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Comment by kenniskrag | Hacker News Reader

> toying with the idea of dropping daylight

Europeans turn back clocks for daylight saving, perhaps for last time. source: https://www.dw.com/en/europeans-turn-back-clocks-for-dayligh...

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The EU DST debacle has been such a shitshow that I have trouble believing the words "perhaps for last time". And now with COVID-19, I haven't seen anyone actually focus on implementing the damn thing.

What do you have to implement?

For once pretty much no one is aware of this supposed change. There was like a couple of articles on the day it was voted and that's it.

This will 100% not happen, it's another one of those things that the EU parliament votes that everyone ignores, and it's perfect ammunition for those complaining that it makes laws without popular consultation.

Trying to go forward with this change will generate massive anti EU backlash.

And then you have the UK problem. Having variable time offsets between EU and UK would add yet another layer of disruption on top of Brexit.

> For once pretty much no one is aware of this supposed change

The consultation had 4.6 million responses.

> Having variable time offsets between EU and UK would add yet another layer of disruption on top of Brexit.

So?

> The consultation had 4.6 million responses.

A disproportionate amount of which were from Germany (2/3 of the responses, even though Germany only is only ~ 16 % of the EU-population pre-Brexit).

>it makes laws without popular consultation

That's not accurate.

>This online consultation, which ran from 4 July to 16 August 2018, received 4.6 million responses from all 28 Member States, the highest number of responses ever received in any Commission public consultation. According to the preliminary results (see annex), 84% of respondents are in favour of putting an end to the bi-annual clock change.

Selection effect. Those who really cared about this commented.

But what about the 99% rest of population? It's a mistake thinking that because they dont realllly care they will accept either way.

Resistance to change is huge, especially when it plays into the narrative "Bruxelles demanded it"

And what I meant by lack of popular consultation is that if you go on EU streets and ask about this change 95% of people will have no idea what you are talking about.

No representative democracy is asking the electorate to vote on each and every bill. It defeats the purpose of having a parliament in the first place.

I agree with you.

I was just pointing out that it's wrong to say this this decision had ample consultation, because overwhelmingly the population is not aware of it.

And almost all the respondents were German (apparently this is a big deal in Germany).

> Selection effect. Those who really cared about this commented.

And a disproportionate proportion of those (more than two thirds) were from Germany, were that topic was an especially hot issue for some reason or other.

In other words, an internet poll in which less than 1% of the population participated, 2/3 of which were from Germany.

>> And then you have the UK problem. Having variable time offsets between EU and UK would add yet another layer of disruption on top of Brexit.

It's worse than just EU/UK offset. You would have Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland in different timezones.

Portugal and Spain manage it, but it would be extremely contentius among around half of the NI community.

Issues with the NI/IE border are always delicate, due to obvious reasons in the recent past. Let's say Portugal and Spain's quarrels are much much farther in the past!

The EU is currently one timezone for most of its area, the whole continent excluding Portugal (edit: and Finland, Greece, Baltic states) has the same timezone. But actually it should be 3 or 4 timezones if you want to be close to solar time. Also, there are people who would prefer having solar zone time +1 (so e.g. UTC+2 in Germany instead of UTC+1). The EU decided to chicken out and let the members decide for themselves. So now each country has to decide which timezone it would like to implement, and of course if a neighbour does it differently, you also got yourself a timezone boundary at your border, which people dislike. So now all the politicians are caught in a state of indecision, keeping the status quo.

>The EU is currently one timezone for most of its area, the whole continent excluding Portugal has the same timezone.

That's definitely not accurate.

Oh, you are right, sorry. The Baltic states, Finland and Greece are UTC+2/3

A good portion of the EU is in CET when they probably shouldn't be when it comes to solar time:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Europe

France should probably, AFAICT, be in WET (like the UK) and Spain definitely should be. Solar time offsets are quite off for them:

* http://blog.poormansmath.net/how-much-is-time-wrong-around-t...

* https://github.com/stefano-maggiolo/solar-time-vs-standard-t...

* https://24timezones.com/world-time-zones#toc-0

I hope that we can stop trying to sync noon to the local sun at some point. I think it made sense when communicating over distances was hard and rare. In that case giving local time some meaning (ex: "People tend to wake up around 8") had some value. However now that communicating with people around the word is commonplace I think that benefit is outweighed by the value of knowing what time people are talking about. Because if you try to schedule something before I want to wake up it is incredibly obvious to me. However if we mess up the timezone math by and hour no one will notice unless they think to explicitly check.

The only real downside I see is that if the day number changes during your "day" it could be confusing. However I think we will quickly learn to deal with it (overnight shifts have been a thing forever and doctors seem to manage). Plus we already have a weaker form of this when we are talking about late-night activities so I think we will figure it out.

> I hope that we can stop trying to sync noon to the local sun at some point.

Humans have circadian rhythms that have health effects:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronobiology

See my comment linking to various position papers of the scientists who study in this field:

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26088541

They generally want to get rid of DST completely and stick with Standard ("winter") Time all year round. (I don't know enough to gainsay them.)

I'm not saying that we shouldn't sync our schedules to the sun, I'm saying that we should sync time to the sun.

So in Toronto I can wake up at 12:00 and in London people can wake up at 8:00. It just changes the number on the clock.

IE use DST also fyi.

> The EU decided to chicken out and let the members decide for themselves

There are reasons the EU doesn't just enforce timeZones across its members.. So this is a 'strange' comment that bothered me.

I didn't mean to say the EU should enforce a timezone. The EU didn't get involved at all after the decision to get rid of DST. Not even by providing guidance or suggestions for the new timezone layout. Usually when there is something to be decided, there is a EU summit or work group. But they didn't even do that.

Brazil spent 3 years talking to everybody, publishing the change, and making sure everybody was on the same page. Yet, all the companies providing software got it wrong at least once (some more than 3 times). The only software that got it right were community based FOSS distributions (not raspbmc... that got me).

At least all the institutions got it right, so it was enough to announce "Windows|Red Hat|iOS|Android|whatever is wrong today, ignore it and use some other clock".

It will not happen. The science is overwhelming that having one timezone all year long is worse for people, and switching the clock back and forth twice a years is a minor nuisance at most.

The EU's "Ban DST" is the same populist bullshit as Trumps "inject Windex to cure COVID". Based on nothing and ignorant at best.

And the cherry on top is, if you ask the EU if they want to receive a no strings attached gift of €10.000.000.000.000 or €11.000.000.000.000, it would still take them 20 years to decide. No way they will ever reach consensus on DST.

If the science is overwhelming, do you have a source? If not, what are the downsides to having the same timezone all year?

Never heard about windex. Now I know.

[Some links that I've posted the last few times DST has come up:]

The folks who study this:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronobiology

Seem to have come to a consensus that if we're going to get rid of DST, then health-wise it is best to have Standard Time year-round:

> As an international organization of scientists dedicated to studying circadian and other biological rhythms, the Society for Research on Biological Rhythms (SRBR) engaged experts in the field to write a Position Paper on the consequences of choosing to live on DST or Standard Time (ST). The authors take the position that, based on comparisons of large populations living in DST or ST or on western versus eastern edges of time zones, the advantages of permanent ST outweigh switching to DST annually or permanently.

* https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/07487304198541...

For a longer-read, referencing quite a bit of academic literature, but a conclusionary snippet:

> In summary, the scientific literature strongly argues against the switching between DST and Standard Time and even more so against adopting DST permanently. The latter would exaggerate all the effects described above /beyond/ the simple extension of DST from approximately 8 months/year to 12 months/year (depending on country) since /body clocks/ are generally even later during winter than during the long photoperiods of summer (with DST) (Kantermann et al., 2007; Hadlow et al., 2014, 2018; Hashizaki et al., 2018). Perennial DST increases SJL prevalence even more, as described above.

* https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2019.0094...

Other position papers that I've dug up over the years when curiosity got the better of me:

> Society for Research on Biological Rhythms (SRBR) is dedicated to advancing rigorous, peer-reviewed science and evidence-based policies related to sleep and circadian biology.

* https://srbr.org/advocacy/daylight-saving-time-presskit/

* (refs, with pro and con): https://srbr.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/DST-References-S...

European Sleep Research Society:

* https://esrs.eu/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/To_the_EU_Commiss...

Canadian Society for Chronobiology:

* https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-turn-back-th...

* https://twitter.com/ChronobioCanada/status/11906320965969264...

American Academy of Sleep Medicine (with 36 footnotes if you want to dig further):

* https://jcsm.aasm.org/doi/10.5664/jcsm.8780

* https://doi.org/10.5664/jcsm.8780

The Centre for Chronobiology, based at the Psychiatric University Hospital (University of Basel):

* http://www.chronobiology.ch/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/JBR-D...

* http://www.chronobiology.ch

(Personally, I'm just going to trust the experts on this as I don't have the energy to go digging in things. A quick cursory Google/DDG search is enough for me.)

The sun rises in Singapore between 0655 and 0715 depending on the time of the year. How would changing the clock help at all?

It wouldn't, as it gets ~12 hours at both solstices:

* https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/singapore/singapore

DST is mostly for countries closer to the poles. See my other comment:

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26088383

> The science is overwhelming that having one timezone all year long is worse for people,

Well the majority of people, countries, and square-kilometres of land doesn't have daylight saving so you'll have to do better than that.

At some latitudes with some social norms (regarding things like school start times) DST is beneficial. In others it's not. There are no absolutes here.

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