Summary
Most European countries moved clocks forward one hour on Sunday, marking the start of daylight saving time (DST), a practice increasingly criticized.
Originally introduced during World War I to conserve energy, DST returned during the 1970s oil crisis and now shifts Central European Time to Central European Summer Time.
Despite a 2018 EU consultation where 84% of nearly 4 million respondents supported abolishing DST, implementation stalled due to member state disagreement.
Poland, currently holding the EU presidency, plans informal consultations to revisit the issue amid broader geopolitical priorities.
Mid-day should be the middle of the day. Mid-night should be the middle of the night.
If you like more light in the
eveningmorning go to bed late and wake up late. If you like light in themorningevening, go to bed early and wake up early.Stop fucking with the clocks and making nonsensible decisions
my problem with that is thats not really up to me, if i have to be up for work or down for work in a given time. and id love to leave work and have a bit of sunlight left.
You’d need new clocks, those times drift every day, so 12:00 midday would need to change automatically.
Yeah this comment makes no sense lol who is upvoting this?
Morons, people who didn’t read it fully, and people who want to encourage discourse.
There are a lot of regions that are put into the wrong time zone, because that’s easier for business. They’re not even close to 12:00 being the middle of the day especially during DST.
It also depends on your location within your particular time zone. You can’t have noon at the same time of day on both the eastern and western end of the zone.
We aren’t all having the same argument. Solar noon should, indeed, be close to chronological noon, but that will only ever be true in the center of the time zone.
On “standard time” on the western end of a time zone, solar noon is (ostensibly) 11:30 am, while on the eastern end, it’s 12:30. Under DST, those times shift to 12:30 and 13:30, respectively. In zones wider than 15 degrees, there can be more than an hour difference.
When the eastern end of the zone argues for permanent Standard Time, and the western end of the zone argues for permanent DST, both ends are arguing for the same preference.
“Midday” (solar noon) should indeed be close to noon, but midday should never be before 12:00pm.
The solution is to lock the clocks on one system or the other, and allow political subdivisions to move the line so their clocks work best for them.
What about people who are in school or employed?
Yes, but the EU is split into four time zones now and if you implement this technically there would be many more:
8 if we’d have 30-min time-zones 16 if we’d have 15-min time-zones 24 if we’d have 10-min time-zones 48 if we’d have 5-min time-zones 240 if we’d have 1-min time-zones
I’m not saying we should keep dst, but we can’t have everyone have midday at 12:00 and midnight at 00:00.
You can keep 1 hour time zones just fine. It still puts noon within 1 hour of mid day, which you don’t get with DST.
I can accept that. So long as after we lock the clocks on standard time, my region is allowed to switch to the next time zone to the west.
I don’t think the “noon = midday” argument is complete. I think noon should be close to, but never before midday. Midday should never occur at 11:30 AM, like it currently does on the western ends of the zones.
If you are arguing for permanent standard time and you are on the eastern end of your time zone, you are making the same argument as someone advocating DST from the western end.
That’s how it was back in the day. When you walked over a couple of villages you’d have to change your watch by 3 minutes.
I’m all for aligning life with the rhythm of nature and all, but I don’t see how that’d work in current times.
Tell my employer that.
This but unironic. Employers just do what everyone is doing, and will stop when everyone else does.
You’re more likely to win the euromillion than to successfully shift norms away from the 8:30-18:00 working hours. This shit is baked into every employment contract out there. I work an office job where it doesn’t matter so much, but anyone who works shifts or a time-sensitive job is stuck there basically forever regardless of the time zone.
Other way around. If you want a lighter evening, your day has to slide earlier so when you sleep is closer to sunset.
Yep… And damn I put so much effort into working that out and still got it wrong
Understandable. Everyone is sleepy this week.
Your first two lines need a caveat: … at a local meridian as chosen by the will of the people*.
Otherwise you end up in situations where every individual location sets their clock by local noon, which varies by longitude. If you think it’s bad there are a handful of different time zones across your continent, wait until it’s different from one end of town to the other.
The British invented (or popularised) standard time to avoid those sorts of problems. Problems that didn’t exist until high-speed long distance travel became a thing. And time zones were a later addition because Britain didn’t need any, but they’re also somewhat necessary.
* for “will of the people”, read “will of the ruling class” as necessary. See: China.
We need a standard system for tracking time. If every city decides their own time based on the sun it will be chaos.
Have the whole world go on UTC, that way there’s never confusion.
I’ve had way too many conversations with people that simply can’t comprehend how that works. “But then we’d have to do everything so much earlier, it would be dark all the time.” I try to explain that we’d still do everything at the same time of day, just call it something different, but they just can’t wrap their minds around that.
We can’t. It’d make it too easy to discover how arbitrary “9 to 5” is.
China has one time zone, but in Xinjiang they use local time anyway. Getting everyone on one time zone for daily use is unlikely.
Na, we should get rid of that idea completely. If everyone used one time like UTC (other time zones are available) and just align your working hours etc to your location.
Then 14:00 is 14:00 everywhere, just that some are asleep then, others are awake!
This is the way
While we’re at it, cancel the time zones. I have no fucking clue why we’re still pretending everyone wakes up at the same time of the day all over the world. All it does is mess up scheduling for when you actually want to talk to people on the other side of the world.
How would we decide to handle the date with no time zones? Half the world would have a date switch during the daytime. Not necessarily impossible to navigate but it would be confusing for a while.
That is up to the people to decide. Have the date switch at 00:00 whenever that is, or switch it at whatever time is the middle of the night - I just want to be able to see the time written out and be able to tell how many hours from now that’s happening without googling what flavor of time fuckery any specific time zone abbreviation means. I don’t think changing dates is going to be more confusing than some countries having 15 minutes ahead of GMT time zones or screwing up everyone’s circadian rhythms twice a year.
That’s going to be way worse. I can get down with no timezones, but if we replace time zones with date zones you’ll end up with two locations where the same instant of time is either March 2nd at 3am or March 1st at 3am. There really just isn’t an easy way to handle time that works for all weird geographies and also makes it easy to schedule things across an ocean. But also, fuck daylight savings, that’s a totally unnecessary way of making it all worse than it needs to be.
I don’t mind just changing the date a 0 hours everywhere at once, personally. Though, there’s also a thing Japan already does where they list time at 25:00, 26:00 and so on - meaning 1 AM, 2 AM, but tomorrow. I think that might be handy for when you want to list the time that would technically be tomorrow but still during the current daylight period.
But… That’s already the case even with timezones… There already is an international date line where one side is a day off the other.
Imagine going to work and writing March 31st on documents all morning, and April 1st all afternoon.
You might remember that you have an appointment on the 5th. But, when you wake up on the 5th, you’ve already missed it.