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European Parliament requests recommendation to end biannual clock change
- rhino369 9y agoI'm against time changes, but Daylight savings time is better. We should just stay on that year long.
- blattimwind 9y agoHonestly: Whatever. As long as we stop doing the clock change.
- aiCeivi9 9y agoThis is what stopped such ideas before - even if majority of people that want to stop the clock change they disagree on which timezone to choose
- ajmurmann 9y agoWe could also just get up an hour earlier without redefining what time it is...
- kozak 9y agoThis is what Turkey recently did, but this has no sense in my opinion. If you want something that's happening at 8 AM to be like 7 AM, why not just do it on 7 AM?
- tome 9y agoInertia. Most things will work to the time of 9-5 (or whatever) regardless. It's a fine plan for individuals. It's not fine when you want to interact with anyone else.
- bryanlarsen 9y agoIt's the 9-5 that's silly. If noon is mid-day, then why 3 hours of morning and 5 of afternoon? Construction workers and other outside workers have this figured out: 7-3 makes a heck of a lot more sense. Use that gorgeous afternoon sun for your leisure time.
- vuln 9y agoThe reason out side workers start early and end early is to avoid the hottest portion of the day.
- baud147258 9y agoIt does not make any sense during winter, but because of inertia, they keep the same schedule as the rest of the year.
- tluyben2 9y agoI would be sleeping in that case in that gorgeous afternoon. As a night owl I always detested waking up early, no matter what timezone. When travelling, once the jetlag is gone, I again wake up 10 am and sleep at 2-3 am. I like my days like that. I tried what you say and it does not work for me; 8:30-9 is a reasonable compromise. Seems getting up later, taking a longer afternoon break but working later at night meshes with the partners/ companies we work with in Portugal, India and China; all of their offices start about 10, 11 all are there and they work till 2100 with a 2 hour lunchbreak. I for one have almost never set an alarm since high school (and at least in my uni the interesting profs also preferred late mornings and nights) and if definitely makes me feel more rested. It is personal but do not think everyone just gets used to it; like said, I tried and I know many who tried because somehow it might convenient and failed. Like in high school I had to get on my bike at 7 but I would just fall asleep in all classes after lunch while I do never have that if I shift my time; I sleep the same number of hours in both cases but I guess my brain does not accept waking in the dark for some reason.
- bryanlarsen 9y ago
- dorfsmay 9y agoNo! Let's keep time that make sense, I like the concept that the sun is at its highest at noon. Shit like drawing the shadow of a stick is stuff that kept me interested in school, as opposed to arbitrary/political things such as spelling (in french and english anyway). If natural light matters, shift society to do everything earlier! It shouldn't be very difficult, especially in Europe, where governments have such an influence, mandate that schools start earlier, shift transportation peak time (number and frequency of trains and buses) earlier, give some tax incentive for a year or two to companies who let their employees leave work earlier, etc... I lived in countries where the currency was changed, people got used to it, it didn't turn out to be the end of the world. Some countries shifted on which side or the road cars drove, people adapted.
- Svip 9y ago> No! Let's keep time that make sense, I like the concept that the sun is at its highest at noon. But in how many places during 'normal time' is this even actually true? No where in Spain is this true, and even for territories within their timezone, only a tiny sliver of land actually meets the above criteria. In England, the further east or west you get from GMT, the further you are from the Sun being the highest at noon by minutes, quarters and more. Timezones aren't even really accurate currently if we ignore daylight savings time, so why pretend it is? And honestly, if the purpose is for there to be more lighter hours during the evening, why not just adjust time so our current 14:00 is 12:00? And stick with that all year round?
- lmm 9y ago> And honestly, if the purpose is for there to be more lighter hours during the evening, why not just adjust time so our current 14:00 is 12:00? And stick with that all year round? Because that's aesthetically ugly. Can't we just change work hours to be 7:00-15:00 instead?
- lower 9y agoEven in Greenwich, it is true only twice a year.
- rectang 9y agoHaving a decent amount of daylight time after work and rush hour end makes a huge difference. Should daylight savings be taken away, it will have a outsized negative impact on my life. It's not realistic for the entire society to change from "9 to 5" to "8 to 4". The only hope is for daylight savings time to persist.
- Aaargh20318 9y agoHow does it have a negative impact if you have more usable hours in the evening ? Summer evenings don't get comfortable until after the sun goes down, before that it's usually too hot to spend outside in the sun. We should move the clock an hour in the opposite direction, so the hot parts of the day are during working hours (when you're in a nice airconditioned office) and the cooler parts are in the evening, when you want to sit in the garden and have a beer and a BBQ.
- rectang 9y agoNo way -- I'm not nocturnal, and the heat of the hours just before sundown is perfectly tolerable. Damn the tyranny of the electric light bulb! Give me sunlight!
- Kronopath 9y agoYou realize that your assertions are heavily influenced by the climate of where you live, right? While what you said makes a lot of sense for somewhere like Texas or Arizona, it is completely wrong for, say, the majority of Canada.
- Aaargh20318 9y agoI live in the Netherlands, our summers are probably closer to Canada than Texas and it’s still way too hot to be outside un direct sunlight during summers.
- tluyben2 9y agoThat is highly personal though; I am from NL and I have never experienced what you say. Too hot in NL is not a thing. I moved to Spain and we even usually (outside august) find it too cold there. Each his own but for a country with such crap summers like NL I find this a weird one; most people I know there take summer afternoons off to hang outside on terasses. That and working, walking etc in the hot sun gives me energy personally; energy I missed in our Dutch winters.
- alangpierce 9y agoYou need to actually shift the clocks if you want a time system where schedules are consistent and you typically wake up at about sunrise. (I realize this greatly depends on latitude and location within timezone, but shifting the clocks gets a lot closer overall than any fixed time offset would.) The big downside to keeping summer time in the winter is that in northern areas it will be dark for a lot of the morning, when there are sleepy drivers who just woke up and kids walking to school. That's probably a bigger safety issue than the sleep issues caused by the time shift. I'm generally against shifting the clocks, but the problem it's solving isn't an easy one.
- Aaargh20318 9y agoNo, DST makes no sense, in fact IF we have to move the clock at all, we should move it in the other direction. Let's call it MST (Moonlight Saving Time). DST gives you more sun-hours during the day, which is exactly the opposite of what you want. It means your evenings are useless. On a nice summer night, I want to have a BBQ with friends but usually it's not possible due to DST, it's simply too hot to be outside for any reasonable amount of time. Summer nights get nice and comfortable AFTER the sun goes down, so instead of maximising sun-hours during non-working hours, we should try to minimise them. You want the hottest part of the day to be during work hours when you're in a nice airconditioned office building, and the coolest parts in the evening when you want to be outside.
- blauditore 9y agoThis only applies to certain areas in the world. In most parts of Europe, it hardly ever gets really hot during summer, so I guess many people would argue in the exact opposite direction.
- Aaargh20318 9y agoI live in the Netherlands and it's already too hot on many summer days, it's probably worse farther down south. In my experience, the number of really hot summer days has increased a lot in the last decade or so, and it's probably going to get worse, not better.
- scbrg 9y agoThis is obviously highly dependent on where you live. In large parts of Europe, which this is about, that is not the case.
- Aaargh20318 9y agoI live in the Netherlands and it's already a problem here, and we're supposed to be a relatively cold country. Global warming is a thing and summers have been getting hotter every year.
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- sorenjan 9y agoI agree. I don't really care about how bright it is in the morning, but I want as much light as possible in the evening.
- marssaxman 9y agoI don't care what time zone I live in so long as it stops changing every six months.
- phillc73 9y ago> Many believe the clock change negatively impacts on people's mental and physical health. This is absolutely not true for me. An "extra" hour of daylight during summer evenings has a large positive impact on my mental and physical health. I don't find the actual physical change of the clocks to be a problem either. Change them twice a year by one hour, which most digital clocks do automatically now anyway.
- singularity2001 9y agoYes, please abolish winter time, not summer time!
- tome 9y agoAny chance you can start and leave work earlier, and get the same effect?
- phillc73 9y agoOnly if everyone else did the same thing and my son's school decided to start an hour earlier too.
- mchannon 9y agoGiven that everyone else could be doing the same thing if they are driven by natural daylight, and not what some clock on the wall tells them to do, maybe everyone else _would_ do the same thing, including your son's school. I think there's a case to be made of Stockholm syndrome going on with the fans of daylight saving time. Meanwhile, everybody under its control suffers.
- nicky0 9y agoDST really is a very clever behavioural hack. You could never convince every school, workplace etc to change its hours in a coordinated way. But everyone changes their clock and poof it's done.
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- sehugg 9y agoI once had to write a daylight savings calculator from scratch for a Windows CE system -- its kernel couldn't be updated, and I had to implement the 2007 changes to the DST rules. Good times.
- okket 9y agoMaybe it is time to switch one global time and ditch the old system completely. E.g. UTC, but it carries the old semantics with 'high noon' at 12:00. Maybe another system, but UTC is very popular already, e.g. for logging. Imagine you don't have to deal with different time zones any more.
- pluma 9y agohttps://qntm.org/abolish https://qntm.org/abolish Mandatory read every time this comes up.
- kuschku 9y agoWhich completely misses culture-based time differences (depending on culture, in Europe, two neighboring countries in the same time zone may have 3 hours difference in usual working hours) and mismatched timezones (half a china has a timezone 5 hours off from their local time) Look at this map: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e8/Standard_World_Time_Zones.png/1920px-Standard_World_Time_Zones.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e8/St... the timezones already are all over the place. What you think of as 4:25 can be 9:25 or 23:25 thanks to timezone mismatches.
- pluma 9y agoThat's an argument for more timezones, not less.
- danesparza 9y agoYour link indicates you may misunderstand the original article. They aren't abolishing timezones. They are considering removing the 'shift' that happens twice a year.
- icebraining 9y agopluma is not replying to the original article, but to the post by okket.
- ocdtrekkie 9y agoHow likely is the EU removing DST to pressure the US into considering the same? Any chance at all?
- pluma 9y agoNone. Why should it?
- tom_mellior 9y agoPossibly because the followup studies might show that it is better for people's wellbeing and for the economy to do away with this nonsense. There are regular articles going around saying that traffic accidents increase and productivity decreases in the weeks following a clock change. If we do away with it, we should see actual, measurable improvements in road deaths at least.
- zimpenfish 9y ago> Possibly because the followup studies might show that it is better for people's wellbeing and for the economy to do away with this nonsense. To be fair, the US isn't exactly known for listening to studies that demonstrate improvements in people's wellbeing (cf health care, gun control, pollution control, etc.)
- wafflesraccoon 9y agoUnlikely but keep in mind that two states (Hawaii and Arizona) don't use DST. So it isn't outside the world of possibility.
- ocdtrekkie 9y agoArizona is actually way cooler than this. (Or more confusing, if you like.) Differences in how some Native American territories chose to respect DST or not, this is Arizona's DST map: https://www.timeanddate.com/time/us/arizona-no-dst.html https://www.timeanddate.com/time/us/arizona-no-dst.html Traveling in a straight line you can go back and forth in time repeatedly!
- msiebuhr 9y agoYes! No more jet-lagged minors twice a year, no more train tickets stamped ~200 years in the future (yes, that has happened to me) and no more confusing server logs with odd duplicates. Also, contact your local EU parliament member and politely explain why this is good...
- ajmurmann 9y agoNit: Why isn't the server running in UTC?
- petecooper 9y agoI'm seeing more people recommending this. Is the main reason to avoid the daylight savings time changes twice a year, or am I missing something else obvious? Disclosure: I don't use UTC, I set the server to local time. I'm very open to learning why I'm wrong and how I can improve. Edit #2: thanks, responders – makes perfect sense when you put it that way. Today I learned.
- mtmail 9y agoFor logs you avoid having one day with 23 hours and one day with 25 hours per year. You also avoid trouble when running a cronjob at 2:30am, one day it would run twice, another not at all.
- lazyant 9y agoYou run servers and dbs in UTC then you translate in your app to local times, this is best practice. Otherwise, problems.
- notyourwork 9y agoThe question was what problems and why would I want to do this. Saying problems happen isn't helpful.
- kuschku 9y agoIf you have multiple servers in different timezones, or devs in different time zones, etc, this can all lead to confusion. It’s generally best if all your servers have one identical environment – time in UTC, language in english – globally, everywhere.
- Gys 9y agoA bit of a click bait title ? 'Parliament accepted our proposal to ask the European Commission to come forward with a recommendation that we would end the bi-annual clock change' So if I understand it correctly, this is a 'proposal' 'to ask' for 'a recommendation' ?
- Svip 9y agoThat's why I titled mine 'to thoroughly reassess' and linked to a Bloomberg article. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16332264 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16332264
- SunShiranui 9y agoIf I recall correctly, the European Parliament doesn't have the power to introduce new legislation on its own. Instead, they can ask the Commission to present legislative proposals. This might be what's happening here...
- contravariant 9y agoAccording to that sentence we're past the 'proposal' stage. Now we're at 'asking for a recommendation'.
- tmoravec 9y agoWelcome to the European Union. /s
- sjwright 9y agoDunno if you're trying to be sarcastic, but at least in this instance it appears they're productively tackling a controversial, thorny, side-effect-laden subject at a sensible pace. (Edit: OP has added "/s" marker.)
- ogdoad 9y agoTo be precise: the European Union doesn't welcome you, it welcomes your petition to be welcomed by it. Lest we fail to avoid making things needlessly forth-right.
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- jxub 9y agoIt would be paramount to look at labour productivity changes after the implementation of this proposal.
- epanchin 9y agoContinental Europe permenantly on UTC+2 would move EU further from NY... a nice little boost for the City of London.
- gpvos 9y agoI really hope they won't do that, but just switch to permanent winter time (UTC+1), which is the closest to solar time. In fact, while we're at it, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, and certainly Spain should switch to UTC+0. The eastern border of those countries aligns pretty well with 7.5 degrees east. Then I can finally be fully awake when work starts at 9 o'clock.
- bouke 9y agoNetherlands should be at +00:20 UTC to be at solar time, thus having the sun peak at noon. This offset was in use until WWII and was called Amsterdam Time. But having such an offset would be very unpractical to work with.
- gpvos 9y agoYeah, I just meant that winter time is closer to solar time than summer time (and then argued that we should get even closer to solar time). I have no problem with using full hour offsets, since they make calculations about times in other zones so much easier. The Netherlands was one of the last countries to switch to a "modern" time zone, in fact it was again a foreign occupier (the first being the French) that forced us to modernize (except that they put us in the Central European time zone instead of the Western European). Until 1937 we even used an offset of +00:19'32.13", using the meridian of the Westertoren in Amsterdam.
- shmerl 9y agoGreat. Now US should do that as well.
- fsloth 9y agoThank goodness. Daylights savings time is one of the most god-damned fiddly attempts to optimize something that it fails to achieve, and at the same time irritates most who have to deal with it. It was invented out on a whim, and adapted because it sounded good. No results have shown that it saves anything or helps anyone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time "Modern DST was first proposed by the New Zealand entomologist George Hudson, whose shift work job gave him leisure time to collect insects and led him to value after-hours daylight" "Many publications credit DST proposal to the prominent English builder and outdoorsman William Willett,[29] who independently conceived DST in 1905 during a pre-breakfast ride, when he observed with dismay how many Londoners slept through a large part of a summer day.[15] An avid golfer, he also disliked cutting short his round at dusk." I don't mind people collecting bugs and golfing, but please keep your hands off the society's synchronization mechanism without a better reason.
- Karunamon 9y ago>No results have shown that it saves anything or helps anyone. Even worse, the changeover has demonstrably negative effects. Not just in the obvious lost productivity from people going to work tired, but more injuries on the job[1], car accidents[2], and heart-disease related death![3] Killing it off is low-hanging fruit. [1]: http://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/apl9451317.pdf http://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/apl9451317.pdf [2]: http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199604043341416 http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199604043341416 [3]: http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc0807104 http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc0807104
- imarg 9y agoI dislike changing the time twice a year too, but would prefer to stay on summer timer throughout the year instead of winter time. In autumn when the day becomes smaller, there remains almost no light(day) time after a typical 9-5. Shifting to winter time at this very moment of smaller days makes this 0. (For reference I live in Greece). I understand though, that people with different schedules have different preferences.
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- excalibur 9y agoDoesn't bi-annual mean every two years?
- Aunche 9y agoIt means both every two years and twice a year. English is a silly language.
- danesparza 9y agoBiannual means "twice a year" https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/biannual https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/biannual Biennial means "every two years" https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/biennial https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/biennial
- macintux 9y agoNotice, however, the 2nd definition. Biannual means whatever the user happens to be thinking at that point in time.
- dazc 9y agoMaybe Spain should get back to the correct time zone first? http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/12/13/spain-plans-replace-nazi-time-zone-gmt/ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/12/13/spain-plans-repla...
- horsecaptin 9y agoI sure will miss my extra long summer days.
- lancebeet 9y agoThis seems like an "up to eleven" argument to me. Why not just wake up earlier in the summer?
- 5_minutes 9y agoI hope at least they go for summertime all year long then. Instead of wintertime, that would be crazy.
- kabes 9y agoBut...I really like my extra hour of sun in the evenings in summer.
- nicky0 9y agoJust do everything an hour earlier.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- pdq 9y agoShouldn't this say semi-annual, not bi-annual?
- dbatten 9y agoBiannual is fine. I think you're confusing biannual and biennial. Biannual and semiannual both mean twice a year. Biennial means every other year.
- colsandurz 9y agoSo what's semiennial mean?
- bloak 9y agoGood question. I'm going to say "demisemiennial" instead of "quarterly" from now on.
- diabeetusman 9y agoCould be either [0] http://grammarist.com/usage/biannual-biennial-and-semiannual/ http://grammarist.com/usage/biannual-biennial-and-semiannual... [1] https://writingexplained.org/biannual-vs-semiannual-difference https://writingexplained.org/biannual-vs-semiannual-differen...
- cletus 9y agoA lot of hate here for DST. Personally, I like it. In the sense that in northern climates, the really long days are actually pretty nice. Even in London in the height of summer, the Sun didn't set til about ~10pm. That's nice. I'm not opposed to the clock change but my solution for that is to have DST year-round not non-DST year-round. All this being said, I'd be surprised if this goes ahead.
- torstenvl 9y agoDST does not change the length of the days. If your shift begins at an inconvenient hour, or your timezone is misaligned to your astronomical time, those problems do not require manually fiddling with time by multiple countries to solve.
- JoeAltmaier 9y agoBeing pedantic is not lovely. Of course it changes the daylight hours we enjoy outside of working hours. During work most of us are indoors anyway.
- drb91 9y agoWell, you could just adjust when you work. No reason to alter time to get this effect. Personally, I haven’t noticed any more day with DST. I’d much rather have the daylight in the morning anyway! Meanwhile, it’d be lovely to hear why you appreciate the “extra” time in the evening but don’t notice the missing hour in the morning, and why you’re ok with that.
- etatoby 9y agoAdjusting the time when you work is not an option for 99% of people. Also, an extra hour of light in in the morning is barely noticeable to most people, who are struggling to wake up, get dressed, deal with family, and commute to work in time, to even notice whether the sun is out yet or not. In the evening, on the contrary, most people go out and have fun, so an extra hour of light is a big deal.
- encoderer 9y agoBuilding Cronitor has given me more experience with local dst customs than I ever wanted to have. One great thing about dst in Europe is that rather than happening at 2am local time in each tz the way USA does it, it happens across Europe at the same timestamp.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- pmarreck 9y agoGreeeat, more code to write to work around it ;)
- minikites 9y agoI like DST for all of the reasons outlined here: http://www.leancrew.com/all-this/2013/03/why-i-like-dst/ http://www.leancrew.com/all-this/2013/03/why-i-like-dst/ The alternatives are worse. Either you drop DST and the sun rises at 4 in the morning in the summer or you stay on DST permanently and the sun rises after 8 in the winter.
- siberianbear 9y agoI'm an American living in Russia. Russia got rid of daylight savings time in 2014. [1]. I love, it's great. One of the most confusing part of daylight savings time is that the dates that it occurs on vary between countries. Trying to figure out how to get hold of people back in the states at an agreed-upon time was a huge PITA. [1] https://www.timeanddate.com/news/time/russia-abandons-permanent-summer-time.html https://www.timeanddate.com/news/time/russia-abandons-perman...
- seba_dos1 9y agoBut 0h Game Jam! :( http://0hgame.eu/ http://0hgame.eu/ (see the FAQ)
- spodek 9y agoIn the United States we do even better. We propose laws for values of pi. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Pi_Bill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Pi_Bill
- icebraining 9y agoI don't see the similitude..?
- macintux 9y agoAlways interesting how this topic starts (at least?) 3 different discussions. * Whether your local time should change twice a year * If the answer is "no", whether your local time should be equivalent to the current DST or standard time (aka "summer" vs "winter" time) * Whether we should be using time zones at all Please know which question you're ranting about before you actually rant, thanks. Lots of orthogonality here.
- tantalor 9y ago> Whether we should be using time zones at all "So You Want To Abolish Time Zones" https://qntm.org/abolish https://qntm.org/abolish
- mixmastamyk 9y agoStrange he doesn’t use UTC as his base but rather Australia, I think.
- pjvandehaar 9y agoThat's addressed in the post. > Oh, where did you think it was going to be? Somewhere convenient for you? > One of the stronger reasons for adopting a new time zone is to more easily do business with a neighbouring territory which already uses that time zone. China, a gigantic country spanning some sixty degrees of longitude (and therefore, nominally, four whole "hours") has been unified on a single time zone since 1949. And it was already the largest single time zone in the world by population. > So, this phenomenon has now spread globally. Everybody wants to do business with China and her allies - everybody is China's ally. Everybody is on China Standard Time, UTC+08:00.
- mixmastamyk 9y agoHe says it is UK time, but then proceeds to talk about Australian times in the UK. The problem is also not as hard as he implies. Instead of looking up the time there in google, you look up a day/night diagram instead.
- Girlang 9y agoThey change their clock every other year?
- starchild_3001 9y agoNotion of wall clock time is probably unnatural and harmful. Humans for millenia did not follow wall clock time to wake up, go to bed, go to work etc. they rather followed the sun. Following the sun is natural because we all need light. For better mood, for being able to do work outside or for vit d. We should rather sync up our schedules with the sun rise/sun set (while minimizing the total wall-clock delta and confusion people experience).