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EU to recommend that member states abolish daylight saving time
- informatimago 8y agoYay!
- insulanian 8y agoFinally! It was about time to end this annoying practice.
- NKosmatos 8y agoIt's worth noting that Greece, Cyprus, Malta and in a lesser extent Italy were the only ones supporting the existing system. All the other countries are clearly in favor of abolishing the change. Strange that Spain and Portugal didn't vote like the remaining southern EU countries. Here is the official link to the preliminary results: http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-18-5302_en.htm http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-18-5302_en.htm Not a lot of people participated, less than 1%, so the results should be taken with a grain of salt.
- Piskvorrr 8y ago4.6 million people is "not a lot"?
- contravariant 8y agoNot as much as the 512.6 million it might affect.
- Piskvorrr 8y agoWell, it's representative enough for an opinion poll, which this was.
- contravariant 8y agoIf it were truly random it would be more than enough even, the real problem here is bias which is hard to rule out. Frankly if you could guarantee a truly random sample you wouldn't need much more than a few thousand people to give their vote on pretty much anything, but the reason we still have elections is because it's nigh impossible to rule out any kind of bias.
- Piskvorrr 8y agoSure. Which is, again, why this was not an election - the resulting proposal, if any, will need to be ratified by each of the member states. (Which is where elections, referenda etc. come in)
- Piskvorrr 8y agoEt voila: "How and when would these changes become effective? The European Commission's proposal will now go to the European Parliament and the Council for their agreement. To allow for a smooth transition, under the Commission's proposal each Member State would notify by April 2019 whether it intends to apply permanent summer- or wintertime. The last mandatory change to summertime would take place on Sunday 31 March 2019. After this, the Member States wishing to permanently switch back to wintertime would still be able to make one last seasonal clock change on Sunday 27 October 2019. Following that date, seasonal clock changes would no longer be possible. This timeline is conditional on the European Parliament and the Council adopting the Commission's proposal by March 2019 at the latest." http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-18-5709_en.htm http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-18-5709_en.htm
- bovermyer 8y agooh thank god
- baldfat 8y agoCan we just stick to the Daylight time year round? I am 100% for getting rid of this dumb system.
- keymone 8y agoalso https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar
- Avamander 8y agoalso Single time zone earth please
- dtech 8y agoWhat does UTC lack for you to fulfill that role?
- Avamander 8y agoI said it half-jokingly, trying to continue the train of thought of OP. The current system is quite fine.
- ifdefdebug 8y agoI suspect most supporters of that idea live near Greenwich latitude but I might be wrong...
- Chinjut 8y agoLongitude, you presumably mean.
- ifdefdebug 8y agoexactly, sorry.
- rectang 8y agoDammit. If they made daylight savings time permanent, I'd be thrilled. The switch is only a brief adjustment. But having an extra hour of daylight in the early evening for half a year makes a huge difference.
- prairiedock 8y agoIf you read the article, you will find that they do propose to make daylight saving time (they call it "summer time") permanent.
- cpfohl 8y agoThrilled they're considering this, but my first thought was "I wonder how many time and date libraries will fail to adjust correctly?" I'm sure that for the well designed ones it's just a matter of configuration somewhere ... But there will definitely be some fun and weird time bugs in the near future
- nicolaslem 8y agoDST rules and timezones in general already change all the time. This is why having automatic updates for packages like tzdata or pytz is important.
- rimunroe 8y agoAnother example: unlike leap days, leap seconds don’t get added at predictable intervals.
- Dylan16807 8y agoThe vast majority of systems can ignore leap seconds, though.
- rimunroe 8y agoCan you elaborate? Most of the date time libraries I've encountered support them, and it seems like knowing when something happened would be pretty important generally.
- Nursie 8y agoSo long as here in the UK (you know, as if we were part of the EU anyway...) we could stick with BST all year round, then definitely!
- m4r35n357 8y agoNah, we will hang on to GMT on some sort of half-arsed "principle" and hang the inconvenience. Anything else would be admitting that the EU is right about something.
- gaius 8y agoGMT is the time from which all other times are derived. It’s not going anywhere.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- netsharc 8y agoBut BST (British Summer Time) is GMT + 1 hour. So e.g. London and Berlin always has a constant 1 hour difference (they both switch to summer time and back at the same moment). I used to live at GMT+7, I just realize now that this doesn't mean I was always 7 hours away from London, in summer I would've been 6 hours away. Edit: I just realized you're replying to a comment about GMT, not about BST. GMT is theoretically the old name anyway, it's UTC nowadays.
- matt4077 8y agoBut do hey switch at the same moment... or one hour apart?
- tialaramex 8y agoThey switch at the same moment, they're both defined to switch at 0100 UTC. So in London it will go from 0059 to 0200 in the Spring, and from 0159 to 0100 in the Autumn In Berlin it goes from 0159 to 0300 in Spring and from 0259 to 0200 in the Autumn. Making the change at 0100 UTC is pretty convenient if your timezone is close to the zero line, because most people will be asleep or at least in bed and won't care. It's not so practical near the dateline where 0100 UTC is the middle of the day.
- jventura 8y agoI see that most people here (and people I know) would like to keep the "summer time" all year, because they like to get out early from work. But why not start working at 7am instead of 8am, while keeping the "true" solar horary, instead of our clocks be almost 1,5h away from the reality? Time is relative, I guess.. :)
- philf 8y agoDepending on where in the EU you are, it's already off.
- apexalpha 8y agoBecause we want 12 o clock to be the middle of the practical day, not the middle of the sun-day.
- Asooka 8y agoIn typical 9-17 jobs, 12 is definitely not the middle of the practical day. I don't know anyone whose sleep schedule puts 12 at the middle of their waking period either.
- aleksei 8y agoIf your job requires no interaction with the rest of society, that would work. As it is, people's lives ironically revolve around the clock and not the sun, so you're expected to be available from a certain hour of the day to a certain hour of the day regardless of the position of the sun.
- e12e 8y agoIn general I suppose I'd prefer to get off work around 10 am or so (if we're adjusting work to fit daylight to our free time). But I suppose there's indeed a cultural bias towards dragging everyone (in offices anyway) to 8-16 rather than 7-15 or 9-17.
- ddebernardy 8y agoThe most surprising here isn't the landslide 80% in favor. It's the 4.6 million responses [0] for this type of citizen consultation. That's huge. Hopefully t's will get crossed and i's will get dotted before winter time kicks in this year. [0]: https://www.lemonde.fr/europe/article/2018/08/31/la-commission-europeenne-prone-la-fin-de-l-heure-d-hiver_5348420_3214.html https://www.lemonde.fr/europe/article/2018/08/31/la-commissi...
- mnw21cam 8y agoAre you aware how slowly the wheels of EU bureaucracy turn?
- ddebernardy 8y agoIndeed, but there's nothing in the institutions that should prevent anything from going fast when planets align, and that one looks like a no brainer. They consulted at the request of the Parliament. Junker took note of the unusual popularity of the consultation and the strength of the consensus. Northern countries (Finland, Baltic countries) have been calling for it for years. More cynically, it's unusual enough for the Commission to have a popular topic on their plate. So better get media attention for that, than for sulfurous topics like the migration crisis or boring ones like the EU's multi-annual budget.
- thefounder 8y agoIt's a recommendation after all so once it's voted the speed is really determined by each local government/member state.
- apexalpha 8y agoIt's not huge at all: it is less than 1% of the population. The fact that this is used to justify 'the people want it' is hilarious. 1) People who care about abolishing it are way more likely to vote. 2) It depended heavily on media broadcasting the fact that it exists. This is why 90% of the 4M people are German; their media picked it up. Whether you want to get rid of it or not; both are fine. However, this poll isn't a reasonable argument in favour of it.
- bjourne 8y agoAbout time! If people want to get up earlier or later, then they should do like the Iranians and go to work one hour earlier in the summer. Don't change the clocks.
- lucb1e 8y agoI had no idea the Iranians do that, definitely an interesting idea.
- jxub 8y agoIn Spain something similar also happens: in August many companies let employees opt for "jornada intensiva" from 8am to 3pm instead of the usual 9am 6pm with an hour for lunch.
- scalesolved 8y agoYou end up so hungry doing that though :D
- astura 8y agoOnly for the first week or so, your body adjusts. At least mine adjusts pretty easily based on when its used to eating.
- dkersten 8y agoGiven that its pretty easy to go for a few days without eating, once you let your body adjust to it, this sounds plausible to me. Besides, on days when I’m not working, I can easily go until 4 or 5pm before eating (and then only eat once more before bed).
- gordaco 8y agoI've been doing that for more than five years. Not five summers: five whole years. I only very rarely eat at the office. I guarantee that your body will adjust after a little. In fact, you'll probably be surprised about how little it takes to get accustomed. In fact, I think this is why intermittent fasting is somewhat easy to adopt: it's surprisingly fast to adapt your body to a different meal schedule, as long as you're eating as much as you need.
- protoster 8y agoFantastic! Though I'm getting a vision of the future ~50 years from now where the US is one of the two countries in the world still practicing daylight savings.
- dev_north_east 8y agoSome states in the US already don't switch.
- r3bl 8y agoFrom what I can find, only two at the moment: Arizona and Hawaii (and most of the overseas territories). Florida is on its way to abolish switching, but it's not there yet.
- DerpyBaby123 8y agoIndiana just fully switched over to using DST in 2006[1] [1]https://www.timeanddate.com/time/us/indiana-time.html https://www.timeanddate.com/time/us/indiana-time.html
- gamesbrainiac 8y agoThank goodness, this is the most annoying thing that I've had to face.
- chrisper 8y agoThey are also saying that each country then can choose if they want to keep winter or summer time... That's going to be chaotic! Imho the summertime should be abolished for all member states..
- mpweiher 8y agoNah...summertime is actually the better one. You get more light in the evening, rather than at 4 in the morning.
- hrktb 8y agoIn the end does it matter though? I mean, if it had a proven benefit for kids, schools could start at different hours depending on the seasons. Companies can decide to start at 10 or 8 instead of 9, etc. More light in the evening doesn’t seem to make sense to me as we are the ones deciding when is “evening”
- dtech 8y agoApparently it's easier for our collective society to agree that what was 9:00 yesterday is now 10:00, rather than allowing companies to start at 10:00 instead of 9:00. I fully agree with you, but in many people do not agree with your argument. Interestingly in my experience whether people agree with this is different depending on whether that person has a STEM/non-STEM study or job, STEM people tend to agree.
- masklinn 8y ago> In the end does it matter though? Yes. > More light in the evening doesn’t seem to make sense to me as we are the ones deciding when is “evening” Western society has pretty much embedded the idea that the day is centered around 16:00 (4PM) and "night" around 03:00~04:00. Lights out being when the vast majority of people are asleep with no light when they're actually up is stupid.
- leereeves 8y ago
- coding123 8y ago3 minutes till a comment suggesting we all be on GMT
- anoncoward111 8y agoAlready happened lol. Come visit our shop, open from 01:47 UTC to 16:23 UTC!
- 1023bytes 8y agoHopefully all the countries will agree on this together. It would be quite inconvenient if ever country would have a different time.
- dudul 8y agoNot all EU members are on the same timezone already.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- apexalpha 8y agoBut most are and breaking up that big CET block would be inconvenient.
- patrickmcnamara 8y agoThe CET should be smaller. Spain should be on the western time.
- minikites 8y agoI'm going to go against the grain and advocate in favor of daylight saving time, mostly because the alternatives are worse. Dr. Drang lays out the reasons nicely: http://www.leancrew.com/all-this/2013/03/why-i-like-dst/ http://www.leancrew.com/all-this/2013/03/why-i-like-dst/ >If we stayed on Standard Time throughout the year, sunrise here in the Chicago area would be between 4:15 and 4:30 am from the middle of May through the middle of July. And if you check the times for civil twilight, which is when it’s bright enough to see without artificial light, you’ll find that that starts half an hour earlier. This is insane and a complete waste of sunlight. >If, by the way, you think the solution is to stay on DST throughout the year, I can only tell you that we tried that back in the 70s and it didn’t turn out well. Sunrise here in Chicago was after 8:00 am, which put school children out on the street at bus stops before dawn in the dead of winter. And if you’re wondering why I’m not accounting for predawn light in this case, it’s because winter skies tend to be more overcast and don’t provide as much twilight as summer skies do.
- pluma 8y agoI wasn't aware Chicago is in Europe. Jokes aside, as a kid growing up in Germany I already went to school in the dark in winter even with DST. Having permanent summer time won't change that. It's also a total non-issue because Europe isn't as dangerous to pedestrians as the US and fears of "stranger danger" aren't nearly as widespread.
- fyfy18 8y agoThere are always going to be localities who like the current situation, because they are so far away from true solar time. It’s around 4000km from the east of Poland to the west of Spain, but they are all in the same time zone. China has it even worse.
- RegBarclay 8y agoDaylight time or standard time -- I don't care. Just pick one and stop changing it twice a year. There's plenty of evidence that messing with the clock doesn't do any good.
- jlangenauer 8y agoAs an Australian who lives in Berlin, I find this hilarious, remembering the (cretinous) debates about daylight saving back in Australia, particularly Queensland where I was born. For 30 years, Queensland has been in a different time zone to NSW and Victoria during summer, because it has never adopted daylight savings. For this, such wonderful arguments were advanced such as "It will fade the curtains" (Wait, wat) and it will upset the cows to be milked at a different time. And across the other side of Australia, Western Australia (always a, er, special place) has had FOUR referendums in the last 50 years on whether to adopt daylight savings. All were rejected. So watching Europe deal with this pragmatically and quickly is quite pleasing to watch.
- chrismorgan 8y agoMy experience in my family and with my friends is that “it will fade the curtains” is said flippantly (my mother particularly likes it). Does anyone have any documentation of people that have said it seriously, or is it unsubstantiated and potentially urban myth?
- jlangenauer 8y agoIt's often attributed to either Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen, or his wife Flo. I can't find a definitive source after a quick Google search, though.
- cromulent 8y agoI'm pretty sure it was him in the 1970s sometime. I don't know who complained that "the men would get their morning erections while on the bus" though. Edit: Another Queensland premier Peter Beattie claimed daylight savings would increase skin cancer rates. https://www.theage.com.au/national/now-daylight-saving-causes-cancer-20061025-ge3ew3.html https://www.theage.com.au/national/now-daylight-saving-cause...
- chrismorgan 8y agoPeter Beattie’s statement doesn’t seem unreasonable to me; if daylight savings time causes people to spend more time outdoors when the sun is up, or that for the time they spend the sun is up more—which is basically the whole purpose of DST—then increased skin cancer rates is what you would expect. How much increased, I wouldn’t care to comment, and it’s difficult to measure most such things unless you have parallel measurable universes.
- Wildgoose 8y agoFantastic! Changing the clocks wrecks people's sleep cycles and indirectly causes accidents. Pick a time and stick to it!
- wott 8y ago> Fantastic! Changing the clocks wrecks people's sleep cycles By this logic, let's suppress week-ends, and holidays. And evenings out as well.
- jemfinch 8y agoTheir recommendation is not to "abolish" Daylight Saving Time, but to commit to it and make it the year-round standard.
- CalRobert 8y agoIf it means people stop telling me I'm in UTC in the summer, this would be fantastic. "we'll meet at four your time" "great!" "why weren't you there?? I googled 'current time utc!!'" "because we're on BST, aka IST, aka UTC+1 in the summer" But this rando website says UK/Ireland is UTC!! Someday, somehow, we'll teach people that if you're using PST in the summer, there's a 99% chance you're wrong.
- xamolxix 8y agoAlas, Britain will likely not be in the EU by then.
- CalRobert 8y agoPretty sure they won't be changing tome zones differently from the rest of Europe. Or maybe I'm wrong and that's one of the freedoms Farage holds so dear. Putting the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland in different time zones would be.. annoying, at the least. Then again you said Britain, not the UK, but I can imagine the DUP protesting pretty loudly if NI were in a different timezone to GB. Nomenclature is fun.
- ben_w 8y agoIt might just be wishful thinking on my part… but it looks like the people in charge of leaving are so mindbogglingly incompetent that Britain might have accidentally joined the Euro by then. Accidentally.
- Balero 8y agoYou can just do "time Dublin/London/city of choice" and it'll give you the right one.
- CalRobert 8y agoIndeed, and I do. Unfortunately my frustration is with gently telling people that if they set a meeting at 6 PM UTC it's at 7 PM for me, and that's not ideal, and them wondering why I'm telling them they did something wrong.
- rostigerpudel 8y agoObligatory XKCD reference: https://xkcd.com/673/ https://xkcd.com/673/
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- callesgg 8y agoGood, the switch fucks with my internal day/night clock every time. Takes several days to adjust.
- drinchev 8y agoOn top of that DST is one of the nastiest things when dealing with time / date in CS. I’m scared as well that there will be another edge case when the DST is being demolished from EU as the time calculation in the past and the future will have another “if” clause.
- narrowtux 8y agotzdata is a database about time and it has all this builtin. Even dates when countries switched from one system to another. So if your code uses the tzdata database through a library, you probably don't have to do anything.
- secabeen 8y agoYeah, and as a database of time changes over the last 50 years, it's not going to go away, as you'll need it for historical dates, and for other time zone changes that occur anyways.
- thomastjeffery 8y agoThose kind of edge cases already exist.
- buboard 8y agobut timezone changes happen all the time https://www.timeanddate.com/news/time/ https://www.timeanddate.com/news/time/
- Aardwolf 8y agoMy order of preference: Summer time only: great, less dark winter evenings! Daylight saving: meh... why do they make the already dark winters even darker? Winter time only: nooooooooooo!
- Asooka 8y agoWell, this change will piss off half the population, because my preferences are exactly the other way around. Astronomical time is the best, because it syncs with the sun. Summer time means having to get up too early and doesn't play well with my biological clock. Heck, it will be even worse on teens going to school who need their sleep the most and whose biological clocks absolutely do not respect our silly numbers. I always loved when summer ended and I didn't have to wake up so early to go to school. Those few months on summer time were torture. I wouldn't want to inflict it on everyone year-round for any reason.
- Aardwolf 8y agoIn winter it gets dark at 16h to 17h. Nobody (except those with night shifts, ...), not even the earliest bird, goes to sleep that early, so you don't lose that light. In the morning, half the population loses that lightness, so they should shift it to where most people can benefit from it.
- jandrese 8y agoAs someone who deals with date/time on computers I can only say "about damn time". Time is a goddamn mess already, no need to complicate it even further.
- kevinherron 8y agoYou shouldn't be too happy until the entire world gets on board. Now you just have another conditional branch to follow for a certain region. Complexity increase :( Even with the entire world on board there's probably a conditional branch per region where you do things differently based on whether the date is before or after the change went into effect. Maybe this is just a problem for the authors of Date/Time libraries though :)
- jandrese 8y agoThat complexity is already there. Different regions have different rules already, even in the US there are states/municipalities that don't do DST so their relative offset from their neighbors changes twice a year. The day I am made God Emperor of Earth I will institute a single time standard for the entire planet. No timezones, no AM/PM nonsense, no daylight savings time, nothing. If it means you're getting up at 14:00 and going to bed when the sun sets at 06:00 then that's just how it is. I would also not worry about leap seconds until you get 60 of them and need to do a full minute change. This would be about a once a century thing. Leap years sadly still need to be a thing to prevent the calendar from wandering off.
- snarfy 8y agoThe reality is the time the sun rises changes throughout the year. To fix reality, we adjust the definition of time. If an activity depends on the sunrise, and not the position of the hands on the clock, then maybe they should, I dunno, schedule around the sun instead of the clock. I know, seems like crazy talk. Farmers should have farming clocks, not break everybody else's clock to align with the sun.
- Asooka 8y agoFarmers have always hated having to switch because doing everything an hour earlier messes with the animals. They can't simply roll everything one hour forward in the summer, because their produce has to be loaded on trucks and then transported to markets quickly, so the entire food distribution chain would have to switch to one hour later in summer.
- azurezyq 8y agoThis made my day. We've assumed that animals can adapt changes as fast as we can.
- kerng 8y agoI never thought about that - farm animals also have to adjust twice a year!
- GrinningFool 8y agoHousehold pets that get fed on a schedule too :/
- irrational 8y agoFarm animals don’t adjust. They can’t tell time. The cows get milked when they are ready to get milked regardless of what DST says the time is. The farmers are the only ones who’s schedule gets messed up by DST.
- kerng 8y ago
- metalrain 8y agoHere in Finland, sunrise and sunset shift quite a bit. During year sunrise shifts from 4AM in summer to 9AM in winter and sunset from 11PM to 3PM. Shifting one hour for DST doesn't really fix it.
- tallowen 8y agoI think it's interesting how there are two common threads in the comments: 1) People don't like switching twice a year. 2) People have a preference for summer time or winter time based on the perceived benefits of the existing system in the summer or winter. I wonder if there is a certain wisdom to time shifting that people are ignoring. For those of you who would prefer permanent summer time would you rather get permanent winter time or the existing system?
- zeveb 8y ago> The European commission will recommend that EU member states abandon the practice of changing the clocks in spring and autumn, with many people in favour of staying on summer time throughout the year. Eliminating the annual time change makes huge amounts of sense, but why stay on incorrect time all year? Why not just be on the real time year-round?
- toyg 8y agoDefine "real". Time is arbitrary anyway.
- lylecubed 8y agoEverybody should abolish DST. That 1 hour loss in sleep time spikes the rate of heart attacks by 24%. Reversing DST decreases the rate of heart attacks by 21%. https://openheart.bmj.com/content/1/1/e000019 https://openheart.bmj.com/content/1/1/e000019
- fh973 8y agoTitle is wrong. They want to go on permanent daylight saving time.
- DyslexicAtheist 8y agoI wonder if anyone has looked at the complexity¹ of maintaining timezones in software before raising as a solution for every member state decide for themselves whether to abolish or not. It will be an absolute nightmare. It's going to be hours of code audit and consulting gigs like it's 1999 (I mean Y2K). __ ¹ The Problem with Time & Timezones https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5wpm-gesOY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5wpm-gesOY
- aleksei 8y agoTBH, if you've rolled your own time handling logic you were already in a special kind of hell. But time zone changes aren't that irregular, so it should be pretty straightforward for library maintainers to fix the timezones up.
- nicolas_t 8y agoI'm in the minority here but I like DST. I like it when it's 11 and still sunlight outside when I'm coming out of dinner. The advantage of DST is that all the times of other shops changes in a way that makes the summer time ideal for me in Spain and France
- brianpan 8y agoDo you like DST or do you like evening light? Because those don't have to be the same thing. When I was in France, it was still bright out after 9pm. You'd have to add another hour on top of DST to get that in the States.
- pilsetnieks 8y agoBecause the States are much further south than France. The length of day is more equal throughout the year when you're closer to the equator. Shorter days during the summer, longer days during winter.
- nicolas_t 8y agoI like the evening light which means that DST is great in France and losing it would reduce evening light by one hour. To be fair, if I had a choice, I would prefer DST to also apply in winter so to switch the timezone of France by one hour.
- brianpan 8y agoThe first sentence of the article: "The European commission will recommend that EU member states abandon the practice of changing the clocks in spring and autumn, with many people in favour of staying on summer time throughout the year."
- tzs 8y agoOK, time (no pun intended) for something new, which address most of the concerns both with keeping DST and getting rid of DST, with the added advantage of providing a reasonable path to making eventually shifting our clocks to UTC acceptable. I'll call it "TZS Time". If we want to change the starting time of schools, the opening time of businesses, etc., twice a year to accommodate the changing daylight patterns of the seasons--and apparently we do want to because most proposals to get rid of DST seem to include proposals to seasonally change the clock time when those events occur--there are two obvious ways to do it. 1. Change the clock time at which things start twice a year. 2. Change the clocks twice a year. Start times are printed on signs and in documents, which are a pain to update. They are also on web sites with are not as hard to update, but still often require manual intervention. Clocks, on the other hand, are designed to be easy to update. For an already large and ever growing subset of the population who get all their time from their computers, mobile devices, and other internet-connect devices that sync with time servers, updates are automatic. Changing clocks twice a year, therefore, is probably a lot easier than changing start times twice a year, unless something is done about the difficulty of updating signs and the rest. At the cost of one annoying update year, we could address the sign problem by replacing them with signs that print both the summer hours and winter hours. That would probably cause problems around the transition dates as many people do get confused for a few days then over whether or not things have switched. That brings us to TZS Time. 1. We define a new time of day called "DAY START" (D). 2. In places that do not want to do seasonal changes of starting times, D is 6:00 clock time. In places that do want to do seasonal changes, D changes between 6:00 and 5:00. 3. Clocks would be enhanced to display both regular time, which does not change seasonally, and to show the difference between the current time and D [1]. E.g., if you are in PST on the day before the seasonal change and it is 11:34, your clock would tell you it is 11:34 and it is D+5:34. 24 hours later, after the seasonal change, your clock would again say the time is 11:34, but now it would say that is D+6:34. 4. Signs would have to be updated once to include D times. E.g., a sign that under the present system where the clocks change says: Open: 9:00 AM Close: 8:00 PM would need a one time change to: Winter Summer Open: 9:00 AM 8:00 AM D+ 3:00 Close: 8:00 PM 7:00 PM D+14:00 (For signs that you don't want to expand, I'd omit the Winter and Summer columns and just show the D times). 5. D times would be more convenient than clock time when talking about local events. E.g., instead of asking for a lunch with someone at 12:00 PM or 11:00 AM, depending on the time of year, you'd say D+6 all year. 6. Over time, people would end up using D times for most of their daily time keeping. Direct clock times would be mostly used when dealing with things outside your time zone or things that should NOT change seasonally. At that point it might become easier to have your clock show UTC instead of your time zone's clock time. For example, if you are in UTC-8, your clock would show UTC, and D+0 would be at 14:00 in the winter and 13:00 in the summer. 7. (Optional) None of the above addresses the DST problem of the one hour sudden change in start times twice a year messing up sleep schedules and other biological rhythms. At some point almost everyone will be getting their times (clock and D) from devices that have decent computing power and internet connections to time servers. At that point, we might want to consider changing from a one hour jump twice a year to smaller jumps more often. If it is handled automatically by all the clocks, I don't see any reason that the offset between D and UTC in a given time zone should not change frequently, even daily. This should eliminate all disruption of sleep schedules and other biological rhythms. [1] For 7 segment displays, or other displays that don't have room for an extra symbol, we could reserve 3 special 7 segment patterns, such as 1, 2, or 3 horizontal bars, to indicate that the display is showing D time. The display could be Hx:MM where x is one of the special patterns. x = 1 bar could mean it is D+0H:MM, 2 bars could mean D+1H:MM, and 3 bars could mean D+2H:MM.
- jlj 8y agoAs a parent with young kids will tell you it takes a couple weeks for our family to recover from the twice yearly switch. It is also depression for me when I lose that hour of daylight in the fall. My body doesn't get the benefit of a gradual change in daylight from season to season. I hope that it can be abolished in the US too.
- Markoff 8y agothis was exactly my reasoning when participating in this survey, you could provide additional comments for them and small children was my reasoning it's annoying but bearable for adults, but it's torture for children who need routine
- cwkoss 8y agoWhat percentage of software development work will this eliminate?
- archgoon 8y agoIt will increase it, as now any local time calculations will need to take into account which country the user is currently in, whether the country has passed a law terminating daylight savings time, and whether the law has now taken effect (which may or may not be as simple as checking the year). So basically, it creates a bunch of additional time zones that will activate depending on the current year.
- danirod 8y ago> Any local time calculations will need to take into account which country the user is currently in, whether the country has passed a law terminating daylight savings time, and whether the law has now taken effect. I mean, isn't this why stuff such as tzdata exist? Countries already do this. Not every country in the world is already following DST, so you must know which country the time calculation being performed on, because the result may vary. In fact, it's interesting to navigate through the public tz mailing list [1] because it turns out that countries or regions along the world still like to change whether DST is being enforced or not, and if they enforce it, at which point of the year the clock shifts forward or backward. Any local time calculation that doesn't already take into account the region and the current year could be wrong, that's why getting timezones right in software is difficult. [1]: https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/ https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- amai 8y agoRussia has done this already in 2014: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Russia#Daylight_saving_time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Russia#Daylight_saving...
- vatueil 8y agoCalifornia will also vote in November on whether to stop daylight savings time changes, either by getting rid of daylight savings time or making it permanent: * [San Francisco Chronicle] California voters will get a say on year-round daylight-saving time: https://www.sfchronicle.com/news/amp/California-voters-will-get-a-say-on-year-round-13035491.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/news/amp/California-voters-will-... * [Ballotpedia] California Proposition 7, Permanent Daylight Saving Time Measure (2018): https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_7,_Permanent_Daylight_Saving_Time_Measure_(2018) https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_7,_Permanent_...
- SllX 8y agoJust to clarify for anyone that hasn't clicked through. Even if this passes, two conditions must apply first: 1. The US Federal Government has to change the law to allow States to make DST permanent. You can choose to not have DST at all, or you can apply DST on an annual basis, but presently Federal law makes no provisions for making DST permanent. 2. A Bill would have to be drafted and passed through the California legislature with a two-thirds majority after the Federal law changes. All this does is give the legislature the option, to maybe change to permanent DST, if Federal law ever changes to make it legally possible. Personally I will still vote for it, I enjoy long Summer evenings with sunsets at 9pm and walks along Ocean Beach, but if you are planning to vote for or against it, just want everyone reading this to know what you are really voting on. By itself, this ballot measure does nothing.
- deathanatos 8y agoEveryone wants to abolish DST; fine. But they want to "abolish" it by making it permanent. They want that evening light in the summer far too much to give it up. Now, in the winter, the already short day will start an hour later; you will wake up at night. Sunrise is 8:13am, for example, in Boston, at its extreme, under such a scheme. And as an engineer, it is just so arbitrarily decoupled from anything natural, like the sun. Sure, standard time was already based on mean time which was based on solar time … it's already quite removed. But the reasons for those steps were much more sound, IMO. I look forward to the day in the far future when the malcontents, dissatisfied with waking up at night, create a system to shift an hour from the evening to the morning in the winter, and establish Winter Saving Time, or WST…
- dghughes 8y agoMany people in northern countries or parts of countries farther north like using DST. It was noted some parts of Scotland wouldn't otherwise see daylight until 10am. I'm in Canada at about 46 degrees latitude and it's quite dark here in the morning in winter once DST ends in November (it used to end in October). London and Glasgow are 51 and 55 respectively so their much worse than my region.