26 ms·

Proposal on implementing permanent time zones in the European Union

190 points by caiobegotti 3y ago

datadrivenangel 3y ago
"After agreement of a common date within the EU, we recommend doing the transition in 1 to 2 steps, depending on the member state: Step 1: All EU countries abolish the clock change to DST in spring and remain on the clock time they use in winter. For those countries whose recommended time zone is their current standard time, no further steps need to be taken. Step 2: Those countries whose recommended time zone is not yet their current standard time, additionally turn back their clocks one last time by one hour in autumn, in order to adopt their recommended time zone as their new standard time." I really wish we could do this in the US.
- deleted 3y ago
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- Dylan16807 3y ago
  I've never seen anyone propose moving in the opposite direction of summer time before. That seems needlessly awkward to me.
  - qsort 3y ago
    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.
    - wiredfool 3y ago
      Ireland is on GMT/-1, and we're already pretty far west in the 15 degrees centered on 0.
  - baggy_trough 3y ago
    The United States adopted summer time in the 70s but abandoned it because of complaints about the late darkness in winter mornings.
    - wharvle 3y ago
      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.
      - bobthepanda 3y ago
        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.
  - pavon 3y ago
    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.
    - Dylan16807 3y ago
      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.
    - netsharc 3y ago
      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...
      - Dylan16807 3y ago
        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.
  - deleted 3y ago
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  - vikingerik 3y ago
    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.
    - Dylan16807 3y ago
      > 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.
      - reidrac 3y ago
        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-spain-has-been-in-the-wrong-time-zone-for-the-past-76-years https://theculturetrip.com/europe/spain/articles/heres-why-s... Spanish civil war was won by the fascists and Franco's dictatorship followed.
        deleted 3y ago
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- polishdude20 3y ago
  I'd rather it be how it is in the spring rather than winter. When you get home there's at least a bit more time in the day to enjoy the sun.
  - loloquwowndueo 3y ago
    For large parts of the US it’s probably dark by 4:30 so no, not really. I’m not in the US by the way.
    - deleted 3y ago
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    - madcaptenor 3y ago
      Here's a map of the earliest sunset time: https://weather.com/science/weather-explainers/news/2018-12-11-earliest-sunset-of-the-year-before-winter-solstice https://weather.com/science/weather-explainers/news/2018-12-... . There are parts of the US which have sunsets before 4:30, including some major population centers, but I don't know if I'd call them "large parts".
      - alright2565 3y ago
        that map shows most major cities in North America have the sun set before 5PM (traditional work end time). New York, DC, Los Angeles, San Fransisco, Chicago. New York, Boston, and Chicago all set before 4:30, a minimum of 10% of the population just there.
        madcaptenor 3y ago
        Right. Most people have sunset before 5 (there's not that much blue on the map), but not before 4:30.
  - mjevans 3y ago
    If you live, vaguely, in the north (of the 45th parallel) you get that change either way thanks to the tilt of the earth. I'd rather have the sunset start at 8PM and go over the horizon at 9PM (without DST) in the summer, than the current ends at 10PM in the summer. https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/seattle https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/seattle Now somewhere like Miami, FL https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/miami https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/miami with DST has a longest day of about 6AM to 8:40PM (civil twilight start / end), which without DST goes to 5AM and 7:40PM.
- xoa 3y ago
  Well we can't, and that's having tried! The replies do a great job of illustrating why really: there's no consensus. Some want permanent standard time. Some want permanent DST. Some are fine the way it is. In a big country spanning a lot of latitude as well as longitude and tens of millions on wildly different work and sleep schedules, messy compromise making no one entirely happy is what success looks like. Basically time stuff is arguably one of the big Chesterton's Fences that comes up on HN a lot. We didn't end up where we are for no reason or because people in the past were stupid.
  - BurningFrog 3y ago
    We legislate lots of things without consensus with 51-49 majorities. People in the past had a very different time environment. I used to have 1 watch. Now I have a dozen different clocks in my apartment. We also did not interact with other time zones nearly as much.
    - xoa 3y ago
      >We legislate lots of things without consensus with 51-49 majorities. We really do not in the US when it's a matter of genuine controversy. Once in a long while something gets forced through if the status quo is just unsustainable or it's a core plank issue or something, but the system isn't designed to allow anyone hitting 51 to easily pass anything contentious. And that's with your implicit take that there is a 51-49, but that's the thing, it's not a dichotomy in the first place. It's more like 25/25/40/5/3/1/1. Plus this isn't some inherently critical issue, for most people it's at most a minor irritation twice per year. For some it's a minor enjoyable, "free sleep". And thus status quo rules :). >People in the past had a very different time environment. I used to have 1 watch. Now I have a dozen different clocks in my apartment. Indeed! Our clocks used to not have global sub-millisecond automatic time synchronization.
      - anon84873628 3y ago
        >Plus this isn't some inherently critical issue, for most people it's at most a minor irritation twice per year. For some it's a minor enjoyable, "free sleep". I want to push back on this a bit. It's not just the moment of change itself, it's how wall time compares to the sun. And the problem with that is business hours being stuck to wall time. Essentially the government controls how business hours relate to the sun, instead of expecting each entity to change their business hours with the seasons (or not) as desired. This goes back to the time when business hours posted on a door were much more important. If you are stuck in a "9-5" job or otherwise are committed to what the clock says, the time change significantly controls your interaction with the sun.
- golemotron 3y ago
  > I really wish we could do this in the US. The US is about 4000 miles wider. That makes it hard.
- deleted 3y ago
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simbolit 3y ago
(1) abolishing daylight savings time is great and should have been done years ago. (2) the proposed time zones are really impractical, not necessarily in principle, but in their specific implementation. Germany-Netherlands in different time zones is strange, Dublin and Belfast in different time zones is stupid, Athens and Crete in different time zones is absurd.
- bobthepanda 3y ago
  I agree. National borders is quite possibly one of the worst ways to do time zones. At least in the US time zone borders were specifically chosen to run through areas of low population, so you would minimize the number of people doing, say, living in France but working in Geneva one hour ahead. Also it's kind of odd that Ireland and Portugal are in their own little time zone, when it probably makes more sense to just sync up with all their other neighbors.
  - simbolit 3y ago
    Ireland and Portugal already are together in this time zone, but the UK is with them, which makes good friday sense. Map of Timezones: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/88/World_Time_Zones_Map.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/88/World_Ti...
    - ianburrell 3y ago
      It would make sense to have Portgual and Ireland in the Western Europe time zone. They are right over the border from UTC but it makes sense to include them with neighbors. Especialy when they are currently in UTC. It is Spain and France that need to move.
      - madcaptenor 3y ago
        For what it's worth, Spain and France were on GMT (as it was back then) before World War II. (Technically French law referred to the time as "Paris mean time, retarded by 9 minutes and 21 seconds" - they had thought the Prime Meridian ought to run through Paris rather than London and were sore about losing that.)
deleted 3y ago
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AndyMcConachie 3y ago
This actually kinda sucks. I like not changing clocks. But I'm not happy about moving the timezones around. I'm in The Netherlands and after this Germany will be in a different time zone than me. That's not cool.
- ghusto 3y ago
  I'm in the Netherlands too, and I can't understand this sentiment. You're the second commenter to say this. Explain?
bouke 3y ago
This proposes that The Netherlands switch to WEST/UTC. There is already no clear consensus on whether to stay on permanent summertime (+2) vs wintertime (+1), and I would expect the switch to UTC to be even more challenging to adopt. Interestingly we switched from Amsterdam time (+0:20) to Berlin time (+1) during WW2, so going to +0 would mean a much earlier noon. Additionally policymakers have been saying to favour keeping the time with our major export market (Germany) in sync, so that wouldn’t fly with this proposal. Personally I don’t care that much for what offset is chosen, as long as we abolish DST.
- Aachen 3y ago
  I do like the idea of being in UTC and not having to worry about this timezone nonsense between my computer and any server application. Unfortunately I've moved from the Netherlands to Germany and my family, a few longitudinal kilometers away, would have to do timezone gymnastics when we talk about any sort of plans, so needless to say, from my personal point of view I fully agree with you that NL and DE being in different timezones, instead of the sea being the timezone separator as it is today, is bonkers
  - tgv 3y ago
    > I do like the idea of being in UTC and not having to worry about this timezone nonsense between my computer and any server application. It's an automatic watch. You do not have to worry about it. Communicate UTC timestamps with timezones between computers, but don't make people use those "because it's easier to program."
theodric 3y ago
After placing all of Europe on permanent winter time, going by the image provided, this proposal seeks to split Ireland's time zone from the UK's and place it a further hour earlier, thereby ensuring that the sun will begin setting at 2:30PM, and it will be pitch black out at 3:30PM in the winter, all in the name of achieving "permanent time zones as close as possible to solar time (natural time) in Europe." Well done.
- loudin 3y ago
  Exactly. This proposal is absolutely soul-crushing for most people. Having extended daylight hours when people are actually awake in the evening is critical for positive mental health.
- antupis 3y ago
  Studies show that you want those daylight hours to morning less depressions and sleeping problems.
  - computerfriend 3y ago
    This is extremely at odds with what I actually want: longer evenings.
  - theodric 3y ago
    Are you following that we're talking absorbing a 2:30PM dusk to achieve this? That's worse than northern Finland. It's absurd and foolish. Those studies are failing to take northern latitudes' extreme swings into account when trying to legislate timezones...from Barcelona.
- cge 3y ago
  >"permanent time zones as close as possible to solar time (natural time) in Europe." It doesn't even do that for most people in Ireland, according to its own map! As it appears to be based on land mass without regard to population density, the majority of the population would most naturally be in the Western European Time Zone, but they'd be pushed into the Azores Time Zone. A government in Dublin is not going to agree to a time zone change that wouldn't make sense for Dublin, and that's even ignoring the extreme political problems and potential violence and unrest involved with Ireland and Northern Ireland being in different time zones. For that matter, Greece is understandably not going to agree to any change in time zones that results in a map where its islands that Turkey disputes are changed to be the same colour as Turkey, rather than Greece. Neither is Cyprus. It would be a bit like asking either the government of Taiwan to start using simplified characters, or the PRC to start using traditional characters, and simply saying that it would make language support on computers simpler. I would support a reasonable proposal to end DST and have more natural time zones. But it has to at least consider factors other than just land masses and solar time, or it will never be a viable proposal. Their "full document" and "justification" doesn't include any discussion of the political ramifications or of population densities. They don't appear to give any justification of their specific country-level recommendations at all.
stavros 3y ago
This sucks, not only will Greece not stay on summer time, we'll actually go to one hour back from winter time? So not only will we not get one more hour of daylight in the evening (ie stay on summer time), we'll actually get one hour less than we have now? That's terrible.
- vasco 3y ago
  Same with Portugal, moving to Açores time seems bad, specially for working with the rest of Europe.
  - maratc 3y ago
    Portugal is already an hour behind the rest of Europe.
    - vasco 3y ago
      1 hour behind central, now would be 2 hours.
      - maratc 3y ago
        "central" today being both France and Germany — according to the proposal would be 2 hours behind Germany but still same 1hr behind France.
- p-a_58213 3y ago
  Also, the Greek islands will have a different timezone from the Greek mainland? This must be a joke.
  - stavros 3y ago
    That must be an error, there's no way.
- alex_duf 3y ago
  It's a proposal not a law
lloda 3y ago
I'd put Portugal and Ireland in the western zone.
irdc 3y ago
I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: switching to UTC+0:30 will put a large number of countries in a common time zone without them deviating from their solar time too much.
- qwytw 3y ago
  And make converting time between different time zones/countries even more confusing.
  - jhugo 3y ago
    India manages to deal with a fractional offset from UTC, as well as several other countries. It’s really not that big a deal.
    - netsharc 3y ago
      That makes me wonder of the little adaptions they need, that we Minute-Zero-ians ;) don't notice... do many Indian desktops have world clocks, for example?
      - rational_indian 3y ago
        Regular people dont't have world clocks. Only people who need to care about this do.
      - madcaptenor 3y ago
        I just had a look through https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_UTC_offsets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_UTC_offsets, because I thought it was just India and some obscure little islands - but some fairly substantial countries (Iran, Afghanistan, Nepal, Myanmar, Sri Lanka) also have non-whole-hour time zones.
    - deleted 3y ago
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    - Tagbert 3y ago
Halan 3y ago
Crete not having the same timezone as the rest of Greece?
- tzot 3y ago
  [dead]
roflmaostc 3y ago
I find it kind of absurd that people claim that clock alignment has negative impact on their health. Studies show that but: You do it only twice per year. But how often do you stay late up because of an event or whatever. And how often do you travel to another time zone, sometimes even >6 hours. I think the latter effects outweigh the health impact of clock alignment significantly.
- loloquwowndueo 3y ago
  You find it absurd because you’re one of those people for whom the change isn’t hard. It’s hard for a good percentage of the population (like me). Please just stop messing with my clock!
  - Freak_NL 3y ago
    Also just ask any parents of young children for a vocal opinion. Feel free to mess with the clock every other century or so, but not twice a year.
- graeme 3y ago
  Especially because people only focus on the one time that the clock takes sleep. Certainly, studies show that heart attacks rise that day. But also during the year, you gain an hour of sleep. Studies show that heart attacks fall that day. People always discount this one.
- ghusto 3y ago
  > You do it only twice per year Your body has six months to get used to an hour difference, so it sets in nicely, for maximum impact 6 months later. > But how often do you stay late up because of an event or whatever Personally, not often at all, but I get the point. The time you're supposed to wake up doesn't change though, and that's what makes the difference. > And how often do you travel to another time zone, sometimes even >6 hours I can count how many times I've done that in my life on one hand, and I'm sure I'm not alone in Europe. > I think the latter effects outweigh the health impact of clock alignment significantly. Have to disagree. Like I said it's to do with having a set hour you're _supposed_ to wake up. Meal times are another big factor.
Dylan16807 3y ago
If you move Spain to UTC+0, then it would finally line up with Portugal. Why move Portugal over even further? It's accurate enough.
jonathankoren 3y ago
Abolishing daylight savings and keeping standard time. If you’re going to abolish it, this is the way. None of this permanent summertime nonsense.
- loloquwowndueo 3y ago
  Yes people think they like summer time because they only use it in the summer. Most people will realize it sucks during winter more than “winter” (read: actual) time sucks in summer.
- wewxjfq 3y ago
  I want summer time all year. In winter it really doesn't matter if the sun rises at 8am or 9am and if it sets at 4pm or 5pm, it's depressing no matter what. But with winter time in summer, you rob working people of a chance to catch some sunlight in a meaningful intensity after work. It will just make people more depressed.
  - serpix 3y ago
    yeah, it's depressing to start working at dark and stop working at dark. What a waste of life.
  - jonathankoren 3y ago
    Dude. You are aware that the length of daylight naturally gets longer in the summer and shorter in the winter right? Eliminating daylight savings means the sun goes down at 8pm in August, instead of 9pm.
highmastdon 3y ago
We (Europe) shouldn't fragment time zones that much. We (NL) should stay on permanent summer time. Reasons - criminality is lower when there's longer light - earlier darkness leads to more accidents. It's better to have longer darkness after the masses are RESTED (in the morning), opposed to when they're TIRED (in the evening) - longer day-time for office workers, is more productive - shorter time of year that has long after noon darkness. As humans are using artificial light to stay up longer, it's better to align the time of day with that
- bojangleslover 3y ago
  Criminals can't distinguish between 8PM and 9PM light because they don't operate on an hourly schedule
  - matthewdgreen 3y ago
    Potential victims sure do.
- pmontra 3y ago
  I live in Italy and I also want a permanent summer time: for the way we live it's far more valuable to have light in the evening than in the morning. Actually, I'd get double summer time March to October or at least April to September. I know that we could just change our culture and habits and move everything we use to do one hour back, but that has an inertia that will make it impossible.
- edgyquant 3y ago
  > criminality is lower when there's longer light Correlation is not causation
  - ImJamal 3y ago
    What do you believe the causation is then? If light isn't what impacts it, then it seems like the summer should have more crime than winter. Kids are out of school and there is no snow and cold.
Freak_NL 3y ago
That line putting the whole Benelux, France, and Spain on one side of the divide (Western European Time) and Germany, Switzerland, and Italy on the other (Central European Time) makes this proposal just about dead in the water.
- amai 3y ago
  Central European Time in Benelux, France and Spain is basically Hitler time, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38478402 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38478402 If people would become aware of that the proposal might have more chances.
  - Freak_NL 3y ago
    It's not a secret or anything. People won't care that the German occupation had anything to do with it, because before that Amsterdam Time ran 19 minutes and 32.13 seconds ahead of Greenwich! No one wants to go back to a timezone like that in the twenty first century. Hitler actually did us a favour on that front.
charlieyu1 3y ago
Don't think it is workable. Changing clocks is annoying, but probably a good idea when you live in high latitudes.
- mjevans 3y ago
  See my other post in this discussion. Higher latitudes are dominated by the tilt of the earth https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/seattle https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/seattle DST only harms them by making the latest summer sunset around 10PM.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    >DST only harms them by making the latest summer sunset around 10PM What's the harm in that? It still gets light in the morning at a reasonable hour.
- bluGill 3y ago
  Changing clocks only makes sense (to the little it does) in middle latitudes when there is a decent amount of both light and dark in a day in the worse case, as you can shift things around to use the light better (maybe). When there are only a couple hours of light/dark in the day it doesn't mater what the clocks do, you can't really do anything different.
trabant00 3y ago
Apart from the specific location issues highlighted in the comments here, the entire site can be summed up to "everything is better, just trust us". Zero arguments for any claim. Terrible.
- tgv 3y ago
  Indeed, there is none. There is a FAQ though, but it is not supportive of any advantage. It just contains a handful of "But won't it ..." with rather shallow dismissals, but nothing to show an advantage of the proposed change. And it contains "debatable" statements, such as "For most people, it is not a problem to sleep beyond sunrise." That's not my experience, and they don't offer evidence. It's followed by a worse one: "Having to get up an hour earlier due to DST the next morning, unable to finish your sleep, is what causes sleep deprivation." Yeah, that's one day, perhaps two. Very early sunrise is 2 months. But if you shout loud enough, you get influence.
- deathanatos 3y ago
  > Zero arguments for any claim. You mean aside from the list of citations?
seydor 3y ago
Half of greece having a different timezone that's kind of ridiculous Why don't we reduce working hours to 7 also
- datadrivenangel 3y ago
  How about 6 working hours for half the year and 7 working hours for the other half?
  - seydor 3y ago
    which half
    - anticensor 3y ago
      Longer in summers?
    - nurumaik 3y ago
      6 for current half, 7 for other half
NeoTar 3y ago
Putting Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland (AKA Ireland) on different timezones strikes me as political suicide for anyone proposing it. But otherwise I am warm to the proposal. Some tweaks would make it more practical/politically acceptable (keep Portugal and Ireland on the Western Time Zone, don't split up Greece from the islands).
- closewith 3y ago
  Yes, that's completely absurd. Ireland is more likely to leave the EU than accept timezone partition.
  - switch007 3y ago
    Nonsense. Ireland will never leave the EU. They more likely to accept a time zone difference than leave the EU. They wanted membership desperately in the early 60s but had to wait a decade partly because de Galle hated the Brits. They couldn’t join quick enough.
    - closewith 3y ago
      Are you aware of the accession path Ireland took and why it was linked to UK accession? Ireland has the highest level of pro-EU sentiment in the bloc and it is still more likely that we will leave than accept a timezone partition with the North. It's not in question. Failure to understand this is a complete failure to understand the country.
      - switch007 3y ago
        I am. What’s your point ? I know Ireland likes the riches that come with EU membership. They don’t want to return to being a poor country. It would be a time zone difference, not a partition. Let’s not used such loaded language. Edit: is the USA “partitioned” or any less united because of multiple timezones?
        3y ago
pmontra 3y ago
From the Who We Are page of the site > The Time Use Initiative (TUI) is the main non-profit organisation promoting the right to time all over the world. Its main objective is to encourage public discussion on how we collectively organise our time, seen as a way to improve citizen’s well-being through innovative time policies. So this is not a proposal from an EU department, but it's a proposal to the EU. For sure they "encourage public discussion" as the comments here on HN demonstrate.
- theodric 3y ago
  It is, however, endorsed by some EU department and a bunch of other entities (see bottom)
  - morsch 3y ago
    The only organisation related to the EU is the European Economic and Social Committee, which is[1]: a consultative body of the European Union (EU) established in 1958. It is an advisory assembly composed of "social partners", namely: employers (employers' organisations), employees (trade unions) and representatives of various other interests. ...ok? This does not strike me as a particularly important institution. Some -- not all -- of the other cosigning entities are ridiculous. One of them (Normalzeit Leben) is literally the title of one person's blog where they talk about their struggles with DST. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Economic_and_Social_Committee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Economic_and_Social_C...
    - slartibardfast0 3y ago
      also, was it some formal declaration by this body, or just someone with an email address from the organization? doubtless, the irish representatives wouldn't support any divergence between Dublin and Belfast, (especially considering this is wrong from a spatial perspective as population density is heavily skewed to the east of the island). edit: i was curious enough to email all of the irish delegates to this organisation. some fairly heavy hitters, as a citizen with a keen interest in Dublin & Belfast being in the same timezone will be interesting to hear back!
janice1999 3y ago
This is absurd and absolutely detached from reality. Not one person on the island of Ireland is going to accept either a timezone border between Ireland and Northern Ireland or between Northern Ireland and Britain. Unsurprisingly not one expert or group on their list is Irish or from the UK.
- amai 3y ago
  No one is going to change the time just in the summer. That doesn’t make sense. It generates a additional time zone border between countries just in the summer. Just imagine the chaos this is causing with train schedules. Just imagine the problems this is causing for programming libraries handling time. And yet many countries do this every year.
  - janice1999 3y ago
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gizajob 3y ago
Ha why “Azores time zone” including Ireland and Iceland when the Azores are miles away. “Atlantic time zone” seems to make more sense.
- jcranmer 3y ago
  In the Americas, "Atlantic time zone" refers to the time zone 1 hour before Eastern. Presumably Azores time is meant to avoid confusion with existing Atlantic time. Also, Azores Time Zone is the existing name of the time zone.
yafbum 3y ago
Time zones are geopolitical artifacts just like borders, laws, currencies, etc. They can't really be "permanent"...
- delecti 3y ago
  They can be "more permanent" than changing twice a year.
alentred 3y ago
I live in Europe. As far as I remember, the proposal to abolish DST was already voted in the European parliament some time before the COVID pandemic, and the next steps were for the countries to chose their time zones and implement the change. Then the pandemic happened and this was put on hold. Probably, there is also some analysis paralysis: it is just hard to chose between keeping the winter or the summer time. Just look at this thread: morning birds cannot agree with night owls, someone leaving a bit to the west disagrees with those leaving in the east of the same country... I wish we'd just settle on any choice. At this point I care much less about "winter vs summer time", more about abolishing DST itself. Twice a year I have a small jet lag for nothing.
rvba 3y ago
In the last vote 80% peoppe wanted to stay at summer time permanently to have more aunlight after work. Wtf is this?
riffic 3y ago
here's an idea - UTC everywhere
- tgv 3y ago
  That's so utterly absurd. So now I know that it's also 20:00Z on the other side of the ocean. Great. But, are they awake at 20:00Z there? Or asleep? Let me subtract the time difference...
  - ghaff 3y ago
    I think it's mostly a sentiment from people who don't travel--or don't really communicate with other timezones at all. I need to know that someone in Europe is about 5 or 6 hours ahead of me whether it's a timezone or an informal UTC offset. And if I'm traveling, while there are cultural differences between countries (e.g. later dinners in Spain), I know that the workday is something roughly 9-5 and dinner is roughly around 7pm.
amai 3y ago
+1 for this proposal. It is just unhealthy to permanently live in a wrong time zone and this proposal would fix that at least in europe.
- jalk 3y ago
  By that logic it would be unhealthy to permanently move from Portugal to Spain.
  - amai 3y ago
    "Some activists believe that the mismatch between Spain's clock time and solar time contributes to the country's unusual daily schedule.[9] They believe that the relatively late sunrises and sunsets shift the average Spaniard's day later than it otherwise would be, and that a return to its original time zone would help boost productivity and bring family and work rhythms into better balance.[10]" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Spain#Criticism_of_the_use_of_Central_European_Time https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Spain#Criticism_of_t... But both Portugal and Spain are living in the wrong time zone, which is at least one hour off compared to natural solar time. So it most probably don't make a difference health wise if you move from Portugal to Spain.
    - ghaff 3y ago
      Certainly, it's a plausible theory that Spain being so far off its "natural" solar time (because Franco supposedly switched timezone in WWII to be in sync with Germany) leads to the late dinners--and one I've often heard. I suppose you'd have to look into pre-WWII Spanish dining habits. Whether it's a good or bad thing? <shrug> Personally, I like lighter evenings more than mornings.
dirtybirdnj 3y ago
DST is social terrorism at this point. "We" keep it that way because the herd is too scared to change. Never underestimate the awful raw power of herd thinking, it's the worlds greatest cancer.
- jalk 3y ago
  Really? Perhaps you should checkout https://www.timeanddate.com/ https://www.timeanddate.com/ to see when the sun rises/sets in the summer in various places. I.e. June 21st Stockholm - 03:30 and 22:08 with DST. The vast majority of people simply prefer evening sun to "useless" night sun.
  - dirtybirdnj 3y ago
    So we should re-adjust timezones in places where it's not a problem because some different people have chosen to settle in places where the sun isn't as optimal... and their comfort outweighs the experience of the people who don't need timezone adjustment? Because they made a bad choice on where to live and now they don't care about the unintended consequence on others? Help me understand why "your" problem on the other side of the earth deserves to override what is best for me locally. DST is not natural. Animals do not set their watches back and forth. It's a human construct. We only do it "because we've done it" for years and the general population is too herdmind to even consider changing it.
    - jalk 3y ago
      I simply gave you an example of why lots of people like DST, as a counter to your "hivemind" claim. Perhaps my example was too extreme, so consider southern Europe - June sunrise at around 04:30 and sunset at 19:50 without DST. I bet plenty of Italians rather have the sun set at 20:50 since very few get up before 05:30 anyway. It seems that you also made a bad choice of where to live, since apparently it's a place on the other side of the earth where Europe has the power to imposed DST. I do feel sorry for you, that you are so sensitive to these timezone changes, especially since it limits your holiday travels to mostly going north/south. Do be careful if venturing too far in either of those direction, as the sudden change in hours of daylight might also affect you negatively.
amai 3y ago
Interesting tidbit from the full document: "During the Second World War, Western European states were forced to adopt Central European Time by Hitler and Franco. After the war, this was not revoked, leaving the Western European states at a disadvantage to the Central European states due to the detrimental effects of misaligned clocks." https://timeuse.barcelona/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/proposal-on-implementing-permanent-time-EN.pdf https://timeuse.barcelona/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/proposa...
steveBK123 3y ago
This almost feels like a false flag of proposing the most disruptive plan possible such that it couldn't possibly be approved, haha. Splitting & re-groupings are almost arbitrary and have no consideration for politics, business and culture. Ireland & N. Ireland in different TZ? France & Corsica in different TZ? Pushing Ireland & Portugal into their own TZ and calling it Azores time? Bringing UK into alignment with Spain/France/Belgium/Netherlands, but pushing Germany/Italy/Switzerland into alignment with Eastern Europe countries but out of alignment with Western Europe? A 2 step process by which some countries change TZ twice? Would love to write the code for that mess.
- sonicanatidae 3y ago
  I too would also love maintaining servers where the time changes according to some convoluted approach that no one really understands. Sec becomes really, really easy. No one can access it at all!
- BryantD 3y ago
  The page does explicitly call out Ireland and Northern Ireland as an issue with the first draft of the map. This feels to me like the part of the process where you stand up a proposal to get refinement, since large deliberative bodies are rarely able to create such a proposal from scratch.
- DoughnutHole 3y ago
  On Ireland, our biggest business partner in Europe is still the UK. I don’t think we’ll be clambering to add friction to business with Northern Ireland and Britain so we can hang out with Portugal and Iceland.
  - jonathankoren 3y ago
    Such European parochialism! Next you’ll be talking about how traveling more than 900 meters is an epic adventure. Trust me. You can deal with 3 hour time difference without even noticing.
    - 3y ago
mklepaczewski 3y ago
Serious question, why not adopt one timezone globally? For some of us sunrise would happen at 10pm, for others on 4pm. So what? Wouldn't we just get used to it? Is there any rationale for anchoring start of the day between 4am-8am?
- katbyte 3y ago
  No I imagine not as mid day and midnight have meaning and that changes them from roughly 12 and 12
  - globular-toast 3y ago
    Midday and midnight should be based only on the sun. Midday is when the sun is at the highest and midnight is half way between middays. Whether midday corresponds with 12ish on the clock or any other time doesn't really matter. The point of your parent comment is people would just get used to midday being around 18ish or work starting at 03:00 etc.
- Tagbert 3y ago
  Then you just need to implement a global system of determining how people's activities are aligned locally. What you end up with is timezones by another name. Timezones are a lot less of a problem now that we are using calendar apps to book events. Better integration of tools to negotiate availability would make that even easier. The problem that people largely govern their activities by the rotation of the earth and we are in different places on that globe doesn't go away.
  - mklepaczewski 3y ago
    But why I need to come up with system similar to timezones? You translate all hours once and that's it, no? It might be weird at first have business hours from 9pm to 3am, but those are just numbers. I don't find it any more weird than starting a day at 6am.
    - Tagbert 3y ago
odiroot 3y ago
No way RoI and Northern Ireland will be okay having separate time zones. On the other hand, I'm glad to have Central European TZ.
Halan 3y ago
Good luck convincing Greece to have two timezones. These are the people who made a Macedonia change their name to North Macedonia
Erratic6576 3y ago
We need a two-tier schedule for businesses and institutions. Summer time and winter time. So, when authorities switch from CEST to CET or viceversa and clocks are adjusted an hour, schedules are inverted to leave things as they were according to the Sun. So if after the switch you are supposed to start an hour earlier, you just start one hour later, thus starting at the same time according to the sun. This might sound crazy but the craziness of making people switch clocks is evil and cruel
RamblingCTO 3y ago
I also want permanent summer time. Winter is so depressive when it's dark at 15:30 already.
mongol 3y ago
All attempts to optimize society by changing time zones and adjusting for daylight savings time time should be abandoned. Let society set the schedule after a static time. With this I mean ordinary time zones and the same time throughout the year. Which approximately should correspond with the sun at its highest at noon. If someone prefers brighter mornings and darker afternoons, and someone else the opposite, the solution is easy. Adapt your life to follow that. Don't expect the time to suit you, it is keeping track over the sun's trajectory over the sky, not your life.
- pilsetnieks 3y ago
  > the solution is easy. Adapt your life to follow that Those pesky employers are such traditionalists, though.
  - chrisBob 3y ago
    My employer might be flexible, but I am sure my daughter's school wouldn't let me just pick when her bus picks her up and drops her off.
- maicro 3y ago
  Honestly I would prefer to go even further - UTC for the entire planet, no offsets. Unfortunately I know most people won't go for that...
  - SllX 3y ago
    Why not go just one step further and adopt Swatch Internet Time? I mean if we’re just going to go the mass upheaval route, we might as well ride that train as far as it will go.
    - candiddevmike 3y ago
      I'd rather go all the way, decimal time and dates. Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité
jurschreuder 3y ago
I never understood why you have to change the time zones, when you can just change the office hours
enz 3y ago
Japan Standard Time is funny: very early in the morning you have bright light, and you are in the darkness at 4pm in winter. But it’s the "Land of the Rising Sun" after all, so it makes sense.
kinnth 3y ago
Surely just getting rid of summertime would have most of the benefits without moving countries current time zones?
salmonfamine 3y ago
I have a modest proposal to end all time-zones forever: the fractalizing time grid. Currently, partly due to a historical legacy of railroads, time-zones are longitudinal. That is, they help standardize time (and daylight hours) across east-west distances. However, given that the number of daylight hours is even more starkly affected by north-south latitudinal differences, we should also implement time-zones in that direction. After all, what does "12:15am" really mean if its dark in London and sunny in Reykjavik? So, in order to standardize daylight hours, we could implement north-south time-zones as well, producing time-offsets for each lat/long cell on the globe. We could standardize the number of daylight hours in a given 24-hour period (using the equator as reference) and standardize each cell to have the same number of daylight hours. In order to do so, we would simply have to redefine what a "second" is (or really, all time measurements.) So, the further north you go during the summer, the shorter a "second" becomes (so as to preserve the same number of "seconds" per time-cell) whereas in the winter you would have the opposite effect. Therefore this also has the interesting consequence of changing the duration of all time measurements seasonally, with a greater delta the further away from the equator you are (a "second" would always have the same duration at the equator.) So the further away you are from the equator, the quicker the duration of time changes with respect to equatorial time as time passes seasonally. Still with me? Good, because we can do even better! Why even have time cells? Time-zones were implemented as lines on a map because that was the technology that was available at the time. But now that we have the internet, we can instead standardize an algorithm that could be implemented into all RTC chips and run on reference servers a la atomic clocks. So instead of "crossing over" into the next time cell, all of your time measurements would be sped-up or slowed-down proportionally to your GPS-measured latitude (standardized to some number of significant digits.) So all analog clocks would immediately be rendered useless -- unless you are exactly on the equator -- and we would live in a world where you could speed up time by running north, but only in the summer. If you've made it this far without throwing your laptop/phone out of the nearest window in rage, thank you for your patience (and welcome to the time grid!)
tgsovlerkhgsel 3y ago
The debate here shows why we'll be stuck forever with the status quo: It's a topic that can be endlessly bikeshedded, everyone has an opinion, and there are a million incompatible proposals (each with drawbacks that will make some groups strongly oppose them). Meanwhile, I bet most even don't understand the effect of DST (minimizing how much the clock-time of sunrise varies, at the cost of increasing how much the clock-time of sunset varies, https://coolinfographics.com/blog/2012/11/6/daylight-savings-time-explained.html https://coolinfographics.com/blog/2012/11/6/daylight-savings...)
matthewfelgate 3y ago
[flagged]
mcnesium 3y ago
HN, please explain why everyone is so upset with having a time offset in the city/region/country next door. In Germany, there are 16 states. Many of them have different laws, e.g. regarding store hours and so on. Neighboring countrys like Austria or Poland have even more conservative laws. The difference between sunrise and sunset in Palermo and Oslo is almost 90 minutes twice a year. There are tons of cultural differences between Europeans. In southern countries, people tend to stay up later in the evening and sleep longer in the morning than in northern countries (at least that is my impression from traveling). In the continental United States, there are four time zones, none of which even pay much attention to state borders. Still, everyone manages to live their lives, talk to people on the phone, commute from one place to the other. So why are Europeans so afraid that the people they talk to might be an hour or two off?
rldjbpin 3y ago
this is just as ridiculous as the lengths countries have gone near the international date line. just getting rid of dst seems most reasonable to me but iirc it has been prposed before without any success. if the world is still ok with adjusting with time like taking 6 hour flights twice every year, then so be it.

190 points by caiobegotti 3y ago

"After agreement of a common date within the EU, we recommend doing the transition in 1 to 2 steps, depending on the member state: Step 1: All EU countries abolish the clock change to DST in spring and remain on the clock time they use in winter. For those countries whose recommended time zone is their current standard time, no further steps need to be taken. Step 2: Those countries whose recommended time zone is not yet their current standard time, additionally turn back their clocks one last time by one hour in autumn, in order to adopt their recommended time zone as their new standard time." I really wish we could do this in the US.

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Dylan16807 3y ago
I've never seen anyone propose moving in the opposite direction of summer time before. That seems needlessly awkward to me.
- qsort 3y ago
  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.
  - wiredfool 3y ago
    Ireland is on GMT/-1, and we're already pretty far west in the 15 degrees centered on 0.
- baggy_trough 3y ago
  The United States adopted summer time in the 70s but abandoned it because of complaints about the late darkness in winter mornings.
  - wharvle 3y ago
    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.
    - bobthepanda 3y ago
      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.
- pavon 3y ago
  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.
  - Dylan16807 3y ago
    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.
  - netsharc 3y ago
    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...
    - Dylan16807 3y ago
      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.
- deleted 3y ago
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- vikingerik 3y ago
  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.
  - Dylan16807 3y ago
    > 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.
    - reidrac 3y ago
      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-spain-has-been-in-the-wrong-time-zone-for-the-past-76-years https://theculturetrip.com/europe/spain/articles/heres-why-s... Spanish civil war was won by the fascists and Franco's dictatorship followed.
      - deleted 3y ago
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polishdude20 3y ago
I'd rather it be how it is in the spring rather than winter. When you get home there's at least a bit more time in the day to enjoy the sun.
- loloquwowndueo 3y ago
  For large parts of the US it’s probably dark by 4:30 so no, not really. I’m not in the US by the way.
  - deleted 3y ago
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  - madcaptenor 3y ago
    Here's a map of the earliest sunset time: https://weather.com/science/weather-explainers/news/2018-12-11-earliest-sunset-of-the-year-before-winter-solstice https://weather.com/science/weather-explainers/news/2018-12-... . There are parts of the US which have sunsets before 4:30, including some major population centers, but I don't know if I'd call them "large parts".
    - alright2565 3y ago
      that map shows most major cities in North America have the sun set before 5PM (traditional work end time). New York, DC, Los Angeles, San Fransisco, Chicago. New York, Boston, and Chicago all set before 4:30, a minimum of 10% of the population just there.
      - madcaptenor 3y ago
        Right. Most people have sunset before 5 (there's not that much blue on the map), but not before 4:30.
- mjevans 3y ago
  If you live, vaguely, in the north (of the 45th parallel) you get that change either way thanks to the tilt of the earth. I'd rather have the sunset start at 8PM and go over the horizon at 9PM (without DST) in the summer, than the current ends at 10PM in the summer. https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/seattle https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/seattle Now somewhere like Miami, FL https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/miami https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/miami with DST has a longest day of about 6AM to 8:40PM (civil twilight start / end), which without DST goes to 5AM and 7:40PM.
xoa 3y ago
Well we can't, and that's having tried! The replies do a great job of illustrating why really: there's no consensus. Some want permanent standard time. Some want permanent DST. Some are fine the way it is. In a big country spanning a lot of latitude as well as longitude and tens of millions on wildly different work and sleep schedules, messy compromise making no one entirely happy is what success looks like. Basically time stuff is arguably one of the big Chesterton's Fences that comes up on HN a lot. We didn't end up where we are for no reason or because people in the past were stupid.
- BurningFrog 3y ago
  We legislate lots of things without consensus with 51-49 majorities. People in the past had a very different time environment. I used to have 1 watch. Now I have a dozen different clocks in my apartment. We also did not interact with other time zones nearly as much.
  - xoa 3y ago
    >We legislate lots of things without consensus with 51-49 majorities. We really do not in the US when it's a matter of genuine controversy. Once in a long while something gets forced through if the status quo is just unsustainable or it's a core plank issue or something, but the system isn't designed to allow anyone hitting 51 to easily pass anything contentious. And that's with your implicit take that there is a 51-49, but that's the thing, it's not a dichotomy in the first place. It's more like 25/25/40/5/3/1/1. Plus this isn't some inherently critical issue, for most people it's at most a minor irritation twice per year. For some it's a minor enjoyable, "free sleep". And thus status quo rules :). >People in the past had a very different time environment. I used to have 1 watch. Now I have a dozen different clocks in my apartment. Indeed! Our clocks used to not have global sub-millisecond automatic time synchronization.
    - anon84873628 3y ago
      >Plus this isn't some inherently critical issue, for most people it's at most a minor irritation twice per year. For some it's a minor enjoyable, "free sleep". I want to push back on this a bit. It's not just the moment of change itself, it's how wall time compares to the sun. And the problem with that is business hours being stuck to wall time. Essentially the government controls how business hours relate to the sun, instead of expecting each entity to change their business hours with the seasons (or not) as desired. This goes back to the time when business hours posted on a door were much more important. If you are stuck in a "9-5" job or otherwise are committed to what the clock says, the time change significantly controls your interaction with the sun.
golemotron 3y ago
> I really wish we could do this in the US. The US is about 4000 miles wider. That makes it hard.
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simbolit 3y ago

(1) abolishing daylight savings time is great and should have been done years ago. (2) the proposed time zones are really impractical, not necessarily in principle, but in their specific implementation. Germany-Netherlands in different time zones is strange, Dublin and Belfast in different time zones is stupid, Athens and Crete in different time zones is absurd.

bobthepanda 3y ago
I agree. National borders is quite possibly one of the worst ways to do time zones. At least in the US time zone borders were specifically chosen to run through areas of low population, so you would minimize the number of people doing, say, living in France but working in Geneva one hour ahead. Also it's kind of odd that Ireland and Portugal are in their own little time zone, when it probably makes more sense to just sync up with all their other neighbors.
- simbolit 3y ago
  Ireland and Portugal already are together in this time zone, but the UK is with them, which makes good friday sense. Map of Timezones: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/88/World_Time_Zones_Map.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/88/World_Ti...
  - ianburrell 3y ago
    It would make sense to have Portgual and Ireland in the Western Europe time zone. They are right over the border from UTC but it makes sense to include them with neighbors. Especialy when they are currently in UTC. It is Spain and France that need to move.
    - madcaptenor 3y ago
      For what it's worth, Spain and France were on GMT (as it was back then) before World War II. (Technically French law referred to the time as "Paris mean time, retarded by 9 minutes and 21 seconds" - they had thought the Prime Meridian ought to run through Paris rather than London and were sore about losing that.)

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AndyMcConachie 3y ago

This actually kinda sucks. I like not changing clocks. But I'm not happy about moving the timezones around. I'm in The Netherlands and after this Germany will be in a different time zone than me. That's not cool.

ghusto 3y ago
I'm in the Netherlands too, and I can't understand this sentiment. You're the second commenter to say this. Explain?

bouke 3y ago

This proposes that The Netherlands switch to WEST/UTC. There is already no clear consensus on whether to stay on permanent summertime (+2) vs wintertime (+1), and I would expect the switch to UTC to be even more challenging to adopt. Interestingly we switched from Amsterdam time (+0:20) to Berlin time (+1) during WW2, so going to +0 would mean a much earlier noon. Additionally policymakers have been saying to favour keeping the time with our major export market (Germany) in sync, so that wouldn’t fly with this proposal. Personally I don’t care that much for what offset is chosen, as long as we abolish DST.

Aachen 3y ago
I do like the idea of being in UTC and not having to worry about this timezone nonsense between my computer and any server application. Unfortunately I've moved from the Netherlands to Germany and my family, a few longitudinal kilometers away, would have to do timezone gymnastics when we talk about any sort of plans, so needless to say, from my personal point of view I fully agree with you that NL and DE being in different timezones, instead of the sea being the timezone separator as it is today, is bonkers
- tgv 3y ago
  > I do like the idea of being in UTC and not having to worry about this timezone nonsense between my computer and any server application. It's an automatic watch. You do not have to worry about it. Communicate UTC timestamps with timezones between computers, but don't make people use those "because it's easier to program."

theodric 3y ago

After placing all of Europe on permanent winter time, going by the image provided, this proposal seeks to split Ireland's time zone from the UK's and place it a further hour earlier, thereby ensuring that the sun will begin setting at 2:30PM, and it will be pitch black out at 3:30PM in the winter, all in the name of achieving "permanent time zones as close as possible to solar time (natural time) in Europe." Well done.

loudin 3y ago
Exactly. This proposal is absolutely soul-crushing for most people. Having extended daylight hours when people are actually awake in the evening is critical for positive mental health.
antupis 3y ago
Studies show that you want those daylight hours to morning less depressions and sleeping problems.
- computerfriend 3y ago
  This is extremely at odds with what I actually want: longer evenings.
- theodric 3y ago
  Are you following that we're talking absorbing a 2:30PM dusk to achieve this? That's worse than northern Finland. It's absurd and foolish. Those studies are failing to take northern latitudes' extreme swings into account when trying to legislate timezones...from Barcelona.
cge 3y ago
>"permanent time zones as close as possible to solar time (natural time) in Europe." It doesn't even do that for most people in Ireland, according to its own map! As it appears to be based on land mass without regard to population density, the majority of the population would most naturally be in the Western European Time Zone, but they'd be pushed into the Azores Time Zone. A government in Dublin is not going to agree to a time zone change that wouldn't make sense for Dublin, and that's even ignoring the extreme political problems and potential violence and unrest involved with Ireland and Northern Ireland being in different time zones. For that matter, Greece is understandably not going to agree to any change in time zones that results in a map where its islands that Turkey disputes are changed to be the same colour as Turkey, rather than Greece. Neither is Cyprus. It would be a bit like asking either the government of Taiwan to start using simplified characters, or the PRC to start using traditional characters, and simply saying that it would make language support on computers simpler. I would support a reasonable proposal to end DST and have more natural time zones. But it has to at least consider factors other than just land masses and solar time, or it will never be a viable proposal. Their "full document" and "justification" doesn't include any discussion of the political ramifications or of population densities. They don't appear to give any justification of their specific country-level recommendations at all.

stavros 3y ago

This sucks, not only will Greece not stay on summer time, we'll actually go to one hour back from winter time? So not only will we not get one more hour of daylight in the evening (ie stay on summer time), we'll actually get one hour less than we have now? That's terrible.

vasco 3y ago
Same with Portugal, moving to Açores time seems bad, specially for working with the rest of Europe.
- maratc 3y ago
  Portugal is already an hour behind the rest of Europe.
  - vasco 3y ago
    1 hour behind central, now would be 2 hours.
    - maratc 3y ago
      "central" today being both France and Germany — according to the proposal would be 2 hours behind Germany but still same 1hr behind France.
p-a_58213 3y ago
Also, the Greek islands will have a different timezone from the Greek mainland? This must be a joke.
- stavros 3y ago
  That must be an error, there's no way.
alex_duf 3y ago
It's a proposal not a law

lloda 3y ago

I'd put Portugal and Ireland in the western zone.

irdc 3y ago

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: switching to UTC+0:30 will put a large number of countries in a common time zone without them deviating from their solar time too much.

qwytw 3y ago
And make converting time between different time zones/countries even more confusing.
- jhugo 3y ago
  India manages to deal with a fractional offset from UTC, as well as several other countries. It’s really not that big a deal.
  - netsharc 3y ago
    That makes me wonder of the little adaptions they need, that we Minute-Zero-ians ;) don't notice... do many Indian desktops have world clocks, for example?
    - rational_indian 3y ago
      Regular people dont't have world clocks. Only people who need to care about this do.
    - madcaptenor 3y ago
      I just had a look through https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_UTC_offsets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_UTC_offsets, because I thought it was just India and some obscure little islands - but some fairly substantial countries (Iran, Afghanistan, Nepal, Myanmar, Sri Lanka) also have non-whole-hour time zones.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - Tagbert 3y ago

Halan 3y ago

Crete not having the same timezone as the rest of Greece?

tzot 3y ago
[dead]

roflmaostc 3y ago

I find it kind of absurd that people claim that clock alignment has negative impact on their health. Studies show that but: You do it only twice per year. But how often do you stay late up because of an event or whatever. And how often do you travel to another time zone, sometimes even >6 hours. I think the latter effects outweigh the health impact of clock alignment significantly.

loloquwowndueo 3y ago
You find it absurd because you’re one of those people for whom the change isn’t hard. It’s hard for a good percentage of the population (like me). Please just stop messing with my clock!
- Freak_NL 3y ago
  Also just ask any parents of young children for a vocal opinion. Feel free to mess with the clock every other century or so, but not twice a year.
graeme 3y ago
Especially because people only focus on the one time that the clock takes sleep. Certainly, studies show that heart attacks rise that day. But also during the year, you gain an hour of sleep. Studies show that heart attacks fall that day. People always discount this one.
ghusto 3y ago
> You do it only twice per year Your body has six months to get used to an hour difference, so it sets in nicely, for maximum impact 6 months later. > But how often do you stay late up because of an event or whatever Personally, not often at all, but I get the point. The time you're supposed to wake up doesn't change though, and that's what makes the difference. > And how often do you travel to another time zone, sometimes even >6 hours I can count how many times I've done that in my life on one hand, and I'm sure I'm not alone in Europe. > I think the latter effects outweigh the health impact of clock alignment significantly. Have to disagree. Like I said it's to do with having a set hour you're _supposed_ to wake up. Meal times are another big factor.

Dylan16807 3y ago

If you move Spain to UTC+0, then it would finally line up with Portugal. Why move Portugal over even further? It's accurate enough.

jonathankoren 3y ago

Abolishing daylight savings and keeping standard time. If you’re going to abolish it, this is the way. None of this permanent summertime nonsense.

loloquwowndueo 3y ago
Yes people think they like summer time because they only use it in the summer. Most people will realize it sucks during winter more than “winter” (read: actual) time sucks in summer.
wewxjfq 3y ago
I want summer time all year. In winter it really doesn't matter if the sun rises at 8am or 9am and if it sets at 4pm or 5pm, it's depressing no matter what. But with winter time in summer, you rob working people of a chance to catch some sunlight in a meaningful intensity after work. It will just make people more depressed.
- serpix 3y ago
  yeah, it's depressing to start working at dark and stop working at dark. What a waste of life.
- jonathankoren 3y ago
  Dude. You are aware that the length of daylight naturally gets longer in the summer and shorter in the winter right? Eliminating daylight savings means the sun goes down at 8pm in August, instead of 9pm.

highmastdon 3y ago

We (Europe) shouldn't fragment time zones that much. We (NL) should stay on permanent summer time. Reasons - criminality is lower when there's longer light - earlier darkness leads to more accidents. It's better to have longer darkness after the masses are RESTED (in the morning), opposed to when they're TIRED (in the evening) - longer day-time for office workers, is more productive - shorter time of year that has long after noon darkness. As humans are using artificial light to stay up longer, it's better to align the time of day with that

bojangleslover 3y ago
Criminals can't distinguish between 8PM and 9PM light because they don't operate on an hourly schedule
- matthewdgreen 3y ago
  Potential victims sure do.
pmontra 3y ago
I live in Italy and I also want a permanent summer time: for the way we live it's far more valuable to have light in the evening than in the morning. Actually, I'd get double summer time March to October or at least April to September. I know that we could just change our culture and habits and move everything we use to do one hour back, but that has an inertia that will make it impossible.
edgyquant 3y ago
> criminality is lower when there's longer light Correlation is not causation
- ImJamal 3y ago
  What do you believe the causation is then? If light isn't what impacts it, then it seems like the summer should have more crime than winter. Kids are out of school and there is no snow and cold.

Freak_NL 3y ago

That line putting the whole Benelux, France, and Spain on one side of the divide (Western European Time) and Germany, Switzerland, and Italy on the other (Central European Time) makes this proposal just about dead in the water.

amai 3y ago
Central European Time in Benelux, France and Spain is basically Hitler time, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38478402 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38478402 If people would become aware of that the proposal might have more chances.
- Freak_NL 3y ago
  It's not a secret or anything. People won't care that the German occupation had anything to do with it, because before that Amsterdam Time ran 19 minutes and 32.13 seconds ahead of Greenwich! No one wants to go back to a timezone like that in the twenty first century. Hitler actually did us a favour on that front.

charlieyu1 3y ago

Don't think it is workable. Changing clocks is annoying, but probably a good idea when you live in high latitudes.

mjevans 3y ago
See my other post in this discussion. Higher latitudes are dominated by the tilt of the earth https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/seattle https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/seattle DST only harms them by making the latest summer sunset around 10PM.
- ghaff 3y ago
  >DST only harms them by making the latest summer sunset around 10PM What's the harm in that? It still gets light in the morning at a reasonable hour.
bluGill 3y ago
Changing clocks only makes sense (to the little it does) in middle latitudes when there is a decent amount of both light and dark in a day in the worse case, as you can shift things around to use the light better (maybe). When there are only a couple hours of light/dark in the day it doesn't mater what the clocks do, you can't really do anything different.

trabant00 3y ago

Apart from the specific location issues highlighted in the comments here, the entire site can be summed up to "everything is better, just trust us". Zero arguments for any claim. Terrible.

tgv 3y ago
Indeed, there is none. There is a FAQ though, but it is not supportive of any advantage. It just contains a handful of "But won't it ..." with rather shallow dismissals, but nothing to show an advantage of the proposed change. And it contains "debatable" statements, such as "For most people, it is not a problem to sleep beyond sunrise." That's not my experience, and they don't offer evidence. It's followed by a worse one: "Having to get up an hour earlier due to DST the next morning, unable to finish your sleep, is what causes sleep deprivation." Yeah, that's one day, perhaps two. Very early sunrise is 2 months. But if you shout loud enough, you get influence.
deathanatos 3y ago
> Zero arguments for any claim. You mean aside from the list of citations?

seydor 3y ago

Half of greece having a different timezone that's kind of ridiculous Why don't we reduce working hours to 7 also

datadrivenangel 3y ago
How about 6 working hours for half the year and 7 working hours for the other half?
- seydor 3y ago
  which half
  - anticensor 3y ago
    Longer in summers?
  - nurumaik 3y ago
    6 for current half, 7 for other half

NeoTar 3y ago

Putting Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland (AKA Ireland) on different timezones strikes me as political suicide for anyone proposing it. But otherwise I am warm to the proposal. Some tweaks would make it more practical/politically acceptable (keep Portugal and Ireland on the Western Time Zone, don't split up Greece from the islands).

closewith 3y ago
Yes, that's completely absurd. Ireland is more likely to leave the EU than accept timezone partition.
- switch007 3y ago
  Nonsense. Ireland will never leave the EU. They more likely to accept a time zone difference than leave the EU. They wanted membership desperately in the early 60s but had to wait a decade partly because de Galle hated the Brits. They couldn’t join quick enough.
  - closewith 3y ago
    Are you aware of the accession path Ireland took and why it was linked to UK accession? Ireland has the highest level of pro-EU sentiment in the bloc and it is still more likely that we will leave than accept a timezone partition with the North. It's not in question. Failure to understand this is a complete failure to understand the country.
    - switch007 3y ago
      I am. What’s your point ? I know Ireland likes the riches that come with EU membership. They don’t want to return to being a poor country. It would be a time zone difference, not a partition. Let’s not used such loaded language. Edit: is the USA “partitioned” or any less united because of multiple timezones?
      - 3y ago

pmontra 3y ago

From the Who We Are page of the site > The Time Use Initiative (TUI) is the main non-profit organisation promoting the right to time all over the world. Its main objective is to encourage public discussion on how we collectively organise our time, seen as a way to improve citizen’s well-being through innovative time policies. So this is not a proposal from an EU department, but it's a proposal to the EU. For sure they "encourage public discussion" as the comments here on HN demonstrate.

theodric 3y ago
It is, however, endorsed by some EU department and a bunch of other entities (see bottom)
- morsch 3y ago
  The only organisation related to the EU is the European Economic and Social Committee, which is[1]: a consultative body of the European Union (EU) established in 1958. It is an advisory assembly composed of "social partners", namely: employers (employers' organisations), employees (trade unions) and representatives of various other interests. ...ok? This does not strike me as a particularly important institution. Some -- not all -- of the other cosigning entities are ridiculous. One of them (Normalzeit Leben) is literally the title of one person's blog where they talk about their struggles with DST. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Economic_and_Social_Committee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Economic_and_Social_C...
  - slartibardfast0 3y ago
    also, was it some formal declaration by this body, or just someone with an email address from the organization? doubtless, the irish representatives wouldn't support any divergence between Dublin and Belfast, (especially considering this is wrong from a spatial perspective as population density is heavily skewed to the east of the island). edit: i was curious enough to email all of the irish delegates to this organisation. some fairly heavy hitters, as a citizen with a keen interest in Dublin & Belfast being in the same timezone will be interesting to hear back!

janice1999 3y ago

This is absurd and absolutely detached from reality. Not one person on the island of Ireland is going to accept either a timezone border between Ireland and Northern Ireland or between Northern Ireland and Britain. Unsurprisingly not one expert or group on their list is Irish or from the UK.

amai 3y ago
No one is going to change the time just in the summer. That doesn’t make sense. It generates a additional time zone border between countries just in the summer. Just imagine the chaos this is causing with train schedules. Just imagine the problems this is causing for programming libraries handling time. And yet many countries do this every year.
- janice1999 3y ago
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gizajob 3y ago

Ha why “Azores time zone” including Ireland and Iceland when the Azores are miles away. “Atlantic time zone” seems to make more sense.

jcranmer 3y ago
In the Americas, "Atlantic time zone" refers to the time zone 1 hour before Eastern. Presumably Azores time is meant to avoid confusion with existing Atlantic time. Also, Azores Time Zone is the existing name of the time zone.

yafbum 3y ago

Time zones are geopolitical artifacts just like borders, laws, currencies, etc. They can't really be "permanent"...

delecti 3y ago
They can be "more permanent" than changing twice a year.

alentred 3y ago

I live in Europe. As far as I remember, the proposal to abolish DST was already voted in the European parliament some time before the COVID pandemic, and the next steps were for the countries to chose their time zones and implement the change. Then the pandemic happened and this was put on hold. Probably, there is also some analysis paralysis: it is just hard to chose between keeping the winter or the summer time. Just look at this thread: morning birds cannot agree with night owls, someone leaving a bit to the west disagrees with those leaving in the east of the same country... I wish we'd just settle on any choice. At this point I care much less about "winter vs summer time", more about abolishing DST itself. Twice a year I have a small jet lag for nothing.

rvba 3y ago

In the last vote 80% peoppe wanted to stay at summer time permanently to have more aunlight after work. Wtf is this?

riffic 3y ago

here's an idea - UTC everywhere

tgv 3y ago
That's so utterly absurd. So now I know that it's also 20:00Z on the other side of the ocean. Great. But, are they awake at 20:00Z there? Or asleep? Let me subtract the time difference...
- ghaff 3y ago
  I think it's mostly a sentiment from people who don't travel--or don't really communicate with other timezones at all. I need to know that someone in Europe is about 5 or 6 hours ahead of me whether it's a timezone or an informal UTC offset. And if I'm traveling, while there are cultural differences between countries (e.g. later dinners in Spain), I know that the workday is something roughly 9-5 and dinner is roughly around 7pm.

amai 3y ago

+1 for this proposal. It is just unhealthy to permanently live in a wrong time zone and this proposal would fix that at least in europe.

jalk 3y ago
By that logic it would be unhealthy to permanently move from Portugal to Spain.
- amai 3y ago
  "Some activists believe that the mismatch between Spain's clock time and solar time contributes to the country's unusual daily schedule.[9] They believe that the relatively late sunrises and sunsets shift the average Spaniard's day later than it otherwise would be, and that a return to its original time zone would help boost productivity and bring family and work rhythms into better balance.[10]" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Spain#Criticism_of_the_use_of_Central_European_Time https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Spain#Criticism_of_t... But both Portugal and Spain are living in the wrong time zone, which is at least one hour off compared to natural solar time. So it most probably don't make a difference health wise if you move from Portugal to Spain.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    Certainly, it's a plausible theory that Spain being so far off its "natural" solar time (because Franco supposedly switched timezone in WWII to be in sync with Germany) leads to the late dinners--and one I've often heard. I suppose you'd have to look into pre-WWII Spanish dining habits. Whether it's a good or bad thing? <shrug> Personally, I like lighter evenings more than mornings.

dirtybirdnj 3y ago

DST is social terrorism at this point. "We" keep it that way because the herd is too scared to change. Never underestimate the awful raw power of herd thinking, it's the worlds greatest cancer.

jalk 3y ago
Really? Perhaps you should checkout https://www.timeanddate.com/ https://www.timeanddate.com/ to see when the sun rises/sets in the summer in various places. I.e. June 21st Stockholm - 03:30 and 22:08 with DST. The vast majority of people simply prefer evening sun to "useless" night sun.
- dirtybirdnj 3y ago
  So we should re-adjust timezones in places where it's not a problem because some different people have chosen to settle in places where the sun isn't as optimal... and their comfort outweighs the experience of the people who don't need timezone adjustment? Because they made a bad choice on where to live and now they don't care about the unintended consequence on others? Help me understand why "your" problem on the other side of the earth deserves to override what is best for me locally. DST is not natural. Animals do not set their watches back and forth. It's a human construct. We only do it "because we've done it" for years and the general population is too herdmind to even consider changing it.
  - jalk 3y ago
    I simply gave you an example of why lots of people like DST, as a counter to your "hivemind" claim. Perhaps my example was too extreme, so consider southern Europe - June sunrise at around 04:30 and sunset at 19:50 without DST. I bet plenty of Italians rather have the sun set at 20:50 since very few get up before 05:30 anyway. It seems that you also made a bad choice of where to live, since apparently it's a place on the other side of the earth where Europe has the power to imposed DST. I do feel sorry for you, that you are so sensitive to these timezone changes, especially since it limits your holiday travels to mostly going north/south. Do be careful if venturing too far in either of those direction, as the sudden change in hours of daylight might also affect you negatively.

amai 3y ago

Interesting tidbit from the full document: "During the Second World War, Western European states were forced to adopt Central European Time by Hitler and Franco. After the war, this was not revoked, leaving the Western European states at a disadvantage to the Central European states due to the detrimental effects of misaligned clocks." https://timeuse.barcelona/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/proposal-on-implementing-permanent-time-EN.pdf https://timeuse.barcelona/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/proposa...

steveBK123 3y ago

This almost feels like a false flag of proposing the most disruptive plan possible such that it couldn't possibly be approved, haha. Splitting & re-groupings are almost arbitrary and have no consideration for politics, business and culture. Ireland & N. Ireland in different TZ? France & Corsica in different TZ? Pushing Ireland & Portugal into their own TZ and calling it Azores time? Bringing UK into alignment with Spain/France/Belgium/Netherlands, but pushing Germany/Italy/Switzerland into alignment with Eastern Europe countries but out of alignment with Western Europe? A 2 step process by which some countries change TZ twice? Would love to write the code for that mess.

sonicanatidae 3y ago
I too would also love maintaining servers where the time changes according to some convoluted approach that no one really understands. Sec becomes really, really easy. No one can access it at all!
BryantD 3y ago
The page does explicitly call out Ireland and Northern Ireland as an issue with the first draft of the map. This feels to me like the part of the process where you stand up a proposal to get refinement, since large deliberative bodies are rarely able to create such a proposal from scratch.
DoughnutHole 3y ago
On Ireland, our biggest business partner in Europe is still the UK. I don’t think we’ll be clambering to add friction to business with Northern Ireland and Britain so we can hang out with Portugal and Iceland.
- jonathankoren 3y ago
  Such European parochialism! Next you’ll be talking about how traveling more than 900 meters is an epic adventure. Trust me. You can deal with 3 hour time difference without even noticing.
  - 3y ago

mklepaczewski 3y ago

Serious question, why not adopt one timezone globally? For some of us sunrise would happen at 10pm, for others on 4pm. So what? Wouldn't we just get used to it? Is there any rationale for anchoring start of the day between 4am-8am?

katbyte 3y ago
No I imagine not as mid day and midnight have meaning and that changes them from roughly 12 and 12
- globular-toast 3y ago
  Midday and midnight should be based only on the sun. Midday is when the sun is at the highest and midnight is half way between middays. Whether midday corresponds with 12ish on the clock or any other time doesn't really matter. The point of your parent comment is people would just get used to midday being around 18ish or work starting at 03:00 etc.
Tagbert 3y ago
Then you just need to implement a global system of determining how people's activities are aligned locally. What you end up with is timezones by another name. Timezones are a lot less of a problem now that we are using calendar apps to book events. Better integration of tools to negotiate availability would make that even easier. The problem that people largely govern their activities by the rotation of the earth and we are in different places on that globe doesn't go away.
- mklepaczewski 3y ago
  But why I need to come up with system similar to timezones? You translate all hours once and that's it, no? It might be weird at first have business hours from 9pm to 3am, but those are just numbers. I don't find it any more weird than starting a day at 6am.
  - Tagbert 3y ago

odiroot 3y ago

No way RoI and Northern Ireland will be okay having separate time zones. On the other hand, I'm glad to have Central European TZ.

Halan 3y ago

Good luck convincing Greece to have two timezones. These are the people who made a Macedonia change their name to North Macedonia

Erratic6576 3y ago

We need a two-tier schedule for businesses and institutions. Summer time and winter time. So, when authorities switch from CEST to CET or viceversa and clocks are adjusted an hour, schedules are inverted to leave things as they were according to the Sun. So if after the switch you are supposed to start an hour earlier, you just start one hour later, thus starting at the same time according to the sun. This might sound crazy but the craziness of making people switch clocks is evil and cruel

RamblingCTO 3y ago

I also want permanent summer time. Winter is so depressive when it's dark at 15:30 already.

mongol 3y ago

All attempts to optimize society by changing time zones and adjusting for daylight savings time time should be abandoned. Let society set the schedule after a static time. With this I mean ordinary time zones and the same time throughout the year. Which approximately should correspond with the sun at its highest at noon. If someone prefers brighter mornings and darker afternoons, and someone else the opposite, the solution is easy. Adapt your life to follow that. Don't expect the time to suit you, it is keeping track over the sun's trajectory over the sky, not your life.

pilsetnieks 3y ago
> the solution is easy. Adapt your life to follow that Those pesky employers are such traditionalists, though.
- chrisBob 3y ago
  My employer might be flexible, but I am sure my daughter's school wouldn't let me just pick when her bus picks her up and drops her off.
maicro 3y ago
Honestly I would prefer to go even further - UTC for the entire planet, no offsets. Unfortunately I know most people won't go for that...
- SllX 3y ago
  Why not go just one step further and adopt Swatch Internet Time? I mean if we’re just going to go the mass upheaval route, we might as well ride that train as far as it will go.
  - candiddevmike 3y ago
    I'd rather go all the way, decimal time and dates. Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité

jurschreuder 3y ago

I never understood why you have to change the time zones, when you can just change the office hours

enz 3y ago

Japan Standard Time is funny: very early in the morning you have bright light, and you are in the darkness at 4pm in winter. But it’s the "Land of the Rising Sun" after all, so it makes sense.

kinnth 3y ago

Surely just getting rid of summertime would have most of the benefits without moving countries current time zones?

salmonfamine 3y ago

I have a modest proposal to end all time-zones forever: the fractalizing time grid. Currently, partly due to a historical legacy of railroads, time-zones are longitudinal. That is, they help standardize time (and daylight hours) across east-west distances. However, given that the number of daylight hours is even more starkly affected by north-south latitudinal differences, we should also implement time-zones in that direction. After all, what does "12:15am" really mean if its dark in London and sunny in Reykjavik? So, in order to standardize daylight hours, we could implement north-south time-zones as well, producing time-offsets for each lat/long cell on the globe. We could standardize the number of daylight hours in a given 24-hour period (using the equator as reference) and standardize each cell to have the same number of daylight hours. In order to do so, we would simply have to redefine what a "second" is (or really, all time measurements.) So, the further north you go during the summer, the shorter a "second" becomes (so as to preserve the same number of "seconds" per time-cell) whereas in the winter you would have the opposite effect. Therefore this also has the interesting consequence of changing the duration of all time measurements seasonally, with a greater delta the further away from the equator you are (a "second" would always have the same duration at the equator.) So the further away you are from the equator, the quicker the duration of time changes with respect to equatorial time as time passes seasonally. Still with me? Good, because we can do even better! Why even have time cells? Time-zones were implemented as lines on a map because that was the technology that was available at the time. But now that we have the internet, we can instead standardize an algorithm that could be implemented into all RTC chips and run on reference servers a la atomic clocks. So instead of "crossing over" into the next time cell, all of your time measurements would be sped-up or slowed-down proportionally to your GPS-measured latitude (standardized to some number of significant digits.) So all analog clocks would immediately be rendered useless -- unless you are exactly on the equator -- and we would live in a world where you could speed up time by running north, but only in the summer. If you've made it this far without throwing your laptop/phone out of the nearest window in rage, thank you for your patience (and welcome to the time grid!)

tgsovlerkhgsel 3y ago

The debate here shows why we'll be stuck forever with the status quo: It's a topic that can be endlessly bikeshedded, everyone has an opinion, and there are a million incompatible proposals (each with drawbacks that will make some groups strongly oppose them). Meanwhile, I bet most even don't understand the effect of DST (minimizing how much the clock-time of sunrise varies, at the cost of increasing how much the clock-time of sunset varies, https://coolinfographics.com/blog/2012/11/6/daylight-savings-time-explained.html https://coolinfographics.com/blog/2012/11/6/daylight-savings...)

matthewfelgate 3y ago

[flagged]

mcnesium 3y ago

HN, please explain why everyone is so upset with having a time offset in the city/region/country next door. In Germany, there are 16 states. Many of them have different laws, e.g. regarding store hours and so on. Neighboring countrys like Austria or Poland have even more conservative laws. The difference between sunrise and sunset in Palermo and Oslo is almost 90 minutes twice a year. There are tons of cultural differences between Europeans. In southern countries, people tend to stay up later in the evening and sleep longer in the morning than in northern countries (at least that is my impression from traveling). In the continental United States, there are four time zones, none of which even pay much attention to state borders. Still, everyone manages to live their lives, talk to people on the phone, commute from one place to the other. So why are Europeans so afraid that the people they talk to might be an hour or two off?

rldjbpin 3y ago

this is just as ridiculous as the lengths countries have gone near the international date line. just getting rid of dst seems most reasonable to me but iirc it has been prposed before without any success. if the world is still ok with adjusting with time like taking 6 hour flights twice every year, then so be it.