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Comment by Dylan16807 | Hacker News Reader

I've never seen anyone propose moving in the opposite direction of summer time before. That seems needlessly awkward to me.

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The point is to correct those locales that have gone way too far in the direction of summer time. Spain in particular is almost 3 hours off of solar time.

There's a societal pull in the direction of earlier time, even aside from anything about sunlight. Nobody wants to be "late" compared to their economic neighbors so they gravitate towards earlier time zones. This is correcting for that.

> Spain in particular is almost 3 hours off of solar time.

I suppose if you squint right at the western edge in summer time you could get there.

But the prime meridian runs straight through the country. I think a sensible reckoning would say that it's 1 hour off as a baseline and 1 extra hour during summer.

Despite the prime meridian crossing the country, Spain is the same timezone as Berlin. One hour more than London.

If you are interested, look for the historical reasons for that.

Edit: OK, a good source.

> On March 16th 1940, the clocks jumped from 23:00h to 00:00h to display the same time as Nazi Germany and other Nazi-occupied countries such as France and the Netherlands. This was an entirely politically motivated move to show support to the fascist government of Germany and showed no consideration for the natural cycle of the sun in Spain. According to the original 24-hour division of the world, Spain’s latitudinal position meant that GMT was the most natural time-zone for it to follow.

From: https://theculturetrip.com/europe/spain/articles/heres-why-s...

Spanish civil war was won by the fascists and Franco's dictatorship followed.

I don't think it is proposing that. From what I can tell their proposal is a (somewhat awkward) way of saying some countries will stick to their current summer (standard) time next time they switch to it. Other countries will stick with their current winter (DST) time when they next switch to it.

Look at the resulting time zones. They wrote it correctly. Every country is skipping the +1 to summer time, but several of them are still doing a final -1 after that. Several countries that use time zones X and X+1 would switch to X-1.

You got the 2 terms mixed up...

But yeah, assuming they want to do the magic in September: It would mean for countries where UTC+01:00 (standard time, winter time) makes more sense, they'd move to UTC+01:00 when the next switchover date in September shows up, whereas for countries where UTC+02:00 (daylight savings/summer time) makes more sense, they'd stay on that TZ past the September switchover date. They'd have to assign new names though, one can't have 1 timezone with 2 different names...

No, none of the countries say on summer time in the plan.

Every country that is currently UTC+01:00/UTC+02:00 ends up in either UTC+01:00 or UTC+00:00.

The idea would be to move Spain, France and Benelux to UTC. Currently all of Western Europe is on UTC+1/UTC+2, which is much wider than it "should" be.

I have no opinion on the idea, just relaying what they are proposing.

Ireland is on GMT/-1, and we're already pretty far west in the 15 degrees centered on 0.

The United States adopted summer time in the 70s but abandoned it because of complaints about the late darkness in winter mornings.

The sun setting at or before 5PM is so very much worse than morning darkness. Especially for kids. They need sunlight and their only real opportunity to get much time outside during the school year is the late afternoon and evening, especially as recess time has been cut post-NCLB (and public schools are absurdly timid about sending kids outside in the winter anyway). My kids are old enough that they won’t reap a lot of the benefits of the change even if it happens tomorrow, but I remain hopeful we can make this happen for their kids’ sake.

And at least morning darkness means you don’t start your day with a commute that involves having your eyes melted by a just-over-the-horizon sun.

Yeah, the argument made more sense in the 70s, but these days school districts have cut back on bus services so much that your child most likely wakes up in darkness anyways to catch a much windier bus route to school.

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