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Comment by shmerl | Hacker News Reader

> The country follows the same DST schedule as most of Europe, setting the clocks forward one hour on the last Sunday in March and back again one hour on the last Sunday in October.

Didn't EU plan to cancel DST? It's long overdue to cancel this erratic switch everywhere.

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Yeah, 2021 was planned to be the last time that clocks would be put forwards in March in Europe. Countries would then stay on Summer Time in October if that was their preference, not putting the clocks back. If a country had planned to stay on Winter Time they would put clocks back for the last time in October 2021. From then on no changes would be made in March/October.

Shame it's not happening now. Due to the pandemic the negotiations were not completed, so we'll still be doing the DST shuffle this year and again in 2022 at least. There's a danger this will fall off the political map and for Europe to continue the DST changes forever. There are several members that are against removing the clock changes too, others who cannot decide if summer or winter time is better (so may want to keep the status quo, rather than make a choice that half of the population won't like) so it isn't clear-cut.

How about this: we get rid of the time change, but have schools start an hour earlier march through october than november through february. Change the eraly bird parking hours at bart similarly.

I'd say yes, adjust local schedule to your needs instead of adjusting the clock to some schedule.

Adjusting your entire schedule (commute, job, child care, school, bedtime, alarm time, meal times) twice a year is much much more disruptive than changing your clocks twice a year.

I'd say the opposite. Adjusting the clock is more disruptive, because your schedule shifts anyway in relation to astronomical cycles. But besides that you also mess up the clock. So it's better to leave the clock alone and to adjust your schedule if you need to.

>schedule shifts anyway in relation to astronomical cycles

That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about calling into work saying you need a schedule change to work around your kid's new school schedule. Calling your daycare provider to setup a new schedule. If you take public transport, finding how the timetables will work with your new schedule. If you plan doctor's appointments in the future, you now need to take into account time of year to know when your and your kid's availabilities are. None of that happens when everyone changes their clocks.

When you mess up the clock currently no schedules need to change (except the people who are working at 2am, which is not very many).

All this is a mess due to DST anyway (like system bugs and so on). So it's much better without the switch.

I disagree that DST is as bad as personal rescheduling. People aren't currently having to reschedule work, school, daycare, etc, twice a year.

Yes there are some problems, but they don't end up in disagreements like "sorry, I can't let you adjust your shift" or "sorry, this daycare doesn't have those hours, you'll have to find a new daycare" or "sorry, this bus only operates at these times".

Now I'm not saying removing DST is actually that bad. We could remove DST without expecting people to reschedule everything. We would lose daylight during some periods of time, gain it in others, that's it.

I really don't understand what the fuss is about: twice a year the clocks change, mostly automatically, and sometimes i even forget it happened. You just wake up, and go about your day. Zero impact from DST. Once a year you're lucky and have one hour longer to sleep, once a year you're out of luck and get one hour less to sleep. No big deal.

Much easier than having to rethink, reschedule, and renegotiate all times at some (rondom) moment in the year.

Luckily, here in Hong Kong, we have a constant UTC offset, but my poor colleagues in Sydney interacting with London and New York have 1-hour swings relative to UTC, opposite direction from NYC and London. So, Sydney has a 2-hour relative swing one way, and 2 hours back the other way, with 6 different days a year to take into account.

My brother spent a year and a half in New Zealand, and 6 months in Russia. Our mom spends half the year in Arizona, with no DST. Between family and colleagues, I found it easier to just switch to UTC, but obviously most people don't. Even after interacting with some pretty smart people for years, some of them in London and New York still get Sydney DST wrong, often getting both the dates and directions of the swing wrong.

Ideally, we'd all just do international business in UTC, but that just seems too difficult for most people, so getting rid of DST would at least make things a bit easier. Granted, my dealing with 5+ time zones in 5+ countries every work day is a bit unusual. Poor Kiwis: most people think Wellington and Sydney are in the same time zone.

It is not. You can reliably know that school/work starts at this or that hour. You dont have to negotiate different hours.

You dont have to go through the "is it changing this week or next week, should I appoint at 8:00 or 9:00 that week" issues.

You decide on hours one time and don't do it anymore, instead of messing up the clock twice a year without end. I'd totally get rid of DST and leave the rest to those who want to handle their schedule in custom way.

EU and US: They have both been talking about it in spurts, and they do wake up every ~6 months when the time changes, but no serious action anywhere.

The US has been talking about making DST permanent, which is very different from cancelling it.

As long as the switch itself is dropped. Which one to drop is probably moot and benefits could depend on the region.

It's easier to adjust local schedule than to switch the clock back and forth.

Split the difference and let’s move on.

I would prefer to not live in a timezone with a half hour offset from UTC (which do exist, in fact 15 minute offsets exist).

My favorite timezone absurdity is timezones with an offset > 12 hours.

I often need to covert timestamps to and from UTC. I sure hope I don't end up in a -6:30 timezone.

the clock is effectively a human construct. It would make little difference one way or another if there was no twice-a-year time change. You can not change the number of hours a point on the earth receives daylight over a 24 hour period, and you can not change the fact that axial tilt means the amount of time you do receive daylight changes over the course of the year.

Can we short-circuit all this BS and just eliminate timezones completely? It'll take a week to get used to thinking in UTC, and then we can forget the nightmare of timezones forever.

https://qntm.org/abolish

Unless you happen to be part of the privileged part of the world living nearish the meridian, good luck to having the calendar date changing in the middle of your waking hours and all the confusion that that would entail.

For the unlucky rest of the world it also means that things like public holidays and suchlike either weirdly start and end in the middle of the (solar) day, or alternatively you'd have to specify that all holidays etc. actually start and end not at midnight (UTC), but whatever time actually corresponds to some time in the middle of night, which basically means reintroducing time zones through the back door.

Also the link K2L8M11N2 posted.

The 'difference' is action vs inaction. I do not know what the consensus is, but we see this drama every 6 months. If they just said 'we are not going to do it', it would be one thing, but we have been having this charade for a while now. I know some charade is required to build consensus, but based on my reading of the news, there is just too much chatter, and we all get riled up every time we change clocks.

Yes, the EU parliament passed a resolution to end DST 2021. Unfortunately, they didn't mandate a return to standard time along with it, leaving it open for countries to stay on permanent DST. But of course, a decision about this was never made - looking at the EU timezones, permanent DST basically has no place in the schema. The only non-chaotic alternative to DST would be standard time, but no such resolution has been made. Of course, Corona has made all of this even less of a priority. In this situation, the EU is doing something unexpected practical: ignore that resolution so far :)

> Unfortunately, they didn't mandate a return to standard time along with it

It's arbitary anyway -- Spain and North Macedonia are on the same time zone, but in A Coruña in winter the sun rises at 9am, while in Bitola it comes up at 7am, despite being on about the same latitude.

What makes "standard time" standard? Sun at the highest between 1130 and 1230?

Timezones have a rough connection to solar mean, but on standard time the middle of the day in Brest is at 1326, in Białystok it's 1136.

Spain is well lined up on the 0 meridian, but is on continental time. It should surprise no one that odd times result.

China is on a single time zone, IIRC. Imagine if SF shifted clocks forward 3 hours just because that's what Washington does.

And this means that evenings in Spain are gloriously long.

Well, only to an extend, as of course a lot of things just happen later in Spain to compensate the offset of the time zone compared to the sun.

In this context: the time which is valid in each country outside of the DST shift. Yes, there is some mismatch between the time zones and the local astronomical time, but this was decided long ago for the sake of good inter operation between the countries. If the EU wanted to get quickly rid of DST, just not doing the switch to DST would have been the means of choice. Renegotiation of all time zones first will take many years to resolve, and there are few really good alternative layouts.

What makes year round winter time objectively better than year round summer time as a rule?

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