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Finland to propose that EU abolish daylight savings time
- mpweiher 9y agoCan't happen soon enough for me. Also smart: '“Member states should mull over together which time – summer or winter time – should be adopted on a permanent basis.”' Let's keep it on summer time, having light at 4 pm is more valuable than at 4 am. (I know, exaggerating, but only a little)
- mongol 9y agoI prefer to keep local time aligned with its historical roots, so that 12 is the hour closest to sun's highest point in the sky. What prevents society from adjusting to that?
- troels 9y agoAs measured from where? CET is a pretty wide zone.
- mpweiher 9y agoIt's a good idea. However, it is incompatible with having the same time across a fairly large swathe of longitudes. The benefits of having a common time such as CET/MEZ for most of continental Europe outweigh the nicety of having 12 noon correspond to the high point of the sun's arc in the sky.
- akvadrako 9y agoYou could actually do even better and just make all of the EU one timezone - since it doesn't have much to do with high noon anyway.
- mpweiher 9y agoA good idea. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Time_zones_of_Europe.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Time_zones_of_Europe.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_European_Time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_European_Time
- tonfa 9y agoYou'd have to move western europe (France/Spain) to GMT for that to happen :) (they stayed on CET/CEST after changing timezone during WWII)
- skrause 9y agoWould that be a problem? I think CET is way too big anyway. UTC makes sense for Spain and maybe France, UTC+1 is a perfect fit for Germany and Poland could be UTC+2.
- tscs37 9y agoThe third option might be a middle ground: +0:30, though I guess a lot of timezone dropdown boxes would suddenly break at that one (not that they worked to begin with).
- hannele 9y agoThere are plenty of places that already offset by half an hour (Newfoundland for example) or even a quarter of an hour (Chatham Islands in New Zealand) so any dropdowns should already handle this.
- tscs37 9y agoSadly, a lot of dropdowns I encounter handle only even offsets from -12 to 12... The state of modern web forms is sad.
- runarberg 9y agoThat is what Iceland did. Before the 1960's Iceland observed the daylight saving hour by switched from Iceland standard time (GMT-1) to GMT. In 1968 however, Iceland decided to stay on the daylight saving hour making true noon in Reykjavík often around 13:30. Having grown in those hours I have to say it kind of sucks. You wake up in darkness most of the year. If you wake up at 7:00 local time, that means you wake up at 5:30 solar time. There are loud voices (including psychologists and medical experts) that are advocating for moving Iceland back to Icelandic standard time (UTC-1). They claim the lack of sunshine can have detrimental effect on the sleeping cycle and therefor the general health of the population. Adding an extra hour of sun in the morning might be helpful for the general population.
- skrause 9y ago> Let's keep it on summer time, having light at 4 pm is more valuable than at 4 am. The vast support for permanent summer-time makes me think that either a lot of people are early birds or people just don't understand that DST is simply a way of forcing everyone to get up an hour earlier to "magically" get more sunlight in the evening. If you don't like getting up early you should hate summer time.
- failrate 9y agoI have never loved Finland more than I do right now.
- albertgoeswoof 9y agoWhile we’re at it let’s switch to binary time and a global timezone
- Numberwang 9y agoI'm so with you on this. A bit of a shame it's just you and me.
- akvadrako 9y agoYou 2 guys want to say things like, lets meet at 01100110010110001101011 ?
- cornholio 9y agoThat wouldn't really solve the problem DST tries to solve.
- akvadrako 9y agoSure it would, because DST is about changing what solar time you wake up throughout the year. But if we didn't have a 9:00 AM every day, just some random number, you would likely set your alarm based on solar time.
- mrtksn 9y agoTurkey did that. The results so far are not promising as apparently more energy is used and people are complaining that they don't see the daylight in the winter as it's dark outside both when leaving home for work and coming back. Will switch back to daylight saving as nobody is happy(Maybe except for the Energy minister who is the son in law of Erdogan and also runs energy companies). edit: here is a source, it's form a Turkish factchecking website: http://www.dogrulukpayi.com/bulten/kalici-yaz-saati-uygulamasi-elektrik-tuketimini-ne-kadar-arttirdi http://www.dogrulukpayi.com/bulten/kalici-yaz-saati-uygulama... according to the reports, the effect on increase in consumption is inconclusive(there's an increase but not necessarily due to this) but public opinion polls shows that people want to go back to the daylight saving schedule with %66 majority and only %22 of the people like the permanent summer time. here is a news article reporting that Turkey is ending the permanent summer time and going back to the daylight saving time at the end of the 2018: http://www.milliyet.com.tr/surekli-yaz-saati-uygulamasi-2018-de-ankara-yerelhaber-2366624/ http://www.milliyet.com.tr/surekli-yaz-saati-uygulamasi-2018... I guess you can use Google Translate to verify. The factchecking website also links to the actual reports. BTW, to all DST Haters, check http://momentjs.com http://momentjs.com and calm down. DST is your friend, let the computers do the bookkeeping and enjoy the sunlight.
- Jhsto 9y agoI recommend anyone interested to look at some of the documentation done in the IANA timezone dataset (historical references of Finland shown here): https://github.com/eggert/tz/blob/master/europe#L1213 https://github.com/eggert/tz/blob/master/europe#L1213
- rwmj 9y agoPlease yes please. I hate DST. It's an enforced twice yearly jet lag for no reason I can discern.
- user5994461 9y agoAdjusting the time allows to have more natural lights. It saves a lot of electricity.
- akvadrako 9y agoThat doesn't seem true - when the US extended summer time it ended up costing more electricity. And if it was true, you can just extend it year round. Winter is when summer time is really needed anyway.
- Asseon 9y agoRussia tried that for 3 years, now they use normal time the hole year. It seems only "summer time" is not a good idea either.
- Promarged 9y agoPoland also wanted to remove daylight savings time (the project was in the lower house) but ultimately it was rejected because all EU countries need to use the same time (DST). It seems Finland is taking it further...
- lgierth 9y agoPortugal, UK, Ireland have been in UTC for ages.
- wyufro 9y agoAnd Finland is in UTC+2. The thing regulated is probably when DST starts and stops, not the timezones.
- user5994461 9y agoUK is GMT time. Do not confuse with UTC, it's not the same.
- dingaling 9y ago> Do not confuse with UTC, it's not the same. GMT as a time standard is defunct. The Mean Sun no longer traverses his notional sky. GMT as a civil time zone is based on atomic measures[0]. It is not measured from the meridian. This is the phrase used to indicate this in UK legislation: In these Regulations Co-ordinated Universal Time (UTC) is the same time as Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) [0] Time scale UTC(NPL)
- jwilk 9y agoEU in not in a single timezone; but all EU countries observe DST. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Europe
- hawktheslayer 9y agoWe already thought of this in Arizona. https://youtu.be/k4EUTMPuvHo https://youtu.be/k4EUTMPuvHo
- aristidb 9y agoIn 1517174122 daylight saving time is so obsolete...
- cornholio 9y agoThe great majority of people opposing daylight saving don't really appreciate it's purpose: DST does not screw up winter, it makes summer better, much better. During the winter, there is limited light no matter what time you use. In a world without DST, social conventions evolve so that work hours, business opening and close times etc. find a compromise that allow most of the activity during the day - a clear preference of the human species that also maximizezes productivity and satisfaction for most people. It's irrelevant if that time is called 7 AM or 54 APM, you will tend to start working at the time the winter daylight starts. That's our baseline. Since we are no longer use sundials and enjoy predictable schedules, that time and schedule is maintained for the whole year; however, as summer arrives, the days get longer and they stretch both in the morning and in the evening symmetrically. And since most people like to start their activity in a short time after waking up, and the wake time is now fixed by the wallclock to be the same as during the winter, a good part of the daylight that we enjoy happens before most people are awake, say 5AM to 6AM. This is where DST idea comes into play: if the morning daylight is "wasted" since most people don't get up so early, why shouldn't we "move" that extra hour of light in the evening, so that most of us can enjoy a longer summer day and late twilight evenings by simply moving the clock ? Incidentally, DST reduces electricity consumption, but the main benefit in my opinion is the increased quality of life during the summer, for a very modest price: you wake up an hour earlier one day a year, and then enjoy 183 days with 1h more of light each. The reverse, going back to winter time by sleeping 1h more is essentially free for most people. I love DST and would hate to see it gone for a misunderstanding, it's impact over the winter days, when in fact that's unavoidable and it's real purpose is to make summer better.
- cameldrv 9y agoIt is fashionable among nerdy people, especially programmers who have to deal with the complicated relationship between different ways people describe time, and the actual flow of time, to not like DST. DST is really good, and really simple though. It's a social agreement to do everything an hour earlier in the summer. People like this pattern. Before clocks and railroads and computers, people generally woke up with the sun, and went to bed shortly after dark. In the winter, this meant that people slept a long time, but that was fine because there wasn't much to do in the winter anyhow, and it was better to conserve energy, since there wasn't much food available. Since we now have artificial light and ample food, we prefer to stay up past sundown and get a consistent 7-8 hours of sleep per night. Still though, people like to wake up after sunrise -- the sunlight is a pleasant and natural alarm clock, and waking up with it is built into our biology. In the modern world, most people have to go to work. Most people prefer to wake up, get ready, and then head to work. If work starts at 9:00 without DST, and you're far enough north, the time between sunrise and 9:00 changes a lot. Without DST, people either have to wake up later in the summer, or find something else to do in the morning before they go to work. Most people would rather go to work earlier and go home earlier while it's still light out. Now, you could say, employers could understand this and have different summer and winter hours. That's true, but there's a coordination problem. Suppose a shop opens at 7 in the summer, but 8 in the winter. Maybe their bread delivery happens at 7:30, so now that has to be changed twice a year. That means that the delivery driver's route needs to change because not every shop changes their hours, or if they do, they don't change them at the same time. DST fixes the coordination problem by just relabelling time, so everyone starts doing everything one hour earlier on the same day across the whole country.
- metafunctor 9y agoHere's why Finland doesn't like DST. In the south of Finland (like Helsinki), in the summer, the sun rises at 4am and sets at 11pm. The entire night is twilight, and it doesn't get completely dark at all. In the winter, the sun rises at 9:15am and sets at 3:15pm. At it's height, the sun barely rises above the trees. In the northern parts of Finland, things are even more extreme: for a long period of time in the summer, the sun doesn't set at all [1]. Similarly in the winter, the sun won't rise at all [2]. Therefore, for the Finnish people, DST is mostly useless. In the summer there is no shortage of daylight in the evening or in the morning. In the winter it's going to be dark in the morning, and dark in the afternoon anyway. For most of the year, there's nothing be gained by moving the clocks around. Moving the clocks mostly throws your sleep cycles off for a few days. Especially families with small children seem to get hit especially hard by this. That all said, perhaps Finland should not move to totally abolish DST, since some people in southern Europe appear to like it. At the very least, though, northern EU states should be allowed to opt out of DST. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midnight_sun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midnight_sun [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_night https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_night
- cornholio 9y agoI see your point and indeed there is little to be gained in the extreme north; people are already chronically light stressed and a small sleep shock with no real daylight benefits could have the claimed psychological effects. But this is not the case for the vast majority of the Europe's population. Why would DST be mandatory anyway? We are already using different timezones, I doubt it would disrupt trade, airtrafic or anything if an EU country does not change timezones when others do.
- metafunctor 9y agoDST in Europe has a bit of a history. The European Community, consisting mostly of countries in the southern parts of Europe, decided in 1981 that DST was a good idea. For political reasons I don't fully understand, Finland adopted the same DST convention in 1981. Possibly there was a need to appear to be in line with other European countries. Maybe there was fear that international business might be disrupted if the time difference between Finland and a given European country wasn't always the same, no matter the date. Certainly the Finnish people didn't need or want DST any more than they need or want it today. Later, DST was encoded as a (mandatory) EU directive in 2002. All relevant countries were already following the practice, so making it a directive probably seemed like a good idea at the time. Given the amount of international dealings with non-EU states with varying DST conventions, it doesn't seem that useful to force the same DST rules on all EU states.
- mezzode 9y agoDST has it's place I think, but given the choice between having it active never or always I'd choose the latter. The extra daylight is great.