in accomodating this natural schedule alongside other students who stick with the more familiar clock-based one, but hey - the sunlight is the convention we follow."

I mean I live in quite a hippy place but that just ain't gonna fly.

> Just fix your schedule...

Clocks are standardized, which means there's a simple point of coordination for fixing them.

Schedules are...not.

Wrote about that here

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18011554

No DST usually means that solar noon is at 12:00 somewhere in the timezone. There are many places in the US of equal longitude but differing timezones.

The timezones are supposed to be small enough to be accurate +/- 30 min of the actual solar noon.

In some countries, even to +/-15 min - Russia comes to mind.

Not necessarily. Lot of places have an offset compared to their ‘natural’ timezone for economical or political reasons.

I'm not sure I understand your question? The point is to stop changing times twice a year. If you do that, you have to pick one of two GMT offsets: the one you were using in the summer or winter. Picking either one solves the problem.

Many people intentionally don't want solar noon to match clock noon (permanent DST), apparently because they don't want to update their schedules and have to go up at another clock time. (Seems bizarre to me.)

They want their clocks to be permanently shifted one hour, instead of shifting their schedule one hour.

Noon is not the center of the waking day for most people anymore.

Also, even if you use DST, most people still won't have the sun be directly overhead at noon.

Schedules are social artifacts. If restaurants, bars, workplaces, schools, shops, etc. were available at all hours, caring about clock time might be silly. However, since people's lifestyles tend to be anchored around these institutions, it's easier to adjust everyone's clock than to wait hopefully that each institution you care about adjusts its schedule to suit your needs.

With some planning, you could convince most of them to change schedules at the same time as you change the DST regulations.

With some planning, you could convince most Americans to switch to the metric system as well!

Not gonna hold my breath for that one.

Or, just change the clocks twice a year. Sounds like you are advocating the same end result (one-hour shift twice a year to preserve afternoon daylight time), but simply abolishing the current implementation. The present implementation is well understood, and most importantly standardized and automated at scale. Anything else would require massive effort to switch toward, so can you explain why it is a net improvement to spend that effort?

The improvement is that we won't have a clock that's permanently arbitrarily shifted because of ancient convention.

The time on the unshifted clock is also an arbitrary convention.

> Many people intentionally don't want solar noon to match clock noon (permanent DST)

Solar noon matching clock noon would require daily clock shifts as well as differing clocks at each slight difference of longitude. Almost no one wants that, and the various differences people want from that are all about (different ideas of) social convenience.

> They want their clocks to be permanently shifted one hour, instead of shifting their schedule one hour.

No, they want society’s clocks shifted an hour, because that is something practical for government to do, whereas shifting society’s schedules by an hour is not.

Basic time zones makes sense even to me, you don't need to match it perfectly. Just don't make arbitary changes all the time.

It's equally easy to regulate that everybody change their schedules at the same time as you regulate the clock. It's just less popular. Doesn't make it impossible.

> It's equally easy to regulate that everybody change their schedules at the same time as you regulate the clock

No, it's not, and I think if you spent a little while thinking how you'd write a law or regulation to do each you'd recognize that.

You could just make the law say "at day X when DST otherwise would have taken effect, every business with more then Y employees shifts their scheduled times relative to solar time to match the relative change as if DST would have taken effect"

Small business and other organizations will follow to not be left out. You only need to do this once or a handful of times before society will learn to shift schedules on their own.

And what is gained by doing it this way versus shifting the hour hand?

Clocks update themselves. Store hour signs, bus tables, stickers in windows, business cards, Outlook calendars, etc. They do not.

I don't like changing clocks twice a year; sticking with one time-zone offset is better. But having the entire population shift their working, banking, classroom, and service hours ad hoc is strictly worse than a universal hour shift. Instead of "Open M-F, 9a-5p", you suggest that "Open M-F, 9a-5p, Winter, 10a-6p Summer" is more elegant? Because that's what all vinyl stickers on glass doors would look like.

And it's still centralized and regulated, just like DST is now. So what have we gained?

Seasonal schedules is already a thing in many places. It's not that hard.

No. But neither is changing the clock. So what’s the benefit of having enforced seasonal schedule changes vs the DST change?

Forcing it would only be temporary to make the transition smoother, getting people used to updating schedules. After the first two years or so, it would hopefully run on its own, people would run on the schedules that makes sense locally.

Asking again: What’s the benefit of having enforced seasonal schedule changes vs. the DST change?

Having a rational clock

There's more examples like this, famously electric negative and positive poles that would have been reversed compared to the current standard if the scientists would have known how things work.

Many current standards have unintuitive quirks that only live on because they're old and entrenched, and that wouldn't have existed if the standards were set today instead.

So let's stop with the dumb quirks before it's entrenched.

Also you'd have to agree on how to define "winter" and "summer", just like we now have rules that guarantee that all daylight savings time changes will be on the same date across all US states or EU countries.

Every meeting in every outlook calendar in the country would have to change. Every exchange (equities, derivatives, commodities, etc) would all have to revise their trading schedules and applications, all the trading systems connecting to them would have to change and in some cases the actual laws governing those exchanges might need to be updated. The work contracts or at least the conditions of employment of millions of people would need to be changed. I've worked on applications that need to connect on a schedule to end points in other timezones, and plan and implement time and DST changes. It would be a nightmare.

Decide on the switch a few years in advance. Nobody would need to instantaneously change any schedules, just to remember that after a certain time in the future it will need to be updated.

> It's equally easy to regulate that everybody change their schedules at the same time as you regulate the clock.

This is absolutely not true. To answer the question "What time is it in my country?", everyone turns to a single national source of time. Changing that central source for time is absolutely trivial.

Changing signs on every door on every business, changing timetables of every train and every bus line, changing opening hours of every school, and changing people's conventions - that is absolutely not trivial.

Especially because business times and social event times are very rigid, even if it's just in people's heads.

I'm assuming everyone here who says you should just change your own time doesn't have friends.

Why would those things have to change? We don't change them when the clocks go back (or forwards), so why would they need to change if we make one of those times permanent? Or have I just got completely the wrong idea here?

I think you missed some context. They're talking about the differences between sticking with summer time vs sticking with winter time but moving things by an hour (so a 9-5 job would be 8-4). In both cases things would happen at the same solar time.

Basically the convo was:

A: People want to change their clocks to summer time instead of changing their personal schedule

B: They don't want to change their personal time but rather society's time

A: They could just change society's schedule, it's just as easy.

C: Nah, you'd have to change a lot of things, signs, timetables, etc...

Ah yeah that makes more sense, thanks. I thought they were just arguing that we should stick with winter time, without moving things by an hour.

Grandparent poster was arguing that it's just as easy to change society's conventions like opening hours and business hours everywhere, as it is to change the time.

I'm saying that that is absolutely not the case, and that grandparent is delusional.

In one of them 12noon approximates solar noon better than in the other. Some people object to that because it interacts with the magic social numbers 9 and 5 in a way they find inconvenient.

By contrast, in most places where I've lived, I have found that daylight savings time less convenient than the one which approximates the astronomical situation.

I would personally prefer it, just so that it's not always dark before I leave the office. The more daylight at the end of the day the better, IMO.

DST feels more natural to me. When the clocks go back in November, the "dark times" begin, and it's depressing as hell.

That’s my experience. I always feel like the clocks move in the wrong direction in November.

In my experience, most people feel this way. More daylight after noon is more desirable for the majority of us who work a 9-5 type of job.

I'm curious how many people are confused about which part of the year is Daylight Savings Time. I've corrected people who "hate daylight savings" on a few occasions. They had it backwards.

it's mad to fit our inner body-clock and live around something as arbitary as a 9-5 and the railroad clock...

Millions of years of evolving to fit our environment, and then an asshole invents “office hours” and we’re all screwed. File under “qwerty-level bad choices”.

>and then an asshole invents “office hours” and we’re all screwed

Assholes invent all kinds of things. It's those who enforce and tolerate it at fault.

>File under “qwerty-level bad choices”

Qwerty wasn't actually that bad, and Dvorak was more like self-promoted infomercial-snake-oil-style cargo-cult

https://www.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/keys1.html

Colemak and Workman are on another level. Qwerty should go the way of buggy-whips.

That study is disputed: http://dvorak.mwbrooks.com/dissent.html

Moreover, people in modern times have attempted to create improved keyboard layouts (e.g. BEPO, Coleman) which are also better for typing Unix commands, suggesting that such a rearrangement may be helpful etiher for reducing RSI or for increased speed.

I personally use Colemak for comfort and it is great to type on. The key presses just seem to flow from beneath my fingertips without effort. My typing speed isn’t very high, but colemak greatly improves the comfort and accuracy of my typing. I also use an ergonomic keyboard because I’m at risk of RSI, though (my day job is programming and one of my hobbies is alright of hand, both are rough on my hands) and being a programmer, my hands are very, very important to me. I’m surprised that so few programmers take care of their hands.

The Liebowitz and Margolis article doesn't really bring anything to the table; it seems to just be an attempt to showcase market efficiency or something. Take this from someone who is both an economist and have actually tried the Dvorak keyboard: I believe August Dvorak much more than the authors of this piece.

But the nice things about keyboard layouts in the digital age is that it doesn't matter: You can believe that it's all hogwash and continue clunking Qwerty.

That would be when some asshole invented artificial lighting, surely.

Many people hate it during the transition... when the hour moves forward, and you have to re-adjust. I can understand that.

this feeling made me realise how clocks and time influence our daily lives, and not care so much for such accurate timekeeping. i think most people would never need to be confronted with such things. it should be transparent to the user so to say... if some business or government processes require it, which i doubt unless they were constructed in a specific way to fit it, they can use their own time juggling devices for that. :s

people are so obsessed about time, all the time! it just cause them unneccesry stress. maybe if these kind of things are changed, people will start to look in other areas how time is affecting them and also make adjustments there to live more free and relaxed.

now i know some things are stuck with specific times, public transport, work times etc., but even there you can make your life so that you don't need to worry about it or have it influence you. i usually get up far before i need to leave for work, so i dont need to worry about catching the train or not, i can just get the next one, or the one after that. subsequently i also don't ever need to worry about that start time of work, because that's tied to the same mechanism. it saves tons of stress in the morning, which makes all days feel much much more relaxed even though i'm doing the same things and not missing time sensitive appointments (not to cause others stress because of their obsession of time!).

time is a funny thing, and one needs to be careful how to use it. it's arguably just a construct of our imagination, so don't let it be a nightmare ;D

I stopped wearing a watch several years ago, and I never really adopted carrying a cell phone with me everywhere, so I started relying on clocks being where ever I would end up needing them. When there wasn't a clock hanging, I would typically find a person to ask, or a computer screen to glance at.

It's amazing how many places would benefit from hanging a simple clock. Airports, for example...

Its amazing how useful a watch is.

I am really confused about the lack of clocks in airports. Train stations usually have plenty, but airports usually close to none. Why?!

Theory: There are arrival/departure time screens everywhere and those have the current time on them?

You'd think, but the really big old ones don't actually have the current time, and the screens in the departure area are usually small and less frequent than I'd like.

Second theory: Planes are late constantly and the airport/airlines don't want to keep reminding people how late the flight is; apart from the obvious intercom announcements, that is.

Don't you mean "it's amazing how many times I'd be better off wearing a watch/carry a cell phone"?

I think this is a good argument against DST. I realized a few years ago that I don't need to wear a watch because I'm never in any place that doesn't have a clock. Unfortunately, a lot of clock don't get changed promptly for DST.

Here in Seattle, it seems the transit clocks are always changed a month or two (!) after each DST change. Some public clocks never get changed. There's a significant fraction of the year where I simply can't trust any clock I see.

you're an adult, you'll live. i still remember how as kids we hated walking to school when it was all dark in the morning. end of summer time was a blessing. so if we really do away with dst i really hope we go for standard time.

Because in many places, standard time is the exceptional case. In the US, at least, we spend almost twice as much of the year in daylight saving time than in standard time. For example, standard time during the 2017 to 2018 winter lasted 127 days. Daylight saving time this spring through fall lasts 238 days.

Having lived in Japan that doesn't use DST, it really sucks. In the summer, it starts getting light just after 4am but then it's dark by 7:30pm. The daylight time is wasted.

Ex-pat in Japan, Tokyo area here.

Not having to change clocks is nice. Pressure companies / employers to have flex time to allow earlier starts and earlier leaves. Even though Japan culture tends to lag 10 to 15 years behind, it does change.

Now if the rest of the world (London / New York) would stop shifting clocks around on different dates, it would make global synch ups easier to handle.

How many clocks do people really have to change these days? Everybody has a phone in their pocket that magically has the right time.

Everytime the government changes the rules, people have to modify the firmware of basically any device with a clock, the people have to go around updating those (especially ones that don't have any auto update mechanism). Source: I'm a software engineer and I had too update hundreds of copy machines manually a few years ago.

I replaced all the wall clocks in my house with ones that set themselves from the NIST radio broadcast. My computers (and presumably phone) are all ntp based. None of those require firmware updates. It's quite nice to never mess with the clocks and have everything just be correct.

NTP gives you accurate time in UTC. It doesn't tell you how many hours you're offset from UTC.

Databases like tzdata do that, and they have half a dozen updates every year.

Well yeah, but then you tell your devices that you're UTC-4, and when it receives the NTP update, it just automatically subtracts 4 hours.

Or, like in the case of most phones, GPS-enabled devices know what time zone you're currently in, and then automatically adjust accordingly.

Your device from 2005 that hasn't received a firmware update will show the wrong time if you're in New York.

GPS does not contain your current timezone, like NTP it gives out UTC.

The reason your phone (that's set to use "New York" as a timezone) knows to change the UTC offset from -4 to 05 on the first Sunday of November is because it has received a firmware update at some point since 2006. A standalone device from before 2006 can not know that the spring forward/fall back dates in the US changed, unless it's updated.

Your statement "None of those require firmware updates. It's quite nice to never mess with the clocks and have everything just be correct" seems naive at best.

> The reason your phone (that's set to use "New York" as a timezone) knows to change the UTC offset from -4 to 05 on the first Sunday of November is because it has received a firmware update at some point since 2006. A standalone device from before 2006 can not know that the spring forward/fall back dates in the US changed, unless it's updated.

Fair enough, good point - I didn't think about that.

> Your statement "None of those require firmware updates. It's quite nice to never mess with the clocks and have everything just be correct" seems naive at best.

I never said that, possibly you're replying to a different person than intended.

You may wish to know that the current executive budget proposal would shutter the NIST time radio broadcasts (WWV, WWVH, and WWVB)[1][2][3].

[1] https://swling.com/blog/2018/08/information-from-the-nist-re...

[2] https://www.kb6nu.com/nist-to-shutter-wwv-wwvh-wwvb/

[3] https://www.nist.gov/director/fy-2019-presidential-budget-re...

"Illustrative program reductions in FY 2019

-$6.3 million supporting fundamental measurement dissemination, including the shutdown of NIST radio stations in Colorado and Hawaii"

Right. I'm not asking about changing rules. I'm asking about the burden of keeping the current daylight savings rules. The person I was responding to said "not having to change clocks is nice". I live in a daylight savings region and I already don't change any clocks.

Not having to change clocks is nice, but having a little offset over the sun time is good.

I lived in Japan as a student, and when you wake up at noon to get only 4 hours of daylight it's really depressing, and feels like you've wasted your whole day in bed.

Anyway, prepare to adjust your watch twice a year!

https://www.ft.com/content/4db264b4-a764-11e8-8ecf-a7ae1beff...

“...wake up at noon ... feels like you've wasted your whole day in bed.”

Well it’s half true

> when you wake up at noon to get only 4 hours of daylight it's really depressing

That's just a normal winter to some people.

The problem is not so much the lack of DST, but the fact that solar noon is around 11:30am in Tokyo, compared to around 12pm in SF in winter time, and 1pm in summer time.

The daylight is only "wasted" because you are sleeping through it. Try waking up earlier in the summer months to take advantage of it. I find that I don't even need an alarm to wake up at 4:30 AM when the sun is already up. And early morning is the best time to get out for some exercise in the hot, humid Japanese summers.

Anyway - I don't really think it matters too much whether it gets light at 4:00 AM in the peak of summer or 5:00 AM. People can adapt their schedules to take advantage of the daylight at the beginning or end of their day as needed. What really sucks is having your schedule abruptly changed twice a year for DST - something which people aren't really adapted to handle.

Yes, except that everyone else doesn't shift their schedules to accommodate you. Many people still need to work 9-5. (Or 8-8 or something in Japan...) Also, generally social events around dinner happen at something like 7pm. After dinner events might be at 8 or 9. You're likely to miss out on a lot if you're going to bed at 8 so you can get up at 4.

All of that would apply more or less equally for a 5:30 sunrise with DST, wouldn't it? You'll miss out on a lot going to bed at 9 to get up at 5, etc.

Yeah, ideally you'd shift to 7am sunrise and 10:30pm sundown, that would be ideal in terms of social events and waking time.

I wouldn't get up at 5. I'd continue to get up around 8, but I would miss three hours of daylight instead of four.

I’ve gotten friends out early in the morning for outdoor social events like golf, hiking, camping, etc. I play on a softball team that has games at 6 am. Heck, even some of my first dates with my wife were early in the morning. So I disagree that social events need be limited to dinner and drinks in the evening. Oh and I still go out for dinner and drinks too... just not every day and when I do I usually sleep in a bit the next day.

I really don’t understand the resistance to waking up a bit earlier in summer. Btw I don’t even consider myself a morning person really, it’s just that when I moved to a place that gets light early in the morning I naturally started waking up earlier.

Totally agree. Japan sticks to a 9-5 but its clocks would work much better in a 7-3 environment. Totally misplaced

Personally, i just recommend were introduce temporal lag. Time moves too fast in general. So we should just slow it down.

Just like the Fed can print more money, the government can just make minutes worth more.

Why do we need 60 minutes in an hour? If we only had 30 minutes in an hour, then we would get twice as much done in half the time!

Because our culture has shifted a few hours later than 'natural' time - for the vast majority of people, midnight isn't nowhere close to the middle of your night, and noon isn't the middle of your day; we stay up long past sunset and (except in northern winters) wake up significantly after dawn.

Furthermore, this time is very "sticky" with all kinds of regulations, processes, organizational practices etc having fixed on a particular start-end time, so one does not simply live according to a natural schedule, and it's much harder to change that than the single centralized decision of the time zone.

Thus, switching to a timezone where middle of the astronomical day is 13:00 means that the people's day is better aligned with the sun.

> Because our culture has shifted a few hours later than 'natural' time ... we stay up long past sunset and (except in northern winters) wake up significantly after dawn.

But wouldn't DST be the opposite of what you want, then? Shifting the clocks one hour forward, as DST does, pushes typical business and waking hours one hour earlier in the astronomical day.

No, that's the whole point, the hours have shifted later, and DST brings them back closer to where they "should" be.

Due to accumulated cultural baggage from earlier centuries where the "habits" were formed in a very different environment with different needs than we have now, currently we (well, most of us, e.g. farmers have different schedules) have unused/spare daylight in mornings and too much darkness in evenings after work, so pushing typical business and waking hours one hour (or possibly more) earlier in the astronomical day is just the thing that we need, giving us more daylight in the evenings (which we all need) at the cost of less daylight in mornings (which most of us waste).

It's just that for the current interconnected set of practices it's a sticky "local minimum" where there's a disadvantage for any person or organization to deviate from the accepted local hours (e.g. businesses can't deviate from habits of customers, schools can't deviate from time needs of parents/teachers, customers can't deviate from schedules of their large employers and kids schools, etc), so we can't expect to ever switch gradually, and the best solution to that coordination problem is a global change for everyone at once like switching a timezone.

isn't the argument against DST the same argument against the above?

If you need to wake up at the sunrise to tend crops, then wake up at the sun's rise regardless of time.

If you like to stay up late, don't let the tine dictate it. Seems silly considering if/once the rest of the country switches as well it would lead to further confusion and already is since AZ has set the precedent for your timezone already

Because 12:00 is not the middle of the waking day, at least in western countries. It's closer to the first third or so.

So? I genuinely can't figure out why people keep bringing this up.

If you want clock noon in "the middle of the waking day", for some reason, then by your on admission, permanent-DST (+1hr) isn't going to solve your problem, either.

Once you decouple clock noon from physical noon, I don't see why it has to be 1 hour, or even a multiple of 1 hour.

Probably because states that observe daylight saving time are already on it for eight months of the year. It’s actually a smaller change to stay on it all the time.

You think that's bad? Canada is forced to follow the US. Whenever the US moves the dates/times we just mirror them. We want to get rid of the entire thing, but a north/south split would be a huge disruption to air traffic, at least for the passengers.

In the real north, the part with very short/long days/nights, an hour one way or the other really makes no difference.

"Forced" is a strong word. We do it because it makes things easier for business and commerce to follow the U.S.

Actually the impact on nations higher in latitude makes the time change more compelling.

The biggest issue is traffic accidents as a result of commuting directly into the rising or setting sun. It's especially acute if there are children crossing streets to get to school at the same time. It doesn't take many dead kids to make headlines.

If I remember correctly, Chile abolished DST, and then after they have a ton of traffic fatalities, they added it back two years later.

It's not as clear cut as people make it out to be.

I don't buy this. Sunset/sunrise times change year round. If you shift the time by one hour you are still going to have a few weeks where the sun is in your eyes in the morning or evening, it'll just shift when that happens by some number of days

I found that the change in timezone actually caused me to be commuting into the sun twice as often. I'd go through a period of commuting into the sun, and then the sun would start rising later, and then the timezone changed and I'd be commuting into the sun again.

This test says otherwise

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11152980 METHODS: Data from 21 years of United States' fatal automobile accidents were gathered. The mean number of accidents on the days at the time of the shifts (Saturday, Sunday and Monday) was compared to the average of the corresponding mean number of accidents on the matching day of the weeks preceding and following the shift. This was repeated for each DST shift. The number of accidents for a particular shift was also correlated with the year of the accidents.

RESULTS: There was a significant increase in accidents for the Monday immediately following the spring shift to DST (t=1.92, P=0.034). There was also a significant increase in number of accidents on the Sunday of the fall shift from DST (P<0.002). No significant changes were observed for the other days. A significant negative correlation with the year was found between the number of accidents on the Saturdays and Sundays but not Mondays.

Saskatchawan has some of the northernmost respectably-sized cities in Canada, and they also have lots of rural farming which means endless long winter drives on snow-blown roads.

They don't do the time-changing thing.

And Saskatchewan is also FLAT. So sunrise/set times line up with the astronomy. Your horizon is a horizon. I'm in BC. Whether I can see the sun in winter has far more to do with mountains than earth's orbit.

It's nothing but a nuisance in Canada now that the DST period has been extended to 8 out of 12 months. Previously when it was shorter it'd have more of an impact during the spring and fall when it was shifting daylight to more "useful" times of day.

A huge disruption? It's managed without a fuss when traveling between the UK and the rest of the EU.

Can't you change your time-zone while opting out of PDT?

"Abolishing" DST means that there's no longer any PDT, just PST, MST, CST, EST... But abolishing DST while desiring to move to "summer time" just means, in practice, shifting the state from PST to MST.

> shifting the state from PST to MST

I’m not a lawyer, but from my reading of the respective regulations and the little case law that exists, I believe California has the legal authority to elect to move to Mountain time.

This is what Arizona did. They just went to MST. If California likes PDT, then MST is the exact same thing.

Wouldn't it be PT then?

Also why not just move to one zone west. POE Pacific ocean east time.

The states alone cannot, because the time zones are set by Federal regulation. See https://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/text-idx?SID=6a1a124065df269aff....

Tell that to Indiana.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Indiana

That article goes into a long history of the interplay between state and federal authority in terms of time zones - most of it Indiana acting within the bounds set by congress or petitioning congress to give them exemptions.

Right, just like the states alone cannot make Schedule I substances legal for consumption and sale.

Except, of course, that half the country does it[1].

We are living in a strange country.

[1]http://www.governing.com/gov-data/safety-justice/state-marij...

> but the federal government doesn't allow a state to permanently be in PDT.

I mean this sincerely: I don't understand how the federal government gets away with stuff like this. I don't see where DST is in the constitution. And according to the 10th Amendment[0], that means that decision belongs to the States or the People, right? So the federal government, I suppose, could make the law, but the states should have the ability to say no to anything the Feds say without an Amendment being passed. What am I missing here?

0: https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/tenth_amendment

Probably some interstate commerce clause justification.

Time zones were invented in order to standardize railroad time schedules, so that's probably exactly what it is.

200 years of arguing about state versus federal power/rights/law?

Nor do I. But I also have trouble believing that, were California (or any other state) to change timezones, abolish DST, or whatever combination thereof, that the federal government would have any power whatsoever to do anything about it.

It's very possible that if a state decided to do this, and the feds tried to stop them, the state would win in court. But court is expensive, and it adds to a long list of "reasons why this might be more trouble than it's worth".

I imagine it falls under the weights and measures clause, considering the clock is how we measure time:

> To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures;

Interstate commerce clause. It's been the reason for many the Congressional abuse, and it would be my go-to for any time I ask, "why can't the state(s) just tell the Feds to piss off?"

"Because in some infinitesimally small way, someone might lose money."

I don't personally smoke weed, but I'm still incredibly offended that the Supreme Court ruled that the feds can prevent you from growing your own personal supply because of the negligible impact it might have on interstate prices.

Do you think a city should have the power to ignore daylight savings time entirely, or should the state have the power to regulate all its cities? Where do you draw the line?

In practice, I imagine if California passed a state amendment fixing themselves to PST, the federal government would either change the law or refuse to enforce it. Opposing such an amendment would be pretty unpopular.

But in theory, the federal government does have power to "fix the Standard of Weights and Measures" nationwide. I see no reason for a court to rule this as being outside federal jurisdiction.

Many border cities observe the timezone of the closest major metro, even if they are supposed to be on the same time as the rest of the state.

West Wendover, NV (for instance) follows Mountain Time to synchronize with nearby Salt Lake City. So far as I know, they never asked for federal permission.

No. I don't believe that. I believe that states, not the federal government, are the ones allowed to make those decisions according to the Constitution.

However the weights and measures stuff makes sense and is something I completely overlooked.

For what its worth, the relationship between cities and their state is very different than the relationship between the states and the federal government. There has historically been a concept referred to as dual-federalism which has evolved into cooperative federalism to describe this relationship. This is in contrast to the creation of cities and towns, which are entirely creatures of the state governments.

That said, I do agree the regulation of DST definitely falls under the weights and measures clause. We can't have Shelbyville continue to operate on metric time, we here in Springfield gave up on that years ago. One might even be able to successfully argue an interstate commerce argument on standardizations of timekeeping.

It is a power granted by the “weights and measures” provision of the constitution (or so interpreted). Read the first paragraph the history section of this Wikipedia article for more details:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Time_Act

That actually makes a lot of sense. Thanks!

Others have addressed the federal government's legal right to set standards of weights and measures, but I just want to add that there's a legitimate interstate commerce argument as well. Prior to the application of time zones, train schedules were nearly impossible to keep consistent as every town had it's own 'time zone' being aligned to their solar noon.

Time is already crazy for programmers and logistics, but imagine it being essentially a continuously changing band with longitude with slight local variations. The modern economy relies on a sane, more or less consistent view of time.

Exactly. Changing an entire culture is hard, so you just change the clock. People naturally wake up at some delta from sunrise, so it's inconvenient that we have set times to do things that aren't set based on time since sunrise. Of course the sun rises at different times everywhere, so it wouldn't be very convenient to say that we were going to have a conference call at sunrise+3 hours, when that's not a consistent time for both of us.

Instead we just approximate the correction with a one hour step function every year, and everyone is coordinated on it automatically. If a few programmers have to use more complicated date/time functions, it's a small price to pay for everyone to be able to keep their bodies on a more natural schedule.

"a few programmers have to use more complicated date/time functions"

This is a denial of the actual problem, which is that time zones get separated from times in practice. It's not a programming problem that can be solved by technicians. Blaming them is like blaming shortcomings of the taxation system on the IRS. As you wrote, "changing an entire culture is hard"

Yeah. I suppose it depends a lot on latitude, but where I grew up, businesses and schools would need summer and winter hours so that activity reasonably matches daylight. Having everybody change at once seems much easier than letting everybody do their own thing. Especially given that computers are handling more and more of the clock-changing workload these days.

> the federal government doesn't allow a state to permanently be in PDT.

I don't recall this part of the enumerated powers of the federal government from when I read the constitution. Has there been a recent amendment?

> I don't recall this part of the enumerated powers of the federal government from when I read the constitution. Has there been a recent amendment?

No, it's in the bare unamended text:

“The Congress shall have power [...] To coin money, regulate the value thereof, and of foreign coin, and fix the standard of weights and measures” (Art. I, Sec. 8; emphasis added)

Wow. Thanks.

The business will adapt if you fix the clock.

If gung-ho on the subject then why not split the difference and lobby the UN or the powers that be to add half an hour to ST in all time zones and eliminate DST? The only ones who might complain are those in Winter who live north of 40N or south of 40S latitude.

Is there a federal mandate that forces us to be in pacific time instead of mountain time?

How does Arizona get away with it?

Could you change to PST for one day in summer and keep PDT the rest of the year?

No, when Daylight Savings transitions happen is federally regulated; you can opt out or opt in, but not customize.

I'm on a team collaborating with branches in CA, IN, and NC. Given the majority of us (including the lead site) are on Eastern time, the CA team tends to dread milestone reviews since they have to be prepared and on the ball by 6am; the first few reviews started 5am PDT, but that quickly proved to be too painful for our CA brethren. If Pacific states decided to drop DST without (at least) Eastern states following suit, collaboration would become that much more difficult.

I feel like Central and Mountain states have the geographic flexibility to decide either way without significant impact to interstate commerce on the whole. From the same lens, Pacific and Eastern states don't appear to have the same flexibility insofar as the potential for a 4-hour gap if Pacific states drop DST while Eastern states perpetuate the status quo. I'm just selfishly thinking in terms of synchronization, overlap, engagement opportunity, jet lag...as if 3-hour gaps weren't already a chore.

I lived in Mountain time for a few years while still working east coast hours. It was awesome. Starting working around 6 meant I was done locally early. And done early was really done because the east coast was shutting down and going home. Much different than when you start around 5-6am and people give you funny looks when you leave around 2pm, or you get dragged into staying late through the day.

Definitely more power to you. Every week, I try to trick my body into waking up at 6am (let alone being at the office at the same time), but my biological clock always finds a way to reject attempts at realignment in short order.

On the flip side, being an early bird on an 8-hour schedule is a non-issue with my current employer. In fact, 5:45am-2:15pm was clockwork for a certain graybeard engineer; if you couldn't schedule and conclude your business with him within those hours, you were simply out of luck, and any manager with a clue of who really transforms shit into green leaves in our branch would be seriously hardpressed to upset this balance.

The secret is there is no trick. I set an alarm and get up. Do that every day, even the weekends, and you'll start going to bed at a time that works.

I love the feeling of getting up early, getting a ton done (gym, errands, personal projects, work) all day, and that night falling asleep in minutes when my head hits the pillow.

I would be in favor of abolishing the Pacific time zone and merging it with Mountain Time to create Western Standard Time. The mountain states can still do DST if they want, but the pacific states can just stay on WST all year round.

After the EU does this, 90%+ of the world population will have abandoned DST changes. The only holdouts will be North America, a few Middle Eastern & African countries, some Brazilian provinces, and 4-5 other small countries or provinces.

Sounds like a repeat of the Imperial vs Metric system divide. Why does the USA always have to be the odd major modern country using obsolete customs? Is there a cultural explanation?

> Is there a cultural explanation?

Yes they're lacking in culture. :P

Seriously though, I think culturally they think whatever they're doing must be "the best", irregardless of whatever the rest of the world thinks. And it caused NASA disasters too!

> they think whatever they're doing must be "the best", irregardless of what <others> think

The word that comes to my mind is "arrogance". Is there a better fitting word? (Honest question, not a native speaker)

As a fellow non north american, that seems quite fitting.

I think the proper academic term for it is "American exceptionalism"

Even American chauvinism.

>I think culturally they think whatever they're doing must be "the best", irregardless of whatever the rest of the world thinks.

Funny, one could say the same about Europeans. And it'd be an equally sweeping and divisive claim.

You've missed parts of Australia and New Zealand, plus the UK (which will have left the EU by then and may keep DST).

DST seems to be one of those weird Anglophone things that we do, I would't criticise the USA directly for this one, they're not alone. As a New Zealander I was actually surprised to learn that DST isn't standard across the globe.

You think UK will keep it after Brexit if EU doesn't? I doubt it. Australia has a strange situation where some states observe DST and some don't. (Or had 10 years ago anyhow)

Still does - Queensland doesn't observe it, while most of the rest of the country does.

I don't think it's going to be much of an issue for the UK to keep it. They're not on the same timezone anyway, so it won't change much. So yeah, considering the amount of hassle it would be to change, I wouldn't be surprised to see them stay with it.

> I don't think it's going to be much of an issue for the UK to keep it. They're not on the same timezone anyway, so it won't change much.

But it will change, specifically: twice a year any UK-EU timezone offsets would change, affecting all communication and arrangements between UK and EU. Currently we are all in sync even though we are offset, so it might actually be more hassle to keep it DST if the EU does not.

> They're not on the same timezone anyway, so it won't change much.

It would change the time relative to Ireland, which is in the same timezone as the UK and has very close ties to it. It would introduce timezone differences along the Irish border. It would also change the time difference to every EU country twice a year; those differences are currently constant.

> So yeah, considering the amount of hassle it would be to change

What hassle would that be?

The UK kept the Pound Sterling, miles, and pints when it joined the EU, so I don't see why they'd get rid of DST just because the continentals are.

And the UK support in the survey was an overwhelming 0.02% of the population. Compared to 3.79% of the German population.

Given we couldn't even be bothered to move to a timezone that EU other countries are on (Portugal aside), I can't see there being much appetite for change.

Now, if the EU Commission had said they were forbidding the removal of daylight saving, I think it would be a completely different story...

> Portugal aside

And -the republic of- Ireland! A "timezone" border to be added to the one already introduced by Brexit

Politically, this has always been a tricky domestic issue, because different countries within the U.K. are affected differently by, and have different political opinions on, daylight savings time. Effectively, changes to the status quo are blocked by differing interests.

Legally, it is almost comical.

The Act of Parliament defining daylight savings time has a significantly different mechanism to how daylight savings time has operated in harmony with the E.U. for the past several decades. It allowed for double daylight savings time, ran over a different part of the year, and had to deal with Easter.

It was modified by an Order in Council in 2002, which removed double daylight savings time and changed the rules for the start and end. This was not the first time that the 1972 Summer Time Act had been modified by statutory instrument for harmonization with the E.U., either.

But that Order in Council was done by the Queen under the authority of the European Communities Act 1972, which is repealed by the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018. That, in turn, classes the Order in Council as "EU-derived domestic legislation". It retains it, but abolishes the Act that authorizes such orders. Adding to the comedy, the 2002 Order in Council also abolished the original authority to issue statutory instruments that was in the 1972 Summer Time Act itself.

So a different new mechanism has to be created to authorize further orders in council if the 1972 Summer Time Act is to be altered with another statutory instrument. There apparently isn't one in the E.U. Withdrawal Act 2018, by my reading, as "EU-derived domestic legislation" is not covered by the infamous so-called "Henry 8" provisions for dealing with "direct EU legislation". Otherwise and more likely, a full Act of Parliament has to be made to replace the (modified) 1972 Summer Time Act.

However, now look to history. There have been numerous attempts at this over the years, some fairly recent. They have got nowhere. The upshot of the legal tangle and the political will that effectively blocks changing the status quo is thus very likely that the U.K. will keep to the old E.U. rules after the E.U. itself abandons them. This is highly ironic for Brexit.

* http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2018/16/crossheading/ret...

* http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2002/262/note/made

* http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2002/262/introduction/mad...

* http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1972/6/section/1/enacted

* http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1972/6/section/2/enacted

* http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1972/6/section/2

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Summer_Time#Current_st...

May have left the EU. No clear plan for doing this has yet been presented, and doing it without a plan looks like immediate disaster.

No plan for staying either

This is also true. Nor is there any plan for international air travel, the Irish border, Gibraltar, nuclear material including radioisotopes, road freight, food export, farm subsidy replacement, or the 3m European residents of the UK or UK residents of the EU. There will be only one time in the UK: "too late".

Staying wouldn't have required them to do anything different.

AFAIK staying (i.e. cancelling article 50) needs approval of all EU members. So it's quite unlikely to happen.

Yes - the do-nothing situation here is that the UK leaves the EU, it’s international agreements with the EU, and almost all of it’s worldwide international agreements, which are negotiated through the EU. For those who’ve read the term but don’t know what it means, this is “No Deal”.

With regards to cancelling article 50 - there is no precedent for it, but there was no precedent for using it either. It’s considered an ornament. A lawyer who wrote it insists it should be revocable - but nowhere in law says it is revocable. Or irrevocable for that matter. So those who want to reverse it should plan on getting total unanimity from EU27+U.K. because anything else might not be enough.

> May have left the EU.

Article 50 is quite clear. If you invoke it, you start the timer: "The Treaties shall cease to apply to the State in question from the date of entry into force of the withdrawal agreement or, failing that, two years after the notification referred to in paragraph 2, [...]".

Although there is a possibility to extend that period "[...] unless the European Council, in agreement with the Member State concerned, unanimously decides to extend this period".

But the word crucial word is "unanimously". It's very unlikely that for example Spain would agree to that.

> No clear plan for doing this has yet been presented,

Yes. But don't underestimate the power of all-nighters. Politicians are at least as good with them as programmers are.

> and doing it without a plan looks like immediate disaster.

Yes. But Brexit is fitting for the crazy times we find ourselves in. So I don't think they will get less "interesting".

Brazil does not have provinces, it has states and territories.

In my experience, americans say “everyone” when they mean “everyone in the country” and “the whole world” when they mean “the usa”. This may shed some light into the psychological context for such decisions (or lack thereof).

Setting aside the fact that public opinion is already changing in the US and several states are already voting to do away with DST, do you really think it’s fair to criticize the US for being one of the few countries using an “obsolete” custom when the EU hasn’t even made the transition yet?

There are plenty of valid reasons to criticize the US but this isn’t one of them. And the mere fact that you would read an article about the EU and your mind immediately jumps to what the US will do almost lends credence to the idea that the US is indeed exceptional.

Unwillingness to change, plus a STRONG unwillingness to be told to change.

Anecdotes aren't data but everyone I've talked to about this subject in the states is either ambivalent or tired of DST and would not miss it. It's just that in order to make the switch, the whole country has to commit together for it to not be a pain, and that's a big lift for something that the public thinks about twice a year. It'd take some current event or an extended public campaign plus momentum to get over the hump.

Can we move to UTC exclusively next please? Enough with vague abbreviations only people who use them understand like EET, PST and whatnot.

"I live in UTC+2 and you live int UTC-5, meeting at 15:00UTC?" ain't that easier? I add 2 hours, you take away 5 - math a 6 year old can do. And yet we refer to timezones with some made up meaningless words like Easter European Time - what does that even mean? It's not even accurate description as not all Eastern Europe follows it - pure madness.

> Can we move to UTC exclusively next please

Your phrasing was ambiguous. For a moment I thought you meant https://qntm.org/abolish. Still, you can't remove the past, and since the names carrying disambiguating meaning (notably DST changes, is UTC+01:00 CET or BST?) even if you remove them for the future the past still exists so you still have to handle them.

UTC is explicit, you don't need to know anything than your local number. With current system you need to learn what all of these dumb abbreviations mean and their relations to your dumb abbreviation - it's pure madness and I just can't fanthom how this even came to existance when we had GMT since 1884.

Can we go back to calling it GMT as well?

UTC and GMT are similar but not the same.

GMT does not observe leap seconds for instance.

TIL GMT != UTC

UTC only has leap seconds to keep within 0.9s of UT1, which is the mean solar time at 0° longitude (based on Quasar measurements). GMT is essentially equivalent to UT1 (and in modern usage either means UTC or UT1).

UT1 essentially doesn't need leap seconds, because it is the correct mean solar time and not an 1Hz approximation of it (which UTC pretty much is).

GMT and UTC are not semantically the same though. In this case UTC makes more sense as it doesn't depends on Greenwich time.

GMT should be defined by UTC, but not the other way around

Can you imaging changing date in the middle of the day !

- I'm going to lunch I see you early tomorrow ? - But we have meeting this afternoon ! - Yes tomorrow, should I remind you we are UTC+12 ?

This doesn't remove the problem, only shift it to different place.

From the local perspective: "I always eat breakfast at 8am!" - two people can communicate when they eat (or do whatever). When you move to different country instead of sticking to your routine (minus jet-lag) you have to adjust your brain to completely different hours.

Benefits of using UTC internationally would only be good for companies and people that do a lot of international meetings so using UTC would make their life easier (instead of wrapping their heads around multiple timezones)

I don't think they were advocating for using UTC exclusively, just identifying their own timezone relative to UTC when communicating with someone in a different hour. For example: "I always eat breakfast at 08:00 UTC+01, so I prefer to do that Skype call we planned at 09:00 UTC+01 at the earliest. Is that fine with you or do you have plans in the evening?"

If you're not in UTC+01, it's easier to work out what time that would be for you than if I said I wanted to have a tele-meeting at 09:00 CET.

Nice, I hope US can do the same one day. DST changes twice a year are an unnecessary burden.

I am also not too hopeful about US changing considering its federal-state model. In EU, multiple countries can agree on a decision, but US states are adept at bikeshedding and not getting anything done :(

This is a bit needlessly cynical, because individual states already have the power to choose whether or not to observe daylight savings time. Arizona and Hawaii already don't, and there are bills in the Florida and Massachusetts legislatures to do the same.

The only federal regulation that applies here is that states wouldn't have the option to choose between summer or winter time as their permanent time, as the EU states can. IOW, US states are allowed to disregard the observance of DST, but they can't change their time zone without federal congressional approval.

> IOW, US states are allowed to disregard the observance of DST, but they can't change their time zone without federal congressional approval.

Interestingly, that seems to be the exact opposite of EU where countries can choose their own timezones but (currently) have to observe DST.

Arizona and Hawaii already don't

And Indiana. Except for the part that's part of the Chicago market.

And about a quarter of Arizona actually does change time. The Navajo Nation goes with New Mexico/Denver time.

Indiana started observing DST across the whole state in 2006.

Ah. Thanks for that. I haven't been up there in a while. Apparently longer than I thought!

I commented on this shift here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18009875

And the Hopi Nation that is an enclave in the Navajo Nation follows Arizona. That got really confusing when we drove the 264 during our holiday in our way from Grand Canyon to Canyon de Chelly.

Here in Indiana there was an attempt to go off DST for a long while but it became more of a problem because it was inconsistent with all of the other places nearby and for people going through.

Indeed, small states wedged between big states are going to have the hardest time of it; the best way for Indiana to jettison DST is to convince Illinois and Ohio to. If there's ever going to a movement to abolish DST across all the states, it's probably got to start at the big edges of the country (California, Texas, Florida) and roll its way inward.

Same with leap days and leap seconds, why not just count forward at a consistent rate?

The earth doesn't rotate at a consistent rate, so leap seconds (as determined by astronomical measurements) are necessary to keep civil time in sync with sunrise and sunset.

Have you LOOKED at how much civil time moves around? Heck, the discrepancy changes as you physically move around.

In a few thousand years they can change timezones ONCE to deal with leap seconds adding up. It won't even count as noise next to how much happens for random political reasons.

Right? It would make way more sense to have a "leap period" once every century that calculated for all the leap days, minutes, seconds, OR people 200 years from now, might not care when my sunrise and sunset were.

Florida's bill passed, but it's conditional to Congress or the DoT's authorization

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/08/us/daylight-saving-time-f...

Note that in this case it's conditional on Congress because Florida wants to move to permanent summer time, which, if we imagine that as of tomorrow DST were abolished everywhere else, would effectively put them in Nova Scotia's time zone ("Atlantic Time").

(I'm personally sympathetic; I live in the northeast US and I'd much rather go to work in the dark than leave work in the dark. Summer time or bust!)

In Maine we passed a bill to move to Atlantic time as well, but it's conditional on Massachusetts and New Hampshire moving to the same time zone: https://www.pressherald.com/2017/04/27/maine-may-switch-to-a...

(I would love this)

I lived in Indiana when they decided to adopt DST. The reasoning was that interacting with other time zones which had DST while they didn’t was expensive. It’s bad to not use DST until none (or few) do.

Such a chilling network effect might exist if all the states were equal in population, economic activity, and interstate traffic, but that's not the case here. If California wanted to abolish DST, it certainly has the clout to pull it off--and it may very well force NV to as well in the process (and perhaps even OR and WA). Same for Texas, which could force the hands of OK/LA/NM. The Northeast would be harder; you'd basically need all of New England sans CT to agree to make the switch at once, and then NY+CT+NJ+DE(+PA?) to do so at the same. The problem is far from intractable, though.

You are greatly overestimating the cost of dealing with states that do or do not observe DST. We don’t here in AZ and it barely matters. The worst is that everyone else expects us to move around our daily stand up times twice a year so they don’t have to.

AZ is much larger than Indiana. A large fraction of Indiana is suburbs of cities in other states (Louisville, Chicago, and arguably Cincinnati).

Pretty sure you can include Maine in that group of states as well...

The federal government did extend the dates of daylight saving time for no particular reason just a few years back. Congress has the power to change it for everyone, there's no reason to blame the federal model.

I know this is against the bandwagon but still: it was just fine the way it was. Changing the clocks (that is, society's timetable) to match the suntime is a good idea. And countries should absolutely have the freedom to choose what suits them best.

Now we're going to have to pick either summer time or winter time, to be on all year. Pick the latter? Bye-bye awesome summer afternoons with the sun setting down at 8:30. Pick the former? Say hello to waking up in darkness with the sun rising at 9 during winter.

"Changing the clocks (that is, society's timetable) to match the suntime is a good idea"

Except that's not what we do. The sun doesn't shift rise and set times by an hour on two magic days of the year. You know this right?

There's a lot of unused sunlight hours in the morning in the summer, so we change our clocks to make use of it. That's how we "match the suntime".

Or just get up earlier.

Getting up earlier is definitely an option but you can't make the most of the time if schools and workplaces are still on fixed times.

Of course. It’s called an approximation—I’m sure you know this though. Being a pedant doesn’t lead to interesting and/or productive conversations.

Sorry, I still don't get it. The sun doesn't shift by an hour, it just shows itself for less time as we get into winter and more time as we get into summer. Why can't we just center our days so that noon is always when the sun is highest and be done with it? The shift makes no sense.

>Why can't we just center our days so that noon is always when the sun is highest and be done with it?

That's what abolishing the DST gets us closer to, and the answer is - nothing is stopping us. Arizona has it that way, and they're fine.

A longer answer: time zones are just an approximation to "sun is highest at noon" because it's awfully convenient to have clocks show the same time for people within a several hundred mile radius. The railroads made it pretty much a necessity, but even things like scheduled television programming would be very tedious with astronomical time: every city would end up with a slightly different schedule.

Think about it this way: the circumference of the Earth is about 25000 miles, and one revolution is 24 hours. That means that 1000 miles is roughly an hour difference, and 100 miles is about 5 minutes.

That means that, with astronomical time, if you have a 100-mile commute (sadly, not uncommon), you also have to account for the 5 minutes time difference between your home and work!

While this might not be the question you are asking, some threads on HN have considered the possibility of everyone being on astronomical time, since we can put a GPS chip in every clock (...heck, we pretty much do that already), and everyone gets their schedules from realtime systems.

But perhaps a more compelling alternative is just to give up and have everyone follow the same clock[1], extending the convenience of time zones (which are, after all, arbitrary and are an awful approximation for Solar time!) to the whole globe.

[1]https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/02/12...

"That's what abolishing the DST gets us closer to"

Which is the point I was trying to make. Thank you.

Yup, I was just reaffirming it, and then rambling on why we don't use Solar time... which is something I imagine being a fun thing to go back to.

At my latitude (26°N) the zenith for noon changes about every 5 miles (8k) east or west of where I'm located, and the distance grows shorter the more north you go (at 45°N it's 3.8m/6.1k east/west). That's why time zones exist, to make this a tractable problem (although we somehow have managed to make a mess of time zones but that's another rant).

EDIT: my latitude was too precise for the distance mentioned. Simplified it.

No but seriously...the sun is in zenith the same time all year. Summer vs winter time doesn't follow the sun.

>Of course. It’s called an approximation

DST is approximation to what exactly?

It's an artificial construct with a vague purpose, and nothing else. Please do basic research before accusing others of pedantry.

> DST is approximation to what exactly?

OP seemed to be suggesting a gradual shifting of clocks each day instead of a single leap around each inflection point.

> It's an artificial construct with a vague purpose, and nothing else

A 24hr day is an artificial construct. DST is mostly an energy saving measure, and some also enjoy more daylight after leaving work.

> Please do basic research before accusing others of pedantry.

I certainly know the basics of DST and the earth's orbit. Thank you very much. These are the type of threads that tend to spawn from OP's style of comment, and I regret my reply.

Sorry, I need to learn to be more clear. I was not suggesting a gradual shifting of clocks each day. I was pointing out the silliness of shifting by an hour twice a year. My desired alternative is to not shift at all.

>OP seemed to be suggesting a gradual shifting of clocks each day

It's hard for me to see how it can be interpreted that way.

>These are the type of threads that tend to spawn from OP's style of comment,

Please don't blame OP for what you wrote, which is - to quote - "It’s called an approximation", and what you wrote now doesn't explain what you meant by that.

I responded in that fashion to mimic the OP's tone.

---

The fact that daylight saving time is an approximation for fixing sunrise to a specific time is common knowledge and should not require a thorough explanation. But for posterity [1] is a graph that illustrates the approximation.

[1]: http://thumbnails-visually.netdna-ssl.com/daylight-saving-ti...

Thank you for answering. Now let's discuss this answer.

The first question is: which specific time? This time will differ based on the timezone and geography. Because of timezones, sunrise time effectively makes a one-hour jump at the transition points, which makes this chart of yours look different for people living living close to timezone border vs. someone living in the center.

To that end, which time zone and which city was this chart made for? Because we'd need many charts like that to see the effect of DST on sunrise time. (Remember, timezones make sunrise/sunset times depend on longtitude (exact coordinates, actually) as well as latitude and time of year!).

Thankfully, some people have done just that[1][2] (note that [2] is interactive!).

As you can see by playing with [2], if your goal is to have sunrise before 7:00AM across the country on as many days as possible, then DST works against this goal.

Of course, one can always throw one's hands up in the air and say "it's an approximation". In the same sense, 0 is an approximation to any number -- just not a very good one.

The US foreign debt is approximately 0 dollars, if you don't talk about error margins.

Now, looking at the interactive chart at [2], do you really think that DST is a better approximation to "having the sun up at (your chosen time)" than doing nothing at all? Or shifting the whole timezone by an hour?

[1]http://mentalfloss.com/article/71521/heres-how-daylight-savi...

[2]http://andywoodruff.com/blog/where-to-hate-daylight-saving-t...

> The first question is: which specific time? This time will differ based on the timezone and geography.

That's not what it's about. The specific time is irrelevant - that's just an arbitrary number. The reasoning in the blog posts you link to is just based around making comparisons to another arbitrary number (7 AM).

Rather, the point is shape of the curve. DST makes the sunrise time approximate a constant line.

In other words, if you plotted the time difference between sunrise and "x o'clock" (for any x) for every day across the year, DST reduces the standard deviation of those values.

The argument is that circadian rhythm causes humans to naturally wake up near sunrise. Most people also wake up at some fixed time in order to start their workday (because businesses generally have fixed hours, and people wake up just before going to work). DST makes it so that the difference between this fixed time and 'sunrise' can be minimized over the year. Without DST, you will not be able to have a fixed wake-up time and also minimize the difference between that time and sunrise.

I don't think it's pedantic at all, as far as I'm concerned I find that light in the evening is a lot more important and useful than in the morning and clearly our life cycles do not match that at all. Where I am in the summer (with DST) we still have daylight past 9pm while in winter it's dark at 7. DST would need to be several hours more to roughly match that (and in my subjective opinion it does it the wrong way around, I want more daylight in the winter evenings). I say good riddance.

I don't think what you're suggesting in line with OP. If that is not the case, your comment is worded much more effectively.

> . . . in my subjective opinion it does it the wrong way around, I want more daylight in the winter evenings . . .

I believe this is because DST originated as an energy saving measure to maximize usage of morning light. [1] I tend to agree with you as well. If we're not trying to conserve energy in the evenings, DST doesn't make much sense.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time#History

Morning light regulates your circadian rhythm and is far more important than you make it sound.

That may be true but certainly having morning light brutally change twice a year can't be a great thing then? I always found the switch from DST to winter time pretty jarring for instance, you go from very dark mornings to much brighter ones.

In the end no matter how you look at it trying to match any form of "sunlight cycle" by merely offsetting time is bound to fail. It's not a translation you need, it's a homothety.

Well, we voted and we do not like it.

Losing an hour of sleep is bad for you, and having a mandated lost hour of sleep every year could be more than just bad for some people:

https://healthblog.uofmhealth.org/heart-health/why-daylight-...

> setting down at 8:30

uh, in France it's more like 10pm in Paris at the end of June, and 10:20 in Brest (western France).

France is also a full time zone West of where it should be.

Part of France is in the right timezone, and part isn't. It's Spain that's really crazy.

"Funny" story about that... We switched to Berlin time when Paris was occupied in 1940. We didn't go back to GMT after the war.

Same thing happened here in The Netherlands. We were in our very own little "Amsterdam Time" which was UTC+00:20 but switched to Berlin Time during the war and we never switched back.

Having lived both in France and a solar hour to the east of it (but still in CET), I find that France is exactly where it should be and most of CET is off by an hour or more. Moving the EU to permanent DST will fix some of this for me.

> I find that France is exactly where it should be and most of CET is off by an hour or more

How? The correct timezone is the one where the sun is closest to directly overhead at 12 noon.

The real problem is that 9 to 5 is a lopsided working day, because it's centred on 1 pm, not noon. DST just moves solar noon to 1 pm, when the correct fix would be to move the working day to 8 to 4.

As you explain, the "correct" timezone does not correspond to most people's preferences. Metropolitan France's position within its timezone is a better fit for my preferences than the positions of more easterly countries in the same timezone.

I don't care where the sun is at noon; I care where the sun is after work.

> I don't care where the sun is at noon; I care where the sun is after work.

Precisely, so it's the working day that should be changed, not the clock. The clock affect everyone, including people who do care where the sun is in the sky (e.g. those working outdoors).

At 1st of July sun sets in Amsterdam at 22.04 and rises at 5.22. Summertime doesn't make much of a difference. It's basically light all day. In winter it's the opposite. Just live with it and try not to be depressed. :-)

"it was just fine the way it was."

I agree. Before the nonsense about turning the clock twice a year was "invented".

"During World War I, in an effort to conserve fuel, Germany began observing DST on May 1, 1916." [0]

See, there was shortage of fuel, and they thought DST would save energy. I don't think anyone has any credible data to support that it does. This has been an ongoing experiment for a century. Maybe we all can declare the experiment over.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time_in_the_Un...

A net energy loss/gain analysis of DST would be interesting, at least from the consumption side. That could impact carbon emissions which would be relevant today, right?

Many analyses have been performed and the only thing they have agreed on is that the difference, whether more savings or extra waste, is miniscule: less than 1%

> less than 1%

On a global or national scale this can be a very large amount - calling it miniscuLe is a little disingenuous

No, what is meant it's so small, that no one can tell how big the difference is and more importantly, does DST waste or save energy.

Eh fair, was a little early in the morning and I misread the +- part

It's 1 to 4% energy cost based on https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/10.1162/REST_a_00131 Additionally, that study found increased pollution and associated costs.

I don't see how invoking the original (flawed) rationale has any relevance on whether or not it ended up being a good idea for other reasons.

It hasn't been a good idea for other reasons too. In fact, it has been a terrible idea for various.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=br0NW9ufUUw

I agree with you. I grew up in South Africa with no daylight savings time. In the summertime the sun would be up and shining by 5am and would set by 7:30pm.

Now that I've experienced daylight savings time in both the UK and NZ, I would much rather have a minor inconvenience twice a year to make the most of the sunny days.

It speaks volumes that we find it easier to redefine time than to go to bed and wake to earlier.

You know, I have a better idea then! Let's have DST year round! It both saves the hassle of moving the clock, and gives you the extra hour of sunlight in the winter months as well as summer months!

Russia tried going DST only, they had to switch back to winter time only because people hated summer time in the winter.

May a better idea would be winter time only in Northen Europe and symmer time only when you get further south.

We did that once: https://www.mercurynews.com/2016/10/30/the-year-daylight-sav...

I'm surprised it's unmentioned here. My recollection was that a kid got hit by a bus in the morning, and that ended that.

Thank you! I didn't know about that.

Sounds awesome, if you ask me. As a kid, I didn't care in the slightest what the world was like in the morning, but getting home from school in the dark made for pretty tiresome winters.

I think the children were used as an excuse to push something the legislators wanted yet again.

you can wake up at 4am but that doesn’t change the fact that society centres around 9-5

Exactly this. And if all of society moves forward an hour, then that's just the same as having DST.

I cant change the times the school of my kids start, so i cant change the time when i start working.

I do most of my sports outside, in the summer while it's still light, DST is a great! It's just wonderful to windsurf or kitesurfing till 22:30 in May, June and July.

Getting rid of DST means a lot let sporting hours for me...

Not really, since changing time is what allows you to wake up later for work.

> And countries should absolutely have the freedom to choose what suits them best.

Unfortunately that's not how the EU works.

You can't change the number of daylight hours in a day by fiddling with your clocks. That's just impossible. All DST does is move an hour of daylight from the morning to the evening.

> Bye-bye awesome summer afternoons with the sun setting down at 8:30

For whatever it's worth, there are plenty of people who hate this. The sun is still up when they're going to bed, meaning summer is a season of lost sleep.

I'm one of those few, because I have to get up really early, so I also gotta get to bed really early and I have trouble sleeping when it's light outside.

Or make work periods 10am - 6pm in the summer..

Is that not precisely what DST does?

It's the exact opposite. I can't understand the amount of people who have elementary problems comprehending which way the clock changes "geographically" speaking, and what it means in practise.

Most European countries did start using summer time until the late 70’ early 80’, I assure you eliminating summer time would be a non-issue.

Even with DST at about 60° North latitude we wake up in darkness during winter. But having sunsets after 10PM in summer is really nice.

> Pick the former? Say hello to waking up in darkness with the sun rising at 9 during winter.

If I recall correctly the EU prefers their members to choose this because most people prefer more daylight at the end of the day.

I hope they do, I don't mind the darkness in the morning but that extra hour of light at the end of the day helps me go outside after dinner instead of turning on the telly and doing nothing all evening.

I've always wanted to abolish not only DST, but time zones in general. Sure, it's cool that noon means the sun is high, but increasingly the cost of managing anything across zones (or across days, or both) is notably higher than the relatively rare cost of learning "I moved to a new state, my work hours are during daylight, 3pm-11pm".

When coordinating we can just use the same times. "Conference call will be at 5pm." "That's early for me, can we make it 6pm?" Instead of "Okay, call will be at 9am" "In what time zone?" "Eastern". "that's 6am for me, can we make it 8?" "You mean 10am? Sure".

I had a road trip to the grand Canyon. Nothing like crossing from Pacific, to Mountain, to AZ (with no DST) and into federal land in AZ (with DST). Coordinated with another couple coming to the same spot from a different direction. It was...non-trivial...and we often gave up on actually knowing when something was, being happy if we were coordinated within a few hours.

You will achieve nothing by getting rid of timezones, really.

Instead of calculating timezones, you will start to calculate when people actually want to sleep, which is actually harder without set "zones". So you end up with "awake/business zones" instead of timezones.

To make it even worse, these "awake zones" will start spanning multiple weekdays. So, when is Sunday, again? Is that the period of daylight that starts at 21:00 on Saturday and lasts until 09:00 Sunday? Or is it the period that starts at 21:00 on Sunday and lasts until 09:00 Monday? When's your business open, again?

Timezones are extremely useful.

Either way you still have to lookup the business hours. Timezone are dumb.

How do you feel about https://qntm.org/abolish , "So You Want To Abolish Time Zones"

We could make up a new system to make it equally confusing for everyone: https://www.swatch.com/en_gb/internet-time/

It's what I always suggest whenever someone doesn't know what to do when presented with a UTC timestamp I have them.

>> causes the question "What time is it there?" to be useless/unanswerable

The question should have been "what time can I call you" anyway. Not everyone works a 9-5. My in-laws get pissed if I call while they're napping and don't want to turn off their phones in case there's an emergency. Some of my friends work night-shifts in the medical field. I put my kids to bed early and my colleagues start their work day exceptionally late. You have to coordinate anyway because everyone is in a unique situation.

>> necessitates significant changes to the way in which normal people talk about time

And right now, how I talk about time varies depending on where in the state I am and what time of year it is and where in the state the person I'm talking to is.

I could go on. I'm sure there are complexities to eliminating time zones I haven't thought of, but honestly this sounds like they're trying to exaggerate the problem and it doesn't even sound that bad.

The article poses the question:

I want to call my Uncle Steve in Melbourne. What time is it there?

Google tells me it is currently 4:25am there, so I'd better not call.

The answer without time zones would be:

It's 18:30 UTC

Google tells me business hours are 23:00 to 03:00, so I'd better not call.

Abolishing time zones would make little difference to this kind of question, it will always rely on knowledge of local hours and on top of that your Uncle's schedule.

It would simplify a lot of coordination though.

Unlikely to happen any time soon IMO as people are attached to the status quo and have no big reason to change.

> I want to call my Uncle Steve in Melbourne. What time is it there? Google tells me it is currently 4:25am there, so I'd better not call.

Is he on day shift or night shift? Does he get up at 4am or 10am?

While switching everybody to the same time is probably impossible to coordinate, contacts would be incentivized to share calendars / schedules.

Sure, but for every example there is a perfect mirror example. Say you're on a phone call with your uncle Steve in Melbourne. At the end of the call, Steven says he will call you back at 18:30 tomorrow. If there was one global time zone, you wouldn't need to do any time conversion to know when to expect the call.

That’s what I meant by It would simplify a lot of coordination though, I agree zones don’t help this sort of question, if anything they hinder.

Main problem with getting rid of zones are day boundaries and people getting used to a 24 hour clock and arbitrary hours ( even the proposer here used am and pm!), so days would start at odd hours - at least the term noon would be a lot more accurate :) It would seem odd for Saturday say to start at 23:00 in some places though.

There's still the issue with a single solar period spanning multiple days in regions.

This alone is a good enough reason to abandon the idea, since whomever gets stuck in the regions with diurnal day changes will absolutely refuse to use it.

Something I hadn't considered, but you're right, that'd be a right pain in the ass.

Sure, 3rd shift workers deal with this regularly, but they're a relatively small percentage of the workforce (in the U.S., anyway).

Can you ELI5 this?

Let's say the world decides to follow UTC. In Hawaii, Midnight UTC is 2pm in the afternoon in our current system. So in the early "solar afternoon" it will switch from Monday to Tuesday.

So if you're working late on Tuesday you'd have to clarify or use some other phrase.

In many parts of the world it will e.g. turn from 23:59 Friday 17th to 00:00 Saturday 18th in the middle of lunch.

This means a simple term like "lunchtime on Saturday" is suddenly ambiguous/useless, since it could mean around 00:30 Saturday (shortly after local solar noon) or it could equally mean around 23:30 Saturday (shortly before local solar noon the following solar day).

Thanks! That's the first decent argument I've heard against this.

Then again, people would develop a convention within days. A month, tops.

For example having local time vs official time. This is what remote cities in western China are using. They've to use same time as east coast, but it makes no sense at all for them. So they plan everything around unofficial local time.

That's an option, but I was thinking we would probably agree to call the days we've always called Thursday "Thursday" locally.

How do you know which was originally Thursday the earlier or later part? Or do you have to calculate it based off old UTC offset? What if you move across the globe? What if you talk to somebody online and they say they're doing smth on Thursday? How do you know which Thursday is theirs?

> Then again, people would develop a convention within days. A month, tops.

That's exactly my point -- the convention they adopt will most likely be to abandon UTC in favor of some local time. At which point, we end up with an ad hoc reinvention of timezones.

We don't have that problem with "Midnight on Saturday", so we'll solve it for "lunchtime on Saturday"

Yes we do..... if someone said that I'd ask if they meant "is that Friday evening or Saturday evening?"

(using "evening" because I assume more people stay up past midnight than wake up before midnight)

We do have the midnight problem. Every time I say something like, "Midnight on Saturday" the response is "Friday night or Sunday morning?"

Yes, midnight technically "belongs" to the day that follows, but it's often used informally to mean the end of the day.

Also, "midnight" has a defined time. It's 12:00 AM. "Lunchtime" does not have a defined time. It's sometimes 11:00 AM, or sometimes 12:30PM. It's a fuzzy time of day.

And the problem isn't just with lunch on a "split" day. What about phrases like, "After work on Friday" (when Friday begins at solar 17:00)? Is that gonna be a different day for Suzie who ends her shift at 23:00 UTC vs. Tommy who clocks out at 01:00 UTC?

What would quickly happen is that people would still use the Sun's position to demarcate the days, and we're back to days starting at different times of the clock in different places. And back to confusion when scheduling across large distances.

Look, the Earth is round and the sun rises at different times for everyone. Having discrete time-zones is probably the most elegant way of dealing with that problem. Any attempt to enforce UTC across the world just moves all the math to the shadows. We're still gonna have to do it, though. At least let's standardize it.

In Spain, people typically do stuff at and beyond midnight (some drinks, partying, etc) and this is absolutely a non-issue. Everyone assumes "Saturday night at 12:30" to mean what technically is Sunday, 00:30.

For example, this is a typical party flyer: https://www.goabase.net/party/encela2crew-presents-vinyl-res...

The 1:00 there refers to 1:00 of the 21st and the 7:00 refers to 7:00 of the 21st. No one would appear there the previous day.

Yes very true that’s probably the best argument against it.

Well, Google would tell you something more like "business hours are 23:00 to 24:00 and 00:00 to 03:00 Monday to Thursday, 00:00 to 03:00 Friday, closed Saturday and 23:00 to 24:00 Sunday".

Some of the points are valid concerns (no system will be perfect as long as we rely on the sun as being significant, which I'm expecting to be pretty normal for quite a while), but the author overcomplicates and overemphasizes the initial point.

"what time is it there?" isn't trying to figure out what time it is, it's trying to say "Should I expect my uncle to be awake?" _and_ then has to rely on a combination of google and internal expectations about a "normal" day to make that determination. In a single zone, you instead need to know how long the sun has been up there, which "4am" is just a shorthand to answer. Obviously if "4am" starts answering "how far away from now is it" (which the current system doesn't answer) and stops answering ("how long since sunrise") then we'll adopt another system to answer that second question. Given that the author literally consults a computer to manage our current system, doing so to get the answer in a new system doesn't sound any harder (and we'd quickly adopt a shorthand that we don't use today because we have nowhere to use it).

All other complaints build from that one. I don't want to minimize the complications of dealing with "days", but at the same time it's crazy to pretend that we're doing it just fine now. It fails ALL THE TIME now. Package shipping, news articles, etc. Heck, Fake News stories for April 1 now span a 36-48 hour period.

Pretending the current system works better just because we're used to the quirks is a false premise. Saying it would hard to switch is valid, but it's a short time high cost vs a perpetual but lower cost. Look at the US and the metric system, or recognizing that you can't find a reasonable definition of "planet" and include Pluto. (Okay, that last doesn't really have costs the way we lose multi-million dollar probes or smaller but more common errors in measurement conversions, but it does show how much resistance people will put up to avoid temporary discomfort).

Does anyone think we'll get LESS global? Does anyone think our current "day"-based system will work when there is more than a colony on Mars? (That may be 50 -100 years out, but I'm point the direction of the trend). At some point sunlight-based systems cost way more than we get for it. If someone doesn't think we're there yet, that doesn't mean the problem won't happen, so these same issues will still exist when we get there (in their mind).

Only helpful while we're (nearly) all on the same celestial body.

What matters is whether someone is by convention asleep, working, or relaxing.

I expect we'll plug UTC into some software to determine exactly that. Or more directly, ping their calendar to see when they designate themselves available.

> Instead, solar days are now formally given hybrid names, as in "it's Friday/Saturday today".

This is also useful when living on the 28-hour day schedule.

https://xkcd.com/320/

"I want to call my Uncle Steve in Melbourne. What time is it there? Google tells me it is currently 4:25am there. Does that mean I can call him? I don't know."

Google can also direct me to other very intuitive tools like this: https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/sunearth.html

I think the 'Reduction to absurd' argument went a little too far in the article you link.

More practical solutions are like the (in)famous Internet Time by Swatch.

The day was divided by 1000 beats and it was the same all over the world.

Call me at @500 was a perfectly valid answer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time

For most people international time coordination issues are rare, rare enough that it's more valuable to have a local time, to tell someone you're meeting at 13:30 so they have a natural feeling for the fact it's comfortably after lunch, but not too late.

For everything else there's UTC.

Every now and then I'm on a complicated trip and wish everyone would just use UTC. The other 48 weeks or so of the year, local time has a lot of advantages.

You’re free to use GMT if you want. The rest of us would prefer it not to change from Friday to Saturday in the middle of lunch.

Why would it matter if it is technically midnight Saturday in the middle of lunch? Does the name of the day affect you?

Remember that the premise here is that nothing would change other than the labels we assign to periods of time.

Business days/hours are currently labeled using the time system based on solar time: We are open Monday~Friday 9AM~5PM Saturday 11AM~2PM etc.

Without timezones, this would be really confusing. You'd have to say something like "We are open from Day1 9PM until Day2 5AM, etc." which can be annoying.

I would prefer one time zone. Even with current multiple time zone you still have to look up for the business hour/days. You can't just assume business day mean monday-friday 9am-5pm.

Indeed, it's important enough to move the date line so that weekdays in Tonga and Samoa (etc.) align with New Zealand. If I understand it correctly, this had to do with the fact that the sabbath is taken seriously by many peoples.

You used the word midnight. Mid-night. Middle of the night. Definitely not middle of lunch!

As others have pointed out, there are two questions that need answering: "What time is it where I'm not?" and "Is this a reasonable time for activity N where I'm not?"

If we drop timezones, then to find out whether N is areasonable time for (say) a meeting a quarter of the world over, you need to look up either sunrise/set times or standard business hours (which are different everywhere anyway) and judge by that. Now, you just have to look up the time difference to you.

It would make it harder to keep track of day/night time. Human activity is mostly happening during day time. In the past sundials were used to keep track of time. Clocks are just a modern replacement for sundials that's more precise and reliable.

These days human activity is not limited to mostly day time only and i suspect it will be less relevant in the future.

Day time as in 8-5? Well, most people still work or study in those hours. Day time as in waking hours 6-23? That's when vaaaaast majority of stuff happens.

On top of that, there's more and more research coming up why it's healthy to stick to solar day. I guess solar day will be more and more relevant and we're having (if not already past) peak nightlife.

So if someone prefer to solar day then do it, its just with one time zone this solar day will be different for everyone.

We have solar day right now. Solar day being 20-04 would be kinda shitty. Is it monday or tuesday? Or do we switch from monday to tuesday at different hour in each location?

On top of that, vast majority of population does not care about that at all. Why inconvenience majority for benefit few people will have?

Not shitty for me.

>Is it monday or tuesday? Or do we switch from monday to tuesday at different hour in each location?

Lets say we choose the UTC date time as the standard then it's the same utc date for, and switch from Monday to Tuesday at the same utc hour for everyone.

I think its nice and i hope someone out there working on this. They have my support.

As other poster said in this thread.. Let's say day switches at noon in your location. You and a fried decide to go out for lunch. Do you meet for lunch on monday or tuesday?

Does the day start with monday morning and ends with tuesday evening? Or is it monday evening in solar morning and tuesday morning in solar evening? Does morning and evening still hold any meaning? Or does morning and evening hours differ in every location?

Like with any other meeting, i will ask or provide with the specific time and location. Even with current situation, when someone invite me for lunch, I will still need to ask what time specifically.

>Does the day start with monday morning and ends with tuesday evening?

Its up to preference. For some one who care about sun light, he/she might start their day during the sun rise whatever the the time is in that location.

>Does morning and evening still hold any meaning? Or does morning and evening hours differ in every location?

This one is hard to predict until it actually implemented

So what does, "You want to meet for lunch on Saturday?" mean?

Do they want to meet for lunch on the afternoon that starts Saturday or the one that ends it?

> Why would it matter if it is technically midnight Saturday in the middle of lunch? Does the name of the day affect you?

But... but... you just complained about having to know it's 6am in another place!

Is today Monday or Monday-Tuesday or Sunday-Monday?

I work with coworkers all over the world. Currently it's Monday afternoon where I'm at, and I'm in a meeting with someone in Australia where it's Tuesday morning. Now this is an edge case. For most people, everything between sunrise and sunset is one day. One business day has one name / datecode that's easy to refer to.

I would greatly benefit from using UTC across the board (and in my mind I do a lot of reasoning in UTC) but that would not make sense for 99% of the population around me. Unlike machines, the human time cycle is bound to day-night cycles, so it makes sense to follow that at least approximately.

Well we could say right now it's 15:72pm on the 47th of Octember, nothing has changed but the assigned labels, right?

That's a good point, but it's not like midnight makes the most sense as the start of the day either. If you're talking after midnight, most people aren't going to consider what happened 1 hour ago as "yesterday at 11 pm."

It's not really important when the switch between days occurs as long as it happens when most people are asleep. Otherwise people are just going to invent 'solar day' and make everything much more confusing.

I mean China makes it work and it spans 5 time zones. It's not "Friday to Saturday" in the middle of lunch but it's not far from it.

Well technically something like 99% of the population lives in zones that map to "theoretical" UTC+7/8, and it's not as if local populations had their word to say anyway--switching Tibet to China's time after its invasion was definitely more political rather than practical

5<<24

ISPs commonly set all equipment and systems that log, or alert, or do just about anything, all to UTC. makes things a lot simpler. It does mean that things like maintenance notification need to be manually converted to local customer time by a NOC, though.

How can you argue for such a thing while at the same time using am/pm (opposed to 15:00-23:00 etc.)? O:)

Uh....advanced stupidity? You're right, that was terrible. I tried the 24 hour clock for several years but got annoyed that no one else understood, (or worse, thought I was trying to pretentiously declare military service that I haven't done) so I don't even notice anymore.

But yes, 24 hour clock is more clear and less aggravating. (11:59pm is followed by 12:00am, and 12:59am is followed by 1:00am? Madness)

Just use UTC. This is routine in aviation. Although consumers see airline schedules in local time, behind the scenes everything is done in UTC.

This is such a terrible idea that would cause so much confusion. I’m suprised someone always mentions this suggestion in time zone discussions.

How would being on the same time help anyone trying to coordinate? Instead of remembering Australia is X hours ahead you would have to memorize the exact time business starts/ends in every locale.

Which you have to do anyway, because not everyone works 8-17.

Not really. Just use a safe zone inside general hours.

No, you still need to know the other person safe zone is.

In rare cases; otherwise, business day convention, right along with a ton of other conventions make local timezones a total win.

Going with one time for everyone would require a lot more information.

I work across zones and continents a lot. This is not hard.

Besides, moot point. One time stamp will never fly politically. I will not support an effort to attempt it either.

Different business have different business day and different open hour. Either way you still have to Look up this information.

China got this right with one time zone.

I will support the effort to attempt this.

Good luck.

China is one nation. Having done that, of course lookups are always needed. They are not in most places.

> China is one nation

Got to to start from somewhere.

Okay, someone tells you they work the night shift -- what time that happens is location dependent and involves you looking up sunrise/sunset and guessing from there. Or you could just have time zones.

You have to look it up either way. This just makes it easier to communicate.

The only people I know that want to get rid of timezones are technical people, often programmers.

Which is crazy to me, because we literally invented computers to solve the coordination issue with timezones. Getting rid of timezones just offloads the difficulty back to our brains.

1 - I thought the primary initial use of modern computers was artillery calculations, not timezones? I don't recall Babbage's goal, but I doubt it was timezones.

2 - While technical people are often the most vocal, anyone that deals with spanning timezones tends to hate them. Aviation, shipping, scheduling, offices that span timezones - all groups that aren't getting smaller.

3 - "Getting rid of timezones just offloads the difficulty back to our brains." How does getting rid of timezones get rid of computers?

> anyone that deals with spanning timezones tends to hate them. Aviation, shipping, scheduling, offices that span timezones - all groups that aren't getting smaller.

I think you're confusing the map with the territory. What these people hate is that their job requires coordinating resources in far-flung parts of the world, all with different waking and operating hours. If time-zones go away, they still have to deal with the fact that a plane isn't going to depart Shanghai until an hour after sunrise, or that the post office won't deliver the packages until just before solar noon. But now they have to keep track of the offsets in each city manually instead of applying the agreed-upon TZ offset.

Time-zones acknowledge a fact about our world. Humans living in different places wake up, work, play, and sleep at different times. These times are (loosely) encoded in the offset. Get rid of that offset, put everyone on UTC, and you lose some information in the process.

Sorry, I poorly worded that (and even used the word literally. Sigh). My bad.

I meant that we invented computers to do mathematical calculations, of which timezones are a great example.

Getting rid of the timezones doesn't mean we get rid of computers. It just means all benefits we get from using computers for timezones are now lost. and we have to do mental calculations to figure out what 4:30am means at any given location.

It's really not that hard. Just ask Google to translate the time for you. Which I feel also demonstrates that the cost are not particularly high either. It mostly effects programmers and doesn't really require ongoing costs once a system is setup to deal with it. If it's too hard for the programmers we probably need to write some better libraries.

I agree but now that you're on that, why don't get rid of the confusing "am/pm" thing and embrace a 24-hour clock?

I was casually in favour of this; I recently mentioned it to my mother in passing, and she pointed out that the UK had trialled this in 1968-1971. She was (surprisingly to me) immediately opposed to it - living in Scotland, she recalled that it was basically dark until 10am, and resulted in a bunch of upheaval as children were no longer able to travel safely to school by themselves, among other things.

That makes no sense. The clocks change in the summer, not the winter, and in summer Scotland sees about 20 hours of sunlight.

Clocks change twice a year, not once a year.

Huh? How could they change once a year? The point is winter time is GMT and summer time is the change. The UK did remain on BST once, but that was during the war (interestingly it also went to double summer time in the summer).

He means the clocks are offset in the summer and not the winter. If we stop changing the clocks and just stick on GMT all year it won't affect anything in winter.

Technically correct. But it's more like "clocks change once a year and then that change is reverted"

We had 4 hours of night in the highlands and that was hard to sleep through.

Sure, but in the case I was talking about the UK switched to BST (i.e. GMT+1) year-round. This has the effect of making it darker on winter mornings.

Seems like they picked summer time, not winter time as the default

They could push the school start time back. It would be better for kids everywhere, not just Scotland.

I figure it will not be easy to change the school start time, since parents are also need to change behavior with the school start time change.

In the end maybe this will be easier to just have a consistent schedule to change the school start time. In the end we invent DST again.

It really would not be difficult to move school later - school hours are already out of sync with 9-5 of 9-6 or the other hours parents work, if anything it’d be welcome.

Of course it would. School starts at roughly the same time as normal work hours. Most schools start a little before here to allow parents get to work after dropping off their kids.

You couldn't just change school hours in isolation without causing a lot of disruption.

School hours are 9-3:20 where I live, so they are nowhere near in line with working hours as you need time to get to work and not many jobs finish that early. Most schools run breakfast clubs and after school clubs as a result.

School began at 7:50 am for us. So that time worked well for parents and 9-5 sort of times. It gave enough room for 8-4 or 8-5 parents and long commute parents. Or parents who want to drop off and come back home first. If you make the school start time 9 am as well, if a parent helps their kid get ready and/or has to be around until the kid leaves for the bus and/or has to drop them off, they wouldn’t be able to unless their commute is short.

I don’t think school times can be pushed much. Maybe 30 min max without seriously disrupting parent’s schedules if that’s a concern.

> In the end we invent DST again.

But without many of its cons :)

Having a patchwork of moving schedules across society, from schools to businesses to recreational activities is far worse than the inconvenience of simply changing your clocks twice a year.

Disagree. Not disrupting my already fragile sleep schedule twice a year is worth it.

I mean, if your work hours shift to deal with school time changes your sleep schedule is going to be disrupted anyway…

Why is your sleep disrupted by DST? Why not start and end sleep at hours that fit both summer and winter time?

It's your choice if you want to adjust your sleep hours to DST, you don't have to.

Interestingly enough, this is exactly the case in many parts of China; schools and organizations have a summer timetable and a winter timetable. I have never found this to be inconvenient, it's kind of comparable to shops having different open times on different weekdays.

It could go hand in hand with more flexible working hours for parents. Admittedly not possible for all jobs, but something to strive for in most

Alright, in order to not have to change the clocks we'll need to usher in massive societal changes that will be annoying to everyone for some hard to quantify greater good.

Changing the clocks twice yearly is disruptive but keeping it only in the northern reaches of Europe so that children can walk to school in the winter light is even more disruptive.

You can’t have everything but at least you can use the changes to move towards a society where kids get up later and parents can work more flexibly. You need to start somewhere. Or are you disputing the benefits of more sleep for children and flexible working for adults?

Annoying for everyone? Talk for yourself, I'd love some flexibility when it comes to job hours, and I'd love my kids to start school later in the mornings.

Jobs should accommodate to people's lives, and not the other way around.

You must mean push the school time forward? pushing it back would just mean they spend more time in darkness.

I'm being needlessly pedantic (sorry) but "back" and "forward" in time is a confusing concept best thought of in terms to "traveling back in time" (decrement your clock, move to an earlier time) "traveling forward in time" (increment your clock, move to a later time).

Saying "push back" is a very confusing phrase to me because I don't actually know what you mean and need to pick it up from context clues which are not always right.

It seems correct to me. I found a good analogy on a StackExchange answer[1]: pushing 'back' means pushing something away from the current point in time. Bringing 'forward' means bringing it closer to the current point.

So 'pushing back' school start times would mean that school started later in the morning, when it was lighter.

[1] https://english.stackexchange.com/a/157003

Isn’t it confusing either way? Pushing school forward sounds right to you, but to me that sounds like making the school times earlier. It’s a bit uncomfortable for me to imagine it meaning the opposite. Obviously I’m saying that light heartedly but pushing back is what sounds natural to me. Like “push back a meeting”.

"spring back fall forward" isn't much help either since you can fall back as well as forward

Changing the school time would wreck havoc on a host of other things.

And changing everything time doesn't?

So kids can go to school one hour later, so they'll stay in bed one hour longer. But this means that they can go to bed one hour later?

This means we'll do the DST switch anyways, but without changing the clocks. Nothing gained...

Just open schools later in winter then. Also that's really just due to the choice of time zone, not how clocks are changed in the summer.

So if everything will switch to a later time in winter, it's the same effect as moving clocks forward in the summer?

It's not so easy to start school later, because the parents might have fixed entry/exit times at work. DST sucks but it has the advantage that everything synchronizes on when to switch.

Don't change the clocks, just do everything an hour later!

Seems like the worst of both worlds.

Why? If you want to do some particular thing during sunlight, schedule it that way yourself, don't force everyone else to change our clocks and lose an hour of sleep for your convenience

I feel the same way, the further north you are the bigger a factor it becomes. I can see issues with icy roads on winter mornings too. Daylight savings makes sense, just not everywhere. The change is happening now though.

Even though it would lead to darker mornings I'd still support adopting summer time here in Ireland. Dark evenings when you get home from work are just too depressing.

> I feel the same way, the further north you are the bigger a factor it becomes.

On the other hand, the further north you go, the more they already deal with this. DST or not, kids in Alaska go to school in the dark for a good part of winter. Somehow they survive.

It depends. If they keep wintertime, that won’t happen

According to a quick internet search, Scotland has about 8 hours of sunlight in the winter and about 18 hours in the summer. You'd have to shift by about 4 hours to keep sunrise at the same time in both mid winter and mid summer. I'm guessing that's not what they were doing and that right around December 21st the kids are going to school in the dark no matter what, or else the sun was coming up at 3 am in the summer. Either way, a one hour shift wasn't making that big of a difference.

An hour can make a big difference! Inverness gets about 6:30 daylight during the winter, with sunrise at about 9:00 and sunset around 3:30. Shifting to year-round summer time would move sunrise to 10:00; an hour can be the difference between "I can see things" twilight and "It's basically night".

I'm not really that bothered myself, having worked weird hours for a long time. But I can definitely see problems it could cause.

The idea of a trial was again brought up in 2010 - 2012, it was rejected due to the same reasons, I think Scotland weren’t happy about it. https://services.parliament.uk/bills/2010-12/daylightsaving....

> living in Scotland, she recalled that it was basically dark until 10am, and resulted in a bunch of upheaval as children were no longer able to travel safely to school by themselves

Meanwhile, in Scandinavia, this is the reality of November, December and January for everyone. Entire countries manage to go to school and work when it's dark outside...

>given member states until April to decide if they will remain on summer or winter time

Oh this will be fun. Imo every country should be in the same time zone but I can imagine say Netherlands stay in summmer, Belgium in winter, Germany in summer, Poland in winter. Sounds fun!

I hope it's just a vague article and they mean member countries from the same timezone should decide together where they stay. Given there are 3 timezones in the EU it shouldn't be a big problem (or yes)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_European_Summer_Time#/...

It’s not like EU countries are all in the same timezone now...? Presumably the big countries will coordinate and the small ones will follow suit where it makes economic sense.

This is also an opportunity to fix timezone assignments that don’t work very well at the edges: for example Spain shouldn’t be on CET.

If you look at the map in the article, currently the largest part of the EU is in one timezone, which is increadibly convenient. It would be sad to have that split apart. Especially if that means, that the time zones are split apart in any other matter than an clear east-west sorting.

Working with team with 1h time zone difference on a daily basis. Makes little difference. I guess 2h would be more noticeable but still fine.

OTOH 6h difference is a real killer. You have very small window for real time communication. The fallback is email but that can be very inefficient.

Countries in the north have long hours of light in summer and long hours of darkness in winter. Shifting time by one hour doesn't seem to make any difference, but I live in the south so I have no direct experience. We have light from about 5 AM to 10 PM in June with DST. That's very convenient. Maybe I'd go for double DST, even more convenient: people still sleep here at 6 AM. DST in winter would mean to get out in the dark at 8 AM, Scandinavia like. I don't look forward to it, but I don't look forward to darkness at 9 PM in summer and useless light at 4 AM. So I voted for keeping the current system (I lost) and for permanent DST (a useless vote because it will be decided country by country).

From somebody living in Spain - we quite enjoy our extra hours of useful (evening) sunlight, thank you very much!

Those "extra hours of sunlight" you "have" are defined by the time you start to work, not by timezone. If you have tendency to start late and you want to hack the tendency by re-numbering hours, you will get to the same situation you are now soon.

It's a mechanism very similar to inflation, but somehow more silly. Who would say that the only way to enjoy sun in the evening is to get up early!

I do agree, but the time I start work is unfortunately decided by society, not me.

You can change the time zone or simultaneously change all schedules for all public transport, all schools, all kindergartens, all universities, all hospitals, all work places, all industries, all radio & TV channels, and so forth and so on.

I hope you get the point.

Spaniard here. CET is perfectly fine. Time is just a convention, and sharing a timezone is better.

Spain has adapted to living in the "wrong" timezone by doing many activities one hour or so later than is common in other countries, in order to match the sun's actual position.

A lot of stereotypes come from not understanding that we don't do things late, we do them at their proper time and it is the clocks that are wrong.

This would be a good opportunity to fix the timezone.

It's not just a matter of economic sense, it's also an issue of whether children are walking to and from school in the dark (or how dark, or how much time spent in the dark, etc).

Compare Naples: https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/italy/naples

And Stockholm: https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/sweden/stockholm

Some people in HN seem to have the opinion that businesses should just adjust their working hours... but isn't that what DST does? It coordinates the change of business working hours across many businesses.

Children will walk to+from school in the dark regardless of summer/winter-time in Sweden.

So glad we are about to get rid of this nonsense.

But why should we have to lose this benefit? If Sweden or Germany doesn't want DST, good. Vote to abolish it. In your own country. But why should Italy and Spain be forced to do the same?

It's obviously a rhetorical question, and unfortunately it just demonstrates with comical intensity how the EU works.

> If Sweden or Germany doesn't want DST, good. Vote to abolish it. In your own country. But why should Italy and Spain be forced to do the same?

Currently they can't because DST is an EU regulation. This action is about removing the regulation. Individual states are then free to do whatever they want.

This is why this whole EU thing began - Finland wanted to get rid of DST but couldn't due to the EU regulation so Finland went to the EU to have it removed and now it will be.

Kids walking to school in the dark is normal in Sweden, especially in the northern parts, so as a Swede I am not sure what the big deal is. Just make sure they get plenty of breaks during the school day when the sun is up.

There's tons of legacy timezone pickers that bundle together cities like Amsterdam, Berlin, Brussels, etc etc... Often, users in smaller countries have to pick a neighboring country's capital city since their own is not listed.

I really hope countries who are currently sharing a time zone don't split ways, or computer clocks and calendars will be doomed to be "maybe off by one hour?" for a decade at least.

If you're handling timezones, and you're not using tz files, you deserve any pain heading your way. Timezone rules change constantly and trying to roll your own is disastrous. (And I say that in the grave baritone voice of personal experience.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tz_database

Tz is great indeed but what if you have to interface with code/devices not using it and relying on a static timezone database ?

Well, the only workable solution for those is to never change any timezone again ever. According to the changelog of tzdata on my system any such device/code older than four months is fucked already.

I'm not sure it's reasonable to expect society to freeze because "assumptions in legacy code".

Obviously! But that doesn't help users of legacy systems!

Not to mention not really cleverly designed connected devices. I work with connected meteorological stations which use the local timezone where the station is installed instead of UTC to label their records...

I know that here in Belgium the decision will also keep the choices of our neighbouring countries in mind and likely involve talks with them. I do think this will eventually will be the case for a lot of countries.

I find it also kind of ironic because when Europe does not give countries the individual choice people complain about how it forces its will. And now countries have that choice it’s also not good.

Not a chance that the Dutch won't follow whatever the Germans will choose.

Now Belgium... I could see Flanders move to summertime and the Walloons join the French in going for wintertime.

I'd imagine the Benelux countries would stay together as there is so much cooperation between them.

>> The decision to tackle the issue was prompted after the Commission launched an online survey. Some 4.6 million Europeans answered the survey — three million of those respondents were from Germany — with 80 percent of them voting to scrap the practice.

At first glance that approach appears to be a deeply flawed way to make policy which affects 28 member states.

What would happen if the commission started asking for more policy-making input from citizens via online surveys?

Online surveys are a horrible idea for this kind of information gathering. You have effectively zero idea if the respondents are even in the EU. All it takes is a VPN subscription to completely trash an online survey of this nature.

funny argument. you think it's a horrible idea, propose a flawed way to do it, and debunk it to serve your initial idea. :)

how you do think online voting is done? you really think a simple VPN is enough?

oh, and btw.. I send my tax statement online. let's hope the russians don't have a VPN connection to Switzerland :)

One doesn't even need a VPN -- anyone can submit a response. It's basically on the honor code.

https://ec.europa.eu/info/consultations_en

So? It's not a vote, it's a consultation. The idea being that anyone can give their input on the matter so it doesn't matter who is responding. The voting part, if it comes to that, comes later by the European Parliament.

Note that the European Parliament can't initiate legislation[1], and the Council appears to be able to ignore Parliament's opinion.

"The European Parliament may approve or reject a legislative proposal, or propose amendments to it. The Council is not legally obliged to take account of Parliament’s opinion but in line with the case-law of the Court of Justice, it must not take a decision without having received it"

[1] http://www.europarl.europa.eu/about-parliament/en/powers-and...

Note that you quoted the special "Consultation" procedure instead of the ordinary legislative procedure where EP has more power.

According to the page, the consultation procedure "is applicable in a limited number of legislative areas, such as internal market exemptions and competition law".

There seems to be a distinct lack of evidence that the veto powers are actually used, though; the backroom deals are alive and well?

A dearth of legislative vetoes: Why the Council and Parliament have been reluctant to veto Commission legislation http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2016/10/25/a-dearth-of-leg...

Legislative Scrutiny? The Political Economy and Practice of Legislative Vetoes in the European Union https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jcms.12252

Sure. At the same time they provide useful input from real users too. Humans are good at spotting fake from real input on this kind of surveys. In the end it is merely a way of including ideas and details that sometimes are overlooked.

Source: I've supported some of the European Union activities.

Online surveys are a horrible idea for this kind of information gathering

It skews the demographic towards people who spend alot of time online and like to do surveys. Most working people won't have the time or even know it's there. They might as well set policy by which memes get the most likes.

TimeZone McClockFace

> What would happen if the commission started asking for more policy-making input from citizens via online surveys?

They already do. At any given point in there there are multiple ongoing consultations[0]. It actually works fine.

[0] https://ec.europa.eu/info/consultations_en

I can't help but think that citizens giving their views on the

"Public consultation on the Evaluation of the Urban Waste Water Treatment Directive"

isn't quite at the same level as getting rid of daylight savings time.

Everything still has to go through the EU Parliament, no need to panic...

> Everything still has to go through the EU Parliament, no need to panic...

As if the EU Parliament has never voted for half-baked ideas that have disproportionate impact for its member states?

Half-baked or not, the point is that everyone gets a say

...then it goes to trilogue[1] for some horse-trading behind closed doors, after which the Council can do whatever it likes[2]?

[1] http://www.europarl.europa.eu/ordinary-legislative-procedure...

[2] http://www.europarl.europa.eu/about-parliament/en/powers-and...

Why don’t the countries just decide for themselves. Why should the EU matter on this?

Because some times, when there's a way A and a way B, it's better if all are doing B, rather than some A and some B, even if A is better than B.

Better for whom?

Because EU members, when they joined, signed away some rights for the privilege of being part of the EU, since you know, EU membership comes with a ton of benefits.

Some of these rights that have been delegated to the EU are economical, and time zone management probably falls in the EU jurisdiction.

And, as the other poster mentioned, standardization is good.

It may seem like they're throwing policy to the wind but something to consider is that the events leading up to the assessment of DST, as well as the public consultation on the matter, were down to both citizens initiative and feedback as well as Member States directly appealing to the commission, as Lithuania asked for a review on the matter to take into account regional differences and Finland asked for it to be abandoned all together[0]. The matter is now left for the European Parliament and by extension MEPs from individual Member States to vote on, all in all it's like an extended referendum that then needs to be voted on in Parliament, everybody from citizens to elected officials get a say.

It's also not too concerning that Germany ended up with 3 million of the citizens consultation vote, it's only a 4% participation rate for Germany and while 25 other Member States only had a participation rate of less than 1% those that voted were overwhelmingly (>75%) in favour of abolishing DST, with only Cyprus, Greece, and Malta being on the fence (with around 50/50%)[1]. It's also the highest amount of responses so far of any public consultation.

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

[1] http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-18-5302_en.htm

>> while 25 other Member States only had a participation rate of less than 1% those that voted were overwhelmingly (>75%) in favour of abolishing DST

(Bearing in mind the historical low in the 2014 European elections) how many EU citizens actually knew there was a consultation about this?

In any case, asking for responses to a survey if respondants think "X" should be abolished looks to be pretty much the textbook case for selection bias.

I suspect the alternative would be to simply not have the online poll, without anything replacing it. That's likely how it was in the 90s.

I'm not in favor of permanently being on Summer time, which is one of the options. Humans are already too disconnected from the physical world, I'd hate to see us completely lose the association of "Noon" with the Sun being at it's highest point in the sky. Yeah, I know. Hopeless romantic...

But I'd love to see the end of Daylight Saving Time. I hate the biannual screwing of my body clock.

Summer time only for me. I have no interest in it getting dark near 5pm. (SF Bay Area)

I am in NYC, which is pretty far east in the timezone (although not as east as others), and I still vote for DST being the permanent time.

Boston is quite a bit further east (and north). Personally, I'd go for year-round DST (or Atlantic Time which would effectively be the same thing).

You'll never resolve individual preferences though. Some won't want sun at 4AM in the summer; others won't want dark at 4PM in the winter [ADDED: or kids waiting around for school buses in pitch dark]. Get far enough north (and much of Europe is much further north) and there isn't enough light to go around at some times of the year.

I used to care more. Now my schedule is mostly flexible enough that I can largely choose when in the day I want it to be light.

Permanent DST improves both of your examples (sun rising too early in the summer and setting too early in the winter).

The argument against permanent DST in Boston is how dark it would be when kids go to school.

Of course the counterarguments are "Alaskans do it" and "you can just adjust school schedules (and the work schedules of all the affected parents...)". In theory, those are both options, but are less desirable for many than the status quo

Or in the UK where it's dark by 4pm in mid-winter. Give me back my daylight

But if it shifts forward it's be dark in the morning till 9.30am.

I hate to break this to you but at least in continental Europe, you don't find a big area where the sun is at its highest point in the sky.

The CET timezone has that property for the town of Goerlitz or, to a slightly less extend, Vienna. That means almost all of Germany, France, and Spain doesn't already have that property.

Looking at this map[1], it doesn't seem that bad. I mean sure, France, Spain and Benelux could move to +0, but other than that the time zones seem to match reasonably well to solar time all things considered. For example both Berlin and Rome seem to be pretty well matched. Notably it would seem like using summer time would make everything worse, shifting the time zones in wrong direction.

[1] http://blog.poormansmath.net/images/SolarTimeVsStandardTimeV...

Summer time is a better match for Italian habits. Business hours are 9 to 18, lunch break at 13. The South of the country has meals at least an hour later than the North. I hope we move to UTC+2.

> Humans are already too disconnected from the physical world, I'd hate to see us completely lose the association of "Noon" with the Sun being at it's highest point in the sky.

This has never really been the case to begin as a wide (geographical) range of countries is part of the same time zone, meaning for instance that noon in Spain is not really noon.

In France, the norm is to start work three/four hours before noon and finish six/seven hours after noon (and of course do stuff after work but not before). If we stay on winter time, I can say goodbye to sunlight for most of the year.

>In France, the norm is to start work three/four hours before noon and finish six/seven hours after noon

You work 9-11 hour days? Doesn't france have a legally defined 35 hour work week and other, fairly stringent laws re max hours / day?

It's 35 hours excluding a 2 hours lunch break, for example 9-12 14-18.

The 35 hour work week is mostly implemented by getting additional vacation (on top of the base 25 days off) and (at least for engineers) some contractually agreed overtime (that is already included in the yearly salary you negociate).

For example, I have a legal 35 hour per week contract with 38h30 of work per week, the difference being compensated by about 15 additional days off and the rest paid in overtime.

Where I work (large private company) working from 9 to 18/19 with a good hour of lunch break is quite standard (with administrative people tending to work more form 8 to 17).

Most qualified jobs have a 39h/week contract (with extra vacation day to compensate), and among those people many seem to do much more with no extra pay (without realizing they actually get a pretty shitty pay for the amount of time they stay at work).

Ponferrada, Spain (42°33′N) has the same time as Skopje, Republic of Macedonia (42°0′N) (both are on CEST); however, in Ponferrada the sun passes through the meridian at 2:20pm today while in Skopje it does at 12:28pm.

https://www.timeanddate.com/astronomy/spain/ponferrada

https://www.timeanddate.com/astronomy/republic-of-macedonia/...

With this new regulation, Spain can adopt a time zone that makes more sense for them while not having to change clocks twice a year.

They could have adopted the same time anyway. This regulation has no bearing on Spain choosing to be in CET when they should be on British time.

I think this is a non issue. I’m just happy that I will be able enjoy more time after work while it’s not dark yet.

I wonder why people couldn’t just start work earlier. The day is the same length.

Yes, exactly! If you want more daylight time after work, just start work earlier! I know not everyone has that luxury. But permanent Daylight Saving Time also makes it darker in the mornings, when kids are going off to school and that isn't necessarily desirable. I think it makes sense to be more flexible about when we schedule things and not further distort the historic understanding of the relationship of the clock to the sky. And yes, I understand that there are many places where this relationship is tenuous, at best.

I would prefer dark while kids go to school in exchange for light after school so they are actually out side playing while there is sun.

Not an unreasonable attitude, I'll grant.

It's not only work. It's schools, theaters, sport events, tv, dinner time. We must move everything and all the ingrained habits. It's not logic but moving the clock is easier.

I already am starting work pretty early. I’m usually earlier in the office than most my colleagues. Starting work even earlier ist not really practical for me.

I have no particular attachment to noon meaning "highest point of the sun in the sky". Though I admit I am totally unaware of what time that happens where I live.

That said, it would only be a very few people who experience this, even on the "correct" time. Time zones are what disconnected time from the sun, not daylight savings.

I'm with you. We should be more in tune with the world and natural measurements rather than less.

But the EU also thinks that the metric system is the bee's knees, even though it's just as arbitrary as the imperial system.

At least lengths in the imperial system are based on natural averages, and not some bureaucrat that decided to use a distance to Pairs. The equator, I could understand. But using Paris just proves that it's all about political control, and not actually improving a system of measurement.

I hope you were sarcastic.

Metric system is worldwide not an EU thing and while it was initially just as arbitrary picked as the imperial one it scales linearly in base 10 so you can do conversions mentally without breaking a sweat.

I'm curious if you could just as easily convert inches-feet-yards off the top of your head?

> I'm curious if you could just as easily convert inches-feet-yards off the top of your head?

For me that's a relatively easy case, because I regularly do that. When it comes to ounces/quarts/pints/gallons though, I'm completely baffled.

Give me microliters please: even if I have no idea how to conceive of that now, I know how to convert it trivially.

If we want natural measurements we should be basing it all off Fibonacci and the golden spiral, I guess?

The metric system is decimal and the orders of magnitude are intuitively consistent (1, 10, 100, 1000, 10000...). If the hang up is that they first chose the distance between Paris and the North Pole for the length of a meter, then that hang up is no more significant than the yard originally being defined as the length of a man's belt (something many people would now consider way too small).

Nobody in those times had the technology, insight, and awareness of the world that we currently do, so it was all defined in terms of what they knew. Nothing wrong with that; in the metric system they've all been adjusted to more scientific measurements (e.g. the precise weight of a precious metal, or some calculation on the speed of light)

I don't know what gripe you have with the metric system, but people don't care about what the base units are based on, but that the relationship between the units make sense.

Also, the original definition of the metre did use exactly the distance from the north pole to the equator. It's just that the earth is not completely round, so you need to define this length along a meridian. The Paris meridian may be as good as any.

The metre is defined as the length of the path travelled by light in a vacuum in 1/299 792 458 second.

The metre was originally defined in 1793 as one ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole.

I don't know where you got the "distance to Paris" idea. From what?

Thank you for that. I stand corrected.

I once looked up (probably pre-Wikipedia) the standard for the length of a kilometer and saw that it was 1/1000th of the distance from Paris to the North Pole.

That's what I get for believing the internet.

I rescind my bureaucratic criticism of the metric system.

But I still like using easy-to-remember natural conventions like inch=thumb, foot=forearm, yard=arm's length.

Mile still seems arbitrary, though. I'l have to look into that one.

Well originally, it was of course the distance from the equator to the North Pole through Paris - which is the distance from the north pole to Paris, plus the distance form the equator to Paris.

I like Summer time precisely so people can go outside and enjoy the physical world more. It's miserable to work until 5:30pm and have to turn your headlights on to go home.

FYI, California is voting on no longer changing the clocks this November. It requires the federal government to sign off on it... but it will be voted on at least:

https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_7,_Permanent_...

I have lived in Phoenix, Arizona my whole life. I didn't know what DST was until I was in high school. The entire concept feels bizarre to me.

The only time I've run into confusion when coordinating a meeting with another time zone is during the DST change. Yes, this week we are two hours behind but next week it is only one, etc.

Summer time really only matters for a few weeks of the year in the farish north of Ireland. (Coincidentally, right around now) when the sunrise and sunset are changing the fastest. We're losing 4 minutes of daylight a day now as we slam towards equinox. Middle of the summer? Sky never really gets dark.

Though, with brexit over the horizon, it's conceivable that Ireland and Northern Ireland will end up on two different sides of daylight savings. Which will be all sorts of annoying.

> it's conceivable that Ireland and Northern Ireland will end up on two different sides of daylight savings. Which will be all sorts of annoying.

This won’t happen, both NI and ROI would oppose it on both the union and republican sides. It makes no sense, neither does brexit and the NI browser will stop brexit, it is an unsolvable problem.

I find the passion on this topic really weird. Yes, it's a minor annoyance twice a year. On the scale of annoyances I have to deal with, it doesn't rate in the top thousand. The traffic every single day, the late trains, random bad weather when I'm not expecting it.... are all significantly more annoying.

And for the price of that inconvenience I get an extra hour after work where I can enjoy the outdoors during summer for a whole 6 months of the year. Gardening, dining outside, going for walks, playing sport etc.

I can get people find it a little annoying and even disagree with it ... but I am perplexed by how passionate people seem to be about it.

My first thought reading this article was: "I can't believe the EU uses daylight savings time. I thought the US was the only country that would ever go along with that kind of nonsense."

Then I read this part:

> The practice, which was used as a means to conserve energy during the World Wars as well as the oil crises of the 1970s, became law across the bloc in 1996.

> All EU countries are required to move forward by an hour on the last Sunday of March and back by an hour on the final Sunday in October.

...and my second thought is: "wow, the EU members must give a lot more control to their central government, in the US the states do whatever they want with their timezones and would scoff at that kind of micromanagement."

Now, you're saying that the states actually are substantially constrained by federal regulation and I am much less optimistic than I was about our current mechanisms of government and democracy when it comes to dealing with timezone policy.

I don't see how this is different from what the United States federal government attempted with the Metric system back in the 1970s. Granted, the effort failed, but more due to cultural inertia than due to any resistance from the states, as far as I'm aware of.

It makes sense for a trade bloc to maintain the same changeover dates for timezones, while leaving the timezone offsets up to each country, because this makes timezone conversions predictable, which I imagine is handy whenever cross-border scheduling is needed.

You could call it micromanagement, but do remember that the member states vote over these things, so it's not like they didn't have a chance to reject it.

One thing to remember about the EU is that anything that can be implemented at a higher administrative level is something that you, the government of the member state, are no longer responsible for. If you need to implement an unpopular but necessary measure, all you have to do is get the bigger member states to go along with it, and presto, you can wash your hands of it, with responsibility diluted across the Brussels bureaucracy and no one in particular to blame.

And then some idiots do a referendum and the state ends up voting itself out of the union?

>I thought the US was the only country that would ever go along with that kind of nonsense

I'm not trying to be snarky, but do you honestly know so little about the world outside the US? have you never traveled?

There are a massive number of countries that observe Daylight savings - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time_by_countr...

I've never been abroad during a daylight savings time switchover, and according to the map on the page you link to I have been to a couple countries that don't do daylight savings at all.

This is great news for simplicity. I hope that we can eventually just all use UTC.

> asked the President and Congress to pass an act that would allow California to adopt year-round DST

The states need to ask permission for that? What ever happened to "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people."

That died pretty quick

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCulloch_v._Maryland

Everyone using UTC would be chaos. Imagine organising a remote meeting - you’d have to figure out which hours each party would be awake, by googling “waking hours in Germany” for example.

And you just reinvented timezones yet informally.

Summer time is really difficult for kids in winter. How are they supposed to be awake when it’s 8:30am and still dark outside?

just adjust the start time of school

One solution (which may or may not be reasonable) is to have a norm where individual schools/offices/stores adjust the start time a few times throughout the year as sunrise changes. DST is basically a way to force everyone to do that together. A synchronized time shift has a lot of advantages, but also is forced even on places that don't need it (some latitudes, some types of businesses), and in some cases the 1-hour shift isn't enough, so it's not clear to me which approach is better.

Erm, their parents can wake them up, or they have an alarm. Exactly like it already works.

Ok, I’ll admit: difficult for parents too! ;)

My kids don't seem to care how dark it is. They can be happily awake in the middle of the night.

Kids do care a lot. The natural biorythm is synced to sunlight hours and going to school while it's dark out could either disrupt the rythm or alternatively have kids being half asleep in school later.

This also goes for adults but there is less risk that it would lead to developmental issues later on.

I take it you don't live anywhere a fairly northern latitude. Up here DST or not makes no difference, it'll still be night at that time and kids do just fine.

It's so funny to watch these discussions and seeing people who absolutely cannot conceive of things being different for different people. Things they see as problems are just everyday life for other people, and it turns out that people cope just fine.

When I grew up you went to school in the dark during winter, and when you went home from school it was already dark again. You got a little bit of sunlight during lunch break, and that was it. It's not like you had a choice...

You are totally right. That’s something I realized too, when reading all the comments. Also, I think another thing I realized is that country cultures adapt to “normal” times, eg dinner in Spain is very late also due to the fact that they actually live in GMT...

Re your point: just because it used to be that way doesn’t mean it should stay like that. If we can optimize now, I think we should

If you get rid of DST then it's not summer time in the winter, it's the same time it's always been in the winter.

I wrote a very reasonable text explaining my position (when I did the online vote) in wanting to abolish the DST bullshit and then when deciding which time to choose I'd prefer winter time for this exact same reason. I'm not oblivious to how painful sad, mad and traumatizing it was waking up to go to school in pitch black. As if I care about a few more artificial day hours at the end of the day. Just let it all be consistent and let my body adapt correctly to the changes that occur naturally over the year in how the sun changes. Noticing the sun adding or removing time daily or weekly is a relaxing thing. Much more than suddenly my perception being changed abruptly and not feeling where and when the sun is at all for weeks after DST change.

I always thought that DST is unnecessary and did not really understand the rationale behind it. I mean, sure, in 1916 it might have made sense to conserve those cca. 3% in home electricity consumption. Today, however, spending more time at home in the heat may introduce additional costs through higher use of air condition. I guess wikipedia's article on DST rationale can explain better than I can :)

That said, doing away with DST is IMO not necessary. People are already used to it and there is little confusion, even if people have to be reminded each year. How the benefits compare to the drawbacks I cannot judge, there are different arguments either way.

But...

The way the EU decided to approach this is worse. Every country will be able to decide whether they want to keep summer time or they want the "normal" time? I think that's another example where the compromise just destroys every benefit of the proposal.

I live in a small country where a lot of our businesses work with neighbouring countries. There is even a significant percentage of people that live here but go to work to another country. So, the kids' kindergarten will use a different time than your workplace?

I think this will create much more confusion and stress if the different countries choose different times than the problems we have now with the switching.

I guess there are countries that have this problem already (if the neighbouring country is in a different time zone) but still we may introduce the problem to places that did not have it before.

>but still we may introduce the problem to places that did not have it before.

And perhaps in some places this will cause the problem to disappear. I think it will be fine.

I don't think that's a highly informed comment. As far as I'm aware choosing time zones has always been a member state decision, where as clock time changes have been regulated by EU in order to be uniform. Nothing changes in regards to time zone regulation. It's just a political expression to say that you can choose to be in "summer time". In reality there's no such thing as permanent summer time.

The reason why it's politically expressed this way is because there is a strong majority consensus that summer time probably isn't useful, but there's isn't one about which time zone should be used. So expressing it this way makes it easier for the politicians.

Agreed, thanks for the correction :) I guess I just used the terminology that's currently being thrown around (in the article and in the media here).

I just wanted to say that this will open up a discussion on which time to use (i.e. which time zone should apply :) ) and that if we are not careful it may complicate some people's lives.

The amount of car accidents is higher on mondays after the switch, this alone is a reason for me to abolish DST. Your body needs 2 weeks to fully adjust after the change, i.e. a full month a year your inner clock is out of tune.

> I live in a small country where a lot of our businesses work with neighbouring countries. There is even a significant percentage of people that live here but go to work to another country. So, the kids' kindergarten will use a different time than your workplace?

I think that's a fairly small problem, and there's a good chance that it'll solve as many cases as it makes worse. For example, the longest single border within the EU is Portugal/Spain. Right now they're in different timezones, but that doesn't make a lot of sense - it leaves Spain in the same TZ as Poland, and with a noticeable unusually late sunrise/sunset. This would be a nice chance for Spain to sync up with Portugal/the UK/Morocco instead, all of whom match its longitude much closer.

Might well not happen, but it's certainly not clear that it'd make life more difficult than it is now.

Don't forget Canary Islands, which are spanish territory but use Portugal/UK timezone.

I believe the subtext here is that Spain should use this as an opportunity to decide whether they should shift time zones altogether.

As a spaniard I'd love to see the DST nonsense end. It gets dark too late in summer: Western provinces can be watchching a sunset at 23:00.

It's called Daylight Saving Time (DST), not Electricity Saving Time (EST ?!). While some of the thoughts around it seems to have started with energy consumption (and thus cost) in mind (which proved useful in time of war), those were just consequences with little to no reason nowadays. The reasons are astronomical and therefore DST must be somewhat observed; it's the implementation approach that must be improved (IMHO together with the time-zones implementation), but people doesn't seems to understand it.

There's a significant cost to this work. Machines have to be upgraded: OS's changed, libraries updated. They did this in Russia and it caused us a headache due to python libs that needed updating and then OS changes. etc. etc.

time zones change all the time. Most OS's automatically take these changes into account, I believe. ( see https://serverfault.com/questions/192858/updating-systems-ol... for a bit of info, but I think it is often included in OS updates rather than having to do it manually normally.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tz_database https://www.iana.org/time-zones

But of course there will be many legacy systems that assumes that all of Europe is on the same zone.

Taking the change into account for the current time is relatively easy, but date/time libraries in programming languages need to be updated so that you can write a calendar application with, say, a recurring event spanning across the change, or count days since a specific date in the past.

Even with DST, the actual date DST starts differs unpredictably from year to year. I don't think this introduces any new problems.

In the EU, the start date is predictable: the last Sunday in March. The end is equally predictable: the last Sunday in October.

Interesting.

I suppose that consistency could’ve given some EU only companies enough rope to hang themselves. Really, doing things the right way is easier than hand-writing some code that assumes DST starts/ends on a fixed date—at least in a language with a real date/time library.

At no point since the invention of timezones has Europe (the continent) been in a single timezone. Even if you only look at the EU, only time all of the EU was in the same timezone, was back in 1957 when "Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and West Germany signed the Treaty of Rome, which created the European Economic Community (EEC)", and it wasn't even called EU. I would wonder which library makes that assumption.

Bad libraries that are written by people who think they don't need the tz.db to keep track of time, obviously.

Indeed time changes are a complex software issue, which is why getting rid of them and making it simpler is the long-term solution.

Because humans need to adapt to computers and not the other way around? And, sure, someone needs to program the libraries etc. that deal with timezones. But that's sort of why we program computers--to do what humans want done.

So first you complain that this will be too hard for computers to deal with because you'll need to update things. Then after it's explained that it's actually trivial for computers, you complain that it's too hard for people to manage and we shouldn't just do what's easy for computers. So which is it?

My intent was that computers (and programmers) need to adapt to how humans want to use systems. Not the other way around. I don't care if it's a PITA for programmers to deal with or not.

Every year there are tens of changes to various time zones/calculations/all that fun stuff that get compiled into the tz updates that your OS vendor will ship and install.

This is nothing new.

If they choose an existing timezone, not really, unless things aren't on NTP.

Just don't swing the tz over like normal.

Time Zones are already a huge PITA no matter how you slice it.

This video sums it up fairly nicely: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5wpm-gesOY

That sound you can faintly hear is the screaming of a million developers who maintain all the datetime libraries in the world.

I have a delayed circadian rhythm. Managing to live on time is already really hard for me. Changing the clocks twice a years for me means a few weeks of jetlag every year. I wish I lived in the EU.

Just based on your observations? I'm asking because I wanted to check how mine looks like. Smartwatch heart rate doesn't seem to be a good enough measure and I have no easy way to check my core temperature every hour. So is there any scientific way to check one's own circadian rhythm at home? Preferably without stopping drinking coffee ;)

At home, your best bet would be some kind of DIY Arduino / Raspberry Pi + temperature sensors.

I have enough of those at home.. in every room.. But as far as I understand it, even measuring temperature with a medical thermometer like when you do when you have a cold wouldn't be enough. You need a core body temperature. And I don't feel like inserting thermometer in my ass every hour. Installing arduino there is also not something that I'm willing to consider.

I did mean personal thermometers in the expansion port, not room thermometers.

I'd rather keep it as an expulsion port.

Don’t choose France. I used to live there but they’re off by an hour. Same time zone as Poland. It’s ridiculous. Best thing I did for my health was crossing the channel...

My phone updates automatically. My computer updates automatically. My alarm clock uses a time signal. Only my oven needs adjusting.

If we wanted to, we could change the clocks every month.

My body, however, does not update automatically to a one-hour loss in time.

1 hour's time difference spread over six months. We could even change it daily.

And how is that better than not changing at all?

But we should do whatever makes things better, not just consider whatever we could do.

Sure, but I've never seen it suggested, so here I am.

I think adjusting time to the seasonal movement of the sun isn't a bad idea, but a twice yearly hourly jump is bad.

I wonder how long it will take people to complain that it gets dark too soon in summer/it's too dark in the morning in winter.

I understand the frustration and inconveniences that occur with the time changes, but I worry that people voted based on the downsides of the status quo without considering the downsides of the alternatives.

>In the past, academic computer science was useless but practical programmers were good.

At least here in Finland I doubt anyone will even notice the difference.

Not sure whether that reply is aimed at the right parent; if I'm wrong, can you elaborate?

Here's the fundamental problem:

1. In places far enough from the equator but not too close to the arctic or antarctic (which includes most of the US and Europe), most people want seasonal changes in when things start relative to sunrise.

2. This can be accomplished by changing the clock times of things (e.g., the office opens at 8 AM in winter and at 7 AM in summer), or by changing the clocks (the office opens at 8 AM, and we set the clocks forward an hour in summer and set them back in winter).

3. In the past, changing the clocks was definitely easier than changing the times of things. Times showed up on signs and in print. Changing all of that would be a pain. Clocks, on the other hand, are designed to be easy to change. (Signs could be dealt with by a one time change to show both summer and winter time, but it would probably still cause confusion to people around the date of the switch each year).

The places with static schedule displays are somewhat diminishing now. Many places that would have once been on paper are now only on a website. Many signs are now actually easily changeable electronic displays that simply do not change often. We are getting to a point where changing the times might actually become as easy as changing clocks. But we probably aren't there yet. (On the other hand, clocks are getting easier to change, too, with them often handling it automatically now).

In an earlier discussion here on this, which I got to too late to say anything that would actually be read, I proposed (mostly seriously, but a little bit in jest) a thing I pretentiously named "TZS Time" (name definitely in jest) to address the above issues, and as a side effect also put us in a position to use UTC for coordinating times between time zones while still having an approximation of local time for referring to events in our time zone.

Here was the TZS Time proposal: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17887952

One year to change/update all computer systems dealing with time! Have they gone mad? I'd expected at least a few years before this would be implemented, so that society could adjust to this.

Actually, 5-6 months, because EU countries can decide to delay the decision until April.

It's a conspiracy to get consultants contracts!

Why is being an hour behind Arizona a negative? Pacific Time is already an hour behind AZ/Mountain Time during the winter, when you're off DST. California has always been in a different time zone than AZ.

As an Arizonan, I like that we don't have to change our clocks. DST doesn't make sense for us – we don't need more hours of sunlight.

DST leads to subtle bugs. On Android, Google Calendar changes the times of events/appointments of Arizona users when DST starts. It's insane, and they've been doing it for years. They've screwed up so many schedules that I'm surprised there hasn't been a class action suit.

The clocks changing really does mess up my sleep for a good couple of weeks every time. This year I might just ignore the change and continue operating an hour out of phase.

I think this is a step in the good direction, but I think getting rid of the time zones altogether is the right thing to do[0].

[0] https://nationalpost.com/opinion/andrew-coyne-forget-the-day...

There was the EU wide poll wether or not to keep DST. Roughly 80% voted in favor of abandoning DST.

Can someone enlighten me what happened just now and what will happen next? EU Commissioner for Transport Violeta Bulc made some announcement, but did the commission vote/decide on the matter just now? (If not, what is the news in the article?) What are the next steps?

Interesting enough Russia adopted DST changes following Europe in 1981-4 (then as USSR) and finally dropped it in 2014. Looks like a data point for DST efficiency study. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Russia

This is just like the Brexit vote. The populous doesn't know what they are voting for. When they realise all that daylight at 4:30 AM is wasted while they are sleeping it will be too late. As others have mentioned a lot of the DST opponents are confused and actually hate the switch from DST to standard time. I love DST I look forward too it every year.

That's why nearly everyone voted to keep DST year-round. Given that, I don't understand what you're trying to say.

After the DST transition last fall I did some analysis using our dataset at Cronitor: After removing jobs that ran every hour, just a little under 20% of jobs ran twice. Most versions of Crontab handle DST changes correctly but there are a lot of ways to scheduled jobs and this will be a win for a simpler spec creating more reliable systems that are easier to reason about.

In 1984 I had a coworker who booted his Unix workstation and found that the date was Jan 1, 1970. The battery that powered the clock that kept the time when the system was off had died.

He set the time to the correct time.

Cron then tried to start every cron job that would have run between Jan 1, 1970 and the current date in 1984.

That's about 120k instances for every hourly job, 5k instances for every daily job, 700 instances for every weekly job, and a mere 170 instances for every monthly job.

That completely locked up the workstation.

It was hilarious.

My solution for that: Set all servers to UTC and use smearing NTP servers. UTC doesn't have summertime, so the clock doesn't suddenly change and the smearing NTP will prevent leap seconds from doing the same.

Timezones should be accounted for in the UI, not the backend.

Hurray! I'm going to have a Daylight Saming Time party on that day, and there will be no excuse for arriving an hour late or early.

Canceling seasonal time change is a terrible idea. How do I know this with certainty? Because the experiment has already been run. https://www.mercurynews.com/2016/10/30/the-year-daylight-sav...

This was a year round DST. How about having a year round correct time instead?

I don’t understand the reasoning behind getting rid of DST. Why do people find it easier to change office and school times, than to change sleeping times?

Why not sleep from 11-7 in winter, and 10-6 in summer. If you do this, there’s no sleep impact due to DST.

If you can’t make this adjustment, changing office hours will also be impossible.

As a Scandinavian DST gives me little benefits, we have to cope with the huge difference between winter and summer anyway, so having to learn how to handle a sudden jump in time too is just annoying.

Maybe DST is worth the hassle for people in the US and Southern Europe, but as a Scandinavian I am happy it is will be gone.

That site has Ireland's time zone wrong. It's actually GMT+1 with DST in the winter.

In computing, it actually matters.

So let's also switch to the International Fixed Calendar and make it dead simple to reason about time. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar

I've never understood people having significant trouble adjusting their sleep schedule by one hour twice per year. Do these people never travel? You don't fly somewhere 3-4 time zones away and stay there for a week and then come home and adjust? I barely even feel a one hour change.

The increased incidence of both heart attacks and car accidents after each time change would indicate that yes, a lot of people have trouble with the change.

> You don't fly somewhere 3-4 time zones away and stay there for a week and then come home and adjust?

No, never. I'm no great traveler, but across 8 countries only one of them was in a different timezone (+1h).

I might be one of a dozen people who enjoys a good 4pm winter sunset or a 10pm summer twilight in Seattle.

It’s stupid to allow countries to select their own zone. If you are enforcing this you might as well just say you are stuck in UTC+1/2/3 and that’s that. You shouldn’t have Bulgaria and Greece be in different time zones. Or am I missing a reason why that would make sense?

> Bulc said EU member states would have until April 2019 to decide whether they would permanently remain on summer or winter time

> "In order to maintain a harmonised approach we are encouraging consultations at national levels to ensure a coordinated approach of all member states," Bulc said.

Why pick a fight before even knowing what every country wants? Maybe they all want winter time or they all want summer time. It sounds like they are talking about that now

Aaah wait... I might have misread/misunderstood. So all countries will be in either summer or winter time? Then that makes sense. My bad. I thought each one can individually choose which seemed like a bad choice.

And another problem to solve in Spain, I bet you all they haven't reached an agreement by April.

Probably Switzerland will follow. The head of the federal institute of metrology declared in a newspaper that there are good reasons to avoid time differences to neighbouring countries. It will be more difficult to organise traffic (for example railroad traffic).

I am truely astounded by the support to abandon DST. I absolutely love being able to come home and play with my daughter at the beach before it gets dark in summer those are the best times of my life. That extra hour of light is incredible.

You can still start work earlier, or your kids can start school earlier. Workplaces plus schools could have winter timetable.

During this member states could decide to stick to year long summer time. It’s not like winter time is very useful and “noon = sun above head” is not a really useful property of time at this point

In the survey, most people said that they want to keep summer time all year. In Germany, this is what is currently favoured.

The EU should introduce a law that requires the sun to adjust to our time, not the other way around.

Considering the technical expertise of the parliament members, I'd fully expect it to pass.

I hope that nightclubs and parties recalibrate their hours. Now that we have lost an hour of daylight in Summer, we will have to wake up and go to work earlier manually.

If europe goes to all dst it means we won't have the 9AM California/5 pm London meeting time. It'll probably go 8/5 or 9/6 half the year.

Not looking forward to it.

It took years to prepare for the year 2000 transition. Is it really wise to make that transition within several months? There should be plenty of systems that have to be updated.

What was the y2k transition?

From two digit dates like 99 to four digit dates like 1999.

There was also the 2005 DST extension that screwed up everything because Windows XP didn't get a patch in time and everyone's calendars were screwed up for months.

Oh, it's that after all. I thought there were some timezone changes also put through in 2000 or so.

There was a sort of rivalry in the Pacific to jockey to the front by wrangling time-zones: https://www.csmonitor.com/1999/1201/p1s4.html

Other than that I don't think there was anything remarkable in play. Everyone was too busy patching systems for Y2K to deal with other issues.

Timezone updates happen on almost a monthly basis, your computer has a file called the Timezone database which is maintained by a few volunteers. All timezone updates go through there and unless the application you wrote is written by someone who thinks they can do better than everyone involved in time-handling code so far, your application will stop using DST once the EU decides to stop using DST.

it's certainly not the weirdest thing that has ever been done, the Chinese government has tried to enforce a single time zone across a incredibly wide range of longitude.

And western Chinese have their own unofficial timezone because it's an annoyance.

Just when you thought it couldn't get any weirder, here's a copy and paste from the Wikipedia article for Chinese time zones.

Currently, timezone usage within Xinjiang is roughly split along the ethnic divide, with most ethnic Han following Beijing time and most ethnic Uyghurs following Ürümqi Time.[10][unreliable source?] Some local authorities are now using both time standards side by side.[11][12] Television stations schedule programmes in different time standards according to their nature.[5]

The coexistence of two timezones within the same region causes some confusion among the local population, especially when inter-racial communication occurs. When a time is mentioned in conversation between Han and Uyghur, it is necessary to either explicitly make clear whether the time is in Xinjiang Time or Beijing Time, or convert the time according to the ethnicity of the other party.[13][14][15] The double time standard is particularly observable in Xinjiang Television, which schedules its Chinese channel according to Beijing time and its Uyghur and Kazakh channels according to Xinjiang time. [16]

I never understood why this is such a binary discussion, either wintertime, or +1 hour for summer.

Why not settle right in the middle, +0.5 hour = EU time :)

These should have been new timezones:

  UTC: UK, Faroese, Ireland, Spain, France, Belgium, Netherlands, Portugal, Iceland
  UTC+40' (Hamburg time): Corsica, Germany, Switzerland, Italy (Rome and west), Norway
  UTC+1h (Görlitz time): Austria, Slovenia, Czechia, Croatia, Italy (east of Rome)
  UTC+1h 20' (Krakow time): Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Montenegro, Albania, Sweden
  UTC+1h 40' (Braşov time): Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, Lithuania, Finland, Estonia
  UTC+2h: Belarus, Turkey (west of Ankara)
  UTC+2h 30': Turkey (Ankara and east), Cyprus, Ukraine

More timezones but not needing daylight saving.

I'm so confused why everyone is against DST. It is such a benefit to all of my friends who live on farms and do physical labor.

This is going to be terrible to program against

Why?

what a relief ! At long last ! Thank you EU. This should help a lot of people including me sleeping better !

I never understood why the time is not just forwarded an half hour, and then kept there. Best of the 2 worlds

I think having whole-hour timezone offsets is much easier. The only exception is if every nation on earth agrees and shifts by half an hour, which I very much doubt is going to happen: some countries even have regions that do or don't observe DST (such as the USA).

It's funny - we have time, which is this uniform stream of numbers that is ever changing. Then we have the time of day, which is a function that takes the current "time" and formats it for different areas in the world. And instead of placing laws around how the flow of time works, we place laws on how people are allowed to render it and display it.

So, we have to make sure we update our datetime librairies, right?

Programmers, rejoice!

Let's just get the world to UTC already.

Finally some good news out of the EU

If we stayed on a single time zone, my life would be easier.

First, I wouldn't have to avoid starting starting a cron/scheduled job between 1am and 3am -- once a year a 2:30am job may not run, when we skip from 2am to 3am, and once a year a 1:30am job may run twice, when we skip back from 2am to 1am. Your operating system may vary.)

Second, most of the world's database date/time fields are in local time. I hate seeing event volumes double for the fall-back hour, and drop to zero for the spring-forward hour.

TL;DR: date code sucks.

UTC everywhere. No dst, no timezones.

That is impossible. UTC also implies ... Earth and its rotation ;-)

Well, isn't this something. Lots to consider (and I'm behind on all the comments atm.)

I worked in aviation operations for a number of years (prior profession) and lived and breathed UTC.

I wrote this then, so it's ... from last century. (Not in the wayback machine anywhere. I had to dig it back up.)

>>>THE UNIVERSAL CLOCK : EXPLAINED

by The AceyMan

Most anyone who can read a language (as you are doing now) is familiar with 'time' and 'timekeeping'. This short essay hopes to explain the concept of non-local, or universal time, and promote its standardization.

Until 1993, the clock that was set as a reference for all local time zones was kept in the United Kingdom. Due to its position at the Greenwich meridian, it was refered to as 'Greenwich Mean Time', or GMT.

This clock was the world standard for all time zones, and never changes, ie, no savings time, no adjustments, except for accuracy. It is _defined_ as the world standard for time.

So, when a nation or geographical area decides what local time is, they still must have a reference to set it against. (Time is relative, remember). GMT is that standard. For example, in the eastern United States, local (non-daylight) time is 5 hours behind GMT. That is to say, if GMT is 1800 hours (and yes, it uses a 24 hour, or 'military' clock), then US eastern time would be 1300 hours, ie, 1800-500=1300 or 1:00 pm.

Now the confusion with local time occurs mainly when either of two things happens. First, when a person moves from time zone to timezone frequently and must make constant calculations to determine what time it 'really' is, or how long he's been awake, driving, burning fuel, running his computer, accruing hours, charging his customers, or any various other important numbers. This is frequent in transportation, especially aviation, where many time zones may be traversed in a short period.

Second, when one is working with a worldwide communications system and may be talking with persons outside of your local timezone, sometimes FAR OUTSIDE your local time zone. In this case, GMT is especially useful, because by referring to GMT, one can still know what time that person is referring to, without asking where he is.

For example, if you know what GMT is, and I know what GMT is, and I say, "I have to leave to go to a meeting at 1400 GMT", then the other person knows when that person will be leaving. S/he won’t have to ask "well, what's your local time now, so I can figure out how long it is before you go". GMT spares all parties from such time-consuming calculations.

GMT should, and this author hopes WILL BE the clock for the world in the near future, as it should be. We owe the widespread use of global communications, particularly the Internet, for this expectation.

###

I stand by most of that now (but I would do at least one rewrite says older me, heh).

Doing time sums and differences on the fly across multiple time zones is loco. For both fuel and personnel planning. It's not just weather reports and ETD/ETA times. We are crunching time ALL time in air ops, and you have to have a pinned baseline.

I think the time has long past to go unified. Then the only question you have to ask someone is "What's your UTC offset?" E.g., in your .plan file or S4B header text.

Problem handled.

/Acey [edit: unix errata]

Benjamin Franklin's worst idea.

about TIME

Good riddance.

Yay gigantic centralized authorities!

Right. Just do like China and make it all one timezone.

ADDED: </s> in case it wasn't obvious (as was, I'm assuming, the parent).

There are basically no downsides!

Yes. Because Lisbon, Portugal should be the same time as Van, Turkey when Turkey joins the EU.

> when Turkey joins the EU

I would bet $100 that we will see an EU member (excluding UK) leave the EU before Turkey joins.

Not sure about that, but I'd bet the same amount that the UK is back in the EU before Turkey joins.

No chance we let Turkey join the EU after the mess of the last few years.

Turkey will not join the EU anytime soon because it currently doesn't have the required human rights track record and has destroyed its fragile democracy.

Turkey will not join EU. Several countries will veto it or rather leave.

For the sake of argument, what is the use of having time zones at all? I think it would be a lot easier to think about time internationally everyone lived in the same time zone.

See discussion elsewhere on this thread. Basically, most people care far about understanding roughly the "time of day" with respect to sleep/business/etc. than coordinating complicated international schedules. (For which UTC is sometimes convenient but even for frequent travelers is a small part of our typical year.)

Obviously, things would confusing to the point where it might not make sense to make the switch. However, after all the chaos, everyone's intuition would adjust to match their local longitude.

It would be a little awkward to decide what "time" to start the day though, but it's not like midnight is the greatest time to start a day either.

But how? Are you saying it would be the same time everywhere? So 12:00pm in London would be high noon and somewhere in the pacific (Sydney, maybe) it would be mid night? I don’t know if that would be any less confusing

I agree, but that's fundamentally a matter of how you think about time.

The more globalized your daily affairs are and the more "scientifically" you think, the more you will be drawn to a unix-time style of thinking. "Humanistic" times are designed to unify everyone around particular rhythms that have the same "names" for when work starts (9), when work ends (5), the middle of the day (12/noon), etc, regardless of where they live (and at the cost of actually meaning the same time wherever you live).

Those are even less meaningful if your schedule is based in weeks and months rather than days, though.

The humanistic factor of time zones is most useful for in-person, social stuff. In every other case I would prefer to tell someone what GMT time I wanted to get on the phone with them.

There's a reason airlines work with "Zulu" time.

There is but how airlines and armies operate doesn't have a lot to do with how regular people operate--even those who are frequently coordinating and traveling across time zones.

Armies and airlines are filled with regular people, so it absolutely could work.

The resistance is cultural, not because people can't deal.

I'd love to be able to say we could schedule a call next Tuesday at 1900 and everyone knows exactly what that means without having to consult a look-up table.

Imagine coordinating between teams spread across Arizona, which doesn't do DST, New York, which does, Brazil, which does but for the southern hemisphere, and Europe, which has its own thing going on. Getting people on the same page is not trivial, each week can be a whole different set of time-zone offsets.

It'd be like switching from °F to °C which, once done, is not a problem, except of course if you have a stubbornly regressive administration like the US did in the 1980s.

I'm sure they could deal and there is absolutely no reason for them to have to. Just because some techies feel that some other system is a more logical approach isn't justification for normal people to pay any attention whatsoever to their ramblings.

If we all lived in thatched houses and rode around in horses and had no interaction with anyone more than ten miles away I'd agree with you, but that's not the case any longer.

Very few people are that isolated, and those that are probably don't care what time it is.

Great, now you just need to convince every single clock in the United States to display 24-hour times, confiscate all the old clocks, and rewire the brains of ~300 million people to ignore the fact that it might be pitch dark at the same time that another location wants to discuss something important. Productivity would plummet among those people who aren't at all "night owls".

The resistance is cultural, and, let's just say people have strong opinions about these sorts of things. The fight against Celsius would be similarly difficult.

Good luck with that.

Yet somehow the entire world moved from °F to °C without freezing to death or dying of heat.

Honestly, it only takes one generation, they'll deal with the change and then the rest is history. of those ~300 million people, 20% are old and will never change, they'll always use legacy time, and 40% are young enough it's no big deal. The remainder will be inconvenienced, but will get by.

Besides, it'll give people something to complain about.

One of Obama's biggest missed opportunities was day 1 declaring the US was metricizing. This would've given conservatives something other than tan suits and mustard to rage against for the subsequent four years.

Except that we live in a physical world where not everything is perfectly measurable. Imperial units reflect this in their real-world analogues.

Moving to metric units would still result in the same fight, even if there is a greater possibility you could actually win.

Changing the habits of ~4% of Earth's population would be a tough sell. No wonder the other efforts haven't worked out.

Without timezones you'd have to know "when is noon where you are" (defining noon as the point where the sun is highest) or "what do most people start work there," either of which is the same amount of information to remember as timezone delta vs UTC.

I don't think there's particularly any advantage either way, but everyone would have to re-learn their tricks for dealing with timezones and instead learn tricks for dealing with the lack of them.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18009417 and marked it off-topic.

It's an (albeit sarcastic) remark about the very decision-making body talked about in the article. Furthermore, it's in direct response to still active comment:

> I am also not too hopeful about US changing considering its federal-state model. In EU, multiple countries can agree on a decision, but US states are adept at bikeshedding and not getting anything done :(

Detaching mine, while leaving the parent (which created the political tangent in the first place), is an obvious example of moderation from bias.

It isn't just about individual comments; we're looking at the threads as a whole. In the above case, the parent got two subthreads in reply. One was just fine, while the subthread that began with your comment went unhinged. From an overall discussion quality point of view, the snip point seems clear. It isn't personal! And certainly not because of political views—we mostly don't even scan for those.

Choosing where to prune these threads is always a judgment call. You're right that the offtopicness often starts on both sides. But it's a matter of degree. Your comment was a significant degree worse, which is probably why its subthread was significantly lower in quality.

Good.

Bike shedding at its finest.

Definitely not. Changing clocks has known connections to health risks including traffic fatalities. Lots of people hate it for good reason. A couple of internet searches should be enough to convince you that it's a real issue. If you are unsure of what search terms to try, I suggest "fuck dst"

This is a good summary in a 4-minute video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=br0NW9ufUUw

next thing you know, they'll drop the penny.

First they ban memes. Now the ban changing clocks. What happens if I travel from Spain to Italy. I'd still need to change my clock.

It’s nice when the quasi-democratic corporatocratic union that gave us the cookie laws, the link tax, upload filters, and dieselgate does something useful that will actually improve and simplify many people’s lives. Well done EU!

Not a fan of GDPR, I'm assuming? Or wait, is that what you meant by cookie laws?

I do support many of the data protection principles of the GDPR but not the pop-up requirements for consenting to very ordinary and reasonable uses of (typically anonymous) data.

The cookie law predates the GDPR and requires pop-ups to consent to cookie setting, something which duplicates browser functionality and is just really silly and annoying.

No and No.

Anonymous data doesn't require consent and neither do some reasonable uses (ie, shopping carts that work via cookie don't need consent). This has been the case for the "Cookie Law" in the past and now for the GDPR.

The EU does a lot to improve peoples lives. You can see the 2018 state of the union here[1].

I particularly like the fact they got rid of all roaming charges, the digital market changes, the digital skills coalition, 30% renewable energy target (especially) and the EU labour authority. Sure, they do some seemingly silly things, but at their scale anyone would.

1. https://ec.europa.eu/commission/sites/beta-political/files/s...

I've always felt that if you can't handle changing a clock twice a year, then there's probably something fundamentally wrong with your ability to handle much more complex problems. Like deciding what's for lunch.

I rarely have to deal with changing a clock. The real pain is having to deal with DST and strange timezones while programming.

Well, turning a dial on your wrist or pressing a few buttons is one thing, but when it comes down to code you're looking at a lot more complication than that.

Knowing how to correctly handle time as a programmer is anything but trivial. It's so not-trivial we even have a database of historical changes in timezones and DSTs in order to maintain backwards compatibility for it.

Is that your argument against simplifying things? That people should be able to handle unnecessary complexity?

You could say the same exact thing with regards to the time on the clock, though. Like, there's no reason that sunrise couldn't be at <arbitrary time>. If we used one worldwide timezone you'd just...wake up at different times depending on where you are instead of it BEING a different time depending on where you are.

After years of trial and error, we've determined that the simplest way to change the clock in one of the in-built appliances in our kitchen is to kill its electrical power completely for a few minutes (by tripping the appropriate MCB in the consumer unit), then powering it back up.

When the power is restored, the appliance knows it's experienced a power cut, and asks for the current time.

Yes, this is completely ridiculous. No, I don't know why they designed the UI this way.

While I think moving away from daylight saving time (DST) is generally a good thing, but why EU not individual nations? Do nations under EU have no authority to determine whether they observe DST or not? In the US, the federal government does not dictate whether a state observes DST or not.

Right,because when I go shopping in another country 1p minutes from here, I want to have to worry about what time zone they're in... Like in Queensland/NSW, that's just silly there.

You can't really have timezones without... being able to cross timezones. What's your point?

That countries within the EU should be within the same timezone when they're on the same longitude, duh. Imagine West- and Southern Europe all having different choices on whether they observe DST and when it starts... Sure there are many places on Earth where it happens, but it's a major inconvenience. Hence, we need supranational coordination.

Most of the EU's rules and laws have been lobbied for by the industry because the industry loves standardization.

Not sure where your comment is coming from, but who doesn't love standardization on an engineers discussion board?

Big Clock strikes again.

The US allows states to skip DST but places fairly strict restrictions on it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Time_Act

Individual nations don’t have the weight to do it alone, if Austria decided to go it alone it would be chaos for then. They have authority to do whatever they want, it just doesn’t make sense to do it alone.

A nation could choose to keep DST, but it would be frowned upon as it would hinder the cohesion with other countries. They have no incentives to do so, nobody likes DST on the whole continent.

Keeping summer time permanently was the popular option in the survey. What makes you think winter time will be the default?

Morocco changes the clocks four times a year. During Ramadan they switch to winter time, so the night falls earlier and they can have a snack (iftar).

The linked article seems to indicate otherwise, but the member states are free to do what they want on this issue.

Because that is the nature of the EU. Although I didn't personally vote for Brexit, it is that kind of thing that made so many people so antagonistic towards it. That and the amount of money shovelled into fuelling this bureaucracy.

According to the European Commission, 6% of expenditure is on administration, compared with 94% on policies. To pay for this, the EU had an agreed budget of €143 billion for the year 2014, representing around 1% of the EU-28's gross national income (GNI).

From Budget of the European Union - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_the_European_Union

that number is disproportionately low as most of the cost of enforcing areas that the EU now controls is attributed to national budgets: this makes the EU look a lot more efficient that it is in reality

e.g. the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is essentially an arm of the EU, but its costs are entirely borne by the UK government's budget

once you realise that 6% is only mostly the very top level of administration in Brussels, and little of the costs to implement policies at the national level: it starts to look a lot more expensive

I dont really think this is a good idea. It boils down to when do you want the sun to be up? 4 in the morgning to 21 in the night, or 5 in the morning and 22 in the night? Since the majority of the people like to be up later at night than waking up early, it is better for everyone to turn the clock one hour. Its better for people. Its wellfare.

The clock is turning an hour automaticly any way. Its not a big deal for the clocks, but it is a big deal for the poeple seeing less day light.

There was a survey from EU https://ec.europa.eu/info/consultations/2018-summertime-arra...

and afair over 80% people voted for ending the DST https://uk.blastingnews.com/world/2018/08/eu-to-propose-endi...

Well, I still think DTS is a good thing.

Whether is better or not is debatable. Indeed, there are studies that show daylight saving has negative effects on human health. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time#Health

Thanks. A nice read.

A pleuthora of pros and cons. No quantitative messure of what is best though.

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